It was on this day (August 15) in 1921 that Mrs. Mary De Brito, once named “the most beautiful Irish girl” in Chicago, was found dead in her bathtub with a hose from an open gas jet in her mouth.
The catalyst for De Brito’s apparent suicide was said to be a letter she had received from Wallace Campbell, the managing editor of Jim Jam Jems, a highly opinioned magazine published out of Bismarck, North Dakota.
De Brito had read an article in the magazine that praised the tar and feathering of a Texas physician, most likely for performing abortions. She had then written the North Dakota governor, complaining that the magazine encouraged mob behavior “by gloating over a most disgraceful and regrettable incident…. When we reach the state where cowardly, contemptible, riotous mobs can, with impunity, render their own decisions and persecutions we have reached a critical state, indeed, for our country’s welfare.”
The governor’s office turned her letter over to the magazine.
The Chicago Tribune obtained Campbell’s letter—an attack on both the city of Chicago and De Brito herself—and quoted it at length.
“This magazine is on its tenth year of unparalleled success,” Campbell wrote. “It numbers over 200,000 monthly readers, declines subscriptions and advertisements which other magazines beseech and does more good than you and your like will do to the crack of doom.”
And he concluded on this ominous note:
“… the very few misguided hands who have grabbed at Jim Jam Jems found they had grabbed live wire, which burned to the bone, ere they could drop it. We didn’t start your intrusion into our affairs, but will guarantee to finish it good and plenty.”
Soon after she’d received the letter, the Tribune reported, a “badly dressed and domineering man” showed up at the home of De Brito’s parents, looking for her. Told that she was at work, he asked for the address, which, for some reason, they gave him.
That night, the parents reported, she came home “a nervous wreck” and told them, “O, they’ll print such awful things—what shall I do?”
The deputy coroner in charge of the inquest “declared his belief that she committed suicide while mentally unbalanced from humiliation at the editor’s keen sarcasm,” the Tribune reported.
Meanwhile, Campbell, seemingly unfazed by the tragic turn of events, doubled down, telling the Bismarck Tribune, “Mrs. De Brito was greatly aroused because we excoriated a Beaumont, Texas, abortioning physician who had received a deserved coat of tar and feathers. For some reason Mrs. De Brito seemed to particularly favor such gentry.… We judge that the poor woman feared some disclosure in her past life. We know nothing about her beyond the fact mentioned.”
At her death, Mary De Brito was 28 years old.