To the dial-painters’ frustration, however, the results of the exams at Argonne were not shared with them. This secrecy may well have been to do with the highly technical nature of the measurements the researchers were making; perhaps they thought the results would mean nothing to the women, but the women still wanted to know. ‘They would never tell [Marie] anything, which made her mad,’ recalled Dolores. By 1985, after going there for decades, Charlotte Purcell had had enough of it. When the researchers called her that year, she said she had not been feeling well, ‘but why should I discuss it – you people don’t help me – I don’t get anything out of it – I don’t even have any money to go to the doctor.’ She refused to go again.
Marie did the same. And it wasn’t just the scientists’ silence that bothered her; it was her town’s continued reaction to what the women had endured. She always thought the whole saga ‘will be swept under the carpet . . . it will never come to light. You’ll never hear about it.’ It made her shock all the greater when Carole Langer came to Ottawa to make her movie. Marie told the director, ‘God has left me here. I always knew someone would walk through that door, and I would finally have a chance to tell my story.’ Langer dedicated the film to Marie, calling her someone ‘who fought against the odds all of her life and never lost her belief in God or her sense of humour’.
When Marie died in 1993, like many dial-painters she donated her body to science. ‘She thought maybe she could help other people,’ said her granddaughter Patty. ‘Maybe they could find exactly what happened and they could find a cure. Maybe she could help other women.’ Marie’s body would not be the last Ottawa dial-painter’s corpse to be studied; nor was it the first. That honour goes to Margaret Looney.
Peg’s family had wanted her exhumed for testing as soon as they’d heard about the post-war studies on the dial-painters. At that time, however, research was limited to the living. By the time CHR was established, the remit had broadened. Finally, someone was prepared to investigate what had really killed Peg.
Every one of her nine brothers and sisters signed the necessary forms. ‘It was going to help somebody else get better,’ said her sister Jean, ‘of course we let them do it.’
In 1978, researchers exhumed Peg’s body from St Columba Cemetery, where she had been resting alongside her parents. They discovered she had 19,500 microcuries of radium in her bones; one of the highest quantities found. It was more than 1,000 times the amount scientists then considered safe.
They didn’t just discover the radium; they discovered that the company doctor had cut her jawbone from her while she lay dead. That was probably how the Looney family found out about it.
‘I’m angry,’ said one of Peg’s sisters. ‘They knew she was full of radium. And then they lied.’
‘Every family has sadness and grief,’ Jean said steadily. ‘But Margaret’s death was unnecessary.’
That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary.
The researchers exhumed more than a hundred dial-painters; many tests proving once and for all that radium poisoning, and not syphilis or diphtheria, was the woman’s true cause of death. And there was one deceased dial-painter in particular in whom the scientists were very interested: Catherine Donohue. In 1984, CHR wrote to her daughter to request her exhumation.
They wrote to Mary Jane because, by that time, Catherine’s devoted husband Tom had died. He passed away on 8 May 1957, aged sixty-two. He had lived the remainder of his life at 520 East Superior Street, never leaving the home he had once shared with Catherine; the home where, when the news of her triumph in court had come through, he and the family had celebrated with pot-luck food. ‘We all went down and we celebrated with him,’ remembered his niece Mary. ‘Because it was such a moral victory. Something that nobody had ever done before.’
Though the money helped a lot, it couldn’t bring Catherine back. ‘I think it broke him when she died,’ said a relative. ‘His heart was broken.’
The family rallied round; for a time, Tom’s sister Margaret moved in to help with the children. Tom doted on the kids. ‘They were all he had left,’ Mary said simply.
‘As time went on,’ she added, ‘he healed. He became [a] smiling man; it was really great to see that.’ He rarely talked of Catherine but, said Mary, ‘It was a painful memory because of the painful death that she had.’
Tom Donohue never remarried. No one could replace Catherine Wolfe Donohue.
As for Mary Jane’s brother Tommy, he had gone to fight in the Korean War – and made it home. He married a young woman from Streator and worked in a glass factory, just like his father. But he died shortly after his thirtieth birthday in 1963, of Hodgkin’s disease: a type of cancer. Mary Jane had been on her own for a long time now.
She had not had an easy life. The little girl who weighed only 10 pounds on her first birthday had stayed small. ‘She was almost childlike,’ remembered her cousin Mary. ‘She was tiny.’
Yet Mary Jane, showing some of her mother’s spirit, rose above the challenges she faced. ‘It was really remarkable,’ said Mary, ‘that she was able to hold down [her] job because she was so small. She was very sweet as an adult; everyone liked her. We tried to invite her to all the functions of the family because of course she had no one.’
When Mary Jane received the request from CHR, she considered it carefully and then wrote back. ‘I have really developed a lot of medical problems,’ she told the doctors. ‘I realise now that most of them are probably a result of my mother’s illness. If it is convenient and you wish me to do so, I would like to come up to Argonne Lab. I feel it is important for myself and for research.’
It seems Mary Jane was tested, adding her own contribution to science. On 16 August 1984, she gave permission to the researchers to exhume her mother. ‘If this could help one person,’ she said, ‘it is worth it.’
And so, on 2 October 1984, Catherine Donohue left St Columba Cemetery for an unexpected journey. The scientists ran their tests and she made her unique endowment to medical knowledge. Catherine was reinterred on 16 August 1985 – where she rests, to this day, beside her husband Tom.
When Mary Jane wrote to CHR, she said, in an uncanny echo of her mother’s final letter to Father Keane, ‘I pray all the time that God will let me live a long life. I certainly try hard enough to fight all the time for a life of fulfilment and happiness.’
But it was not to be. After a life full of physical challenges, Mary Jane Donohue died – from heart failure, according to her relatives – on 17 May 1990. She was fifty-five years old.
For a long time – too long – the legacy of the radium girls was recorded only in the law books and in scientific files. But in 2006, an eighth-grade Illinois student called Madeline Piller read a book on the dial-painters by Dr Ross Mullner. ‘No monuments,’ he wrote, ‘have ever been erected in their memory.’
Madeline determined to change that. ‘They deserve to be remembered,’ she said. ‘Their courage brought forth federal health standards. I want people to know [there] is a memorial to these brave women.’