In July of 1903 Mabel Jordine, a little two year old girl disappeared from her home and was found murdered near her home the next morning. Her parents, Andrew and Anna Jordine were visiting Lake Houghton and the opera house. Their seven children were near the family home on Miller Street. The daughters were visiting a neighbor family, and the boys were playing with neighborhood boys on Miller Street.
The Jordine home was a one room home, sitting above an open, half underground first floor structure where the daily meals were prepared. There were four beds in the home and around eight o'clock Maude Jordine, the eldest child, brought the youngest, Mabel, home and put her to bed after she had fallen asleep at the neighbor's house. Maude then returned to the neighbor's home to retrieve her other sisters and call the brothers home. When they returned home about fifteen minutes later, Mabel Jordine was not in her bed. A search for her was immediately started and a message was sent to the opera house to call the parents home.
Although the family and many neighbors searched through the evening and into the night, Mabel was not found until the following morning. She was found in a nearby pasture adjacent to the Jordine home. There were bruises made by fingers around her throat and her body was mutilated. In the home there were large shoe prints in the dust of some unused stairs, where it was supposed the murderer might have hidden.
The entire city was shocked and obsessed with the crime. The Jordine home was immediately the center of activity and attention. Countless carriages and buggies drove past the house, and passersby found any excuse to walk by the house and catch a glimpse of the grieving family. The home was described in detail, with enumerations of the beds, the primitive cooking arrangements and the unfinished nature of the house.
Another distasteful fact was that four little girls were the pall bearers of the tiny coffin. According to the "Book of Etiquette" by Lillian Richler (1921) it was very appropriate to have little child pallbearers for the funeral of a child. There should be little girls for a girl and little boys for a boys death. This seems extraordinary to us at this time. We shelter children from death, but in 1916 childhood mortality was so high that children would be all too aware of its nearness through illness and accident.
In less than four days, a private detective named Press Butler decided he had solved the mystery and requested a warrant for the arrest of Maude Jordine from the justice of the peace. This detective had made a name for himself in other cases, one of which resulted in the execution of a man. After that execution another man made a death bed confession to the murder. Maude was arrested on the basis of his investigation, and held in the jail until there could be a preliminary hearing several days later.
On the day of the hearing masses of people crowded into the courthouse. Feelings were running very high and citizens were upset that a young woman had been subjected to imprisonment when no facts were made public that would justify her arrest. The hearing was a very short one. Just a few witnesses appeared before the judge declared the hearing at an end and released Maude Jordine, finding no evidence against her. The only "evidence" was innuendo and second hand reports of Maude complaining about taking care of the baby. At the same time, other witnesses said that Maude was very proud of the baby and would buy it little presents with the money she earned at the caramel factory. Other rumors suggested that Maude was actually the mother of little Mabel, but the attending physician dispelled that rumor very positively. After the judge released Maude, the exuberance of the crowd could not be contained. The audience climbed onto the chairs of the court house in hobnailed boots, marring the surfaces of the courthouse that had been rebuilt so recently. They climbed over the bar to congratulate Maude and hiss at the detective.
During the entire circus of rumor and innuendo, Bloomington and the murder were the center of attention in Illinois. A little boy had been murdered in Rockford in a similar way, with mutilation of the body, and the two cases were compared. No solution for the mystery was ever found, although rewards were offered by the police, the Pantagraph and concerned citizens. Photographs of the family, their home and even little Mabel appeared in papers all over Illinois.
Luckily, the rumormongering did not prevent Maude from going on to have a family of her own. She married a few years later and had a large family of eleven children and died in Peoria in 1973.