Like Greta Garbo, once Mildred Gillars became famous, her greatest wish was to be left alone. But while Garbo only acted out dramatic scenes of deception on screen, during World War II the former Ohio Wesleyan coed lived a life of treason as a radio voice of Nazi Germany.
Gillars spent her youth and old age in Ohio, but it was her role as Axis Sally in Berlin and subsequent treason conviction that put her in the history books as a woman gone wrong, one who was surprisingly unrepentant about betraying her country.
It’s tempting to say that the seeds of Gillars’s downfall were sewn in her childhood. She was born to Vincent and Mae Sisk in Portland, Maine, in 1900. The new century would witness numerous changes for women, many the result of the two world wars in America’s first half century. But when Mildred Elizabeth Sisk was born, women did not yet have the right to vote. Divorce was still exceptionally rare, as was higher education for women.
Mae Sisk, Mildred’s mother, soon regretted her marriage. Vincent drank heavily, smoked opium, and beat her regularly. It’s not known whether he ever beat his pretty dark-haired, brown-eyed daughter, but it’s fairly certain he didn’t lavish much fatherly love upon her. After seven years of abuse, Mae divorced Vincent. From then on, he was dead to Mildred and Mae.
One year after the divorce, Mae married Robert Gillars, a dentist. The new family moved from town to town in eastern Canada and the United States as Gillars tended to working-class patients. By 1914, the family, which now included Edna Mae—Mildred’s half-sister—was in Bellevue, Ohio. They moved to Conneaut in 1916, where Robert established a successful practice.
Mildred Gillars, late 1940s. (Authors’ collection)
Mildred took Gillars as her surname, although her stepfather never adopted her. She did not warm to Robert or Edna Mae, remaining a detached yet obedient child, according to biographer Richard Lucas. A reporter who interviewed Gillars during her treason trial suggested that Robert might have been abusive, but she never publicly spoke of any mistreatment. Her one strong bond was to her mother.
Once she entered high school in Conneaut she developed another love: theater. She enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware because of the reputation of its theater department and of Professor Charles M. Newcomb. Newcomb would be the first of “a series of intellectual older men whose influence shaped her fate,” Lucas wrote in his 2010 biography. Like many young women who grow up without a positive father figure, Mildred kept searching for a strong man who would take an interest in her. Once she found that man, she would do anything for him.
At college, Mildred became known for her stylish clothes and vampish ways. She was said to be the first coed there to wear knickers, a slightly scandalous new fashion. She idolized movie actresses, like the exotic Theda Bara, and drew her share of male admirers. She became engaged to a student with whom she spent much of her time. Ignoring her studies, she began failing or receiving incompletes in many classes. Newcomb convinced her to drop out of college to pursue stage acting.
Mae was shocked. Her second marriage was in tatters. Robert, like her first husband, had become an alcoholic, and they separated. In 1919, he left Conneaut to set up a practice in Elyria and by 1922 was working and living in Piqua. Mae hoped Mildred could avoid similar marital disasters by becoming a well-educated, independent woman. She wanted her daughter to never be dependent on men who were dangerously undependable.
But Mildred, drawn by the applause and accolades she had received in college productions, was determined to become an actress. Newcomb recommended she enroll in Chronicle House, a Cleveland drama school whose students had the opportunity to act with visiting well-known professional actors. Coincidentally, Newcomb was also leaving Delaware for Cleveland. About the same time, Mildred broke off her engagement.
In Cleveland, Mildred found a tiny room in a boardinghouse. Newcomb arranged for her to get a sales position at the Halle Brothers Department Store downtown, where she earned $15 a week, plus commission, at the jewelry counter. Once she paid her tuition and rent, she had little left for necessities. She often survived on nothing but crackers and apples; in fact, during rehearsal one evening, she fainted from hunger. When the school’s director learned of her circumstances, her tuition was reduced.
After a year in Cleveland, Mildred Gillars decided she was ready for Broadway. She moved to Greenwich Village and worked a succession of menial jobs while taking acting lessons and auditioning. She toured with acting companies, but while she had a lovely voice and acceptable skill, she didn’t stand out in any way. She had a good figure, long black hair, and pretty eyes. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, though, and that may have prevented her from starring in the vaudeville shows she worked.
She wanted to be more than just another girl in a chorus line. She wanted fame. She sought it in Europe: in 1929, she went to Paris, where she worked as an artist’s model; a nude photograph of her as a photographer’s model in the Library of Congress archives suggests the type of work she was doing. Although her occupation wasn’t unusual for a woman trying to work as an actress, the folks back in Delaware certainly would have been scandalized.
She showed up in North Africa in 1933. By 1934, she was in Dresden, Germany, supposedly to study music. After further travel, she was back living in Germany by the late 1930s.
Mae traveled to Europe in the summer of 1939, hoping to persuade her elder daughter to return to the States. The two enjoyed their visit, and Mae thought Mildred seemed happy. She refused, however, to consider moving home. Meanwhile, opportunities for Americans to leave Germany were diminishing rapidly. Hitler was already in power, and expatriates could not evade the gathering turmoil. Mildred’s connection to Germany grew more personal when she became engaged to Paul Karlson, a German citizen.
But life had never gone smoothly for Mildred, and her contentment didn’t last long this time, either. Karlson was sent to fight on the eastern front, where he was killed. With Germany already at war, it would have been difficult—though not impossible—for her to leave. But she didn’t even try. After Pearl Harbor, she signed a loyalty oath to the Third Reich.
Gillars also began a relationship with Max Otto Koischwitz, a German citizen who came to the United States in the mid-1920s to become a college professor. He taught in New York, first German at Columbia University and then German literature at Hunter College. As the 1930s progressed, Koischwitz became outspoken in his support of Hitler. Hunter officials put him on a leave of absence in 1939, and he returned to Germany early in 1940.
By spring, he was program director of the USA Zone of the German state radio company, the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG) in Berlin. Koischwitz began looking around for American expats to broadcast on behalf of the Nazi regime. He found Mildred, alone and jobless at age forty in a foreign country. Although Koischwitz was married and had children, he and Mildred soon began an affair.
From then on, being with Koischwitz was her primary aim; after the war, Gillars referred to him as “my destiny.” “A Nazi Svengali” is how defense attorney James Laughlin would refer to him years later during her treason trial. After they became lovers, she never thought of leaving Germany. Under Koischwitz’s direction, Mildred attained the fame she had long dreamed of, along with the infamy that followed her to an unmarked grave in Ohio decades later.
Radio was the most far-reaching propaganda tool for both the Allies and the Axis during the war. It was the most accessible media for soldiers, and the one that American GIs were most comfortable with—by 1940, almost 90 percent of American homes had at least one radio. People listened to news, entertainment, advertising, opinions, and music on air. Over the radio waves, celebrities, presidents, and prime ministers could speak directly to listeners in their homes.
Americans were primed to believe what they heard on the radio. In 1939, when a public opinion institute asked them which source they would believe in the case of conflicting news reports, 40 percent of respondents said they would trust the radio report. Only 26 percent said they would trust the newspaper account, and a mere 13 percent would believe an official. The Nazis and the Japanese used that trust to try to demoralize Allied troops.
Gillars’s most popular program was the Home Sweet Home Hour. As a producer, Koischwitz knew what American GIs wanted to hear: swing music, “good, combat jive,” as military correspondent Edward Van Dyne called it in a 1944 magazine column. Gillars’s broadcasts were programmed to pull the men in with popular music—Bing Crosby was a favorite—then assail them with innuendos about what their wives and sweethearts were up to on the home front, as well as dire predictions of their own deaths in combat.
She called herself Midge at the Mike, but the GIs gradually started to call her Sally, because she once described herself as a real Irish type. Gillars had a voice that “oozes honey” and was meant to demoralize the soldiers, Van Dyne wrote. However, the enlisted men saw through her flimflam and got “an enormous bang out of her.”
Sixty-nine years later, a World War II vet in New Mexico gave the same assessment of her effectiveness. In an interview on his ninetieth birthday, Walter Dorman remembered Gillars’s broadcasts as a rare light spot in the midst of horrors. “We’d listen to Axis Sally every night until midnight,” he said. “She’d be telling us to give up, and that we couldn’t win, but she played some good music. We just laughed about it.”
But as the war intensified and more American troops were dying in combat or languishing in POW camps, Axis Sally’s broadcasts became more vitriolic. She chided home-front listeners with accusations that their sons had become cold-blooded killers of innocent German children and women. She ridiculed American troops for fighting England’s war and kept up a stream of anti-Semitic rhetoric.
“This is a Jewish war, and good, honest-to-God American blood is being shed for it,” she said in one broadcast, reminding listeners how often President Franklin Roosevelt had promised that no American boys would be sent to fight on foreign soil. To prove that the Germans were ferreting out accurate intelligence, she revealed planned movements of American troops and read the names of captured and hospitalized soldiers.
As the situation in the war worsened, so did Gillars’s personal life. Koischwitz, who suffered from tuberculosis, became a wanted fugitive in 1943, when the U.S. Justice Department indicted him and seven expatriates for treason. Despite having promised to marry Gillars, he was still living with his wife and three children, with a fourth on the way. She learned of the pregnancy just before the baby’s birth and was devastated.
She tried to commit suicide by turning on the gas in her small apartment; however, a friend who knew of her distress arrived at the apartment to thwart the plan. But more sadness followed; Koischwitz’s infant died soon after birth. A few days later, Koischwitz’s wife, recuperating at a Berlin hospital, was killed in an Allied bombing raid. Gillars and Koischwitz’s relationship continued as before, but a darkness hung over them, exacerbated by the war.
That same year, an Allied air attack heavily damaged Gillars’s apartment. On another occasion, she was on air when the building across the street from the radio studio was hit and burned; she watched the devastation while continuing the broadcast without a word of what she was witnessing.
Late in 1943, Gillars and Koischwitz began interviewing American POWs in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. They feigned concern for the prisoners’ welfare and enticed them to talk about their feelings about the war. Gillars sometimes handed out cigarettes and liquor to convince the soldiers she was on their side. At least once, she posed as a Red Cross representative. Often, she told the prisoners she wanted to interview them, to record messages for their relatives waiting at home. Later, these pieces were edited for propaganda purposes—to convince American listeners that the Nazis were treating their captured loved ones well and that the POWs were ready to denounce the war.
Getting the type of interviews that Koischwitz wanted was not easy. The Americans were wary of the producer and the long-legged woman who attemped to use her feminine charms to get them talking. At Stalag IIB—one of the most brutal POW camps—the ranking American officer flatly refused to let any of the prisoners be interviewed. Guards escorted Koischwitz and Gillars out of a large barracks, where hundreds of POWs hurled curses and insults at them.
Koischwitz next turned to playwriting to try to further the Nazi cause. In his Vision of Invasion, Gillars played an Ohio mother who has a nightmare about her son dying horribly in an attempted invasion of Occupied Europe. The play was broadcast just a few weeks before the actual D-Day.
As the Third Reich began to implode, so did Gillars’s life. In late summer 1944, Koischwitz died while she was on assignment in France. She was lost. He had become her whole world: colleague, lover, protector. Without him, she had no one. Her zeal for propaganda was gone, but she continued broadcasting, largely because she had no other way to survive. When the Russian Army entered Berlin in spring 1945, she barely made it out of the broadcast studio. At that point, her fear of the Russians was even greater than her fear of the Americans. The conquering Russians were known for their brutal treatment and rape of survivors. She went to the home of Koischwitz’s oldest child, Stella, for help, but she was turned out. So, with hundreds of others, she hid in the underbelly of the city, often surrounded by corpses. She traded her few personal possessions on the black market for food. Once the arrival of other Allied forces stabilized the situation in Berlin, she found lodging in a rented room in the British sector of the city.
Meanwhile the United States Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) was hunting for her. Under the CIC’s orders, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been monitoring and recording all Axis broadcasts for months. The FCC worked from a listening post in Silver Hill, Maryland, supplying the CIC with recordings and detailed records.
After the fall of Germany, CIC officers maintained a round-the-clock surveillance on Axis Sally’s known associates and the places she had lived or frequented. On March 15, 1946, she entered the house where she was staying, only to find an American soldier pointing a revolver at her and a CIC agent placing her under arrest. Knowing that this day was inevitable and exhausted by the previous few years, Gillars went along quietly to jail. She asked only to take with her a photograph of Koischwitz. It disappeared during her first night in jail.
Gillars’s arrest resulted in a flood of stories in Allied newspapers—many of which were lurid and personal. After years of war, neither the press nor the public felt compelled to be objective before she was convicted. Adding to the public disdain for an accused traitor was Gillars’s free admission that she had made the broadcasts and her lack of regret for them.
Judy Barden, a journalist with the North American Newspaper Alliance, was one of the first reporters to interview Gillars, who was still under house arrest in a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Berlin. Gillars wisecracked with journalists as she was interviewed. Asked if she thought she was providing a good service to Americans by her broadcasts, she replied, “Surely. I’m told they all got a good laugh. That’s good for soldiers, isn’t it?”
Much was made—good and bad—of Gillars’s appearance. She was often accused of posing for the press, and photographs support that allegation. While one unnamed Associated Press reporter called her “tall and lissome,” Barden was more critical. Axis Sally must have been beautiful once, she wrote, but she had “gone to seed.” Gillars wore her hair—now gray—in a velvet and net snood, in the French style of the day. Her nails—fingers and toes—were painted bright red. “She appeared very proud of her well-shaped legs, which she crossed and uncrossed continually while cameramen flashed bulbs all around,” Barden wrote.
She noted that although Gillars received the same meager rations as the German citizens, there were luxuries including chocolate bars and high-priced makeup in her room. Barden left it up to the readers to determine how Axis Sally rated those perks. Gillars’s most revealing statement in Barden’s article, however, was that she didn’t care about what happened to her in the future: “I’ve lost everything.” That lack of concern—which various sources depicted either as despondent or cavalier—was a theme of her pretrial life. She seemed oblivious that she faced the death penalty.
England quickly tried and executed two expatriates who broadcasted for the Nazis. William Joyce, known as Lord Haw Haw, was executed in early 1946. John Amery, who attempted to convince Allied troops to join the Nazis to defeat the Russians, was executed in 1945. But the U.S. Justice Department proceeded more cautiously, closely looking at what constituted treason. Under debate was whether words—no matter how treasonous or inflammatory—were enough for a conviction. When there were no actions to accompany the words, did treason exist? The attorney general’s office studied cases from the American Civil War while debating the issue. Another problem was gathering enough evidence against some of the accused to mount a successful case.
Of the seven expats indicted along with Koischwitz in 1943, only two had been convicted of treason by the time of Gillars’s trial. Robert Best and Douglas Chandler were both sentenced to life imprisonment. Best died in prison in 1952, and President John F. Kennedy commuted Chandler’s sentence in 1963.
Fred J. Kaltenbach, a German American who grew up in Iowa and worked closely with Koischwitz on a program for the RRG, died before he could be tried. The Russians captured him after the fall of Berlin and refused to hand him over to the Americans; Kaltenbach is thought to have died in a Russian detention camp in 1945. Charges against four other people, including Koischwitz, were dropped for lack of evidence. Charges against poet Ezra Pound were dropped because he was found incompetent to stand trial.
As Gillars awaited her future, she was treated at a military hospital for conditions related to malnutrition and exhaustion. She was also held in a psychiatric ward for a time; though she was released in late 1946, she chose to remain in military custody. With no money and no friends, she had nowhere to go. Gillars had not had contact with her mother, Mae, or her half-sister, Edna Mae, since the war started. The women learned of her arrest in the newspapers.
At the time, Mae was living in Toronto, Canada, where she ran a boardinghouse. When she heard the accusations against her first-born daughter, she steadfastly maintained her faith in her innocence and worried about her safety. Mae died in March 1947 without ever being in touch with her again. Edna Mae was married and living in Ashtabula, Ohio, where she taught at a dance school.
The Justice Department determined there was sufficient evidence to try Mildred. She was rearrested in early 1947 and charged with multiple counts of treason. Death was the ultimate penalty, and the minimum sentence was five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Despite the seriousness of her situation, Gillars seemed able to rationalize her way out of any responsibility. “My conscience is clear,” she told an AP reporter shortly after her capture. “I have nothing to hide.” She said that if her marriage to a German citizen had happened as was planned, she would have had to be loyal to Germany at any rate. As she awaited trial in the United States in 1948, her attitude never changed. Once her trial began in Washington, D.C., in early 1949, she still claimed innocence. She painted herself as a victim of circumstance: once the war began, she claimed, German authorities took away her visa. She said she was threatened with imprisonment in a concentration camp if she did not broadcast for the Nazis.
At times, when the prosecution played parts of FCC recordings of her broadcasts, she said she could not be sure it was her voice. There was, in fact, another Axis Sally making radio broadcasts at the same time as Gillars. Rita Zucca was an Italian American whose family still had considerable property and many relatives in Italy. She moved there in 1938 and began broadcasting for Radio Roma in 1943. She was called “Sally” on the air, and her programs were similar to the ones Gillars was making in Berlin.
During her trial, Mildred claimed she had demanded that Zucca not use the name Sally, because she did not want to be confused with her. Zucca was giving out military information and trying to confuse GIs, Mildred said, while she was merely trying to stay in touch with America and help troops in any small way that she could.
But the prosecution, led by John M. Kelley Jr., presented a different story. Kelley introduced numerous excerpts from Mildred’s broadcasts in which she chastised and taunted GIs, made virulent anti-Semitic statements, and criticized Roosevelt’s handling of the war. Wounded veterans were questioned about listening to her on the radio or being interviewed by her while in POW camps. Germans who had worked with Gillars in Berlin were brought into court to testify about her activities. One German broadcaster said Axis Sally was the second highest paid employee at the station: while he made 1,000 marks a month, she was paid between 2,000 and 3,000.
The one thing Kelley, Gillars, and Gillars’s attorney all agreed on was that Max Koischwitz—not ideology—was her primary motivation for staying in Germany and broadcasting for the RRG. “I believe that a man generally means more to a woman than anything else,” Gillars said under Kelley’s questioning. “I would have died for him.” The prosecutor hit the romantic angle hard, condemning her for an affair with a married man and stating that she had had many other lovers as well.
Gillars was by turns defiant, evasive, combative, and tearful. She continued to maintain that she had done what she had to do to survive in Germany and that her real aim was to help U.S. troops and their families. Kelley’s summation for the prosecution was brutally direct. “Lock, stock, and barrel, she sold herself to the Nazis for 3,000 marks a month,” he said. “She thought she was on the winning side, and the only thing she cared about was her own selfish fame.”
Edna Mae Herrick, then thirty-nine, came from Ashtabula to attend much of the trial. A photograph of her, tearful and well dressed, was distributed to the wire press services, giving her a dubious claim to fame. And certainly Edna Mae had reason to cry. After nearly two days of deliberation, on March 10, 1949, the jury found Axis Sally guilty of only one of the eight treason charges for which she was prosecuted. She was convicted of treason in acting out the role of the grieving Ohio mother in Koischwitz’s Vision of Invasion.
Gillars turned ashen at the verdict but remained silent while Edna Mae left the courtroom in tears. At her sentencing a few days later, Gillars attempted to question the judge about why she had been convicted, but he quickly silenced her. He compared her crime to those of Robert Best and Douglas Chandler. But because there was no evidence that Mildred had conferred with high-ranking Nazis to actually formulate policy, the judge showed her some mercy, sentencing her to ten to thirty years in federal prison and fining her $10,000.
At her sentencing hearing, Gillars continued to proclaim her innocence and attempted to argue with the judge over the verdict. How could she be guilty of treason for acting in Vision of Invasion, as charges against Koischwitz—who had written the play—had long ago been dropped? She would continue to affirm her innocence for the rest of her life.
While Gillars shakily faced prison, her sister returned home to Ashtabula “to face years of both open discrimination and quiet disdain,” biographer Lucas wrote. He added that some residents of her former hometown believed Mildred deserved to be shot.
Although she had escaped the harshest punishments, the adjustment to life at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, was difficult for Gillars, then forty-eight. Physical ailments, fainting fits, and the continuing belief that she hadn’t received a fair trial plagued her. Her attorney’s failure to secure her a new trial brought further depression. Prison officials described her as moody, arrogant, and hard to get along with. She frequently refused Edna Mae’s visits and letters. Some officials worried about her worsening psychological state, but that was an issue not often addressed in the 1950s penal system.
Assigned to a craft room at the prison, Mildred found tasks she was good at and enjoyed: She knitted clothing that was sold to visitors and sewed garments worn by inmates. Eventually, she was assigned to manage the ceramics kiln. She made blue Bavarian beer steins with the motto “Accept your fate, for it is sealed” etched in them in German.
Although she had been raised Episcopalian, in prison she also began to attend Roman Catholic mass, an activity that would lead to a more contented future. She found solace in directing both the Protestant and Catholic choirs at the prison.
In the 1950s, as Americans began to distance themselves from the war, life improved for another resident of the Alderson prison. Iva Toguri D’Aquina, who had become known as Toyko Rose while broadcasting for the Japanese during the war, was paroled in 1955. A first-generation Japanese American, D’Aquina had been visiting an ailing aunt in Japan at the time of Pearl Harbor. She stayed in Japan, married a Filipino man, and began broadcasting what she later called satire. After her parole, the U.S. Justice Department wanted to deport her to Japan.
According to Lucas, there was also talk of sending Gillars back to Germany when she became eligible for parole. That may be the reason she waived her option to apply for parole in 1959. She did apply in 1960 but was turned down because she did not have a job waiting for her. That same year, Father Thomas Kerrigan, the prison’s Catholic chaplain, became her champion. He arranged for her baptism and confirmation when she converted to the Catholic faith, and he began looking for someone to employ her.
He found someone later that year. Our Lady of Bethlehem Convent in Worthington agreed to hire Gillars to teach German, English, and speech to high school girls at the convent school, in exchange for room and board plus $30 a month. The Order of the Poor Child Jesus, which operated the convent, stipulated that no media be allowed on convent grounds when she arrived for her new life.
Gillars’s parole was approved in January 1961. That July, she was released to live with Edna Mae and her second husband, Edwin Niemenen, in Ashtabula until school resumed after Labor Day. Twenty reporters waited in the rain for nearly a half an hour on a July morning for Gillars to emerge from the prison and into Edna Mae’s waiting arms. She appeared to enjoy the photographers’ attention and became more animated when she noticed the tape recorder one radio journalist carried, but her comments were few and mundane.
Now sixty, she looked it: her hair was entirely white, and her face showed her years. She dressed plainly, in a beige suit and dark jacket and hat. But there was still something of the actress about her, wrote Jack Davis, Associated Press bureau chief. Gillars “swirled a blue shawl around her throat several times … and seemed to enjoy the center stage immensely,” he wrote.
She maintained a low profile during those few weeks in Ashtabula. Edna Mae introduced her to a Catholic family who took her to Mass with them and invited her home to dinner. Shortly before she was to move to the content, Gillars donated some expensive black lace lingerie to the local Catholic clothing drive. It was a practical decision but also symbolic of leaving her old life behind for a quite different one.
When Mary McGarey of the Columbus Dispatch interviewed her at the convent in August 1961, she noted Gillars’s “dark eyes sad and wary of questions, her responses slow and often unwilling.” After years of fame as a broadcaster and then infamy as a convict, she only wanted to be left alone to teach. The desire to totally break with her old life included eliminating Edna Mae from it; the half-sister who stood by Gillars during the agonizing trial and sheltered her during her first weeks out of prison never saw her again.
As Lucas researched his biography, he interviewed friends and colleagues from Gillars’s post-prison life. The resulting image is of a woman who never discussed her past unless others pressed her. Those who discovered her story did so accidentally. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she continued to maintain that her broadcasts were aimed at helping American soldiers and their families.
On the rare occasion when the Holocaust was mentioned, she stiffly stated that she had been unaware of what was happening to Jews. It wasn’t a very believable claim, but no one seemed to want to challenge such a benign and private elderly woman. Though President Gerald Ford pardoned Tokyo Rose in 1977, Mildred never applied for a pardon because she never believed she had committed a crime, Lucas wrote.
After her release, she was bitter about what she considered an unjust conviction. But as time passed, her life slowly improved. Acquaintances described her as kind, generous, intelligent, and refined. In addition to teaching at the convent, she also tutored other children. She periodically took some of the convent students to classical music programs at Ohio Wesleyan, her old college. On weekends, she gave piano lessons to inner-city children. In her spare time, she performed in a local drama group. It was, in many ways, the most stable, contented period of her life.
In 1973, she achieved a goal that showed her resolve. By taking classes at various local colleges, she completed the coursework needed for her long-abandoned bachelor’s degree in speech. On June 10, she received her degree at Ohio Wesleyan’s graduation ceremony. Those in the audience likely remarked on the fact that a smiling, white-haired septuagenarian was graduating, but they probably didn’t realize who she was. When the wire services broke the story, though, the secret was out. The Delaware paper ran a photo of her taken just after receiving the degree and said that aside from a “few discreet whispers,” no one seemed to notice or know who she was.
By the time her probation ended in 1979, Gillars was to all appearances just another little white-haired old lady. She lived out the next few years quietly in a Columbus apartment. In June 1988, she died of colon cancer. Her death certificate listed her occupation as teacher; her estate was valued at just a little over $3,000. A few friends attended a simple funeral at St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Lockbourne, in Franklin County, Ohio.
Gillars was finally at peace.
