Who Killed Senator John Joyce?
On a cloudy but mild December day in 1913, Mary Baker strode down the aisle of a Catholic church dressed in messaline and lace. She was adorned with all the trappings of a bride borne from luxury: a sparkling diamond ring, white shoes, a white veil and headpiece, and a bouquet of blood-red roses clasped in her white-gloved hands. As she paraded towards her betrothed, she passed dozens of her closest friends and family, each dressed in their finest garb to reflect their collective wealth. Mary’s stepfather, John Fyalko, locked his arm in hers and guided her to her new husband, Mark Lindsey. Although there was an air of celebration and joy, the Fyalko and Baker families were plagued with what seemed like a curse: each side of the family had experienced contentious marriages, deaths, and divorces. Each marriage — coincidentally between multiple Marys and Johns — had ended in tragedy.
Five years prior, John’s first wife, Mrs. Mary Reynolds, succumbed to tuberculosis in the state hospital where she once worked. Her marriage to John had been contentious even at its best, and she was admitted into a treatment program shortly after their wedding. In 1900, she suffered a mental breakdown after an informant mistakenly claimed that John had died in a car accident. Even after discovering that her husband was very much alive, Mrs. Fyalko remained in a state of shock and fear. John had her declared insane and sent her to a Kankakee sanatorium. A year after her passing, John Fyalko had begun courting a woman named Kate, who became Mary Baker’s functional stepmother. Although records have been lost to time, some reports indicate that Kate was Mary’s biological aunt — which is to say that her stepfather married her mother’s sister-in-law.
Despite the bells and whistles of their elaborate wedding, Mary Baker’s marriage to Mark Lindsey was short-lived. Mark developed tuberculosis and was sent away to a specialty hospital in Albuquerque, where he passed away at age 21. Mary’s grief was as brief as her marriage — she was married again (and divorced) just a few years later. It is unclear how Mary met her second husband, Howard Daly, but their divorce is presumed to be due to Howard’s rampant alcoholism. By 1925, Mary was widowed once again when Howard died of supposed heart disease. Less than a year after his death, Mary attended her stepmother Kate’s birthday party, where she met Senator John Joyce. John became Mary’s third husband, and she enjoyed the attention and prestige that came with being married to a politician.
Joyce, who had served in the navy during World War I and had a moderately successful real estate and insurance career, worked his way through the bureaucratic ranks, first as a committeeman for the Democratic party of Cook County, becoming elected to the House of Representatives at age 25, then elected to the upper chamber, and eventually achieved the Republican nomination for State Senator in the 29th District. Some of his notable works included a “boxing bill” which would aim to regulate boxing matches via an unpaid committee selected by the governor; a redistricting bill to define the boundaries of 51 new districts based on the 1920 census report; Senate Bill 220, which received bipartisan support and provided for general voter registration every four years instead of two; and a gasoline tax bill which was delayed due to multiple members of the state senate ditching the hearing to attend a racing Derby.
But Joyce also had a penchant for trouble. After one Sunday afternoon baseball game between the intramural Democratic and Republican party members, which ended with a massive keg of beer shared between “victors and vanquished alike,” Joyce and State Representative Lawrence O’Brien were pulled over by a police officer under suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Joyce and O’Brien literally came out swinging, and before long a brawl broke out between the politicians and a growing fray of police. Both men were arrested and booked, but Joyce wasn’t shaken. Rather than attempt some kind of damage control, he later proudly boasted to reporters that everything they’d heard about the scuffle was indeed true.
This casual arrogance reared its ugly head once again in 1929 when Joyce was revealed as one of over a dozen legislators who had been cutting themselves extra checks by putting themselves on multiple payrolls. Joyce had been receiving not only his salary as a public officer, but also from the sanitary district and the park district. He had also put several family members on the payroll, despite little evidence that he and his family did any work to earn those salaries. Not only that, but each legislator in question had admitted to voting for revenue bills which would increase their district’s tax assessments by nearly $100 million (over $16 million today), which further enhanced their take-home pay. Again, Joyce stood behind his actions:
“It is true that I have a brother and another relative working as traffic checkers for the park board. But what of it? A man in public life has to take care of his relatives and friends and maintain an organization if he expects to keep going. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
In response to questions over whether he actually performed work for the sanitary district, from which he received $300 a month (over $5,000 today), Joyce could only say that he “worked as much as anybody else” and that “everybody knows the salary [representatives] receive from the state is entirely inadequate to pay our expenses.” In addition to his sanitary district salary and his public office salary, Joyce took home vouchers equal to $2,620 — over $4,500 today.
These slights were a mere fraction of Joyce’s biggest controversy, which began during the 1930 senatorial election. Police initially reported that April 8th was “the most orderly primary in Cook county in many years,” but the day later devolved into chaos when Democratic committeeman Sheldon Govier, traveling with his nephew and a few staffers, was driven off the road by seven men armed with pistols who attempted to kidnap and murder him. Several of the men were caught, arrested, and charged, but those who temporarily evaded capture went on to assault and rob multiple people at a nearby restaurant. One of the men was John Ray, a precinct captain for Joyce. In response, police forces rallied around each polling place and stood guard despite concerns that those policemen were intimidating voters to sway the election. Joyce was said to feel especially worried that the police commissioner was using the massive police presence to attempt to steal the election, but his fears were quelled when he successfully received the Republican nomination. The next day, however, four election officials were arrested when it was revealed that they had allowed a group of outsiders to remove 100 ballots and re-mark them. Joyce’s opponent, Wallace F. Kirk, lost the election by under 100 votes.
The Joyce-Kirk contest began shortly thereafter, with Kirk claiming that Joyce had used “terrorist tactics” to secure the election. During the trial, a witness for Kirk testified that gunmen had entered a 42nd ward polling place, took 60 uncounted ballots, and returned them to be counted about 45 minutes later. On the stand, Joyce initially declined to name said gunmen out of fear for his own life, but on Friday, August 15, he revealed that a gangster named Tommy Abbott was one of the members of the “machine gun brigade” responsible for the theft. Joyce was instructed to return to court the following Monday and provide the names of witnesses who could corroborate his story.
On August 16, Abbott’s wife reported him missing. Abbott and his associate, Dominick Nuccio (affiliates of the Moran-Aiello and Al Capone mob families, respectively) had each been facing charges — Nuccio for attempting to violently infiltrate a rival gang’s territory, and Abbott for murdering a man in Rockford. Abbott left his home on Friday morning carrying $35 on his person and wearing a light tan suit. He later called his wife to tell her to prepare for an upcoming motor tour in Wisconsin, and instructed her to be ready to go at 4pm the next day. 4pm came and went but Abbott never showed. When Mrs. Abbott expressed her fear to the police that her husband may have been killed, the officers responded with “elation,” and told her “good riddance.”
At the same time on the other side of the city, Mary Joyce began receiving strange phone calls from three different unknown men.
She recalled that “a voice asked if the senator was there, and I said he had just stepped out, not wishing to wake him [from his afternoon nap]. The voice said, ‘Are you sure he stepped out?’ and hung up.”
Fifteen minutes later, Mary heard John cry out from his bedroom. She rushed in and only managed to share one last moment with her husband before he died in her arms. Within minutes, the police and coroner arrived and quickly determined that these were suspicious circumstances: there was no sign of a struggle, although two open windows in the bedroom could have been within reach of someone with a stepladder and a quiet affect; there were no weapons present, no commotion to be heard, and besides a slight malaise that Mary attributed to the demands of his trial, Joyce was in perfect health.
One of Joyce’s brothers, Edward “Piggy” Joyce, had suggested that this was a case of poisoning, but the coroner warned that a toxicology report would take at least a week. In the meantime, hundreds of public officials, judges, legislators, friends, and loved ones gathered at All Saints Cemetery to mourn the tragic loss. The funeral featured a salute from a firing squad as well as a tribute from multiple ranks of naval reserves who had known Joyce during his brief time in the service.
It was at this funeral that Piggy was arrested. Several years prior, he had accidentally killed a woman with his car and was ordered to pay $10,000 to her widower, but he defaulted on these payments. Piggy had a penchant for crime — namely multiple arrests for gambling and writing fake checks — but would later campaign for his own brother’s senatorial nomination seat.
On September 3, the coroner revealed that Joyce’s death was a result of hydrocyanic acid poisoning. The State’s Attorney appeared nonplussed, denying that any foul play had taken place and that he was “uninterested” in whether this was a case of suicide or simple mistake.
Hydrocyanic acid is also known as prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide. It was first discovered in 1706 by extracting iron oxide from Prussian blue pigment and combining it with a volatile component. In the 1890s, a British chemist patented a method to produce prussic acid by passing ammonia over coal, and from there its production became widespread in the mining and farming industries. In World War I, prussic acid was weaponized by France, the United States, and Italy as a form of chemical warfare, but was replaced by chlorine and phosgene gasses due to their density and efficiency. Prussic acid gas was too light and dispersed too quickly to be effective against enemies, but made a comeback in World War II in the form of Zyklon B. Although it was put out of practice as an instrument of war, the chemical’s ability to kill a human quickly and quietly made it a popular choice for murders and suicides. During World War II, cyanide pills (also known as “kill pills”) were sometimes sewn into the corners of special agents’ shirt collars in order to ensure those agents evaded torture should they be captured by the enemy. But Joyce was not a special agent, and there is no evidence that he would have encountered cyanide at any point during his service in the Navy. While there were a handful of self-poisonings in the 1930s amongst naval service members and recruits, there was only one such reported suicide between 1935 and 1930 and took place in the course of service. Joyce had been out of the service for well over a decade at this point. If he had intentionally acquired cyanide, it would have most likely been through his familial ties to the mob.
But even if Joyce had ended his life to escape the growing pressure of terrorism charges and mounting debt, the circumstances surrounding his death were undoubtedly strange. Led by lead investigator George Lavin, an inquiry began into the three women closest to Joyce.
First was Joyce’s widow, who within weeks of her husband’s death began running for his very seat as the Republican nominee for the Senate. In fact, both she and her trouble-making brother-in-law, Piggy Joyce, both ran campaigns in October 1930. Mary Joyce was among 13 women who ran for office that year, and she boasted a rabid, if modest, number of supporters. One night in early November, a parade of Mary’s supporters drove past the hospital where Mayor Thompson lay recovering from a serious infection, honking their horns and cheering “vociferously.” 15 cars full of demonstrators waved banners and sang their praises for her, only stopping once police arrived to dispel them.
Potential political motivations aside, Mary staunchly advocated for a deeper investigation into her husband’s death, going so far as to hire a private investigator who would later order Joyce’s body to be exhumed for further testing not once, but twice. In many interviews with the press, Mary insisted that Joyce had been unwell the night before his death. She also pointed to the fact that there were two open windows in the bedroom, each just eight feet off the ground, and claimed that this was indisputable proof of a murderous intruder being responsible. She also pointed to the testimony of a witness who claimed that he and Joyce had watched Assistant State’s Attorney Harry Busch drive down Joyce’s street and slow when he passed them. Busch denied that he had been in the neighborhood at that time, and was never questioned again.
Despite her best efforts to paint herself as a grieving widow, Mary still could not escape suspicion. While she barricaded herself in her home in fear of being “kidnapped” by police, investigators began unfolding the pages of her questionable past, beginning with the untimely death of her first husband, Howard Daly. While his death certificate stated that Howard had died of heart disease (which Mary claimed was spurred on by his rampant alcohol abuse), police found it odd that both of Mary’s husbands managed to drop dead at an early age, especially given her apparent self-appointed role as their caretaker. Of particular interest was Mary’s abrupt statement to the press that Joyce had suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure — facts which were not disclosed in Joyce’s initial post mortem.
Pressure continued to mount when police took their second and third suspects into custody: Isabelle Daly — Mary’s adopted daughter — and Bernice Webb, a 22 year-old hat model who had been boarding at the Joyce’s apartment at the time. Daly was reported to have been taken to a secret location for questioning, and although it quickly became clear that she had no direct knowledge of her foster father’s death, she was nevertheless quizzed heavily on her relationship with her adopted parents. Isabelle had left the Joyce home several weeks before Joyce’s death due to an argument with Mary, but prosecutors would not allow her to tell reporters what had caused the argument. Rumors circulated that Joyce had been overly friendly with his foster daughter and perhaps had overstepped his parental boundaries with her, but Mary firmly denied these allegations.
“I’m not afraid of anything Isabelle may tell them,” she said. “They are trying to make out that I had poisoned John Joyce because he had been too friendly with Isabelle. That’s not true. If John Joyce were anything more than a kind foster father to the girl, I had no knowledge of it.” Still, Mary threatened multiple writs of habeas corpus to prevent the other women in the Joyce household from further questioning. Bernice Webb, whose history and relationship to the Joyces is a mystery to this day, provided “nothing of importance” to the investigation, furthering Mary’s claim that these secret interrogations were politically motivated.
“My only sin is that I am in politics,” she told reporters. “Johnny’s sin was that he won the nomination.”
Meanwhile, the battle for the nomination waged on. After Joyce’s win in April, Wallace Kirk challenged the election’s integrity and petitioned the Cook County Circuit Court for a recount, naming Joyce and Charles Monahan, another candidate, as defendants. Upon his untimely death, Joyce’s representatives filed a motion to abate the election fraud case. Judge David M. Brothers, who was presiding over an “emergency court” in August, and moved for leave to appear as amicus curiae, ruled in favor of abatement. Upon the return of the originally presiding judge, the abatement order was vacated and the recount proceeded, ultimately reversing the election outcome in favor of Kirk. Charles E. Peace, having been nominated by the Republican senatorial committee to fill the vacancy post-Joyce’s death, contested the Circuit Court’s actions and sought a mandamus to compel the expungement of Kirk’s declaration as nominee. The Illinois Supreme Court, in its deliberation, referenced the precedent set in Olson v. Scully, which upheld the common law principle that legal actions abate with the death of a party barring statutory provisions to the contrary. The Court found no such provisions applicable to the primary election contest, thereby ruling the Circuit Court’s continuation of the contest and subsequent declaration in favor of Kirk as beyond its jurisdiction. Thus, the Supreme Court granted the writ of mandamus, ordering the reversal of the lower court’s order that declared Kirk the nominee. Charles Peace maintained his nomination, only to be defeated by Edward O’Grady, a Democrat known as the “Village Blacksmith” who ran on an anti-prohibitionist campaign. O’Grady managed to obtain twice as many votes as Peace; Mary Joyce polled under 1,000 votes; and Piggy Joyce only scraped together a handful of votes. Almost exactly one year after Joyce’s primary win, four election officials were sentenced to one year each in county jail for their involvement in Joyce’s fraudulent voting scheme.
After this point, much of the Joyce story is lost — or forgotten — to time. Mary Joyce went on to receive multiple accolades for her charitable work in her hometown of Streator, Illinois, but died in September 1933 along with the investigation into her husband’s death. Her cause of death and burial site are either unknown or intentionally undocumented. It is also unknown why Isabelle Daly, the adopted daughter whom Mary had so vehemently defended just a few years prior, was never mentioned in Mary’s obituary. Isabelle and Bernice must have evaded any further attention from the press because they, too, appear to have faded into obscurity. The little information that does exist on these women is contained only in the questionable accuracy of genealogy databases, and even then it is unclear whether the Joyce, Daly, or Webb names lived to see the 21st century. Perhaps that is for the best.
To posthumously atone for my efforts to dredge up over a century of shame and scandal in the name of journalism, I visited John Joyce at his final resting place at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines. I felt a certain kind of guilt for having dragged his name through the mud, but I found that the earth had long since accomplished that task: his grave was unmarked in a secluded section of the cemetery and sat somewhere under several inches of wet dirt and moldy leaves. I hoped to find him and leave a penny as penance, but in the absence of so much as a placard, I settled for a gift of peace. I prayed that the afterlife afforded him an eternity of anonymity after my attempt to re-shine on him a spotlight he’d long managed to avoid. With no firm answers and no interest or ability to find them, John Joyce’s legend and legacy is as cold and dead as the ground around him.
