The Invisible Intruders and the Strange Death of Sigrid Barginde

"The Olympian," July 27, 1981, via Newspapers.com

In the movie “Wait Until Dark,” Audrey Hepburn played a blind woman terrorized by sinister strangers searching her apartment.  The film showed that there is a unique psychological horror in knowing danger lurks around you, but you are unable to see it.  That same fear is central to the following crime case--only in this real-life story, justice, let alone any answers, never made an appearance in the last act.

Retired bookkeeper Sigrid Barginde was 87 years old, hard of hearing, and nearly blind, but she still managed to take care of herself in the small brick home on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, where she lived alone.  As far as is known, her life was quiet and unremarkable until April 1981.  One night, she fell asleep on her living room couch while watching television.  She was suddenly awakened by noises in her room.  Through her thick glasses, she was able to make out three shadowy figures moving through the house towards her bedroom.  When she screamed, the intruders threw a sheet over her, struck her on the head, and shut her in a closet.

When Sigrid called police the next morning, the arriving officers, Bill Melmine and Larry Viles, had a hard time believing her story.  Despite her black eye and bloodied sheet, the men found it unlikely that three people would commit a seemingly senseless break-in against a woman who seemed to have little worth stealing--especially since nothing was taken from her home and there were no signs of forced entry.  When she expressed her fears that her house was bugged and the phone tapped, the policemen began muttering to themselves about fanciful, paranoid old ladies who had overly vivid nightmares.

Not long afterwards, Sigrid again went to the police.  She complained that she had to use a neighbor’s phone because her own wasn’t working.  When Melmine and Viles took her phone to a repair shop, they were told that pieces of the receiver had been torn out.

It was then that the officers began to think that perhaps Miss Barginde wasn’t so paranoid, after all.  They got her a new phone, with the receiver screwed on very tightly.  A week later, Sigrid called the police from her neighbor’s house.  The receiver had been vandalized again.  The officers then stuck the receiver cover back on with super glue.  After that, someone pulled the receiver and the cord out of the phone.  Later, a construction horse was found under the only window in Sigrid’s house that could not be locked.  The police removed the horse, but it was soon replaced by a garbage can placed under that same window.  

A locksmith changed her locks for a nominal fee.  Neighbors removed weeds that obscured her house from the street.  And everyone waited for the phantom attacker’s next move.

On June 18, Sigrid was mugged while walking home from the bank.  She held on to her purse and screamed until her attacker ran off.  The perpetrator was never caught.

Melmine and Viles were still not sure just what was going on, but they realized that this poor woman was genuinely going through hell.  The officers began visiting her several times a week, and would often cruise past her address, shining the rays from a spotlight across the house.  “It started to get to her,” Viles later recalled.  “She would be sitting there talking and happy, and then she would sit down and cry.  She was just scared to death.  She was living in terror all the time.  But she wouldn’t move.”  Melmine added darkly, “We told her, ‘If you don’t get out of here, you’re going to die here.’”  (Such an obvious solution was, unfortunately, easier said than done.  Sigrid pointed out that if she put the house up for sale, she would be obligated to warn potential buyers that she was leaving because of repeated burglaries.)

Tragically, Melmine was a prophet.  The day of the mugging proved to be the next-to-last act in our tragedy. After several days of no one being able to get into contact with Sigrid, the police were called in on June 26.  When they entered her home, her body was found face-down on her bed, hands tied behind her back with a scarf.  Her telephone’s cord and receiver were--for the final time--ripped out.  The Cook County medical examiner determined that Sigrid had died of a heart attack.  He stated that it was unknown what brought it on. "It's possible that it came as a result of a shock, but there is no way to verify it one way or another."

This conclusion hardly seems definitive, but it was good enough for Police Commander Milton Deas, who announced that the medical examiner’s decision “closes the case unless something else pops up.”

This was apparently law enforcement’s final word on the matter.  In September 1981, Sigrid’s sister, Ingvelde Barginde Evans, who lived in Colorado, sent a letter to the Chicago Police Department demanding that they reopen the investigation into Sigrid’s death.  The dead woman’s family felt that the Chicago PD had not exactly covered themselves with glory.  Startlingly, Ingvelde wrote that when her daughter, the administrator of Sigrid’s estate, was finally allowed into Sigrid’s house on August 30, she "found and photographed my sister's bloodstained bed, a small pillow at the lower end of the bed, soaked through with blood, and a great blood stain at the head of the bed…”

After the police repeatedly refused to turn over their investigative reports regarding Sigrid’s death, Ingevelde and her relatives obtained a judge’s order demanding that they do so.  Unfortunately, the newspapers carried no further information regarding the case.

From what we know, there are two possible solutions to this remarkably disturbing mystery:  

1. Some monsters, for no clear reason other than sheer sadism, decided to literally torment a helpless old woman to death.  And they got away with it.

2. Sigrid began falling prey to dementia, and her elusive home invaders were nothing but a figment of her imagination.  This theory works to some extent--it may be that in April, she merely dreamed the three shadowy figures in her home, and her black eye was the result of a fall.  Perhaps the June “mugging” was another delusion.  It is also conceivable that she herself took her phone apart searching for planted listening devices.  However, even if her mind was going, it is hard to picture why Sigrid would rip her phone out of the wall, then lie down on her bed and somehow manage to tie her own hands behind her back.  And what to make of Ingevelde Evans’ claims that her sister’s bed was left covered in blood?

Whatever the truth may have been, all one can say for sure is that poor Sigrid Barginde certainly suffered a terrible fate.