On an early July morning in 1951, landlord Pansy Carpenter received a telegram addressed to one of the tenants in her Tampa Bay apartment complex.
She went to the apartment, carrying the telegram, and knocked. There was no answer. She decided to open the door. When she touched the doorknob, it was warm. Almost unbearably warm. Pansy felt something was very wrong. She retreated back to her apartment and called the police.
When the police arrived and entered the apartment of the tenant — 67 year old Mary Reeser — they encountered the most inexplicable case of their lives.
Mary, along with the chair she was sitting on, had burned to ashes. If it wasn’t for the one remaining left foot, skull and part of her spine, nobody would have been able to tell that what they are looking at is a person’s remains. Mary’s body had been almost completely cremated.
Just next to the remaining springs of her chair, was a pile of newspapers. Intact. All of the furniture, carpets, walls in the apartment: also intact. The only sign of a fire were few softened plastic appliances and some soot at the ceiling from the heat and smoke.
Mary Reeser had turned to ashes in the middle of her living room.
Who was Mary Reeser?
Mary Reeser was born on March 8 1884 in Columbia, Pennsylvania. After the death of her husband, she moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, to live close to her adult son, Richard, and his family.
Mary had been complaining about the hot Florida weather. She was also a smoker and would regularly use sleeping pills.
The day before her death, she shared with Richard her concerns over a trip she had been planning to take back to Pennsylvania. She had been looking forward to escape the Florida heat and had been anxious that the trip might fall through. It was cruelly ironic that the telegram that would lead to the discovery of Mary’s remains was from a friend in Pennsylvania letting her know that the trip had been arranged and taken care of.
Investigation
The Police
It took the St. Petersburg police force 5 days to admit defeat.
Mary had been essentially cremated: something that requires a temperature of around 3000 degrees. And yet, her living room contained almost no evidence of a fire.
Her skull had shrunk to a very small size, an anomaly which complicated the investigation even more. Under intense heat, the skull would enlarge and even explode, not shrink.
Nobody in the building noticed anything, apart from Pansy who smelled smoke at around 5 AM but thought it was the electric trump that usually gave her trouble.
The only circumstance around Mary Reeser’s death that the police was able to confirm was the approximate time: 4:30 AM. This is the time a clock had stopped at after its socket had melted.
The FBI
On July 7, police chief J. R. Reichert put in a box the shoe from Mary Reeser’s remaining foot, six “small objects thought to be teeth,” part of the carpet, and glass shards found in the ashes. He sent the box to FBI Director Edgar Hoover, with a note.
“We request any information or theories that could explain how a human body could be so destroyed and the fire confined to such a small area and so little damage done to the structure of the building and the furniture in the room not even scorched or damaged by smoke.”
After several weeks, the FBI declared this a case of the “wick effect,” an unfortunate combination between Mary’s flammable nightgown, her cigarette, and the fact that she had taken sleeping pills.
“Once the body starts to burn, there is enough fat and other inflammable substances to permit varying amounts of destruction to take place. Sometimes this destruction by burning will proceed to a degree which results in almost complete combustion of the body.” — FBI Report
Krogman
Chief Reichert also asked physical anthropologist Wilton Krogman to investigate. Krogman dismissed the FBI findings.
I find it hard to believe that a human body, once ignited, will literally consume itself — burn itself out, as does a candle wick, guttering in the last residual pool of melted wax […] Just what did happen on the night of July 1, 1951, in St. Petersburg, Florida? We may never know, though this case still haunts me. […] I cannot conceive of such complete cremation without more burning of the apartment itself. In fact the apartment and everything in it should have been consumed. […] I regard it as the most amazing thing I have ever seen. As I review it, the short hairs on my neck bristle with vague fear. Were I living in the Middle Ages, I’d mutter something about black magic.” — Krogman’s report published in 1961
No more answers would come forward in the Mary Reeser case. Chief Reichert, in a statement to the media, described it as “the most unusual case I’ve seen during my almost 25 years of police work in the City of St. Petersburg.”
Theories
Spontaneous Human Combustion
The SHC (spontaneous human combustion) theory took hold almost immediately among the public and media. To this day, almost 70 years after Mary Reeser’s death, the case is still described with this label in headlines.
What is spontaneous combustion? Put simply, this is when an object ignites and burns without an external source of fire.
While Mary Reeser is the most widely known case of inexplicable death by fire, other people have met similar fates. The mysterious circumstances of these cases and the failure of investigators to provide indisputable answers makes it hard for people to shake off the image of a person abruptly going up in flames.
However, the FBI categorically ruled out the SHC theory in the Mary Reeser case.
Wick Effect
The wick effect theory proposed by the FBI conjures up a harrowing picture of Mary Reeser burning down like a candle.
If she had been dead (by, say, a stroke or a heart attack), or unconscious or incapacitated (by having fallen asleep or under the influence of sleeping pills), it’s easy to imagine her lit cigarette falling and burning through her skin.
The problems with this theory are two. How did Mary’s apartment and entire building sustain the heat required to cremate a human body (over 3000 degrees)? And, how do we explain the shrunken skull?
Kogman’s report contains the following paragraph.
“The head is not left complete in ordinary burning cases. Certainly it does not shrivel or symmetrically reduce to a smaller size. In presence of heat sufficient to destroy soft tissues, the skull would literally explode in many pieces. I have never known any exception to this rule.”
Murder
Over a decade after Mary Reeser’s death, Kogman himself suggested an alternate theory.
What if Mary was murdered and burned at a different location?
According to him, the theoretical killer had access to crematorium equipment. After incinerating Mary Reeser, he transported her remains back to the apartment.
The question marks in this theory are several.
How do we explain the softened plastics and the warm door knob that spooked Pansy?
Why did the murderer kidnap, kill, and burn Mary together with her chair?
And finally, why? Why would a murderer with access to a crematorium return the remains of his victim back to her home?
There are no satisfying answers to these questions, just like there is no single satisfying theory that explains all elements of Mary Reeser’s unusual death. 70 years later, it remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in modern history.