Mr. Ballin

On the morning of March 12th, so still less than 24 hours after Carrie had gone missing, detectives Manning and Ash, along with a group of uniformed police officers, began canvassing the surrounding neighborhood outside of the hospital, hoping they weren't already too late.

And pretty quickly, they began finding witnesses.

A young boy who'd been outside at the time when Carrie had disappeared said he did see a woman in a blue dress, just like the one Carrie was wearing, running down the street right across from the hospital.

And a woman who lived nearby said she'd also seen the woman wandering down the street a couple blocks away.

Now, this information didn't make it any clearer where Carrie was right now, but it at least gave the detectives some hope that they were finally on her trail.

So the detectives wanted to get Carrie's image in front of as many people as possible.

But back in 1900, reproducing photographs was not nearly as fast or easy a process as it is today.

However, photography had recently become more affordable for people, and newspapers regularly ran photos along with their articles.

So, the detectives met with Kerry's brother, Joseph, and got photos of Kerry that they could reproduce as cards to show people around the city.

They would also put these photos in the local papers.

In the week following Carrie's disappearance, Manning, Ash, and their team walked the city, knocked on doors, and showed Carrie's picture to everyone.

But nobody else beyond those initial witnesses had seen her.

Two weeks after Carrie's disappearance, on March 25th, the detectives still had no real leads, and they were getting desperate.

By now, they had searched the hospital and its grounds several times, they had crisscrossed the city, dragged small ponds, and conducted hundreds of interviews.

At this point, they could only think of one other place to look, the canal that cut through town that also was not far from the psychiatric hospital.

In 1900, very few women were taught how to swim.

So Manning and Ash thought Carrie might have wandered near the canal and with her limited vision and potentially with her inability to swim, she could have not seen the water, fallen in, and drowned.

So the detectives had city workers drain the entire canal.

And then after it was drained, they led a group of volunteers through the mud looking for Carrie's body.

But after hours and hours of searching, they hadn't found any sign of her.