Trading One Hell For Another St. Elizabeth's Hospital Fire Davenport

Firefighters responded at just after 2 a.m.

January 7, 1950, began quietly at Mercy Hospital’s St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric ward in Davenport, Iowa. One nurse was away in Des Moines, leaving Anna Neal in charge of nearly seventy patients. Another aide, Josephine O’Toole, was off duty and asleep upstairs.

Shortly after 2 a.m., Nurse Ellen Hildebrand spotted flames rising from St. Elizabeth’s and alerted her supervisor. Within minutes, smoke filled the halls.

Hospital worker Murray Francis, fifty-seven, saw the fire from the main building. He kicked in the door, carried patients to safety, and then helped firefighters man a hose. Merchant police officer Bill Stagen arrived as crews battled to break through barred windows. He saw women clinging to the iron bars, screaming for help, then disappearing into the smoke.

Patrolman Richard Fee was the first police officer on the scene. Flames poured from the upper windows. Firefighters doused him with water before he climbed into a bucket, ax in hand. Breaking through a window, he found six women huddled together “like bewildered animals.” He pulled them out, describing the bitter cold outside as “trading one hell for another.”

Upstairs, Josephine O’Toole woke to screams, looked out, saw nothing, and went back to bed. Minutes later, smoke filled the hallway. She ran to the basement and escaped with another woman.

Nurse Anna Neal wasn’t so lucky. Four days before the blaze, she’d told a co-worker she’d foreseen a great hospital fire. Her prediction came true, but she didn’t survive it.

Police officer Richard Fee grabbed an ax
and bashed the iron bars blocking the 
windows

Nurse’s aide Irene Bennett saw Neal helping two patients inside the building. Moments later, flames burst from the windows, and Neal was gone. Bennett kept working, pulling seven people out of the blaze.

By the time the fire was out, forty-one women were dead, most of them elderly and locked in their rooms.

In the days that followed, Coroner C. H. Wildman led nuns and hospital staff through local mortuaries to identify victims. Many were unrecognizable. Some were identified by scraps of dress or bits of jewelry; others, by hair. Where names couldn’t be confirmed, they wrote question marks on toe tags.

Investigators quickly found that the hospital’s fire defenses had been dangerously inadequate. The three-story brick building, built in the 1880s, lacked a sprinkler system despite Fire Chief Lester Schick’s warnings two years earlier. “A sprinkler system,” he said, “would have stopped the spread and saved many lives.”

Ceilings lined with fiberboard fed the fire like gas. Firefighter Al Koranda said: “The fire was plain hell. The building burned like paper.”

Windows were covered by heavy iron bars three inches thick and bolted into the brick. They kept patients in—and rescuers out.

At first, investigators suspected bad wiring or a cigarette. Then a twenty-two-year-old voluntary patient, Elnora Epperly, confessed to setting the fire.

Elnora told Illinois State Attorney Bernard Moran she’d started the fire so she could go home to her husband, fearing he’d been hurt or killed. She said she was “crazy with fear” and lit the curtains in her room, then crawled through the transom and escaped. She threw away her lighter on the way out.

Later, she changed her story—claiming a nurse had let her out—but her lawyer doubted it. “If a nurse had opened that door,” he said, “she’d have seen the fire and raised the alarm.”

Elnora said she warned her friend Marilyn Beals before escaping, but Beals stayed behind too long and perished. Outside, Elnora spoke with a man she thought was a reporter, confessing everything. The man was actually a doctor, who treated her injuries and strapped her to a bed upstairs for the night.

Nurse's aide Irene Bennett helped seven women escape

The next morning, her husband, John Epperly, took her home to Rock Island. When she told him she’d started the fire, he didn’t believe her. She threatened suicide if he didn’t go to the authorities.

John brought her to Moran, who took notes but didn’t record the confession verbatim. Later, the couple went to Davenport, where Scott County Attorney Clark Filseth charged Elnora with first-degree murder for the death of Anna Neal, pending a sanity hearing.

A second patient, James Stablein, nineteen, confined for psychiatric testing after an assault charge, also survived the fire. He confirmed that smoking was common inside the ward and said he often borrowed Elnora’s lighter—engraved with her husband’s initials, “J.E.W.” Investigators later found that lighter in the rubble, supporting her confession.

Stablein testified rooms weren’t checked at night for smoking, contradicting staff claims that inspections were done regularly. Safety rules existed mostly on paper.

Dr. Werner Hollander, Elnora’s psychiatrist, diagnosed her with schizophrenia, saying she believed she was responsible for all the world’s problems and often confessed to things she hadn’t done. He doubted she’d set the fire.

Dr. John Marker, a Davenport psychiatrist, disagreed. After examining her for three hours, he believed she was telling the truth—but also that she was unfit for trial and would never recover.

Filseth, the county attorney, was trapped between conflicting opinions. He couldn’t charge an insane woman, but he couldn’t free her either. He ordered her held in jail until the court decided.

Her lawyer, Charles Kaufmann, accused officials of scapegoating Elnora. He visited the ruins and insisted the fire hadn’t started in her room, pointing out that the walls weren’t burned enough.

Still, investigators pressed on. On January 13, they found a lighter engraved with Elnora’s husband’s initials among the debris. It became the case’s only solid evidence.

Reporters noted Elnora laughed during questioning and chain-smoked as she described the fire. She showed little emotion for the dead. Yet she also told a Davenport Democrat reporter she expected “the electric chair.” When he called it mass murder, she replied, “It is, isn’t it?”

At her sanity hearing on January 18, she denied making the confession, saying only that there had been a fire, and she escaped. The court ruled her mentally ill and ordered her sent to Mount Pleasant State Hospital, later transferring her to East Moline in Illinois.

Four months later, she was released on conditional leave to her husband’s care. The Scott County grand jury returned a “no bill” on the murder charge that April, and prosecutors declined to file new ones.

Elnora Epperly lived quietly for the rest of her life. She died in Rock Island on February 29, 2016—sixty-six years after the fire that killed forty-one women.

Fire Chief Schick’s report concluded the tragedy could have been prevented. Sprinklers, alarms connected to the city fire department, and unbarred windows might have saved nearly everyone inside. Instead, cost-cutting, neglect, and confinement turned the ward into a deathtrap.

The fire burned for less than an hour. The questions it raised lasted decades.

(Condensed from a chapter in my book, Iowa Murder Tour)