Chicagoan says he’s identified America’s first female cop

Reporting from Chicago — 

Her story had been lost amid dusty records that were long ago stashed in deep storage and forgotten.

Forgotten until a retired federal agent, researching the history of Chicago law enforcement, stumbled upon a mention that, in the 1890s, she had become a police officer in Chicago. The date caught his attention. A female police officer in the 1890s?

Now, after three years of research, Rick Barrett, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and an amateur historian, says he has found definitive evidence that Marie Owens was not only the first policewoman in Chicago, but also the first known female officer in the United States.

If true, Barrett’s discovery would be huge, said Dave MacFarlan, a police historian and member of the Chicago Police History Committee, who noted that the Police Department previously believed that the first female officers had joined the force in 1913.

Debate has long swirled around the identity of the nation’s first female cop. Los Angeles claimed the distinction of hiring the first, saying a woman joined its department in 1910. Portland, Ore., points to a female officer hired there in 1908.

For Barrett, a square-jawed, hard-charging former investigator, uncovering Owens’ story has become a quest. He crisscrossed the city, befriending archivists and pulling strings to gain access to pension records, civil service documents and cemetery plot listings.

Getting Owens the credit she deserves is, in his view, an issue of justice.

“She wasn’t wealthy. She was Irish. She was Catholic,” said Barrett, 57, himself part of an Irish clan. “She had all of these strikes against her and so they just wrote her off.”

And, he said, wrote her out of history. Though Owens’ role at the police department was well-covered by the turn-of-the-century press, a historian in 1925 mixed up Owens and another woman. As a result, Owens’ accomplishments were almost erased, Barrett said.

A tall, solidly built woman with long, dark hair, Owens was the daughter of Irish-famine immigrants and grew up in the crowded tenements of Ottawa, Canada. In her 20s, she moved with her husband, Thomas, to Chicago. In February 1888, Thomas died of typhoid fever.

Left to raise five children, Owens landed a job in 1889 with the city health department as one of five female factory inspectors who enforced child labor and compulsory-education laws.

At the time, public outrage was growing over sweatshop conditions in factories across the city. But the inspectors’ powers were limited; they couldn’t enter buildings without a warrant. As pressure mounted on public officials to step up enforcement of child labor laws, Owens was transferred to the police department in 1891. She was given powers of arrest, the title of detective sergeant and a police star.

“I like to do police work,” Owens told the Chicago Tribune in 1906. “It gives me a chance to help women and children who need help.”

Owens described how she had discovered children — “frail little things” as young as 7 years old — working in factories all over Chicago.

“In my 16 years of experience I have come across more suffering than ever is seen by any man detective,” she said.

Her work affected thousands of children. She established schools within department stores so young workers could get an education, and she persuaded other employers to shorten their workdays.

In 1923, she retired after 32 years with the force. Four years later, she died at age 74. The eight-line death notice in local papers didn’t mention her police career. And when a historian confused her with another woman and described Owens in a book about policewomen as a patrolman’s widow, her accomplishments were struck from history.

“That was nonsense!” Barrett declared, standing in his dining room, where piles of paperwork documenting Owens’ life had taken over the table and overflowed into an adjacent den.

A balding, bespectacled man with an eye for obscure details, Barrett says that, after 28 years as a federal agent, investigating cases has become second nature to him. In retirement, he has turned his skills toward solving historical mysteries.

His first case of that sort came in 2002, while Barrett was researching his family’s history in the Chicago Police Department; Barrett’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been Chicago cops. Reading City Council records from the 1850s, he stumbled upon a reference to Constable James Quinn and, after much digging, proved that Quinn had been the first Chicago officer to die in the line of duty.

In 2007, Barrett was searching for other forgotten officers when he read a mention of Owens that described her as a widow of a fallen officer. Ever the investigator, he did some checking and found an inconsistency: According to death records, Owens’ husband had been a gas fitter, not a police officer. Soon, Barrett was pulling century-old city directories, church baptism logs and census records.

Sorting out the true story of Owens’ life, he said, was like “untangling strands of Christmas tree lights.” But Barrett began to feel like he knew Owens. “You start putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together, and her character and personality kind of emerge,” Barrett said.

Tough and independent, Owens owned her house at a time when few women of her status owned property. She named her first son after the Irish reformer Charles Stewart Parnell, who fought for Ireland’s rural poor. On the job, she often gave money to the needy.

“She knew about hardship and heartbreak,” Barrett said. “She was sympathetic to the people because she had walked in their shoes.”

Little was known of Owens before Barrett began his research. Her great-grandson, Owen Parnell Page, 51, of Grand Prairie, Texas, had never heard anything about his great-grandmother. “All I knew was that my grandfather was from Chicago,” he said by telephone.

Barrett hopes to change all that.

On a recent morning, when the sky was clear and the lake sparkled in the distance, Barrett stood by Owens’ grave at Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Evanston, just outside Chicago. The headstone, a 6-foot cross, bears only the name Owens.

There is no further clue to the identity or achievements of the woman buried there. Barrett talked about having a plaque put up by the gravesite, or a statue erected somewhere in the city.

In the meantime, though, he said he would return with his own small remembrance.

“I’m going to bring some flowers out here,” he said. “That’s what I’ll do. Next time, I’ll bring flowers.”

cmastony@tribune.com