A Case of Libel

Diana was one of the most unique characters that has ever gained public eye. All
sorts of periodicals and newspapers wrote columns about her elfing life on the
shores of Lake Michigan, sometimes grossly enlarging so that she finally became
embittered against newspapers and reporters and of late refused to be interviewed.151
—the Evening Messenger, 1923

As the summer of the sand hills murder mystery waned, Alice—most likely with a bandage still covering her head wound and still feeling weak—visited Hammond, Indiana. She scouted for a lawyer and vowed to sue the Chicago newspapers for libel. But it would be two years before she finally acted on this threat.

In the meantime, the region was busy road building. With great fanfare, the new Dunes Highway (now U.S. 12), a marvel of engineering begun in 1920, finally opened in November of 1923. Long parades of cars, a band playing patriotic music, banners, speeches by officials of three states— Indiana, Michigan and Illinois—a bronze plaque and receptions marked the dedication of “the greatest highway in the United States,” as viewed by “thousands,” according to the Gary Post-Tribune.¹⁵²

Another local paper characterized the initiative and collaboration between cities:

Conceived within sight of prison walls at Michigan City, fostered by thesteel city of Gary to the west, opened with a corkscrew and dedicated in a hail storm—the Dunes highway between Michigan City and Gary is now open to traffic. The most important link of Indiana hard-surfaced highway, connecting the West Michigan pike of Michigan with Chicago, through Michigan City and Gary, represents an investment of a million dollars.¹⁵³

Postcard view of construction on Dunes Highway (now U.S. 12) at the former Dune Park stop in 1923. Courtesy of Westchester Township History Museum.

That was on a Friday. The following Sunday, Gary traffic officers reported that twenty thousand automobiles passed along the route, mostly from Illinois, although the license tags represented more than a dozen states.¹⁵⁴

Another project, the excavation of the main channel at Burns Ditch, connecting theLittle Calumet River and Lake Michigan, was also underway. The machinery for the project was to be unloaded and corralled at Dune Park, near where Alice had first arrived in the dunes eight years before.¹⁵⁵

During all the construction and commotion, Alice and Paul felt keenly the threat of progress while attempting to maintain their dunes life. The press had left them alone since events of the murder mystery. In the summer of 1923, however, it found something else to write about, albeit a minor blip on the Alice radar—and again, Paul was in the limelight. He was arrested and “taken” for fishing without a state license. The Giant of the Duneland was fined twenty-four dollars and released on his birthday.¹⁵⁶

One week after the opening of the highway, Gary’s newspaper announced that “‘Diana of the Dunes’ and her mate” had fled their shack; they had been planning the trip for a while. The couple left the dunes in a twenty-foot open boat, fashioned of found parts, bound for Texas, with near-freezing temperatures in the local forecast. “In a made-over motor dinghy salvaged from the wreck of a steamship lifeboat that floated to the beach near their isolated shack at Ogden Dunes, east of Gary, the two are floating down the Mississippi River, bound for their great new adventure.”¹⁵⁷

Alice and Paul blamed their departure on encroaching civilization. The dunes region was quickly growing in popularity; new roads from Chicago brought increased tourism and encouraged the building of sturdy, permanent homes in year-round beachfront communities. The squatters’ shack they inhabited was no longer private—worse, a developer decided the structure should be demolished, and sooner rather than later if he had his way.

The developer, Samuel Reck, was creating a beachfront community in Ogden Dunes where “fine suburban homes” were to be built. Alice and Paul’s shack sat on his property. Reck saw the two off on their journey; he had a vested interest in their leaving. “Besides, the romantic squatters who have filled columns of newspaper and magazine space since they decided to lead the simple life, untrammeled, in the then wild dunes region, were served with a notice to get off of the desert by the Ogden Dunes company upon whose property they had reared their humble abode.”¹⁵⁸

It was a long time coming, this departure. Since the murder accusations, followed by the physical and emotional trauma of her head injury, Alice had lost a great deal of the innocence, the idealism and the vitality of a dunes spirit that had guided her through rough times before. It became noticeable to those who had followed her over the years she spent in the dunes: “To the observer who sees Diana these days with the physical eye only, much of the romance in connection with her determination to leave the comforts of home and school and live a lonely life in the hills and vales of northern Indiana has departed.”¹⁵⁹

But “much of the romance” of the press remained intact. “Wilson will go back to his former business of catching rattlesnakes in Texas, it is said, and Diana will tramp the deserts and plains of the ‘Lone Star’ state with him and be just Diana, and that is sufficient to Paul.”¹⁶⁰

Although an explanation is lacking, for some reason the escape plan did not work out. Six months after leaving the Indiana dunes, Alice and Paul returned to Wren’s Nest, their shanty home in Ogden Dunes. Fortunately, Reck had not gotten around to leveling it, as he had planned.¹⁶¹ He allowed them to move back in.

Amid the flurry of house and road construction, Paul’s boat-building project and their subsequent flight from the sand hills, the couple’s fury over news stories published two years before that linked them to the murder had not dissipated—rather, it had continued to fester. “During this summer Diana stayed more closely to their shack. We saw her occasionally. She was busily engaged in writing. They were much concerned over bringing a libel suit against some Chicago papers against which they bore a powerful hatred.”¹⁶²

After a span of eight years of sensational headlines, on June 9, 1924, Alice finally pushed back against the press. With the help of a young attorney from Hammond, Indiana, Timothy Galvin of the Galvin & Galvin law firm, Alice and Paul filed a libel suit against the Evening American Publishing Co. (owners of the Chicago American) and the Tribe of K. (distributors of the newspaper) in the U.S. District Court of Hammond, Indiana.¹⁶³ “They claim the articles in the Chicago paper contained false and malicious libel and defamatory statements reflecting on the character of the couple.”¹⁶⁴

According to the legal documents, a front-page headline in the Chicago American, published June 9, 1922, read, “Death Mystery in Dunes”; the subtitle read, “Charred Body Found on Funeral Pyre; ‘Diana’ Sought.” Headlines above a second story, which ran on page two, were equally damning, the suit contended: “‘Diana’ and Cave Man Sought in Dunes Slaying Mystery,” with the subtitle “‘Diana of the Dunes’ Incarnate Spirit of Wild Waste of Sands.”

Prior to filing the libel suit, Alice and Paul demanded that the Chicago American publish a retraction “in as conspicuous a place and type in the same place where said original article appeared.”

In a Notice of Retraction,¹⁶⁵ which Alice herself delivered to “City Editor Maloney” on June 5, 1924, the couple set forth their objections:

The libelous matters contained in said article being that Alice Gray Wilson, named by your paperas “Diana,” was sought in connection with said alleged death and was connected with and accused of said death and that she met all comers with a revolver and that she went about in unconventional bathing garb and that it was not safe in the neighborhood where she lived and that she was a dangerous and disreputable person and was living with Paul Wilson and not married to him; all of which statements were false and libelous.

They also objected to the published description of Paul:

[He was] known as a tough character in the vicinity of Chesterton and nearby towns and served six months’ time in the penitentiary and honor farm and was charged with theft of fowls, butter, eggs, etc, and was accused of being connected with the alleged death mystery in said article and sought for questioning thereon and that he was a bad and dangerous character... all of which is wholly untrue, false and libelous.

Damages were sought from the publishing company and its distributor in the amount of $100,000. The amount included medical fees incurred by Alice and Paul as a result of their run-in with Deputy Frank, which they felt was precipitated by the newspaper stories, and injury “in their reputation, in their person, in their characters and in their property.”¹⁶⁶

But, just as Alice was denied the opportunity to have her say in court involving the lawsuit against Deputy Eugene Frank, in this case, too, she never got the chance to face her newspaper adversaries. On April 14, 1925, Galvin petitioned the court to dismiss the libel case.

And again, the press confounded the facts: “The death of Alice Gray, ‘Diana of the Dunes,’ who lived in a shack in the Indiana sand dunes, automatically ends a million dollar libel suit pending in the United States District Court.”¹⁶⁷