On the late afternoon of September 24, 1939, thirteen-year-old Allen Siegel became curious when he heard some of the neighbor boys at his apartment building at 1680 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn talking about a “doll” on the roof. He climbed the six flights of stairs to the rooftop to check things out for himself. To his horror, what he found on the rooftop was no plaything, but the lifeless body of a young girl.
This week on Out of the Past: The Murder of Elaine Joan Morris.
Unlike the boys who had been up to the rooftop before him, Allen Siegel contacted the authorities. Soon, officers started arriving at the scene, trying to figure out not only what happened to this girl, but who she was. She had a piece of a men’s undershirt placed over her face. Her white shoes sat beside her body. Nobody in the apartment house knew who she was. She didn’t live there. Detectives were able in a very short amount of time to trace the shoes via the manufacturer’s serial number to the store that carried them, and were put in contact with the purchaser: Brooklyn lawyer Jacob P. Morris.
Jacob and his wife Juliette, of 2108 J in Brooklyn, were prominent members of their community. Jacob was a devout Jew and was at the synagogue for Yom Kippur services the day Elaine went missing. Juliette spent the day at home, allowing her daughter, four-year-old Elaine Joan Morris, to go out to play in the streets of Brooklyn. Around 11:30, she went looking for her. She asked another neighborhood child if she knew where she was, and she told her that she had said she was going shopping for a new white pocketbook with her grandmother. This was a good enough explanation. Juliette trusted her mother, 59-year-old Stephanie Waldman Strauss, with Elaine. She and her husband didn’t even worry when Elaine failed to come home later that day. They assumed Strauss had everything under control. They didn’t even have a chance to worry before the police contacted them regarding the shoes, which came as a complete shock. They were sure that Elaine was safe in the care of her grandmother. When Morris finally came to identify his daughter’s body, he collapsed from grief. Neither he nor his wife had any idea how such a terrible thing could have happened.
Funeral services for Elaine were held the next day, but there was still no sign of Strauss. The police couldn’t find her anywhere. They spoke to witnesses at the Ocean Avenue apartment house who did say they remembered seeing the child with a middle-aged woman.
The more they investigated, the more one fact became obvious: Strauss was the last person ever to be seen with Elaine. And the last place they were spotted was the crime scene. One witness who saw them on the roof, a maid in her twenties named Ollie Thomas, said that at one point “the child appeared to be afraid,” but that she calmed down after the woman talked to her.
People couldn’t wrap their minds around the possibility: how could a woman do something like this to her own grandchild? The more they investigated, however, the more it became clear that Strauss was the only suspect. And now she was missing.
Orders went out to over a hundred New York City police officers, and an eight-state search was launched: finding Strauss was a top priority. They didn’t just want to speak to her; their instructions were to arrest her on the spot.
Strauss evaded the police for five days. Knowing that she was desperate for work, police visited every employment agency in the search area, providing them with a description of the suspect. Eventually, they got a call from Tess Greenberg, manager of the Hamilton Employment Agency in Paterson, New Jersey, who told them that Strauss had come into the office looking for work as a cook. Greenberg was suspicious from the start, as she had just finished reading a police description before Strauss walked in. Her appearance bordered on bizarre: she wore dark glasses over her regular glasses, and her hair was a dramatic shade of auburn. Strauss gave her name as “Marion Fay,” then slipped shortly afterward, repeating her first name as “Miriam.” She fumbled similarly with the fake address she gave. “You’ll have to take my face for my honesty,” Strauss told Greenberg. “I wouldn’t do nothing wrong.”
Strauss stipulated at one point that she refused to work any place with children. Greenberg knew by now that she must be speaking with the wanted woman. She pulled the police description out of her desk and started checking the details. This set Strauss off. She began shouting, “What are you looking at?” and tried to look over Greenberg’s shoulder. Catching herself, Strauss apologized, saying that she was “nervous” and had “family trouble.” Greenberg was desperate to get away by now, but Strauss refused to be left alone. When a reception clerk showed up, Greenberg discreetly excused herself to an adjoining office on the pretext of running to the ladies’ room. As soon as she was away, she called the authorities. Strauss was on her way out the door when she “walked into the arms” of detectives Albert Stengel and James Keys. She protested loudly. “Where are you taking me? I know my rights! You can’t arrest me!” For some time, she denied any involvement in Elaine’s death, saying, “They can’t pin anything on me! I didn’t do anything and I know the law!”
When Strauss finally admitted that she was responsible for her granddaughter’s death, she insisted it was an accident. She said that Elaine had asked her to go for a walk, and that she took her to the roof of a building where she had once worked as a servant. According to her account, she sat on the roof with her granddaughter, drawing pictures of farm animals for her. Elaine was wearing a white ribbon around her neck, and kept complaining about it being too loose. Strauss said that she attempted to adjust it, but it became too tight and soon Elaine’s face began to turn blue, then black. Strauss grew “panicky” and propped the child’s lifeless body up against the elevator shaft, covering it with clothing from a nearby washline. The details of Strauss’s story are fuzzy here, but her claim seems to be that her disorientation at the time was so great, she didn’t know what had just happened: she convinced herself that the supposed ribbon around Elaine’s neck was really a “conspicuous white collar” that she somehow removed from her own dress. She claimed she didn’t know the girl was dead until informed by the police in Paterson who arrested her.
At any rate, Strauss then said that she wandered away in a state of confusion and stayed that night at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, stopping briefly in Queens the next before fleeing to New Jersey. She insisted again and again that she had never had any intention of harming Elaine. She sobbed throughout the confession and kept telling detectives she was “crazy about the child.” Elaine’s mother corroborated at least this much of her own mother’s story: she said that even though there was tension between Strauss and the Morrises, Strauss had always been very fond of Elaine. Strauss admitted to having quarreled often with her daughter and son-in-law, and said that their fights were the reason she left Brooklyn to seek work elsewhere.
A week had passed since Elaine had been killed, and law enforcement had had plenty of time to examine the injuries on her body. Chief Inspector John J. Ryan described the wound around her neck as deep with ridges on either side, indicating that she was strangled with a wire. There was no way, they said, that a ribbon was responsible for her injuries.
Let’s talk about the mechanics of strangulation for a moment. It’s not an easy way to kill someone. Strangulation occurs when so much pressure is placed on the windpipe that it causes enough trauma to make someone asphyxiate. Even if Strauss pulled the ribbon tight enough for Elaine to become unconscious, she still would have to have been holding the ribbon tightly for several minutes in order to kill her. And of course, forensics shows us that she didn’t use a ribbon at all, but some type of wire that cut the girl’s skin. Elaine likely suffered a great deal of pain in the moments before she lost consciousness.
Many of the newspaper stories at the time reported that Strauss had a strained relationship with her daughter and son-in-law. Strauss, according to some accounts, was constantly requesting money from him. He gave her some money, but soon she was asking to move in with the family. That was too much for Jacob, and she became furious when he refused. She quarrelled with her daughter on the morning of the murder, accusing Jacob of “making trouble” with her employers and causing her to lose work. Juliette told authorities that not only had they never badmouthed Strauss to any of her employers, she never even knew where she worked.
When Strauss was captured in Paterson, she waived extradition and returned to New York, accompanied by both Paterson and Brooklyn police. She was indicted in Brooklyn Felony Court for first-degree murder. She was arraigned, and entered a plea of not guilty. She was remanded without bail and kept in the custody of the state. Her case file reports that psychiatrists who observed her at Bellevue Hospital declared her to be “psychotic, suffering from schizophrenia (Dementia Praecox) of the Paranoid Type,” and that she was “in such a state of insanity as to be incapable of understanding the charge against her, or the proceedings, or making her defense.” District attorney Leonard Ruisi had said from the beginning that he thought it was obvious Strauss suffered from a persecution complex. There were reports of her telling people strange things, such as that the police had been tailing her for four years. As she was found not competent to stand trial, she was committed to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Matteawan. Nobody was by her side when her sentence was handed down. Juliette was her only living relative, and she certainly didn’t show up to support her mother. Strauss was without a shoulder to cry on.
Grandmothers are supposed to adore their grandchildren. They’re supposed to spoil them rotten and shower them with love. This crime makes me feel sick and sad. Elaine deserved so much better.
I usually like to give you some extra resources for researching the case yourself, but for this one, there aren’t any. As far as I can tell, this is this case’s internet debut. There’s not a word about it anywhere I’ve searched other than newspaper articles from the time of the crime, and I’ve been unable to find a single word about what happened to Strauss after she was committed, or anything that happened to anyone involved in the case. If you would like to read the old articles about this case, I’ll have clippings available on my website, which I’ll have a link to down in the description box.
That’s all for now. I’ll see you next time on Out of the Past.