On March 2, 1978, an elderly woman known as Mary Doefour passed away in Queenwood East Nursing Home, but Mary Doefour wasn’t her real name. In fact, no one knew who she was or when she was born. No one knew of a single friend or relative to inform of her passing either. Doefour had been found wandering along a roadside in Northern Illinois, about 50 years earlier. She was disoriented and beaten. She’d been sexually assaulted and was later found to be pregnant. When asked who she was, she couldn’t remember her name. She later remembered that she had been a schoolteacher. That was all she ever remembered. When Rick Baker, a writer for the Bloomington Pantagraph got the call to write an obituary for an unknown woman, he was at first annoyed, but later he was intrigued. He had to know who she was.
Mary was not mentally unstable. Nevertheless, she was placed in a state hospital for the criminally insane, and no one tried very hard to uncover her identity. Her child was most likely put in an orphanage. On multiple occasions, she reportedly tried to argue that she did not belong in the hospital, but each attempt left her medicated. She was living a nightmare from which she could not awaken. Doefour was periodically subjected to electric shock therapy for unknown reasons, which likely damaged her mind. After 10 years of this abuse, she was transferred to a state mental hospital in Bartonville, where her mental and physical state slowly degenerated. Sadly, the proper treatment that might have restored her memory to her had been denied her, and she remained a mere shadow of her former self.
For 30 years, Doefour was in the Bartonville mental hospital without visitors. In 1972, she was sent to a nursing home in El Paso and then to one in Morton. For more than four decades, no one could determine who she was, but then no on really tried either. Baker was different, and after hearing the vague details of her story in 1978, he began investigating who she might have been. He ran a 14-page story in the Bloomington Pantagraph about Doefour, hoping that someone would recognize her story. When no one came forward with any ideas about her identity, Baker ran another story in the Peoria Journal Star, which also ran in a few other notable papers. From the story’s printing, a clue arose. A woman wrote in stating that she remembered a teacher who had disappeared in Iowa.
Baker followed up on this lead by calling a school in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where he eventually learned that about 50 years earlier, a teacher had gone missing by the name of Anna Myrle Sizer. After further investigation, he discovered Sizer had a brother, Harold Sizer, who was still alive. From him, Baker learned that Sizer was last seen getting off a train in Marion, Iowa. A later suspected sighting of Sizer placed her wandering, dazed, on a highway between Cedar Rapids, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois. The more he learned about Anna Myrle Sizer, the more Baker became convinced she was Mary Doefour, whose name was given as a way of keeping track of unknowns. The women were all given the name of Mary Doe, with the addition of a number to distinguish each from the others. Mary Doefour was the fourth such unknown woman. 
Baker showed a photograph of Sizer as a young woman to people who knew Doefour, many believed them to be one and the same, still, this did not promote a deeper investigation. Baker tried to get Sizer’s brother to look into the case further, by going through the court to gain access to Doefour’s medical records and hopefully prove she was his sister. But Harold wouldn’t agree. His family had already made peace with Sizer’s disappearance, concluding that she had died long ago. And the possibility that she’d been trapped in a mental hospital for 50 years wasn’t one that Harold could accept. Baker eventually had to close his investigation without ever knowing for certain if he had found the real Mary Doefour and solved the mystery. Nevertheless, I believe from the pictures he showed people that he did indeed find Anna Sizer…may she finally rest in peace.
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