(IntegrityPress.org) – The Cook County sheriff’s office has unraveled a decades-long mystery about somebody known only by the nickname “Seven,” whose remains have been at a Chicago Catholic cemetery since 2015. The burial site, marked solely by a numbered gravestone, concealed the identity of a person who passed away in a nursing home, plagued by memory loss, including forgetting their own name.
This case took a turn when authorities, using fingerprints acquired after their death, identified “Seven” as Reba Bailey, a Women’s Army Corps veteran from Illinois who had been missing since the 1970s. While this revelation offers closure to many who had known Bailey or the mysterious “Seven,” it reveals new layers regarding Bailey’s journey from a veteran with a large family to an unidentified individual buried in an unmarked grave.
Commander Jason Moran, overseeing the sheriff’s missing persons unit, emphasized that is important to provide dignity and identity to every individual, highlighting the commitment to these cases.
The unique nature of this case caught the attention of Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart whose office has a track record of solving cold cases, including identifying victims of notorious serial killers and leading missions to locate missing individuals statewide. Dart expressed the strangeness of Bailey’s situation- being unidentified throughout life and in death- stating that the case only grew more interesting with each discovery.
Bailey’s cause of death was determined to be heart disease, exacerbated by diabetes and dementia, as per the Cook County medical examiner. Fingerprints obtained posthumously in 2015 were cross-referenced with law enforcement databases, revealing no criminal record matches.
Bailey’s final resting place, Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on Chicago’s Far South Side, will soon witness a transformation from an unmarked grave to a memorial bearing her rightful name, marking the definitive end of her interesting story.
Copyright 2024, IntegrityPress.org
