The fictive war was sparked by Darger’s loss of a newspaper photograph from the Chicago Daily News of Elsie Paroubek, a five-year-old Chicago girl strangled in 1911 whose murderer was never found.[7] According to his autobiography, Darger believed the photo was among several items that were stolen when his apartment was broken into. He never found his copy of the photograph again. When he located the picture in a public library newspaper archive, he couldn’t have it photocopied, and his attempts to trace it proved futile. Paroubek, under the name of Annie Aronburg, became a character in the story.