King County Sheriff Matt Starwich first learned of trouble on Mercer Island via a phone call from former deputy Albert Bailey. Bailey said that Adolph Boos was headed for Seattle to surrender himself to the sheriff. Boos had been in a fight and the other man had been killed. The date was May 12, 1923.
Mercer Island – not quite five miles long and a bit over six square miles in area – sits in the middle of Lake Washington, east of Seattle. There was no bridge back then, and ferry service was minimal, forcing Boos to summon a launch that operated between Rainier Beach and points on Mercer.
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| Early Mercer Island, Seattle Public School Histories. |
Boos was badly battered and bruised. He told a rather odd story. About 2 o’clock in the afternoon, he’d been working near the shoreline in front of his house when he heard a commotion out back. Boos rushed around the house where, he said, the door had been broken open. Inside, he found Joseph C. Smith, who threatened him with a shotgun. Boos desperately grabbed the barrel and they wrestled over the gun. He avoided a first blast, fired in the kitchen, and then they somehow ended up outside. After a good half hour of struggle, Boos said, “Smith managed to load the gun again; I don’t know how, and it was fired again and he was hit.”
But that story proved to be literally unbelievable. At the death scene, officers discovered a .38-caliber revolver on the ground, five or six feet from Smith’s body. It had been fired once. Where did that fit in? They also found a single empty 12-gauge shotgun shell in the yard. But there was no sign that the gun had been fired anywhere inside the house. And even a cursory look showed that Smith had not been shot at close range. Boos tried several explanations of these discrepancies, none of which were very convincing. He probably blamed his lack of consistency on how badly he’d been beaten.
Authorities interviewed several people they thought might have relevant information, including Bailey and Smith’s ex-wife. The results showed that there was far more to the story than just “a fight.” Thus, six days after the shooting, King County prosecutors charged Boos with murder.
Boos held out for several weeks, but finally told an even more bizarre story. It was all Bailey’s doing. He had killed Smith and induced Boos to confess to the self-defense shooting. Boos first said that Bailey had hypnotized him into the confession. When that didn’t quite fly, he “admitted” that Bailey (not Smith) had beaten him up, and threatened to kill him.
As it happened, officers had also begun to suspect that there was something fishy about Bailey’s role in the incident. During different interviews, he had changed his account of key details on the day of the shooting. Beyond that, some of his statements conflicted with those of witnesses who had been in the general area. That included two who had seen him on the trail that led to the Boos place shortly after they saw Smith headed the same way. Bailey was arrested and charged with murder on the evening of June 22.
Boos had purchased the revolver from a Seattle pawn shop. The weapon had been delivered to his home around noon on the day of the shooting. Yes, I bought it, Boos said, but that was Bailey’s idea … to use it to kill Smith. Bailey admitted to being at the house when the gun was delivered, unwrapped, and loaded. But he denied everything else. From there, claims and counter-claims swirled into a maelstrom of contradictions.
A week after Bailey’s arrest, prosecutors hired Luke May to investigate further and try to reconstruct what actually happened. Together, May and the sheriff uncovered several oddities in the links among the three men. Born in Michigan, Boos had moved to Seattle around 1908 with his wife and daughter. He was about 53 years old at the time of the shooting.
Albert M. Bailey had been born in Kansas, moved to Seattle in 1914, and married two years after that. He was 43 years old in 1923. Smith being such a common name, it’s more difficult to learn a lot about Joseph C. He married during the summer of 1920 but was divorced within a couple years or so. Smith was 40 years old at the time of his death.
The common thread might have started with work at a shipyard. Bailey definitely had a shipyard job in 1920 and later, and Boos probably so. Smith was a skilled mold-maker and could have found work at a shipyard foundry. In any case, investigators uncovered evidence that the three were engaged in a joint bootlegging venture. There were other indications that Boos and Bailey, and perhaps even Smith, had been part of a conspiracy to burn down structures to collect the insurance money.
The revolver turned out to be something of a dead end. No one had been wounded by the weapon and it was not possible to locate the bullet that had been fired. Oddly enough, we have no information about where the other gun came from. Neither Smith nor Bailey carried a shotgun when they were seen on the path to Boos’s place. May identified it as a semi-automatic shotgun, which could hold four rounds in its magazine. Boos’s statement that Smith “somehow” reloaded after a claimed first shot would indicate that he knew nothing about how the weapon worked.
There was no mention of fingerprints on the shotgun. That would have been a key finding if they confirmed that Boos had grasped the barrel at an odd angle. Either officers had mishandled that piece of evidence (certainly possible in that era), or the weapon had been wiped clean.
May’s assessment showed that the shotgun had been fired from the door of the house, with light shot buried in the wall of a woodshed located against the back of the house. The coroner judged that Smith had been injured by the pellets that hit him, but those alone would not have been immediately fatal. He had, in the end, died by strangulation.
Both Boos and Bailey had cause to dislike or fear Smith. Before the shooting, Smith had told his lawyer that there had been at least two acts of arson on the island. He hoped soon to have more details. As it happened, some time earlier, fire had destroyed most of the Boos home and Smith had been helping rebuild it. But a few days before the shooting, Boos had the sheriff issue a writ to keep Smith off his property. Ironically, he claimed he wanted the order because Smith had a secret still on the island and kept bringing moonshine around.
Both men owed Smith money and had openly quarreled with him about it. Added to that, a few days before the shooting, Bailey argued with Smith about something, and Bailey’s wife had been knocked off a dock into the water.
The minutiae of what followed would not make interesting reading. Suffice to say, vague or conflicting evidence and muddled testimony from Boos were not enough for a jury to convict Bailey of anything.
When it was Boos’ turn, his lawyer arranged a deal to plead guilty to manslaughter, for which Boos received a sentence of 5 to 20 years in prison. Then, because of an earlier agreement in return for testifying against Bailey, he spent only three years in the penitentiary. Significantly, Boos was convicted of arson for burning down his Mercer Island home in 1931. He did not spend much time in prison for that, however. In late 1935, he was at home in Seattle and committed suicide.
We can never know exactly what happened on that fateful day in 1923. Still, the evidence suggests a few likely scenarios. We’ll go with the simplest, starting with Smith at the Boos place, alone with two men who had reason to want him out of the way.
Recall that Boos was basically clueless about the shotgun. Most likely then, Boos first tried to shoot Smith with the revolver. If he had no experience with a handgun, a miss was not unexpected, even from as close as five or six feet. (May would later discuss this kind of situation in his “true crime” column.) It is also at least plausible that the blast of noise and recoil caused him to lose his grip on the gun.
Bailey probably fired the shotgun as soon as he saw his partner’s attempt fail. The pellets incapacitated Smith enough so he could be choked to death. Boos was close by, while Bailey had shot from the door of the house. Thus, in this scenario, Boos pounced immediately on their victim. But Smith was fighting for his life … and severely battered his assailant before he died.
There’s no definitive way to explain the impossible account that Boos initially gave the sheriff. Before Boos turned himself in, he and Bailey surely concocted some sort of explanation that made sense. However, between his battered condition and the turmoil of the moment, Boos may have simply forgotten his lines. He then made up a story on the spot, “improving” it with dramatic details. That was his undoing … at least to the extent of three years in prison.
| References: “[Boos - Bailey - Smith News],” Seattle Times, Washington (May 1923 – December 1935). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
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