St. Elizabeth’s Church is the place where Gladys Mortensen was found after slipping away from the Lakewood clinic. Her arrival there, nearly five kilometers from the clinic, brought Norma Jeane Baker back into contact with her mother and exposed the precariousness of Gladys’s condition and care.

Gladys’s Escape and Discovery

During the night, Gladys managed to open several doors at the clinic and leave across its grounds without being seen. She made her way to St. Elizabeth’s Church, where parishioners found her asleep in a pew when they arrived for the seven o’clock Mass. Confused and disoriented, she did not resist when Lakewood police returned her to the clinic. She was wearing a beige cotton dress with nothing underneath; her cloth slippers had disappeared along the way, and small cuts covered her feet.

The Reunion at the Clinic

When Norma Jeane arrived at the clinic, she burst into tears and held Gladys in an embrace that seemed as if it might never end. She spent the rest of the day caring for her mother, washing her and gently cleaning and disinfecting her injured feet. Norma Jeane asked where Gladys had intended to go and offered to accompany her if she wanted to visit a church or somewhere else. Gladys answered that she had known where she was going. The church thus marks both a place of refuge during Gladys’s flight and the point from which she was brought back into institutional care.