Her story had been lost amid dusty records that were long ago stashed in deep storage and forgotten.

Forgotten until a retired federal agent, researching the history of Chicago law enforcement, stumbled upon a mention of her name and a reference to the fact that, in the 1890s, she had become a police officer in Chicago. The date caught his attention. A female police officer in the 1890s?

Now, after three years and hundreds of hours of research, Rick Barrett, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and amateur historian, says he has found definitive evidence that a woman named Marie Owens was not only the first policewoman in Chicago but also the first known female officer in the United States.

If true, Barrett's discovery would be "huge," said Dave MacFarlan, a police historian and member of the Chicago Police History Committee, who noted that the Police Department previously believed the first female officers joined the force in 1913.

Debate has long swirled around the identity of the nation's first female cop. Los Angeles claimed the distinction of hiring the first, saying a woman joined their department in 1910. Yet Portland, Ore., points to its own female officer, hired in 1908. Barrett's claim would trump them both, and already the discovery has created a ripple of excitement among local historians.

"It's a big deal, and it's great for Chicago," said Russell Lewis, chief historian at the Chicago History Museum.

For Barrett, a square-jawed, hard-charging former investigator, uncovering Owens' story has become nothing short of a quest. He crisscrossed the city, befriending archivists and pulling strings to access pension records, civil service documents and cemetery plot listings.

Getting Owens the credit she deserves is, in his view, an issue of justice.

"She wasn't wealthy. She was Irish. She was Catholic," said Barrett, 57, himself part of an Irish clan from the Beverly neighborhood. "She had all of these strikes against her, and so they just wrote her off."

And, he said, wrote her out of history. Though Owens' role at the Police Department was well-covered by the turn-of-the-century press, a historian in 1925 mixed up Owens and another woman. As a result, Owens' accomplishments were almost completely erased, Barrett said.

"I'm thinking, 'Wait a minute, this woman needs some recognition,'" he said.

A tall, solidly built woman with long, dark hair, Owens was the daughter of Irish famine immigrants and grew up in the crowded tenements of Ottawa, Canada. In her 20s, she moved with her husband, Thomas, to Chicago, no doubt looking for a better life. But in February 1888, Thomas died of typhoid fever, one of several illnesses then plaguing the city.

Left to raise five children, Owens landed a job in 1889 with the city health department, working as one of five female factory inspectors who enforced child-labor and compulsory education laws.

At the time, public outrage was growing over sweatshop conditions in factories across the city. But the inspectors' powers were limited; they couldn't enter buildings without a warrant. As pressure mounted on public officials to step up enforcement of child labor laws, Owens was transferred to the Police Department in 1891. She was given powers of arrest, the title of detective sergeant and a police star.

"I like to do police work," Owens told the Tribune in 1906. "It gives me a chance to help women and children who need help."

Owens described how she had discovered children — "frail little things" as young as 7 years old — working in factories all over the city. Some assembly lines were staffed by scores of kids, many looking suspiciously younger than 14, the age at which children were legally allowed to work.

"In my sixteen years of experience I have come across more suffering than ever is seen by any man detective," she said.

Her work affected thousands of children. She established schools within department stores so young workers could get an education, and she persuaded other employers to shorten their workdays, according to historical news accounts.

In 1923, she retired after 32 years with the department. Four years later, she died at age 74. The brief, eight-line death notice that ran in local papers didn't mention her police career. Already, her work seemed to be fading from memory. And when a historian confused her with another woman and described Owens in a book about policewomen as a patrolman's widow, her accomplishments were struck from history.

"That was nonsense!" Barrett declared, standing in his dining room, where piles of paperwork documenting Owens' life have taken over the table and overflowed into an adjacent den. A balding, bespectacled man with a tenacious work ethic and eye for obscure details, Barrett says that, after 28 years as a federal agent, investigating cases has become second nature to him.

In retirement, he has turned his skills toward solving historical mysteries.

His first case of that sort came in 2002, while Barrett was researching his family's history in the Chicago Police Department; Barrett's father, grandfather and great-grandfather had been Chicago cops. Reading through City Council records from the 1850s, he stumbled upon a reference to Constable James Quinn and, after much digging, proved that Quinn had been the first Chicago officer to die in the line of duty.

In 2007, Barrett was searching for other forgotten officers when he read a mention of Owens that described her as a widow of a fallen officer. Ever the investigator, he did some checking and found an inconsistency: According to death records, Owens' husband had been a gas fitter, not a police officer. Soon, Barrett was pulling century-old city directories, church baptism logs and census records.

Sorting out the true story of Owens' life, he said, was like "untangling strands of Christmas tree lights." But Barrett began to feel like he knew Owens. "You start putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together, and her character and personality kind of emerge," Barrett said.

Tough and independent, Owens owned her own house — first a bungalow in the Heart of Chicago neighborhood and later a two-flat in Lawndale — at a time when few women of her status owned property. She named her first son after the Irish reformer Charles Stewart Parnell, who fought for Ireland's rural poor. On the job, she often gave money to the needy, according to historical news accounts.