Mr. and Mrs. William J.F. Bullerman
ran "a rather mysterious sort of rookery" in Chicago. On November 8,
1879 police discovered a woman named Elizabeth Foley, aka Sarah Monshan,
seriously ill with septicemia at that "rookery."
Police suspected that the abortion had probably been perpetrated by Dr. Franklin Brooks,
"who, a few years ago, was awarded six years at Joliet for abortion."
Elizabeth's sister, Mary Monshan, was also held as an accessory.
They took Mrs. Foley to Cook County Hospital, where she died later that
day. To the end, Elizabeth denied having undergone an abortion. She
insisted that she'd given birth and that her sister, Mary, and taken the
child to their mother's home in Greenbaugh, Wisconsin. Mary denied
this, and her employer told police that she'd not been out of town at
all.
The post-mortem examination showed that Elizabeth had indeed died from
an abortion. The Bullermans were easy enough to find and charge with a
crime, since they were in the county lock-up for stealing $250 in gas.
As for Brooks, even after getting out of Joliet for abortion, and after
Elizabeth's death, continued to practice in Chicago. On December 22,
1891, a Swedish girl named Tillie Thom was found dead from an abortion at Brooks' office.
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