Episode Transcript

Gardenias on a Dead Line: True Crime Reimagined | #MurderNoir

A private eye takes a dead girl's case for a father who can't afford him, and comes home with a box of gardenias that have been cut for a month and still smell fresh.

EPISODE PAGE (includes list of sources): https://weirddarkness.com/noir-gardeniasonadeadlane

TRANSCRIPT: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/55nmcphx

THE REAL CASE BEHIND THIS STORY: The story in this episode is a fictionalized dramatization. Invented for it are the detective, his office, the gravedigger, the specific conversations, and the telephone call, and every name of a person or a place has been changed. The case underneath it is real.On the night of Thursday, June 24th, 1948, seventeen-year-old Mary Jane Reed, a switchboard operator, went on a first date with Stanley Skridla, a twenty-eight-year-old Navy veteran and telephone lineman from Rockford. They drank in taverns in Oregon, Illinois, a town on the Rock River in Ogle County, and the last place anyone could name was the Stenhouse, out on Route 2 at the south edge of town. They left around eleven-thirty. Skridla was found the next morning in the ditch along County Farm Road, shot with a .32. Mary Jane was found five days later along Silica Road, now called Devil's Backbone Road, shot once through the head, her slacks off her and her mother's wedding ring still on her hand. Roughly fifty people were questioned within a week. Nobody was ever charged, and the case was off the front pages by autumn.The casings, the photographs and the investigation reports all disappeared in the decades that followed. On November 15th, 1999 – Mary Jane's birthday – an untraceable floral arrangement addressed to her arrived at the old Stenhouse, by then the Road House, on a day the bar was closed. The owner, Mike Arians, had just been elected mayor, and the case has occupied him ever since. Her brother Warren Reed had her exhumed on August 23rd, 2005. Inside the burial vault, beside the casket, investigators found a dress and slip wrapped in newspapers dated June 25th, 1948 – four days before anyone found her. In 2007, forensic anthropologist Linda Klepinger examined the remains released to the family and reported that the skull and one vertebra had come from a different person. The DNA test that would settle it has never been run. Skridla was exhumed in 2015 on Arians's theory that Mary Jane's skull had been hidden in his coffin; it held one man and nothing else, though two .32 slugs came out of the ground with him and neither matched the gun Arians submitted.Warren Reed died on December 23rd, 2023, at eighty-one, without ever learning whose skull was in his sister's grave. The homicides remain open and unsolved.
The full account – the fifty interviews, the suitor in La Crosse, the missing wallet the record can't agree on, the six years of court fights, the $25,000 reward for a skull nobody ever produced, and the haunting at the roadhouse – is documented in detail here:
Mary Jane Reed's Illinois Grave Held Someone Else's Skull.

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Originally aired: August 28, 2026

The radiator in my office quit sometime in September and the building manager has not answered a letter about it since, so I have been working in my overcoat. Tonight I have the coat, the whiskey, and a cigarette burning itself down in the ashtray while the rain comes along Delacy Street hard enough to make the streetlight look like it is sitting underwater. The file is on the blotter where I dropped it when I got back from Harlow Bend, and four months of work has come to a folder thin enough that I can see the grain of the desk through it. The room smells like a funeral parlor in June. That is the gardenias. They are in the second drawer down, in a hatbox lined with tissue, and they have been dead since the last week of June. Dry things do not smell. Everybody knows that. I have had that drawer shut for three weeks and the smell is stronger tonight than it was the day the girl's sister handed them to me on her front steps, and if I open the drawer to check, I will have to settle a question about my own mind that I would rather not settle before midnight. So the drawer stays shut, and I pour another one, and I wait for the telephone. He came up to Ravenmill in the third week of July, on the bus, in a suit that had been pressed so many times the wool had gone shiny at the elbows. Clifford Vance was fifty-one and looked older, with the particular gray in his skin that men get from thirty years of breathing ground quartz for a living. He sat in the chair across from my desk with his hat on his knees and told me that he worked for the Wexford Silica Company outside a town called Harlow Bend, ninety miles west, that his daughter had been shot in the head and left in the weeds along Kiln Road, and that the county had been working the case for a month without arresting anybody at all. He counted the money out on the blotter in bills that had been folded a long time. It came to more than I would have asked for and I could see what it had cost him to get it, which is a thing you learn to see in this business and never learn to enjoy. He told me the sheriff was a decent enough man and the chief deputy was not, and that he could not tell me which of those two facts worried him more. Then he told me the part he had come ninety miles to say. His wife had stopped sleeping. His youngest boy had taken to hiding behind the davenport in the front room because his mother had gotten it into her head that whoever killed Ruby Jean was coming back for the rest of them, and she had begun putting the boy back there herself. I took the case. Me? My name's not important. I'm a private eye. Harlow Bend sits on a bend of the Wexford River with a limestone bluff on one side and the sand works on the other, and the whole town smells faintly of wet rock. The plant had been out there since before the first war, since a sand man riding through on the railroad looked out his window at a fresh cut and recognized what the crews had been throwing off the right-of-way. In the first war it ran a hundred and ten men. It survived the bad decade by giving up its sand contracts and grinding flint instead, which is the kind of thing a town remembers about itself with a certain amount of pride. The trucks ran out along Kiln Road at first light and you could set a watch by them. East of the river there is a stretch of houses that everybody calls the Sand, because that is where the plant men live. Kettle Road runs through the middle of it. The Vance place was the fourth house down, white once, with a porch that had settled toward the road, and Ruth Vance was sitting in the front room with her hands in her lap when I came in. Arthritis had been at those hands for years. They looked like something left out in the weather. Ruby Jean was seventeen. She had left the high school at fifteen to look after her mother, and had gone to work the switchboard at the Wexford County Telephone office downtown, and she told everybody who asked that she was going to be a beauty operator once there was money for the schooling. Her shift let out at ten at night. She telephoned home every single night after she signed off, without fail, and her mother told me that in the flat voice of somebody reciting a thing she had already recited to eleven other men with notebooks. Ruth Vance asked me whether I thought her daughter had suffered. I told her the truth, which is that I did not know yet, and she seemed to prefer that to what the others had given her. The boy watched me from the doorway the whole time. Five years old, in short pants, one hand on the frame. He had been standing next to his mother when the two deputies came up the walk on the twenty-ninth, and he told me, in the way a five-year-old tells you a thing, that he had felt his mother go out of herself while he was holding onto her fingers. Anton Skirvis was twenty-eight and came out of Calder City, twenty-five miles up the highway, from a family that had come over from Lithuania and called him Antanas at home. Navy through the war, and after it a lineman's job that put him up poles all over the county, which is how he came to be in and out of the telephone office in Harlow Bend often enough to know the girls on the board by name. Eleven years between them. I asked eight different people about those eleven years and not one of them told me it had bothered her. They went out on Thursday, the twenty-fourth of June. It was the first time. They worked the taverns on the east side and then the south side, and the only place anybody could put a name to was the last one, a roadhouse out on River Road at the south edge of town called the Wheelhouse. The building had been there since the middle of the last century by the count of the men drinking in it, and it had been pouring legally since the year after repeal. Bands on Fridays. Dancing in the back room. Trap doors in the floor that the owners talked about the way other men talk about a war record, and a card room in the cellar that everybody in the county knew about and nobody in the county would put in writing. I got out there late on a weekday afternoon, around four, when the light comes through the west windows and lies across the floor in long yellow bars and the place is empty enough to hear the icebox running. The barman was a heavy man with a rag over his shoulder who had been working that room the night of the twenty-fourth. He said the couple had come in around ten. He said they had one drink each, then another, that the girl had a Coca-Cola with the second one, and that they left somewhere around eleven-thirty without any fuss. He also told me about the two men. They had come in behind the couple and taken the far end of the bar and not spent much. He could not give me faces. He could give me that they went out about the time the couple went out, and that he had thought about it more times since than he cared to. A witness told the coroner's jury the same thing under oath, and there was a second story going around town that the couple had a disagreement with another couple that night, and nobody could ever tell me where that story started. While I was standing there writing that down, the jukebox came on. Nobody was near it. The barman looked at it the way you look at a dog that has done something in the house, and he went over and hit the side of it with his palm, and it stopped in the middle of the record. He told me it did that. He told me it had been doing that since the summer, mostly after midnight, mostly the same side over and over, and that he had gone through every disc on the spindles trying to find which one it was and had never found it. I asked him what the tune was. He said he did not know the name of it and that he had been listening to records for a living for eleven years. At six in the morning on the twenty-fifth, a highway department man named John Eckhart was driving out Poor Farm Road toward a culvert job when he saw a shoe lying at the edge of the pavement. He stopped, and Anton Skirvis was face down in the grass of the ditch four feet from it, shot five times. The deputies picked up five .32 casings out of the road, and there was a pool of blood at the lip of the pavement with a wide smeared track running off it into the weeds, which told anybody with eyes that he had gone down in the road and been dragged out of it. Poor Farm Road is the lovers' lane out there. It is a mile and a half of blacktop between two bean fields with a windbreak of box elder along the north side, and I walked it twice, once in daylight and once at eleven-thirty at night to see what they would have seen. In the dark it is about as private as a place can be. You can see the glow of the town off to the northeast and nothing else. Sound carries, though. Standing in that ditch at eleven-thirty I could hear a screen door shut on a farmhouse I could not see. Five shots in that stillness would have carried to three farms. I found two of the three families and neither of them had heard a thing, and both of them told me so without being asked twice, which is the way people answer when they are telling the truth and the way they answer when they have already agreed on it. Skirvis's Buick turned up an hour after the body, a mile north, pulled off near where River Road crosses Pine. On the floorboard on the passenger side there was one cigarette, unsmoked and unlit, with lipstick on the paper end. There was nothing else of the girl in that car. No purse, no comb, no shoe to match his. The Vances had five days of not knowing, and on the third of them the two older children drove over to a woman in the next county who told fortunes out of a parlor with the shades down. Lucille Vance told me about it on the front steps of the house on Kettle Road, in a voice she kept low so it would not carry through the screen. The woman had held her hands, and told her that her sister was living, and that she was being kept in a shack by an older man, and that she was frightened but whole. Her family drove back to Harlow Bend with that, and slept on it, and repeated it to the neighbors, and for two days there was a version of the world in which the girl was cold and hungry and coming home. Ruby Jean had been dead since Thursday night. I have no use for fortune tellers. I have run enough of them into the county attorney to know the trade. What I could not put down that afternoon on the steps, and cannot put down tonight, is that the woman was not wrong about a man, and was not wrong about the country north of the plant, and was wrong only about the one thing that would have mattered, which was the tense of the verb. They found her on the twenty-ninth of June, two miles from where Skirvis died, in the weeds along Kiln Road. She had been shot once through the head. Coroner Fred Hobbs put the wound at the base of the brain, from behind, and the deputies recovered one casing near her. The county paper had run the wound in the left upper chest the first day and then never mentioned it again. She was still wearing her mother's wedding ring. Deputies and state men had walked and driven that stretch on three separate days out of the five, because it is the road that runs out to the plant and it is the natural place to look. Clifford Vance had gone past that exact spot on his way to work every morning of those five days, in daylight, at the hour when the sun is still low enough off the fields to lay a long shadow behind every weed on that shoulder. Then on the fifth morning a truck driver named Harlan Sigmund, hauling for the plant, came along at the same hour those men had come along, and saw her from the cab of his rig, because he was sitting eight feet up and could see down over the top of the weeds. That is the official explanation and it holds together well enough to write in a report. It held together for the sheriff. It has never once held together for me, because Clifford Vance drove that road at that hour in a truck seat sitting as high as Sigmund's, five days running, and saw nothing, and now has to live the rest of his life with another man's arithmetic about weeds. Hobbs described her to me himself, in his office over the hardware store, with the transcript open on the desk and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. She was in her underclothes and a blouse. Her brown slacks had been taken off her and thrown across the lower part of her legs. There were drag marks along both legs where she had been pulled through the stubble. He stated then and he stated to me that she had not been assaulted, and he said it twice, and the second time he said it looking at the wall. Nobody has ever explained why she was undressed. Nobody has ever tried very hard. The other version, the one the town settled on inside a year, has the slacks folded neatly and laid across her back. I asked Hobbs about that. He said he wrote down what he saw, and that if a town wanted a tidier picture there was nothing in his office that could stop it. Lucille identified her sister. The undertaker was Faraday's, on the square. They had her in the back room on a table with a sheet over her, and they turned back the sheet, and Lucille told me that what she recognized was her mother's wedding ring on her sister's hand. She said it to me twice, the same way, with the same words in the same order, the way people say a sentence they have worn smooth. I asked her whether she had seen her sister's face. She said no. I asked why not, and she said the man from Faraday's had told her it was better if she did not, and she had believed him, and she had been nineteen years old and had believed everything anybody told her that week. There is a story in Harlow Bend, and it was already old when I got there in July, that Ruby Jean Vance went into the ground without her head. I heard it three times in a month, from a woman at the drugstore counter, from a deputy's wife, and from a man at the Wheelhouse who had drunk enough to say it out loud in front of a stranger. Every version traces back to the same place, which is that the family identified her by a ring and not by a face, and that the casket at the church was closed. I put no weight on it in July. I want that on the record. They buried her on the thirtieth of June at Daybrook Cemetery, out past the edge of town where the ground rolls, under a stone with one word cut into it. DAUGHTER. The Reverend Sydney Mabrey took the service at the little church on Ash Street and close to a hundred people came, which in a town that size means everybody who could get away from work. Her brother Delbert had been due to marry on the twenty-sixth with Ruby Jean standing up as a bridesmaid, and they pushed the wedding back until she was in the ground. Lucille had bought white gardenias for her sister's hair. She bought them in Calder City because there were none in Harlow Bend that week, and she carried them back on the bus in a hatbox on her lap, and she gave them to the man at Faraday's on the twenty-ninth of June with instructions. They were not in the casket. She found that out the way you find those things out, which is afterward, when a man in a black coat hands you a box at the back door and says the arrangement had gotten away from them. She kept the box in the bottom of a wardrobe for three weeks, and then she gave it to me on those front steps and told me she did not want it in the house any longer, and she would not say why. The flowers had been cut a month by then. I put the box on the seat of the car and drove back to the hotel with the windows down, and the whole way in, that car smelled like a greenhouse. A gravedigger with a grudge against the county and four beers in him told me what went into the vault on the thirtieth. When they set the casket down, there was a bundle already in there beside it. A dress and a slip, folded, wrapped in newspaper. The gravedigger had seen the bundle go in and had thought nothing about it, the way you think nothing about anything on a job, until his foreman told him to forget he had seen it. The dress was the one Ruby Jean was to have worn at her brother's wedding on the twenty-sixth. Which meant she was buried in something else, and it meant somebody had wrapped up the dress she was going to wear to a wedding and put it in the ground beside her instead of on her. The newspaper was dated the twenty-fifth of June. I went to the county paper's back office and pulled the twenty-fifth off the shelf and read it standing up in the aisle with the light coming through a dirty transom. The front page carried a lineman shot dead on Poor Farm Road and a seventeen-year-old girl missing from the Sand. Four days before anybody found her, somebody wrapped her wedding clothes in that. There is a straight explanation, and I have given it to myself a hundred times. Newspaper is what you had in a house in June, and you grab the stack by the stove without looking at the date. The twenty-fifth was on top because it was the paper everybody in that house had been reading over and over for four days, looking for her name in it. I have said that sentence to myself in a lot of hotel rooms. It does not get me all the way there, and I will tell you exactly where it quits on me. The bundle went into the vault and not into the casket. Somebody made a decision to put her burial clothes near her instead of on her, and that somebody was standing at the graveside on the thirtieth of June with a job to do, and every man who was standing there has told the sheriff he does not remember any bundle. Chief Deputy Willard Burrow ran the investigation, and Sheriff Joe Mesker let him run it. Burrow was a short man with a wrestler's neck who had been called Jiggs since grade school, and he had decided inside of a week what the case was. Nothing had been taken from either body. Skirvis still had his wallet. The girl still had the ring, and that ring was the only thing of value in the Vance house. So it was not robbery, and if it was not robbery in Burrow's arithmetic it was jealousy, and if it was jealousy the answer was a man who had taken the girl out before Skirvis did. They questioned about fifty people in the first week. The county paper printed the number like a batting average. The man Burrow wanted most was a Navy veteran who had spent time in a state hospital and had been telling people around town that Ruby Jean had turned him down. He picked up and moved to Lampier, Wisconsin within a few weeks of the killings. They found him in Lampier and they talked to him in Lampier, and nobody ever charged him with anything, and nobody in that county has ever told me why not. While that was going on, Burrow was holding a colored man in the county jail because he had been stopped for speeding in a two-tone Pontiac and there had been a two-tone Pontiac parked out near the scene. That was the entire case against him. The paint on a car. They kept him a while and then they let him go, and when I asked Burrow about it in his office in August he told me they had to look at everybody, and he said it while looking at his desk. The rest of what came in went nowhere in particular. A blue automobile, a 1941 model, with several people in it, seen out that way at ten past one in the morning. A farmer on the north side of Poor Farm Road who had noticed an older man parked alone in that lane night after night for weeks before it happened, always alone, always the same hour, and who never got a plate. Delbert Vance had told the deputies in the first days that his sister had mentioned a man who carried a .32. A .32 is what killed both of them. I asked Delbert about it on the porch on Kettle Road in the middle of August, and he told me he had said it, and that a deputy had written it in a notebook, and that nobody had ever come back to him about it once. He could not put a name to the man, and he was not sure his sister had ever given him one, and he had spent the summer living with the possibility that she had given him one and he had not been listening. I asked Burrow to see the notebook page. He told me the file was thinner than he would like. I went through what they had twice, in September, at a table in the back of the sheriff's office with a deputy sitting across from me pretending to do paperwork. The first time through, the folder had the coroner's transcript, a run of interview sheets, an evidence card for the casings, and an envelope of photographs from Poor Farm Road. Three weeks later I went through it again, and the photographs were not in it. The deputy said they were probably out with the state men. I asked which state men and he said he would find out and let me know, and the next time I came through that office he was assigned to something in the north end of the county and a different man sat across from me. I never saw the photographs again. Neither, so far as I have been able to determine, did anybody else. Somewhere in that same stretch I stopped being able to get a straight hour with anybody who worked for the county, and my telephone calls to the state's attorney's office started coming back through a secretary with a very pleasant voice, and the barman at the Wheelhouse got careful with me in a way he had not been in July. The Wheelhouse changed hands at the end of August. Two months, almost to the day, after the girl died. The new man behind the bar was polite and had nothing to tell me about anything, and the door to the cellar stairs had a padlock on it that had not been there in July. I never got down those stairs. What I know about that cellar is what a man who had been down them told me over four whiskeys in Calder City, which was that the table down there on a Saturday night had two judges at it, a lawyer who did most of the county's title work, and whichever police happened to be off duty. That is one man talking in a bar twenty-five miles away, and it would not hang a dog on anybody. It is also the only answer anybody in that county has ever offered as to how a town of four thousand people arranges to lose a murder. The last week of October I went back out to Harlow Bend on my own money, because Clifford Vance's had run out in September and I was still not sleeping. I took a room at the hotel on the square. On the second night I could not sleep and I walked down to the telephone office, which is a two-story brick building with the exchange on the ground floor, and it was two in the morning and there was one operator on the night board and a light burning over her shoulder. I stood on the sidewalk and watched her work through the window for a while. That is a strange thing to admit to and I am admitting it. Ruby Jean Vance had sat at that board. She had sat at it for two years, six days a week, two in the afternoon until ten at night, and she had plugged a cord into a jack for half the county. Every call made in Harlow Bend across those eight hours went through the hands of a seventeen-year-old girl from the Sand, and every one of them left a ticket, because that is how the business works. The board writes down everything. I went in and showed the night operator my card and asked her a question I had been carrying around for a month, which was whether there was any way at all for a call to come through that exchange and not leave a ticket. She told me no. She told me it in the tone of a woman who is asked a lot of foolish questions on the night board, and then she softened it and said that the only calls that leave no ticket are the ones the operator makes herself, testing a line. I thanked her and went back to the hotel. At about ten past two the telephone in my room rang. I picked it up and nobody spoke, and what came down the line was not the flat nothing of a dead connection. A room was on that line. I could hear the sound a switchboard makes, which is a sound I had been listening to through a window forty minutes earlier, cords going into jacks and the small ratcheting the keys make, and underneath that, a long way off, a girl's voice reciting numbers in the singsong they teach them. I said hello four times. The line went dead on the fifth. In the morning I went down and asked the day operator to pull the ticket on a call to room fourteen at ten past two. She looked for a long time and then she told me there was no ticket, and that no call had come into that hotel between one and three in the morning, and that in any case the hotel board was locked down at one and the night man had the key. I asked her if she was certain. She told me the board writes down everything. Sheldon Crowell, the state's attorney, gave me twenty minutes in November on the strength of a mutual acquaintance in Ravenmill who owed me one. He was courteous about it. He had the file, or what the file had become, on the corner of his desk under a paperweight, and he told me that he had no reasonable prospect of a conviction against any person living, that the physical evidence consisted of six pieces of brass and no weapon, that the two men at the end of the bar had never been identified, that the man in Lampier had an account of his night that could not be disproved and could not be confirmed, and that the county could not indict a rumor. Then he told me the part he did not have to tell me, which is that in his opinion the case had been mishandled from the first morning, and that he did not intend to say so in public while he still had to work with the people who mishandled it. Nobody has ever been charged. Clifford Vance came out to my car when I stopped by the house on Kettle Road to tell him. He stood with one hand on the door frame, gray in the face, and thanked me, and he told me his wife was under a doctor's care now, and that they had moved the boy's bed out of the back room because she could not sleep unless she could see him. It is the fifteenth of November. She would have been eighteen today. I know that because it is written on the second sheet in the folder in my own hand, from the first afternoon I sat with her mother in that front room, and I have looked at it eleven times since I got back. The rain has slacked off and the streetlight has stopped swimming. The whiskey is down to where I ought to stop. Across the hall somebody's radio is playing dance music through the wall, the way it does every night from ten until the building goes to sleep, and it is a comfort, and I am going to leave it at that. The gardenias in my second drawer have been dead since June. I have not opened that drawer since the third week of October, and the room smells like a girl went by wearing them, and it has smelled that way since about eight o'clock, which is the hour her shift used to end. The telephone on this desk has not rung since six. I am sitting here in my coat with the file in front of me, and I am not going to open the drawer, and I am not going to call the exchange, and I am going to sit here until whatever this is decides it is finished with me for the night. The board writes down everything, she said, and she said it the way a person says a thing she was taught in her first week and has never once had to doubt. Somebody, somewhere, is making a call that will not leave a ticket.

NOBODY SAW US LEAVE by Alena Ingram

[VERSE] Ten o'clock, the switchboard set me free, Hung the headset on the wall. He was standing there waiting for me. I forgot to make my call. [POST VERSE] I bought the second round myself, He never asked me twice. They'll say I should have known better They can keep their advice!

[PRE CHORUS] What happened to me, poor Mary Jane? Found bloodied on that lover’s lane!

[CHORUS] Nobody saw us leave that night, The barkeep turned to pour. The band kept time, the room stayed bright, Can we please dance just once more? Nobody saw us leave, Nobody knows why I'm gone. Now I'm the cold that you receive, Now I'm the record playing on. [POST CHORUS] Nobody saw us leave that night... Nobody saw us leave. NOBODY! SAW! US! LEAVE!

[VERSE] Half past eleven, I followed on his arm, The lot was almost bare. He drove us out past the county farm. I wasn't going anywhere. [POST VERSE] A stranger with a gun in his hand, I never saw him plain. Five shots went into my man, Then the gun forced me down the lane.

[PRE CHORUS] What happened to me, poor Mary Jane? Found bloodied on that lover’s lane!

[Tenor saxophone solo]

[BRIDGE] Gardenias sent each fall, No name attached at all. The kitchen then grows cold, While I never grow old.

The jukebox plays my song, It’s here my heart belongs. So pour me just one more, While my spirit sweeps the floor.

[PRE CHORUS] What happened to me, poor Mary Jane? Found bloodied on that lover’s lane!

[OUTRO] Nobody saw us leave that night... Nobody saw us leave. Nobody saw us leave!!!! NOBODY! SAW! US! LEAVE.......!!!! Nobody saw us leave!!!!

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