Niece Says 70-Year-Old Mystery Sketch is Work of Joe McHugh / Crucifix in Cell 8 / An Act of Devotion

By Pauline Masson –

Joe McHugh, the artist, turned a childhood tendency to sketch faces into a lifetime compulsion. He never saw a face that he couldn’t draw, paint, or sculpt. 

From early childhood in the three story McHugh-Dailey building on South First Street – before he entered St. Bridget Elementary School – Joe was a compulsive sketcher. I have a handful of paper restaurant napkins that he sketched for someone as they dined. I don’t even remember who gave them to me.

The hundreds of portraits of family members, friends, pretty girls and political giants that he created in his 91 years are strewn among private collections and public places in and around Pacific.

But now his niece, Mary Helen Murray Beran is on a mission to add one poignant charcoal drawing, circa 1930, to Joe’s repertoire. He was age 22 at the time and often in his cups.

Mary Helen is the daughter of Helen Dailey Murray, oldest child of James J. And Mary Dailey. As a teenager and young adult Mary Helen often worked at the McHugh-Dailey building. Her free time was spent in the company of her uncle Joe, who had appropriated the vacant third floor theater/opera house of the 1908 family building as an art studio. Mary Helen spent hours watching Joe as he slathered away at pictures and felt akin to every slash of color or charcoal.

“I was fascinated by every line he drew,” she said. “I knew where the line was going and what it would look like.”

It was well known locally that Joe had been a heavy drinker in his youth – before he gave up the follies of youth and returned to the comfort of his Catholic faith.

Mary Helen is convinced that the long mystery of the sketch of Christ on the Cross – unknown in the Pacific area but famous among St. Louis Police Department circles – is a remnant of that time of Joe’s efforts at self-rehabilitation.

She first saw the drawing in 2003 when she visited her mother in Pacific.

“I spotted it on my Mom’s kitchen table,” she said. “She hadn’t finished reading the paper when I drove in from Colorado for a visit. My first reactions was, What is Joe McHugh’s drawing doing in the Post Dispatch?”

“I knew his work, his style of sketching,” she said. “When I saw the sketch of Christ I had no doubt it was Uncle Joe’s work.”

Bill Beyan, the Post Dispatch writer, who penned the news piece, died March 24, 2024 after more than three decades covering crime in St. Louis for two newspapers.

The article that Mary Helen saw on her mother’s table reported that the old St. Louis Central Precinct Holdover that dated to the late 1920s was being closed for good. He mentioned a seventy-year-old legend and unsolved mystery that was part of the lore of the crumbling building.

“The department never wrote down much history of the place. But perhaps the most interesting bit of lore dates back almost to its opening,” Beyan wrote. “It’s about a mysterious piece of artwork discovered on the wall in Cell 8 in about 1930.”

“The charcoal or pencil artwork became known as the Crucifix in Cell 8.”

“The story goes that a janitor noticed a man kneeling in front of a cell wall, as if in prayer, and later returned to discover a stunningly professional drawing of Jesus on the Cross. But by then the cell was empty.”

The janitor summoned his superior, who, in turn summoned his superior, and one by one Central Precinct policemen traipsed in to see the spectacular life-sized drawing of a traditional Catholic Crucifix.

When the Chief of Police saw the drawing he ordered a protective glass be placed over it, and ordered that no one was ever to be put in Cell 8 again. It was believed that the chief named the drawing, the Crucifix in Cell 8. The cell was kept under lock and key, only to be unlocked by officers assigned to show the work to visitors. The story of the mysterious picture grew and a steady stream visitors were shown into Cell 8.  

During winter in the 1930s the Police Department opened the Central District Holdover to those unfortunates with no place to spend the night. Homeless, “vagrants or drifters,” one of the former incarcerated men said.  All were given a place to sleep on a steel bunk and the next morning were given a big hunk of bologna, bread, hot coffee, and sent on their way.

It was thought that something led one of those men to draw on the back wall of the cell the almost life-sized – over four-feet high – drawing of a a figure in perfect proportion of Jesus Christ on the Cross. 

There is no clue whether Joe was incarcerated, or was one of those visitors. It was a time in his life that he later described as the years of heavy drinking. 

“Drinking or not, he always carried a piece of charcoal in his pocket. He had to be prepared to draw at ay time,” she said. “I have no doubt he sketched the Crucifix and was the man the janitor saw kneeling before it.”

The police tried for years to identify the artist. They contacted other St. Louis precincts and one story went nationwide on the Associated Press trying to learn the identity of the artist.

Art experts from St. Louis and beyond were asked to look at the drawing, in hope someone would recognize the style and know whose work it was. In a 1960 article on the drawing, the St. Police Journal reported that the experts all agreed that the man who drew the picture was either a student of art or anatomy.

Several visiting artists claimed they had done the drawing, but tests of their work and their attempts to finish the uncompleted right arm, made it was obvious that their work did not match that of the drawing on the wall.

John Fritsch, an early observer of the work, marveled at the careful detail drawn into the lines of the arms, legs, ribs, even the fingers of the left hand, the expression of the face

“Joe had a very distinctive style of drawing anatomy,” Mary Helen said. “It would be hard to match exactly.”

In 1967, the section of wall in Cell 8 that held the sketch was removed and placed on permanent display in the lobby of the St. Louis Police Academy at 312 South Tucker, next door to Police headquarters – and it is still there.

Visitors were – and still are – welcomed to the lobby of the Police Academy to view the framed sketch. Fritsch later created a brochure with a very poor likeness, pictured above, of the drawing and a detailed story of the discovery and preservation of the work that was handed out to visitors. The brochure is currently out of print, a Police Academy receptionist said.

On a later visit here, Mary Helen made a trip downtown to the Police Academy building with her aunt and uncle Ann and Vernon Noelker, and her sister Rita Heitzler. She took a hazy picture of the glass enclosed sketch, which hangs in the lobby.

“While the rest of the group isn’t so sure, I remain convinced, it is Uncle Joe’s,” she said.

In her research on the mysterious sketch, Mary Helen learned that Chicago radio icon Paul Harvey often mentioned the Mystery of Cell 8 during his holiday season radio show ‘The Rest of the Story.’ 

She harbored the notion of writing to Harvey after one of his shows where he mentioned the sketch.

“I wanted to tell him, ‘this is the rest of the story,’” she said.  

Paul Harvey died in 2009 but Mary Helen continued her mission to assert that the artist of the mysterious sketch was her uncle Joe McHugh.

“I would like for all of our people – the vast Dailey clan – and the community, to know about this sketch.” 

She said the art experts who visited the drawing and declared that there was no doubt that it was a work of art, were wrong on that point.

“Joe didn’t draw this Crucifix on the wall of a jail cell as art,” she said. “This was an act of devotion.”