Aug 11, 2012 4 min read

The ringing telephone wakened James H. Shannon M.D. in the darkness before dawn. A few minutes later, he was walking swiftly up Main Street, bundled against the near-zero temperature. Snow was falling lightly on the Sunday morning of Feb. 3, 1907. The only noise the doctor would have detected was that of his own footsteps until he had nearly passed the Lyric Theatre and heard a commotion in the alley. He turned and saw several men carrying what appeared to be a body into the doorway of the building at 78 North Main. One of the men hailed him, and he followed the group up the stairway and into a room where they laid their motionless burden on a bed.

One look at the partially-clothed young woman told Shannon she was quite clearly dead. Her face was still frozen in what he knew as “risus sardonicus,” literally “mocking laugh.” It was not so much the expression of the corpse that startled him, though, but rather the fact that he knew her.

Frances C. Martin was a pretty 18-year-old, with brown eyes, brown hair and a fair complexion, sturdily-built at 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighing 140 pounds. She had been to young Dr. Shannon’s office just three days earlier, when he found her to be in good health, but also pregnant.

The Harvard-educated Shannon, at 30 years old, had only recently begun his practice in the Borough of Washington after having interned at hospitals in Boston, Mass. He rented a room at the corner of West Prospect and Dewey avenues and kept an office at 63 South Main St.

Frances was upset by his diagnosis. Shannon would later testify at the coroner’s inquest that she told him she planned to kill the man who had done this to her, and then kill herself. He testified that he advised her against doing so.

How Frances had died Shannon could not say just yet, but her last moments must have been in terrible agony. He turned his attention from the dead girl to the men who had carried her into the room: John T. Innis, 27, a tin worker who went by the nickname “Spikes”; John V. Cook, stage manager of the Lyric Theatre and in whose apartment the body was taken; and Daniel B. Forrest, 37, manager of the Lyric and a member of one of Washington’s most prominent families. There was something suspicious about their behavior. Why had they taken the girl’s body from wherever she had died to the Cooks’ home? What were they trying to hide?

Shannon would need to fill out a death certificate, but the place where she died was obviously not where the group now stood. What Shannon told them was more accusation than statement of fact:

None of the men who had carried her body from where she did die – the room above the box office in the Lyric Theatre – and across the alley and into the stage manager’s home was a stranger to Frances. She had lived in John and Mary Cook’s home, where she was employed as a maid. The Cooks permitted her to go out on Saturday evenings with Innis, her boyfriend of the previous two years. And Innis was good friends with Forrest; they were the only two people to have keys to the bedroom above the box office that would in the coming weeks become the focus of civic outrage.

The mystery of Frances Martin’s death would be solved quickly, but its effects would reverberate through town for years to come. Moral decay was rotting the foundations of the borough, and the death in the Lyric would bring it all into the light.