Brach's Candy Heiress Disappeared Without a Trace. A Meat Grinder Was Found, but Her Body Never Was By Virginia Chamlee

The disappearance of a Chicago candy heiress continues to confound investigators, decades later.

Helen Brach disappeared on February 17, 1977 in a story that would, as PEOPLE detailed in May 1984, grow to involve “burned diaries, psychic phenomena, an empty grave, forged checks, a meat grinder and a pink Cadillac.”

But for the mystery and intrigue surrounding the eccentric heiress’ disappearance, there remains one thing the story does not include: a body.

Brach had married into the Brach candy dynasty. By all accounts a quiet woman who kept largely to herself, she was eccentric and known for her cadre of luxury cars painted in the Brach’s Candy signature brand colors; pink and lavender.

Brach was 65 years old when she went to a doctor’s appointment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. on that February day. Investigators at the time said she then got into a taxi and went to the local airport, with her housekeeper Jack Matlick saying he picked her up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport later that day.

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Matlick would later tell investigators he spent much of the remaining weekend with Brach at her 18-room mansion in Chicago’s pricey Glenview suburb, and that the last time he saw her was when he drove her back to O’Hare airport to catch a Monday morning flight to her Florida condo.

Brach would seemingly never make it to Florida.

Friends who called her Glenview home that weekend told investigators Brach never came to the phone and that they instead got a variety of conflicting stories from Matlick.

Those weren’t Matlick’s only strange behaviors. Per a PEOPLE story in 1984, “Matlick scrubbed down the maid’s room in Brach’s mansion, had one of her Cadillacs washed inside and out, and ordered a meat-grinder attachment from one of Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department stores. Matlick also cashed six checks supposedly written by Brach; they totaled $13,000. Later Brach’s accountant noticed that the signature on the checks wasn’t hers. Matlick claimed they looked odd because the lid of a large trunk had hurt Brach’s wrist. Experts determined that the signatures were not Matlick’s, further confusing the issue.”

Matlick had begun working for Brach and her late husband Frank, whose family co-founded the eponymous candy company, some 20 years prior to her disappearance. When Frank died in 1970, it was Matlick who became Brach’s “right-hand man,” per PEOPLE’s earlier reporting.

But it would be nearly two weeks before Matlick reported his boss missing to authorities.

And while Matlick reportedly failed at least two lie detector tests, he wasn’t the only one to come under suspicion throughout the course of the investigation.

PEOPLE reported that Brach’s own brother, Charles Vorhees, admitted that he and Matlick together burned his sister’s diaries and her “automatic writings,” notes she had made by holding a pencil tightly and letting “psychic forces” guide her hand. As Vorhees (who PEOPLE reported stood to gain the income from $500,000 of his sister’s estate) said of the lost evidence, “I don’t think Helen would have wanted anyone to see them.”

And then there was horse dealer Richard Bailey, from whom Brach had once purchased $300,000 worth of thoroughbred horses that authorities later said were worth far less.

Per a federal case later filed against Bailey in the 1990s, he and his associates were allegedly engaged in a pattern of racketeering schemes, in which they used “Chicago-area stables to defraud wealthy customers with little knowledge of the horse business.”

According to the U.S. government: “Advertisements lured potential customers to the stables; once there, the conspirators evaluated which prospects were most likely to be wealthy, going so far as to obtain confidential credit and financial information. These persons were then persuaded to invest large sums in relatively worthless, or at least significantly overvalued, horses.”

But also mentioned in the indictment accusing Bailey and others with defrauding wealthy widows, was a charge that he had solicited Brach’s murder as part of a sprawling conspiracy, authorities claimed, that saw dozens of horses killed as part of an insurance scheme.

Bailey was convicted of defrauding Brach as part of a larger conspiracy, fraud and racketeering case. In 1994, a judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison. Though not convicted for her murder, the judge said the lengthy sentence in the fraud case reflected Bailey’s alleged involvement in the conspiracy to kill Brach. Bailey was released in 2019 and died in 2023 at age 93.

Brach was declared legally dead in May 1984.

Her fortune, by then grown to more than $40 million, was reportedly dispersed according to her will: the $500,000 trust fund to Charles Vorhees, and a $50,000 annuity to Jack Matlick (who later ended his legal claim to that portion of the state) with much of the rest going to animal welfare charities.

Matlick died at age 79 on February 14, 2011, in a Pennsylvania nursing home.

While never charged in her death or disappearance, some law enforcement officials believed he was responsible, saying as much publicly after his death.

When asked by ABC7, ex-ATF agent Jim DeLorto said of the secrets Matlick took to his grave: “He probably takes the most important part, which is what happened to her and what happened to her body after she died. He knew.”

As Helen’s body was never found, her own official gravesite — in a private family plot, next to her late husband and dogs — still remains empty.

In 1990, authorities did exhume a body they thought might have been hers though it was later determined not to be, with the case still unsolved, decades later.