They were known as "Seven Doe" in official files, having passed away as a ward of the state at a retirement home in 2015. Going only as Mr. Seven in life, their true identity was unknown and they were buried in a Catholic cemetery with a marker that labeled 04985.
The true story behind Seven Doe was recently revealed when police investigators at the Cook County sheriff’s office ran her postmortem fingerprints against federal databases, according to a report.
They got a hit: the fingerprints belonged to a Women’s Army Corps veteran named Reba C. Bailey. But the story only got stranger from there. Reba survived a car crash that killed her mother and left her and her father injured when she was ten. Around the age of twenty, she joined the Army in 1961.
She was briefly married and left the Army, but had a falling out with her family. Some say it was over her Army enlistment, others believe it was over her sexual orientation, but facts have been hard to come by with so many of her relatives being deceased.
What is known is that in the late 1970s, she showed up at the steps of the St. Francis Catholic Worker House claiming to be a man named Mr. Seven. Seven was soon hard at work helping to worker house feed the homeless, and was well respected for their work there.
Seven passed away in 2015 after suffering from heart disease, dementia, and diabetes. Surviving family members, nieces and nephews, were happy to learn here whereabouts when contacted by the police and to know that their loved one was cared for by the Catholic Worker House.
Seven's marker will now be replaced by a gravestone with appropriate military honors.