History in Glenview

Helen Brach was the coat check girl at the Palm Beach Country Club in the late 1940s when she met Frank Brach, a Chicagoan who vacationed in Florida during the winters.  Frank was the son of Emil J. Brach, the American immigrant founder of E.J. Brach & Sons Candy Company.  Frank had successfully turned his father's fledgling business into one of the biggest candy producers in the world.  By 1950, however, Frank's marriage was on the rocks and divorce was imminent.  In the meantime, Frank had begun dating Helen, who was by then nearly 40 years old, and the two were married in 1950.  Upon frank's death in 1970, Helen Brach became the childless heiress to a $20 million fortune.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, Helen became acquainted with Richard Bailey, who operated two horse stables and specialized in befriending and defrauding middle-aged, single, or recently widowed or divorced women.  Bailey would wine and dine them at Chicago's finest restaurants, shower them with gifts, engage in sexual relations with them, and, in some cases, propose to them, even though he was already married.  He managed to convince Helen, with whom he was having an affair, to invest significant sums of money in a series of worthless horses which he or his cohorts had previously purchased for pennies on the dollar.  At some point in early 1977, however, Helen became suspicious and hired an appraiser to provide her with insight into the value of the horses she already owned.  Equipped with this information, she became extremely angry, accused Bailey of cheating her, and vowed to take the matter to the district attorney when she returned from a check-up at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  Although the evidence conflicts, the general consensus is that she never made it back to her home at this address in Glenview.

The most widely accepted explanation of her disappearance is that she was picked up in an automobile in Minnesota on February 17, 1977, by one of Bailey's many underworld accomplices, that she was kidnapped, beaten, and shot twice as she lay moaning in the trunk of a car, and that her body was dumped into a white hot steel furnace somewhere outside Gary, Indiana.  During the course of the criminal investigation, the United States Attorney's office uncovered dozens of other crimes committed by shadowy racketeers connected with Richard Bailey and even solved the grisly 1955 Schuessler-Peterson murders that rocked Chicago.  Richard Bailey was indicted in 1994 and sentenced to thirty years following a two-week hearing in 1995.  He was already 66 years old at the time.  With credit for good behavior, he could potentially be released in 2020 at the age of 91.