Then he disappeared.
In 1948, a North Shore businessman spent a night drinking at a Clark Street dive.
For Orja Corns Jr. July 2, 1948, began little differently than any other day. He returned from a business trip to his home in Winnetka. His wife wasn’t there. She and their 9-year-old daughter were visiting her mother in Virginia. But a neighbor saw Corns arrive, then leave the white frame house at 421 Linden St. at 7:30 p.m. In between, he’d shaved and showered. It was a scorching hot day.
Putting on a fresh shirt and a grayish brown suit, he drove to a honky-tonk stretch of North Clark Street in the neighborhood that decades later came to be known as River North. When out-of-town clients were in Chicago, Corns would entertain them in its strip clubs.
On this occasion, he drank from midnight to 3 a.m. at the Parody Club, at 606 N. Clark St. When he got up to leave, the house diceplayer, Dirty Neck Marie, as she was known, asked if he was OK. Corns indicated he was, walked out the door and vanished off the face of the Earth.
“This is the most baffling missing-person mystery I’ve come across in the 26 years I’ve been a policeman,” Capt. Thomas Harrison of the Chicago Avenue police station told the Tribune six months later. “But I’m confident it will be solved.”
Instead, it became a perennial yardstick against which other notorious missing-persons cases were measured. John Bartlow Martin, a prominent Illinois author and political speechwriter, wrote a 1950 Saturday Evening Post piece: “Have you seen Orja Corns?”
In 1959, the Tribune noted: “Last year, 99.1 percent of the 9,481 men, women, and children reported missing were found. The exceptions sometimes turn out to be notable. For instance, there was Orja Corns, the salesman who vanished on July 3, 1948.”
With so many solved cases to write about, why such interest in a never-ending mystery? Perhaps because Corns seemed an unremarkable suburbanite, but left behind enough tantalizing clues to fill an Agatha Christie novel.
Born into a wealthy Winnetka family, he attended private schools and enrolled in Georgetown University in Washington. He intended to study law. But Wall Street’s 1929 crash took a toll on his father, an investment banker, and as Orja’s grades were failing, his parents pulled him out of college.
He worked for several stockbrokerage firms, with only indifferent success, then got a job as a clerk for Skilsaw, a manufacturer of woodworking tools. He married Betsy Johnson, who he met in college.
His drive and backslapping personality got him promoted to salesman, and by 1946 he was a district sales manager “He and his wife entertained their friends and lived well,” said police Capt. Harrison. “They were living up to the limits of their income.”
Or exceeding it. Even as he ascended the corporate ladder, his parents sometimes had to supplement Orja’s $12,000 annual earnings. His wife explained: “Our ordinary expenses took it all.”
Some neighbors reported hearing t arguments when passing Orja and Betsy’s home. Money problems are a common cause of marital discord, and similarly, his boozy visits to Chicago’s demimonde street might have created issues. But he wasn’t the only husband to enjoy a look at other women’s flesh, and once even took Betsy along, introducing her to Dirty Neck Marie.
When he didn’t show up for work on Monday, his secretary called his home. Some papers needed his signature. When he didn’t pick up the phone, she called his parents. They found the door of Orja’s house unlocked, its windows open. The lights were on, and there was $80 on his dresser.
“Nothing was missing,” Martin wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, “nothing except Orja and his car.”
As his predilection for strip clubs was known, the police made the rounds of Clark Street’s dives from the river to Division Street.
“North Clark Street has been a rough neighborhood,” Capt. Harrison said. “Almost anything could have happened to him.”
The cops discovered he’d been at the Parody Club. That led to speculation that some lowlife patron had seen a well-dressed man flashing a bankroll. Orja had cashed two checks during his hours at the club, each for $25. Maybe he was followed out the door and killed for the money?
But if so, where was his body and car? Orja’s family put that question together with Dirty Neck Marie’s fear that he was too tipsy to drive. They urged the Coast Guard to search Lake Michigan, the Chicago River and the Skokie Lagoons.
“Surveys were taken periodically with sounding poles by navigation authorities,” Harrison said. “So far we have turned up nothing either in the river or along the lake shore.”
The mystery deepened with the discovery that Orja allegedly had been seen, still alive, three days after his disappearance. Checking out a gas station on Sheridan Road where he usually had his car serviced, an attendant told police Corns bought 10 gallons of gas there on July 6.
That made Capt. Harrison rethink Corns’ fate: “He deliberately ran away to escape family, financial, business or other difficulties.” Supporting that theory was the neighbor’s description of what she saw when Corns left his home, three days earlier.
He had come around to the passenger’s side and closed that door before getting in on the driver’s side, she told the police. That suggested he had a companion. Did he go off with a woman? Was he was having an affair?
He had a $47,470 life insurance policy. Perhaps he rationalized the abandonment of his wife by assuming the money would enable Betsy Corns to restart her life.
The problem was that Orja Corns’ behavior wasn’t consistent with someone who is planning not to be around. On the last stop of his business trip, he made plans with the manager of Skilsaw’s Milwaukee distributor for a round of golf on Sunday, the Fourth of July.
At the other end of his return home, he stopped at the Willow Inn, a tavern a mile from his house. Over drinks — he ordered several Tom Collins cocktails — he and Dick Gibbs, the bartender, made plans to go to the Arlington Park racetrack on Monday.
On Tuesday, he told the Sheridan Road gas-station owner he wanted to have his car washed the following day.
Betsy Corns got a glimmer of hope via telephone on July 17. A caller said if she wanted to see her husband again she should bring $500 to a tavern in Bronzeville, on Chicago’s South Side. Accompanied by undercover cops, she held up her end of the rendezvous, but no one approached her.
There might, however, have been a bit of truth in the hoax. Months later, Orja Corns’ address book was found in a gas station in the African American neighborhood.
In 1952, the Philadelphia police reported that Demitrius Garrett, who they had arrested for passing bad checks, was peddling an intriguing story: he said that a few months earlier he’d been in Chicago and run into James Brown, whose criminal specialty was moving stolen cars from Chicago to New York.
Brown and another man were talking about a green Oldsmobile, like Orja’s car. Corns’ name was mentioned, and the other guy said: “He got tough. They had to kill him.”
A few bits and pieces from Garret’s story jibed with details of Corns’ disappearance and the subsequent ransom demand. Brown was a Black man, and Betsy Corns had been told to bring the ransom money to a tavern in a Black neighborhood. Her husband’s address book was found in that neighborhood. Rare among Clark Street strip joints at the time, the Parody Club employed Black musicians.
But the Chicago cops couldn’t find James Brown, and the address where he supposedly lived was a warehouse. The FBI had heard Garrett’s story and rejected it.
Two years later, Betsy Corns married Sterling Chambers, a salesman living on Lake Shore Drive. She had gotten a divorce on the grounds of desertion and, with her new husband, moved to California.
For years thereafter the cops received hundreds of similarly unfruitful tips. To this day, the case remains as the Tribune proclaimed in 1953: “One of Chicago’s most baffling missing persons mysteries.”