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Assault, battery, disorderly conduct…and insanity. The “controlling interests”1 in the affair now even tried to bring a charge of insanity against Tom. In Hobart Payne’s opinion, it was because he had “vigorously opposed the operation of [the Radium Dial] plant”2; he considered Tom had been “persecuted.”3

Tom’s relatives thought such a move “typical of a company with its back against the wall.”4 “They know that they’re gonna go down,” said his niece Mary. “They’ll do anything. They’ll try anything.”5 Fortunately for Tom, the police case against him was not reported to progress further than a handful of initial hearings; perhaps because there was no foundation to the trumped-up charges.

Like all cowards with their backs against the wall, the company now chose to turn and run. In December 1936, Radium Dial abruptly closed its doors and upped sticks—to where, nobody knew. Nobody left behind did, at least. The Reeds followed the company out in the new year, packing up their house on Post Street. No longer would the Donohues and Purcells run into the girls’ old boss when they made their way about town.

Radium Dial had been “run out of business”6 by Joseph Kelly’s new firm, Luminous Processes. After more than fourteen years of the radium company operating in the old high school, the rooms fell silent. No chatter from the girls, no laughter from the darkroom: just empty rooms, haunted by the memories of all that had gone on.

With Radium Dial gone, Joseph Kelly had a monopoly on radium dials in the little town of Ottawa. It may have been the Great Depression, but things were turning out rather well for the company president. The same, however, could not be said for the husbands of the former dial-painters. They had just about managed to cling on to work through the Depression so far, but in 1937 their luck ran out. Workers were laid off from the Libbey-Owens glass factory, and Tom Donohue and Al Purcell were among them.

For the Purcells, who had three children to feed, it became almost impossible to cope. “They struggled really hugely, financially,”7 said a relative. Charlotte ended up feeding the children mustard sandwiches. “You took whatever you could get,” remembered Tom’s niece Mary of that period. “It was a very tough time.”8 Charlotte and her sisters agreed a solution: move to Chicago.

But even in the city it was challenging. Charlotte’s son Donald recalled: “We used to go to a bakery and ask for day-old [bread]. We heated the apartment with a coal stove, and we used to walk around the [train] tracks in Chicago and pick up coal.”9

It was hard—but it was harder still back in rural Illinois. Pearl Payne said there was no “steady work; just periodic streaks of work.”10 Tom Donohue was not lucky enough to land even those streaks. With the house already mortgaged to the hilt, he was running out of ideas. “Tom was nearly bankrupt,” remembered a brother-in-law. “Catherine was full of radium and dying by inches. She suffered agonies, and [he spent everything] buying medicines to try to relieve Catherine.”11 The family now had debts of some $2,500 ($41,148).

There was nothing else for it. “They were on relief for a while,” confided their niece Mary. “[They felt] very ashamed. Not wanting people to know about it.”12

Yet they weren’t the only ones needing help: lines of desperate people queued outside the soup kitchens in Ottawa. Everyone was living hand to mouth. The Donohues had almost no thought of a lawsuit anymore—this was a battle for survival. By the spring of 1937, their lawyer, Rosenthal, had dropped the case anyway. The women were due to have a hearing before the Illinois Industrial Commission later that year but, as things stood, they had no attorney to represent them.

Time passed. On March 28, 1937, Catherine Donohue and her family marked Easter Sunday, one of the most important dates in the Catholic calendar. Someone gave a gift of a “timid-looking bunny rabbit”13 to Mary Jane and Tommy, who were then aged two and almost four. Tommy liked to paint, just as his mother and father had once done; he had a watercolor set that he played with often.

Catherine took her communion gratefully from the visiting priest—she received it at home now, being unable to get to church—and prayed. Easter Sunday was all about Christ being reborn: salvation, hope, the repairing of a broken body.

It was all the more horrible, then, that this was the moment Catherine’s body fell further apart. “Part of her jawbone,” Hobart Payne wrote, “broke through the flesh and [came] out into her mouth.”14 Her tongue stumbled over it: unfamiliar object. Catherine picked it out with tears in her eyes. It was her jawbone. Her jawbone.

“It was so horrible,” remembered her niece Mary. “[It] just dropped out. I mean it was just…You thought, Oh dear God. Can’t even eat! Just so sad.”15

Tom Donohue was forced to watch his wife literally disintegrate before his eyes. It was horrifying—yet, on this supposed celebration of renewal, Tom found himself renewing one thing at least: his desire for justice. And he knew just who Catherine needed to help her now.

Her friends.

Tom chose wisely the friend he reached out to. Just down the road from the Donohue home, Marie Rossiter now took a call from Tom in her little home on West Superior Street. Tom asked her to call the former Radium Dial girls and find out if any of them might want to hire a lawyer.

Marie was someone who “would always take the bull by the horn.”16 She herself once said, “My grandma wasn’t scared of nobody”17—and she had inherited her grandmother’s spunk. “Marie was a fighter,”18 revealed a close relative, while another added: “If she [thought] maybe she could help [a] person, she would get involved. She was a protector.”19 And not only a protector, but a hugely popular girl.

“She knew all the girls”20 recalled Marie’s relatives. “And she was an organizer all right.”21

True to form, Marie launched straight into action following Tom’s appeal, calling all the women. And now Charlotte Purcell took up the story; for although she was now living in Chicago, she was still very much involved: a faithful friend to the end. It was Charlotte who revealed that the girls they rang said no, they wouldn’t help. For there were dial-painters who didn’t want to face up to what was happening. While there were countless people in the town who denied radium poisoning existed, the reasons for that denial could vary. “They pull back in fright,” said Olive Witt, “asking if it’s catching.”22

Marie was frustrated by the townspeople’s attitude. “She used to say,” recalled a relative, “‘Nobody wants to listen to us!’ And I think that hurt.”23 Nonetheless, she kept trying with the dial-painters and, in the end, a few did come onboard with the fight for justice. “Marie kept right on it, all the time. She got the girls together,” revealed a relative.24 “They were all friends, all working together for [Catherine].”25

That small band of girls now shot for the moon, targeting the best lawyer they had ever heard of. The women felt the approach would be best coming from the men who backed them, so Hobart Payne and Tom Donohue wrote to the most famous American lawyer of the era, the one who “always took the impossible cases.”26

They wrote to Clarence Darrow.

“Dear Sir,” Hobart’s letter read. “It is as a last resort that I turn to you for assistance or advice… These cases are to come before the Industrial Commission for a final hearing [soon] and there is no attorney to represent these girls. Would it be possible for you to take up this case?”27

But Darrow was turning eighty in 1937 and not in good health. Though he said he was sympathetic to the women, he was unable to help—he did, however, promise to refer the case to another lawyer.

Next, remembering their experience from the year before with Mary Doty, the women turned to the media to generate publicity of their plight. RADIUM DEATH ON RAMPAGE!28 cried the front page of the Chicago Daily Times on July 7, 1937. WALKING GHOSTS JILTED BY JUSTICE! Charlotte Purcell, with her single arm, was the cover girl for the piece; she told the paper she “lives in daily fear of [the] end that is inevitable.”29 Charlotte, Marie, and Catherine were only three of the girls involved; others were the Glacinski sisters, Pearl Payne, Olive Witt, Helen Munch (who now lived in Chicago), and a handful more.

As the girls had requested, the paper reported that they had no lawyer for their upcoming hearing before the IIC, which was scheduled for July 23: sixteen days away. The hearing was “their last stand—their last hope of collecting damages.”30 “Without a lawyer,” the paper wrote, “the women fear legal trickery. Indeed, so hopeless is their outlook that many of them may stay away.”31

Catherine Donohue spoke up. “That’s what the company’s lawyers would like, I suppose,” she said archly, “for all of us to stay away.”32

“The Radium Dial Company,” the piece went on, “has closed its plant in Ottawa [and] ‘skipped out from under,’ leaving only a $10,000 [$164,595] bond posted with the Industrial Commission.”33 That $10,000, in the light of Radium Dial’s vanishing act, was the sole pot of money available to the girls for compensation and medical care.

Though Joseph Kelly had set up an identical business now doing a roaring trade, Jay Cook, the women’s former lawyer, explained: “This is a ‘new’ corporation. Under the law, the ‘new’ company isn’t liable for any of the acts of the ‘old’ concern.”34 It was Radium Dial, not Joseph Kelly, that was being sued. “All they’ve really got to levy on is the $10,000,” said Cook. “That is, of course, unless they were able to locate other assets of the ‘old’ company somewhere…”35

The following day, the girls’ ally in the media struck again. OTTAWA RADIUM COMPANY NOW IN NEW YORK!36 chorused the Times in triumph. “The Radium Dial Company,” the article read, “was found here by the Times today doing business on New York’s lower east side.” They were hiring young women to paint dials…

Having been located, Radium Dial’s new president, William Ganley, came out fighting. “These women’s claims are invalid and illegitimate,” he stated defiantly. “A lot of those women were with us only a few months; practically all of them have been out of our employ for many years.”37

And then, dismissing the firm’s secret test results, dismissing Peg Looney’s company-led autopsy where the doctor had been instructed to destroy the evidence of the real cause of her demise, he declared, “I can’t recall a single actual victim of this so-called ‘radium’ poisoning in our Ottawa plant.”38

Radium Dial was not going down without a fight. They had won this case before in the courts when they had triumphed over Inez Vallat, and were supremely confident they would win again.

The president’s attitude underlined to the women just how much they needed an attorney. Yet as the clock counted down to the all-important hearing, no lawyer came forward. Letters and press appeals and word-of-mouth had so far had zero effect. Despite their crippling illnesses, the girls decided they would have to take matters into their own hands.

It was time for the Suicide Club to take a trip to the Big City.