Mary Agnes Moroney

Case background and investigation

Mary Agnes Moroney was born on May 10, 1928 and lived with her parents, Michael and Katherine Moroney, in an apartment above a grocery store at 5200 South Wentworth Avenue on Chicago's South Side. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, her mother was 17 at the time and the family had very little money.

In May 1930 a woman who gave her name as Julia Otis visited the family, bringing food and gifts. On May 15, 1930 she asked to take the two-year-old out to buy clothing. The Sun-Times, citing family accounts, reports that the child was upset and did not want to go. The woman left with her and did not come back.

The family then received two letters. The first, in the name of Julia Otis, said the girl had been taken to California and would be brought back. The second was signed Alice Henderson, who described herself as Otis's cousin and wrote that Otis had lost her own husband and child. According to Wikipedia's summary of the case, investigators concluded that both letters were in the same handwriting. No one was ever charged.

The case returned to the news several times. In 1952 the Chicago Daily News reported that a 24-year-old woman, Mary McClelland, was the missing child, but Katherine Moroney did not accept her as her daughter, and the Sun-Times reports that DNA testing in 2008 showed McClelland was not related. Another woman located in 2018 was also ruled out by DNA. Michael Moroney died in 1957 and Katherine Moroney in 1962.

In June 2022 the case was assigned to Detective Jose Rodriguez of the Cook County Sheriff's Office under its missing persons project. According to the Sun-Times and WBEZ, consumer DNA tests then showed a cousin-level relationship between members of the Moroney family and Terri Arnold of Florida, whose mother, Jeanette Burchard, had been told by her stepfather that the woman who raised her was not her birth mother. Burchard's family records gave her birth date as April 14, 1928. She grew up partly in Chicago, worked as a nurse for more than 50 years, had three children and died in Florida at 75.

The findings were reported on February 17, 2023. Both families said they accepted that Burchard was Mary Agnes Moroney. The sheriff's office said it could not formally confirm the identification without exhuming Burchard and Katherine Moroney, and Arnold declined. The person who took the child has never been identified.