After 76 years and a DNA investigation, the identities of five victims from the Hartford Circus Fire remains a mystery

Chief State Medical Examiner James Gill said Tuesday that experts were unable to extract viable DNA from the exhumed bones of Hartford Circus Fire victims, leaving the identities of five souls buried in a Hartford cemetery a mystery.

“DNA analysis of the remains of both circus fire remains was unsuccessful,” Gill said. “Due to the condition of the remains, there was a high bacterial content that interfered with testing.”

Gill said samples taken from the bones will be retained by his office in the event that future technological advances are developed that could make DNA testing successful.

Gill’s announcement comes a day after the 76th anniversary of the Hartford Circus Fire, which claimed 168 lives and injured another 700, many of them for life. The infamous blaze started when the big top tent, coated with a gasoline and paraffin mixture, caught fire and trapped circus-goers inside either burning them to death or suffocating them in searing heat.

Five of the victims were burned so badly that they were never identified and were buried at the Northwood Cemetery with stone markers that identified them only as numbers 1503, 1510, 2109, 2200 and 4512. A sixth unidentified victim known as Little Miss 1565 was later identified as Eleanor Cook and reburied in Massachusetts.

They were buried under one memorial that said “Their Identity Known but to God.”

After inquiries by The Courant, Gill decided last year to exhume the bodies of two female victims - no. 2019 and no. 4512- to try and extract DNA to see if it matched a descendant of a fire victim. The investigators sought to match it to the DNA of Grace Fifield’s granddaughter, Sandra Sumrow, who agreed to give a sample after The Courant located her.

Sumrow said her grandmother, who lived in Newport, Vt., was visiting relatives in Wethersfield and attended the circus with two of her children — Ivan and his twin sister, Barbara, who both survived the fire. Sumrow’s mother, Beverly, was Fifield’s third child.

The bodies were exhumed last October but DNA testing was unable to find a match with Sumrow.

“Most likely, the remains of Grace Dorothy (Smith) Fifield were originally misidentified and released to the wrong next-of-kin,” Gill said.

The state then turned to the DNA Doe Project to do further DNA testing with the goal of using cutting-edge genetic testing to see if some of the unidentified women’s relatives have used one of the popular DNA ancestry services.

“They were able to get some DNA but not enough to do any kind of comparison,” Gill said Tuesday.

The failure to get viable testing material likely means that the other three unknown victims - a little girl, a little boy and an older male will never be identified either, much to the disappointment of Beverly Zell.

Her uncle Raymond Erickson is another enduring mystery of the circus fire.

Only six-years-old that day in 1944 Erickson made it out of the tent badly burned and was taken to Hartford Hospital by his uncle and left on a gurney in the hallway while he went to find a priest to administer last rights. His body was never seen again.

Zell had hoped to convince the medical examiner to exhume the body of the unidentified little boy to see if it was possible that Raymond had mistakenly been misidentified and buried in the wrong grave.

All that was ever found of Raymond were the sneakers he wore that day, the brightly colored socks stuffed inside of them in a hospital bin.

Beverly Zell was disappointed to hear the news Tuesday about the DNA testing. She said she understood that the same conclusion could be drawn with the body that could be a match to her uncle or lead to his identification. However, she believes the same efforts should be made with the remaining unidentified victims of the fire.

“If they are going to take two bodies out of the ground they should take them all out so that this doesn’t remain a mystery forever,” Zell said.

In the chaotic scene at the State Armory following the fire, it is likely other people, like Erickson, were misidentified. One possibility is that the unidentified bodies are the relatives of people who thought they’d made an accurate identification in 1944. In that scenario, it is possible that some victims thought of as “missing” may have been wrongly claimed by another family.

There are two other women on the list of the missing — Edith Budrick, 38, of East Hartford, and Lucille Woodward, 55, of Salisbury. There are two children on the list: Erickson and Judy Norris of Middletown, who were both 6 years old. Norris attended the circus with her twin sister Agnes and her parents — all of whom died.

According to interviews with hundreds of circus goers who attended the July 6, 1944 matinee, the heat was oppressive inside the 550-foot long, 220-foot wide tent when the performance began at 2 p.m. Friday afternoon. About 40 minutes into the show, shouts of “fire” rang out in the tent, which had been waterproofed with a mixture of 6,000 gallons of gasoline and 1,800 pounds of paraffin wax.

The cry set off a panic in the stands. Many of those closest to the main entrance, where the fire first appeared behind the bleacher seats on the southwest side of the tent, ran to safety through the entrance or by jumping off the tops of bleachers and grandstands and then escaping by going under the side tent flaps, some of which were sliced open with pocket knives by those who got out first.

Others decided to work their way east out the back entrance toward Main Street but some ran into a blockade produced by three-and-a-half-foot tall metal chutes that were being used by animals to leave the center ring. A number of bodies would be discovered piled up by the chutes, which also blocked one of nine exits from the big top.

Flaming canvasburned some victims to death. Extreme heat suffocated others and the ensuing panic also resulted in trampling deaths. The death toll included 59 children who were 9 years old or younger.

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