Child

The moment Ericka Garner learned of the 150-year-old mummified child unearthed in her San Francisco backyard, her life took an uncanny turn. It would take a team of experts to figure out who this young person was and why they were there in the first place.

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Transcript

This text may not be distributed or published online without documented or written permission from Shadow Clock Podcast. Transcripts are generated using a combination of human beings and AI software (i.e., speech recognition) and therefore may contain errors. Please reference the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Special thanks to Cindy Mahalic Higgerson, Spencer Masternak, Bruce Scivally, and Alec Jansen for making these transcriptions possible.

START OF EPISODE

Ericka Karner

We had actually moved out of the house because we were not going be able to live in the house for a good nine months. So we had just relocated to Idaho, and we were kind of settling in to what was going to be our new life. And my husband and I were at a bar having a glass of wine, celebrating the fact that we had found preschools for the kids. And I opened up the email to get the update from our contractor on what they had achieved during the day. Updates like, “oh this was great. We were able to like, go through the foundation, we were able to do this,” and then we got to like item number five and it's like oh, “and do you know anything about a coffin? Um, because we found one in your backyard?”

Katie Mahalic (Voice Over)

You're listening to the voice of Ericka Karner telling me about the moment her life became a bit topsy turvy, to say the least. It was 2016. Ericka and her husband, John, had decided to do a remodel of her childhood home where they were raising their own two daughters. The house, which was in the lone mountain neighborhood of San Francisco, was built in 1938, and it had been in Erica's family since 1976. The family had only been in Idaho a short while when they got the infamous email from their contractor, John Sangiacomo. Here's John telling me about the moment he got the call about the coffin.

John Sangiacomo

It was the morning. It was basically the start of the workday, and the guys had just begun kind of digging in that area when they-when they I think they hit the casket with basically, with a shovel.

Katie

I'm Katie Mahalic and you're listening to: Shadow Clock.

John

When it was first discovered, we didn't know what it was like. The crew onsite was just... Because it was such an ornate coffin, basically made of steel. Nobody knew exactly what this thing was, and I think everybody was hesitant to even go near it. And some of the guys were like, “it's got a smell to it.” They didn't know if maybe it was an existing storage tank for like, you know, propane fueled home or whatever it might have been. And as they further exposed that, then they got very confused. And that's when, you know, I received a call. It was from the site superintendent, and he said they had found something and that I should probably get over there quick. So, we- when I got on site, it was, yeah, that's not normal, but it looks to me like it's a casket. I was like, it's so small that it had to be... we knew it had to be a child's casket.

Katie

It was a child's casket. And even more unnerving, through the lid of the coffin, which was made up of two glass panels, John, and his crew could see the outline of a human face below the glass.

John

This was totally unchartered territory for us. I first called the building department to see if they had any knowledge of how you approach a situation like this, and they pointed towards the coroner's office. And so, then when we called them, they actually came out to the site, and they knew why it was there. It's like I think he said it right there on the site. It's like, yeah, this was all cemetery.

Katie

Like the medical examiner. Ericka was also not surprised, at least once she was over the shock of John's email.

Ericka

I’ve grown up in this neighborhood, so I knew that there were often body parts. All sorts of things that got uncovered when people were digging out because it had been a cemetery at one point.

Katie

It wasn't just the lone mountain neighborhood that had been sacred ground. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century, San Francisco had at least four massive cemeteries spreading out over the city. Mission Dolores Park, Telegraph Hill, and Urba Buena are just some of the well-known areas that became the final resting place for the formerly living. However, it's the word final that is problematic when discussing this history. Today, only two cemeteries remain as actual visitable cemeteries. The reason: a San Francisco group, residential space, became a premium. And so, along with the turn of the century, came a ban on burials within the city limits, followed by the decision to reclaim space for the living. It was in the early 1930s that more than 25,000 remains were relocated, specifically from a massive cemetery called the Odd Fellows. The bodies were moved to Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. All that remains of Odd Fellows now is a columbarium that stands majestically among the residential houses of the lone mountain neighborhood, and the unlucky souls that were overlooked, missed and conveniently forgotten, such as the little girl in Ericka's backyard.

Ericka

The contractor who originally built the house in 1938, there's no way they didn't see the coffin. We know that for a fact, because it was right next to a sewer line and someone had taken off the seal that's on top of the casket that actually identifies who is inside.

Katie

It would be another 78 years after Erika's house was built that this little girl would be unearthed again, only to be subjected to yet another erroneous choice of what to do with her forgotten remains. The medical examiner asked John's team to open the casket.

John

And we were like, You're sure about this? Like, this was clearly a buried child. It felt to me like it shouldn't be just done on a construction site. Like, you should take this away and if you're going to do it, you'll do it in some lab setting, right? Like it felt like there would be a forum for this, and this was not it.

Katie

But the medical examiner insisted. And so, reluctantly, the crew began the task of trying to open it.

John

You couldn't pry it open. You couldn't twist the screws or anything. I mean, it had been in the earth for so long that... You know, somebody tried with a power drill. It couldn't-- we couldn't get a screw to thread. So that's when the coroner was like, okay, cut it open.

Katie

One of the guys from the construction crew had a grinder saw on site, and he did what he was instructed to do. He opened the casket.

John

This little baby, it was. That was what was shocking. She was really well preserved. She was still holding flowers in her hand. It almost looked like lavender. And you can see her teeth and her hair and like, that made it extra sad, to be honest. It's just like... I remember most vividly seeing her hand and her fingernails, and then you could make out clearly her face, like her eyes, her nose and her mouth and her eyes were closed and she still had hair. And so he wouldn't have expected this to have been a baby buried in the 1800s. You know, not quite a baby, but not-- definitely not a toddler. I mean, she looked like it could have been just months before that she was put in the ground.

Katie

Whoever her family was, it was clear they went through great lengths to make sure their baby girl's image was preserved, exactly how they wanted to remember her. It was as if she really was just in an eternal sleep. And that choice of opening that coffin allowed what was intricately preserved to be exposed to air.

Ericka

At that point, that kind of started the... almost like the clock ticking, because it was super hot, and what had been perfectly preserved was now kind of exposed to air and all the things that that can do.

Katie

You see, the casket up until this point was still completely intact. It was functioning exactly as the designer had intended.

Ericka

It was like a completely sealed kind of casket that really, I think, had been designed to maximize preservation.

Katie

Erica is exactly right. This was a Barstow casket priced in the late 1800s at about $50 to $60, the equivalent of about $1500 dollars today. It was constructed of steel and designed to be airtight, once sealed, made with a specific purpose of preserving a body. Whoever this little girl was, she was from a family with means. Family who had spent a great sum of money to preserve their child for what I had imagined they had hoped would be eternity.

John

We think, out of sort of necessity and then maybe even respect, created another... basically a wooden coffin for that to go within. And I don't think it was correct or proper, especially when it was left with us for weeks in the garage.

Katie

John isn't exaggerating. The crew moved the little girl and her casket into the garage where she would sit for almost two more weeks. In the meantime, Ericka and her husband, John, were told they would have to deal with the little girl's removal and burial all by themselves.

Ericka

The medical examiner kicked it to our contractor and said, “Please let the homeowners know this is their responsibility. And it was found on their property.” So, I wasn't expecting this to all of a sudden be something that would get thrown back on us.

Katie

And it was a big something. Ericka started to call around to see who would remove and rebury the body.

Ericka

There is a group that works to validate when the individual passed, probably validate that there isn't anything kind of less than ethical going on, and then they will coordinate all the burial things.

Katie

Erica asked for a quote and started the process.

Ericka

So they sent us this contract that basically said, you know, it's $5,000 for our services. And then you're also basically signing a blank check for all the reinterment and everything else. And at that point, had given estimates like a plot down in Colma, which is where most of the individuals that had been in this area had been taken. It was like $20,000 or $30,000.

Katie

It simply wasn't a financially feasible solution. And what made it all the more frustrating was that the little girl's family had already paid to have a beautiful burial. The mistake of leaving this little girl behind was either by the city, or the Odd Fellows cemetery, or both.

Ericka

This was, you know, a fail on the city's part or whoever owned the cemeteries, you know, back in the 30s. So I reached out to Odd Fellows, like, “Hey, this was one of your kind of residents. When you want to make right by something that should have been done properly, you know almost 100 years ago.” Called a number of different cemeteries, explained the situation, and even though people were sympathetic, it's like, well, like maybe we can give out, you know, for $10,000. I mean, it was just it was still for- for someone who's not a family member. I was... it just was not something that was in our budget.

Katie

Over the next week and a half, John and his crew did the best they could working around the body. Unfortunately, the time that passed also created what one would expect: the smell of decay and decomposition.

Ericka

It was just very clear that the very kind of precious ecosystem that had been maintained for almost 100 years had been disturbed. And so what had been, you know, pretty close to perfect preservation was no longer so.

Katie

For those of you wondering about the option of cremation.

Ericka

Some of the things we were talking about were like, do something that's maybe a little more cost effective. Well, you can't cremate without a death certificate. And so, the medical examiner can't give us a death certificate. So basically, we literally had this body of this little girl sitting in our backyard because the medical examiner opened it in hot weather, kind of doing all these things that, you know, she'd been preserved for a hundred years. Like, why did you open it?

Katie

It was around day ten that Erica finally had a breakthrough after getting a hold of San Francisco's deputy public administrator, Michelle Lewis.

Ericka

They said, listen, they couldn't help, but this was a child, clearly. And there's this organization that kind of deals with this type of thing, although for today's children. But let me get you in touch with her.

Katie

That's when Erica met Elissa Davey.

Elissa Davey

My name is Elissa Davey, and I'm the founder of Garden of Innocence.

Katie

Elissa and her organization have been giving thoughtful burials to abandoned or unidentified children since 1999. The causes of death she sees vary from homicides to stillborn, in which many of the babies are discarded haphazardly in random locations or left at hospitals.

Elissa

We just take them. We just take care of it, make sure that they get a final resting place.

Katie

Each child, the Guardian of Innocence claims, is buried with a hand-knitted blanket, a stuffy and a poem, and all are given a proper burial service. And this is exactly what this little girl needed: a proper burial, albeit a second one. But Elissa, even with all her expertise, also hit a slew of roadblocks.

Ericka

And she's like, this is just not fair to you guys. This is not fair to this little individual. And so she began to get angry. That's when she called the news.

News reporter 1

Well, there was an eerie discovery unearthed in a San Francisco neighborhood

News reporter 2

inside a well preserved body of an unidentified two year old child.

Ericka

All of a sudden, things changed when media got involved. You know, we started to have these pops of stories like this is crazy. Like, why would a resident be responsible for the costs of reburying a body that, you know, they had nothing to do with?

Katie

Suddenly everyone was interested in doing the right thing.

Ericka

All of a sudden, Odd Fellows kind of said, “Hey, we'll pay for some of the reinterment.” All of a sudden, Colma found a plot that they would donate. So, I think, I mean, I think the fact that it was a young child played on a lot of heartstrings and made people realize like, listen, this is- this is just not okay. And we really do need to make sure that we do right by this little girl.

Katie

But the attention also disclosed the location of Ericka and John's house. And considering the little girl was resting on their property, this made everyone involved nervous, especially Elissa.

Ericka

She's said first of all, we need to get the casket out of your backyard because there's just people that are weird. Um, plus, this is just not proper for this little individual to be essentially rotting. So, Elissa is a force to be reckoned with. I mean, she's amazing. She said here, why don't you transfer your property to me?

Katie

And so Ericka and John signed over the casket and contents to Elissa. Right away, Elissa sent over a volunteer from the Garden of Innocence to pick up the girl. And she didn't charge Ericka and John a thing.

Elissa

She goes, “Well, aren't you going to charge me for it?” And I said, “No, she's--she's an abandoned child. She wasn't abandoned by her parents. She's abandoned by the city. But we do it for free. We don't charge anyone.” And we just took care of her the way we take care of all the children.

Katie

The little girl in her casket were secretly taken to a morgue where she would be stored properly until her reinterment. It was during this time that the real work began.

Ericka

Elissa's thing is that no child will be buried without a name.

Katie

And Elissa said, give her a name. Michelle Lewis, the public administrator, asked if the girl could be named Eve. The coroners were then asked to provide a second name, and they posed the question to their daughters.

Ericka

We didn't tell them what, what or who they were naming because that seemed like that might be a little scary for them. So we just talked about like, “Hey, if there was a a beautiful little girl, you know, what would you want to name her?” And so, it was actually my girls that picked Miranda Eve.

Katie

With a new name, Elissa started to prepare Miranda Eve's memorial service. However, she was quite certain the name would be temporary as she was determined to find out Miranda Eve's true identity.

Elissa

I'm a genealogist. That's my hobby. And I love looking for my relatives. What I had were big burial books and I had passed them out to all my church chicks. I had my Church Chicks and they were all researching for me, trying to find a three year old girl.

Katie

This group of friends from church, a.k.a. the Church Chicks, dedicated themselves to leafing through hundreds of burial documents from the original Odd Fellows cemetery and at one point, Elissa realized they missed an entire volume.

Elissa

I thought my friend Pam had looked through it and she says, “No, I didn't look at that one.” So I pulled it out and I went, there's three burials on each page. The book is thick, it's like 100 pages. I looked through every one of them, and then I saw Edith on the 11th page, and I went, “Oh my gosh, this is her. This has every single thing that she has.” You know, her family, they all went to the Odd Fellows. She was in the right casket. She was the right age. And it was perfect.

Katie

The full name of this little girl was Edith Howard Cook. And though she seemed like a perfect match, it was only a hunch. In fact, there were 12 other possibilities of who the child might actually be. And no matter who the child really was, living relatives of the most likely candidates of who was in the casket would need to be tracked down and then be willing to provide a DNA sample to test. Elissa was going to need a team of researchers, historians, archeologists and DNA specialists, all who would be willing to work for free. And as luck would have it, during all the press coverage from Miranda Eve, a professor of archeology and anthropology at UC Davis picked up on the story after reading about it on Facebook. His name is Dr. Jelmer Eerkens, and his specialty is archeo-forensics, which essentially is forensics for old and ancient remains. He was the first of a group of scientists and researchers that came onto the project, but surprisingly, he was not convinced Miranda Eve was female.

Dr. Eerkens

It was assumed that because the child was buried in a dress, it was assumed that it was a girl. But I told them that it was actually not uncommon for boys at that time to wear dresses. So we did not know that it was a girl.

Katie

But I'm confused on how... just from a physical assessment, they wouldn't know the gender.

Dr. Eerkens

They didn't want to do any kind of invasive work. So they didn't, you know, remove the funeral dress. Um, and I don't think they ever actually even took the child out of the casket.

Katie

Elissa's biggest concern was providing a proper burial for Miranda Eve. Second to that was discovering who Miranda Eve really was. Dr. Eerkens, on the other hand, knew that the child provided a rare opportunity to delve into history. Not to mention he also had the contacts who just might be able to help with identifying the girl or boy in the casket.

Dr. Eerkens

I thought that there might be a reasonable chance that we might be able to identify her. And I talked to them about, you know, the importance of archeology and learning about what the child could sort of tell us about childhood and, you know, historic San Francisco. You know, catch a glimpse of, you know, one person, one child.

Katie

And so, he offered to volunteer his help and asked Elisa if she would allow him to take some hair samples.

Dr. Eerkens

And so she agreed that we could take some hair samples.

Katie

You see, Eerkens and his team were working on a method that would use cross-sections of a person's hair to pinpoint the actual season of the year in which the person died. In the case of Miranda Eve, Eerkens hoped his research would not only point to her season of death, but also give a little information about what Miranda Eve's diet and nutrition levels looked like leading up to her death. With the analysis of the hair samples under way, Eerkens reached out to his colleague, Dr. Ed Green, a professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz. His specialty: extracting DNA from ancient and historic samples. Green and his team came on board the project with two main goals.

Dr. Ed Green

Those goals were pretty straightforward. See if we can get DNA and answer a very specific question. Who was this girl?

Katie

I wondered if a guy who had actually worked with wooly mammoth and Neanderthal DNA had any doubt whether or not he and his team would be able to isolate the DNA of Miranda Eve and then actually match it to a distant relative? And so I asked him.

Dr. Green

I didn't know. It seemed like an interesting question. I didn't know if we'd be able to solve it. Um, but we set out down that blind road many, many times. In every project that we do, any time we're trying to, you know, answer a question, it's not an interesting question that, you know, you can answer it. And we thought it would be fun to try and we would learn things along the way and incredibly unique, uh, opportunities. So we enthusiastically set forth not knowing whether success lie at the end.

Katie

And the responsibility of whether or not that success would come to pass fell into the hands of a robust research group made up of volunteers. The first two who came on board were Dave Fredrick of Montana and Bob Phillips of Washington. Bob had taken up genealogy as a hobby and Dave was a professional genealogist and cold case investigator. I wasn't able to talk to Dave, but I was able to chat with Bob, who contacted Dr. Eerkens asking if he could assist in any way.

Bob Phillips

This is like tuna, you know, it's like giving tuna, and I'm putting tuna in front of a cat for, you know, for any genealogists out there. And I said, you know, any-any chance, any--any help I can provide on this. And they said, come on board, you know, and we’ll take all the help we can get. So that's how I got in on.

Katie

The research group's task, to narrow down who this child might be and then find a living relative who would be willing to give a DNA sample for testing comparison. Of course, there was Elissa’s hypothesis that this was Edith Cook. But like Dr. Jelmer Eerkens, these researchers aren't so convinced. Remember, there were at least a dozen probable possibilities of who might be in the casket. I asked Bob how they even knew where to begin when trying to figure it all out.

Bob

You start off say, “Well, what do we know about what's in there? Who's in there? And how do we find the information?” That came to me to be obvious, pretty early on that, well, we needed to find out where the coroner's house sat in relation to the old cemetery. In other words, what plots were they built upon?

Katie

And in order to narrow those possibilities down, they needed to know exactly what cemetery plots once occupied the coroner's yard. The problem was, any existing records of the Odd Fellows cemetery were incomplete. Many of them damaged or lost after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They needed someone who could actually reconstruct what the cemetery layout would have looked like back in the late 1800s. And lucky for them, a historian named Alex Ryder had just moved to the Bay Area. He had read about Miranda Eve in the New York Times and intrigued also called to volunteer his expertise. Here's Alex telling me a little bit about how he remapped the Odd fellows cemetery.

Alex Ryder

I took the 1860’s plan of the cemetery and got it geolocated over an aerial photo. I took Sanborn fire insurance maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930, somewhere in that time frame. Got that layered on top of the plan of the cemetery and then went through the cemetery records to pull drawings of individual cemetery tiers and layered that on top and was able to show which family lots had occupied the backyard.

Katie

That's a simplified version of what Alex actually did and while he was doing all that, the genealogist kept researching while the scientists worked on extracting information from the hair samples taken from Miranda Eve.

Dr. Green

As they were doing their work, going through the old burial records, and maps, and genealogy records, and things... would come up with hypotheses about who it might be.

Elissa

And they're looking, and I'm looking through book after book after book.

Alex

And the original records were found water damaged.

Elissa

And they searched and searched.

Bob

… through the death notices on the newspaper archives.

Alex

We've got holes in the burial records and the plot drawings.

Bob

Just page by page going through those.

Elissa

And at UC Davis, they were using her hair

Dr. Eerkens

to recreate a dietary life history of a year's worth of times.

Dr. Green

It's kind of like getting punched in the face by history.

Elissa

And then I would send them a baby I think might be her.

Alex

The DNA analysis part took a while

Dr. Green

Because we were developing the analytical technique that we would use to compare DNA from Miranda Eve.

Alex

And you would think, you know, with Ancestry and some of these other platforms that, this shouldn't be too hard but…

Dr. Green

… but that was a, you know, question whether there would be good DNA from the hair.

Alex

I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. It's just sometimes, you know, you'll be researching the line of a certain branch in a family tree and then it will just die off or know, these people just sort of, like, disappear into the ether.

Elissa

They all worked on it for months and months and months.

Katie

With an extensive investigation underway, Elissa laid the child to rest, albeit a second time. On June 4th, 2016, Miranda Eve was reburied in Greenlawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. She and her original casket were placed inside a wooden replica of her coffin. A beautifully carved piece of work actually designed by Elissa’s sister and built by Elissa’s brother in law, niece and nephew. Elissa herself applied the final varnish. The sound of bagpipes filled the air, and people from all over the Bay Area came to pay their respects, including members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, an international fraternal order, which now includes women.

Elissa

So many people there, there were probably 100 people there, and a lot of them were old, Odd Fellows and there were women and they were dressed in the- in the uniform that they would have worn in the 1800s. And so they had long black dresses on, and the guys had all this, they were period Odd Fellows and it was kind of scary because there were so many of them. And I thought, gosh, this is kind of scary to see these people like this.

Katie Mahalic

Her new headstone was in the shape of a heart and it read “Miranda Eve: the child loved around the world, if no one grieves, no one will remember.”

Elissa

The service was, you know, everybody felt something for her and people could sprinkle flowers over the grave before we put the cap on. And so they all went down and put their flowers on. And it was just incredible.

Katie

What was also incredible was the care Elissa took when choosing Miranda Eve's burial site. Elissa did her best to obtain a spot as close as possible to a section of the cemetery that is now leased as a commercial flower field. It's a field that sits between a present day Home Depot and Best Buy. So why did Elisa do this? Because beneath those commercial flowers sits much more than just soil and roots. That field was and still is, part of Green Lawn Memorial Park. And though the land is leased, below sleeps more than 25,000 bodies that were relocated from their original resting place in San Francisco. It's in that field that Elissa believes the father of Edith Howard Cook, the little girl Elissa was certain to be the child in the casket, to then reburied after being removed from his plot in the Odd fellows cemetery. And because Elissa was so positive, she had Miranda Eve's true identity correct, Elissa did everything in her power to put the child as close as possible to where one of her parents just might be buried.

Elissa

So I felt that if she's close to him, maybe they could— they'll get together and they could find each other. But I had a lot of thinking to do with her. Took a lot of thought to get her service right and then looking for her. “Okay, how is this going to play out?”

Katie

For about a year, the research continued. Thousands of hours between the researchers and scientists collectively went into the search. Lead beyond lead was followed. There was even an influx of psychics that called claiming to know what happened to the child. I asked Bob Phillips to fill me in on this.

Bob

And then-- then there was the one who said this. You know, she was murdered by her brother. And they said his theory was that somebody who had lived in the house had killed a girl and buried it in the backyard. Well, of course, that didn't match any of the facts of the case. And I told the guy, I said, “you know, you got a great imagination.” I said, you know, you should think about, you know, writing these kind of stories or whatever. But in fact, who's going to go procure a coffin like that and put it in there… you know, whoever they killed, sister or whatever, and bury em’ in the backyard, no that’s… nothing… nothing, adds up. I mean, you know, we didn't really take any of that seriously.

Katie

Back at the lab, things were getting very serious with Dr. Green's team. They were making headway. The team had been successful in extracting a viable DNA sequence from Miranda Eve. However, I found out this wasn't actually the hard part. You see, at the time, DNA found in hair wasn't being used to determine whether or not someone was related. Even today, companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com use saliva samples, not hair, to link and match relatives. So while the genealogists narrow down their search for possible relatives connected to the various hypotheses of who the child was, Green and his students set to the task of creating a software that could make a comparison between DNA from hair and DNA from saliva, and in turn, decipher whether or not the two samples were related to each other, something that had not yet been done before.

Dr. Green

And it wasn't a situation where, you know, here are all of the people who ultimately could have been and we want you to test them all. And it's going to be one of these ten. We-- we didn't know if we would ever get the right person to test. I don't think anybody knew if we would ever get the right person to test.

Katie

But eventually, the time came to see if Green's system worked. The DNA analysis had confirmed that the child's birth gender was, in fact, female. And the genealogists and research group had finally narrowed it down. They believed Miranda Eve was one of two girls and they had found living descendants of both. As you already know, Hypothesis one was Edith Howard Cook. The second hypothesis was another girl, Anna Maria Huck. She had died November 3rd, 1867, at just two years, two months and five days old. It was Dr. Eerkens who took on the job of contacting the distant relatives of each girl to ask for DNA samples. And for once, things were simple, or at least simpler. The distant relative of Anna Maria Huck, already had her DNA on file with one of the sites people used to figure out their ancestry. All she had to do was get permission to send her info over to Green, and she agreed. One down. Now came the awkward phone call to Peter Howard Cook, the great nephew of Edith Howard Cook, who by this time, was in his eighties.

Dr. Green

So and I was talking to him, I could tell he was like, Who is this guy? Like, you know, So he said, you know, explain the situation. I'm working on this. And he sort of said, okay, okay. You know, like he was sort of skeptical. But then I said I said, you know, we know this girl's mother's maiden name is, um, Scoofy. And the moment I said that, he was like, “wait, what did you say?” And I said, Scoofy. And he was like, “Oh!” he said, “I have a Bible that has that name, Scoofy, written in the upper corner.” And he didn't know what that was because he didn't know his father very well. His father had died when he was very young. I think Peter was like three years old and just didn't know very much at all about his father's family. And- and that's when he knew, like, these guys really know what they're, you know, they know what they're talking about.

Katie

And so Peter Cook agreed to give a DNA sample back at the lab, Green and his team started on the comparisons. The relative of Anna Marie Huck was up first.

Dr. Green

The first samples that we tested wound up not being a match.

Katie

Anna Marie Huck was out. That left Edith Howard Cook. And if she wasn't a match. Well, this is what Bob Phillips had to say about that.

Bob

Then, of course, we're sitting around thinking, this is Edith, it’s got to be Edith. I'm thinking, of course, you know, worst case scenario, it's not. And we're going to have to start all over again.

Katie

It was April of 2017, almost one year to the date of Miranda Eve's discovery.

Elissa

I was sitting on my swing in the front yard, just sitting there, and they called, and they said, “We've done it. We've got her. You picked... She was the right child.”

Katie

The match to Miranda Eve's DNA was Peter Howard Cook. Edith Howard Cook was the little girl in the casket.

Elissa

It was just a nice way to end up with closure for her because we didn't have any. And now we had a person with a name and family. It was-- it was-- it was it was very unusual.

Katie

With Edith's identity now confirmed, of course, now I had to talk to Peter Cook, the great nephew of Edith Howard Cook, the man who was the key to providing a match to our DNA. Our conversation was brief, but he was willing to answer a few questions over the phone.

Peter Cook

It was quite, quite a surprise to me. I went to her reburial and there was over 100 people there.

Katie

On June 10th, 2017, almost exactly a year from her first re-internment and 141 years after her first burial, a crowd once again gathered to celebrate Edith's life. The funeral looked very much like her first reburial, except a new headstone, read “Edith Howard Cook. Two years, ten months and 15 days old. I once was lost, but now I'm found.” The other difference, she had family there. Not to mention Ericka and her family. And, of course, Elissa, Dr. Eerkens, Alex Ryder, and Dr. Ed Green. Personally, I really loved Dr. Ed Green's description of what Edith's funeral was like.

Dr. Green

Weirdest funeral I've ever been to.

Katie (online talking w/ Dr. Green)

What was it like?

Dr. Green

Um, Surreal. An enormous group of mourners, mourning for a person who they never knew and never knew anybody who knew her.

Katie

So let's take a moment to get to know exactly who Edith Howard Cook really was. Born November 28, 1873. Edith was the first daughter and second born child of Horatio Nelson Cook and Edith Scoofy Cook, both from socially prominent families in San Francisco, families who often dominated the gossip columns and society sections of the newspapers. Edith's mother's family traces back to the earliest of the Virginia settlers and Edith's father's family came from a line of oyster merchants from Greece. Edith’s dad, Horatio and his father established a leather belting and hyde tending business that made a fortune. Later, Edith’s brothers Milton and Clifford would also help run the business. It was Milton who was Peter Cook's grandfather. The Peter in our story. Who was the key to Edith's identity. Two years after Edith's death, her parents had another daughter, Ethel Howard Cook. Both Ethel and Milton made headlines with scandalous affairs. For Milton, news of a secret divorce filled the columns. The San Francisco Call actually ran a headline that read “Milton H. Cook is Freed from Scolding Wife.” For Ethel, it was murmurs of the secret marriage, along with two documented divorces, not to mention all the gossip surrounding her second marriage as it was to her first husband’s sister's husband. So technically, Ethel's former brother in law. However, the story that really took over the gossip columns was the 1902 account of the Grand Duke Boris of Russia, drinking a glass of champagne from Ethel’s slipper at a banquet where he also declared Ethel to be the most beautiful American woman he had ever seen. Reading about these details made me wonder who Edith would have grown up to be and what stories would have been printed about her had she lived. But she didn't live. And thanks to Jelmer Eerken and his team, we know why. Eerkens's research not only pinpointed Edith's season of death, which, of course, we know to be the fall, but he was also able to provide some answers as to why Edith had died. His hair analysis revealed that in her last months, Edith essentially wasted away from undernourishment or rather starve, to death. The findings are consistent with her cause of death being listed as marasmus on her funeral records. There was nothing nefarious. Marasmus, a term that literally means wasting away, was often caused by viral, bacterial or parasitic infections. The term was commonly listed as a cause of death for children during the late 1800’s and the turn of the century. I thought of all the families who would have been contemporaries of the cooks and wondered how they lived and grieved the loss of a child in those times. During the late 1800s, the majority of women had 5 to 7 children. Statistically, up to half weren't expected to reach the age of five. You could say losing a child was the norm. I couldn't imagine having a child and living with the anxiety that there was a good chance they wouldn't grow up. Knowing all this made me wonder if people in decades past processed life and death differently than we do today. Clearly not with less emotion, but in a way that helped them to prepare for the unimaginable. This wasn't lost on Ericka either, when Edith's body was discovered.

Ericka

So at that time, I want to say, let's say my oldest was four and a half and my younger one was, uh, three. And so that was like definitely one of those things where you just can't even imagine. You know, you just layer in some of those things that clearly she was incredibly loved and it was probably a really tragic thing.

Katie

I asked Erica if her girls knew who Edith was.

Ericka

At some point it basically came out, “This is who this is. This is how she plays a role in kind of our house and our existence.” And we were both bracing ourselves for them being a little freaked out, but they actually weren't. They were like, “Oh, okay!” And, you know, they tell their friends the story now and it did not faze them, which is, I think, a good thing because we didn't want them obviously being scared of like having ghosts in the house or anything like that (Ericka Chuckles).

Katie

As the story comes to an end, there is just one last thing in regards to the Karner side of the story that begs to be shared. Before Ericka and John had decided to remodel. They did experience something that Ericka had never experienced before, even when growing up in the house.

Ericka

I remember it was after my older daughter had started preschool. So we've been here for maybe a couple years, and then we also had a baby and I'd gone out for like a mom's night. And I came home and John said it was the weirdest thing that happened tonight. Like, I heard footsteps running back and forth on the hallway upstairs, and I ran upstairs expecting to see Katie out of bed, and she was completely socked out.

Katie

Erica didn't believe him.

Ericka

I said, “Well, I'm sure you think you heard something.” And then it happened another time again when I was out.

Katie

And again, Erica was skeptical.

Ericka

And then John had gone out one evening and the same situation where I was downstairs and I heard very clearly these footsteps go kind of the full length and back, you know, especially once you're a parent and you've heard those little footsteps, you totally know what they sound like. So it wasn't like a little creaky sound, it was footsteps. Which is why I, like, ran upstairs thinking I'd catch them in the act and there was nothing to be caught.

Katie

But it wasn't just Erica and John who heard a child running about.

Ericka

A contractor who was at the house. It had to stop work because he heard footsteps in the house. Went upstairs, we live across the street from a park. So he was convinced that maybe a kid had walked in, maybe was fooling around the house. You know, was kind of an open worksite. But, he went upstairs, searched the whole house, nobody was here, and then kind of came back downstairs. So that was the only report that we'd ever gotten from one of the contractors or somebody working at the house. And I want to say that that was before she had been kind of reinterned or-- or had gone back to Colma basically to join the rest of the cemetery, so to speak.

Katie

And to sum it all up. When the news broke about Edith's discovery way back when this all started, Ericka got one more call that made her question some things.

Ericka

Then fast forward when kind of these stories got reported in the news, a friend of my father's texted me and he said, “Hey, this sounds a lot like your guys' house. Is that true?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Your dad always thought the house was haunted.” And I was like, Oh! Nothing he had ever shared with me. But my father was probably the most practical scientific person you would ever meet. So for him to, like, mention to a friend that he thought the house might be haunted kind of indicates that I think my dad must have heard some things as well. I'm not someone that necessarily kind of fully believes in that, but I have to admit, after that one night where it was just so clear that I was hearing footsteps and it was so clear that it wasn't my kids, I even had to take a step back and think, hm, maybe I need to rethink some of these things.

Katie

Since Edith's reburial, Ericka, nor anyone else, for that matter, has ever reported the sound of unexplained footsteps in the house again. And in the end, when all is said and done, it wasn't just Ericka who was changed from this experience. Alex Ryder, our historian, explains this best.

Alex

Edith Cook's discovery, like fundamentally changed the way the city of San Francisco approaches historic burials now. Like the level of analysis that is required when human remains turn up is much more intensive than it ever used to be before Edith Cook

Katie

Bodies in San Francisco continue to surface. Occasionally, Alex works as a paid consultant to help put a name to those who are uncovered.

Alex

I think, you know, everything fades away eventually, but I think it's important to put a name to these people and to tell their story. And that's that's what like drew me to Edith Cook and continues to draw me to some of these research projects is being able to tell somebody's story that maybe never had their story told before. And rewriting a bit of an injustice that happened.

Katie

This episode of Shadow Clock was created by me. Assistant Editing is by Alec Jansen. Post-production audio is by Matt Sauro. Story and editorial notes are provided by Adam Gould and Bruce Scivally. Research for this episode is by Alec Jensen, Bob Phillips, Alex Ryder and me. Social media is by Spencer Masternak, Kelsey Hayes and Alec Jansen. News media recreations are by Cooper Johnson and Aaron Fronk. Music is credited to Pond5 and Premium Beat. Content contributors, composers and individual song titles for each episode can be found on our website at shadow-clock.com. Kate Cosgrove creates original illustrations for each episode of Shadow Clock, which you can also see at shadow-clock.com. If you like the show, you can spread the word by telling someone else about Shadow Clock, and of course, by following us on social media. You can find us on Instagram, Tiktok and Facebook at Shadow Clock Podcast, on X formerly known as Twitter, at Shadow Clock Pod and on YouTube at Shadow Clock. I personally want to express just how much it means every time you give us a click, a like, a subscribe or follow, and we love word of mouth endorsement. Your support means the world, and I can't thank each and every one of you enough. Speaking of thanks, a special thanks goes out to Alejandro Velez, Kate Cosgrove, Matt Sauro, Adam Gould, Alec Jansen, Spencer Masternak, Aaron Fronk, Cooper Johnson, Josh Kobak, Jonny Massena, Bruce Scivally, Adam Zavaslak, Austin Krieg, Forest Hills Northern High School in Michigan, Duro Howard, Kelsey Hayes, the Brehm family, with a special mention to Cohen and Fitz Brehm and the Fronk family with a special mention to Harper and Sunny Fronk. I also want to thank Bob Phillips and Alex Ryder for their time spent fact checking many of the numerous historical facts and details in this episode. Finally, I want to thank Ericka Karner for sharing her family's experience with me, as well as Elissa Davey, John Sangiacomo, Bob Phillips, Alex Ryder, Jelmer Eerkens, Ed Green, and Peter Cook. Thank you to all of you for taking the time to guide me through the twists and turns of Edith Howard Cook's story. And before we go, one more important thing. As we are an independent out-of-pocket podcast, creating this entire first season with zero funding, we very much welcome donations. You can make a donation on our website by going to shadow-clock.com and clicking on the donation button. Donating is one of the best ways you… can help us… continue to share these stories. I'm Katie Mahalic. This is Shadow Clock.

END OF EPISODE

Questions or comments on this episode? Contact us at info@shadow-clock.com.