'Queen of Greektown' dies at 97, leaving few clues about her past

Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News

Detroit--The mystery of one of Detroit's most colorful and misunderstood street people continues even after her death over the weekend.

Stella Paris, a Greektown fixture from the 1960s through the mid-1990s, died Saturday at East Grand Nursing Home in Detroit. She was 97, one of the few facts not in dispute about the mentally ill woman's past, that includes questions about citizenship that left her without benefits to pay for her care or even her burial.

Variously known as Greektown Stella, the Queen of Greektown and the Screaming Banshee, she wore odd nurses uniforms adorned with military insignia and she menacingly carried a police nightstick.

For years, anyone within earshot of Trappers Alley, old Detroit Recorder's Court and the Detroit Police headquarters knew Paris and her high-decibel, seemingly incoherent screams and rants. Tourists and patrons of Greektown's shops and restaurants were frequently shocked by her erratic reactions to a world she had difficulty comprehending.

"I met Stella when I was 14, in 1968, a little suburban girl in town for a peace march. She scared the living daylights out of me," said Alicia Chapman, who runs Alicianna, which advocates for and trains others to help people like Paris. "Stella spoke only Greek interspersed with a language completely her own, as so many mentally ill street people do."

But, despite her frequently startling behavior, it was Greektown's shopkeepers and restaurateurs who fed Paris. Nurses from Detroit Receiving Hospital gave her clothes. She had a chair in the courthouse where she sat mending her tattered belongings.

Police officers say they looked the other way when she slept in the basement at police headquarters or bathed in their sinks. Her clothes would be left to dry on lawns and shrubs near the Wayne County Jail.

"I was a civilian cadet working in the identification section at police headquarters in 1975 when I first met Stella," said Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon. "Nobody I know ever knew where she came from. She was just always there, like so many of the mentally ill we just never have seemed to have the resources to help. She seemed scary to some, but I always saw her has harmless and sad."

Over the years, legends grew around the woman: That she was married and deserted by a rich man; that she had sons who were doctors and lawyers; that she was once married to royalty.

None of the stories were true, said Max Lemaux, 74, a Detroit Police sergeant who retired in 1991.

"I was assigned to the court back in 1974 when she got arrested again. She was always getting arrested for ordinance violations and then the judges would turn her loose. I got asked to dig up some background on her. I got a girl from probation who spoke Greek and we spent some time talking with her in a little apartment above the old Athens Bar."

Lemaux said he learned Paris had a brother who lived in the western suburbs, "Farmington Hills, I think. I talked to him."

Paris had never been married. She never had any children.

"I don't know how many times she was victimized or abused, but I'm sure it was often," Lemaux said. "People gave her money all the time and bad people knew that. One Thanksgiving, I handed her a $20 bill and she pulled out a wad of money so big she could have taken everybody in the joint to Aruba."

Lemaux said he never heard Paris say a word in English, and she only occasionally appeared to understand those around her.

"She was just a lost soul out on the street. Sometimes she'd carry on and scream like hell, and I'd think it was because she'd gotten robbed again. But then, sometimes if you looked cross-eyed at her, she'd scream, too."

Broderick T. Williams, a 62-year-old retired Detroit police commander, said he was carrying a camera in Greektown sometime in the 1980s when he pointed it at Paris, and she surprised him by smiling and giving him a salute.

"Nobody was her real buddy. I used to literally see her sleeping in doorways and she was always cautious like an animal, but her hair was always neat and she always wore her makeup. For some reason, she did that little salute, and I got it. I showed it to her later, and I got a smile from her then, too."

In 1994, Paris got picked up again, for brandishing a knife, and this time the judge's recommendation was placement in a nursing facility. Because her citizenship was never proven, she got passed from facility to facility, leaving huge debts in her wake. East Grand Nursing Home is owed about $100,000, and there is no money for her burial.

Patricia Wheeler-Phillips, an investigator hired by the nursing home to find relatives, said Paris was born in Greece in 1912.

"She was not illiterate. She had a driver's license years ago," she said. John Barton, a member of the family that has operated East Grand Nursing Home since 1947, remembers being frightened by Paris on visits to Greektown. But he said she was different by the time she arrived in his facility.

"She was an icon," Barton said. "By the time we got her, she was calm and benign. She would blow kisses to staff and there was a time I walked past her and she ... kissed my hand. I told her, 'Thank you Ms. Stella.' In her turbulent mind, there was finally peace and a sense of feeling safe."