Dead Hoopeston Girl

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Doing genealogical research on his grandmother's family, the author uncovered a shared great-grandparent with President Abraham Lincoln, a branch that produced Elvis Presley, and a 100-year-old unsolved murder involving his grandmother's cousin.

In the spring of 1922, in the Illinois farming community of Hoopeston, 25-year-old Gertrude Hanna had been missing for a month when her carefully preserved body was found in the basement of the parsonage across the street from her home. Was it suicide or murder? Complications multiply after the autopsy reveals a bombshell: the unwed Hoopeston girl was soon to be a mother.

At first conceiving the project as a novelization of the true crime story, the approach was abandoned when the allure of the mystery and how it was sensationalized in the reporting of the day became a story unto itself. Weaving portions of the abandoned novel into the narrative, the author finds himself a character in the unfolding drama, speculating as the clues lead him to dead ends and tantalizing what-ifs.

Can the lack of official documents hinder a present-day investigation? Do the headlines lead to a solution a century after it happened? Can the author offer a plausible resolution to the mystery of the body in the parsonage, and can justice be served for the dead Hoopeston girl and her unborn child?