But life was good, and perhaps the case would provide a fitting close to his long career. Donlan could retire in a couple years, and he had a good nest egg to go with his police pension. His wife and daughter had gone off to visit friends in Olympia. His only “honey-do” was to turn on the oven at 5 o’clock to start cooking a nice leg-of-lamb for a late supper.
Comfortably dressed, including loose house slippers, Donlan took his time reading the newspaper. There had been a huge, costly fire at the Chicago stockyards. In and around Seattle, sheriff’s deputies had seized about fifty illegal slot machines. At some point, he dozed off, comfortably warmed by a rich purple lounging robe.
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| Sergeant John Donlan. Seattle Times (May 21, 1934). |
John Sylvester Donlan was born January 27, 1870 in New York City. The family moved to Washington around 1877. He married in early 1895 and the couple had a daughter, Lillian, about nineteen months later. For a time, he drove a laundry truck in Seattle, as well as playing in a band. Donlan joined the Seattle Police Department in 1904. Despite his minimal education and lack of formal police training, he became an effective member of the force. Known as a dogged investigator, he nevertheless showed compassion for the down-and-out people he encountered on his beat.
In 1908, Donlan passed the civil service exam to be eligible for promotion to sergeant. However, despite several commendations, he had to wait a long time. One wonders if that was because he was a clean cop on a force that was sometimes anything but. He was finally promoted to sergeant in January of 1919. Before and after he made sergeant, Donlan suffered from the political machinations in the department and the city government.
On one occasion, he submitted a report on what he suspected was the construction of a gambling den and speakeasy. Somehow, that report did not make its way to the police chief (or the mayor, apparently). Then the mayor learned about the problem from other sources. After a tour, which included the chief and two other city officials, the mayor ordered the chief to immediately reassigned Donlan to another district. They soon had to backtrack when the “phantom” report came to light.
An “old school” cop, Donlan relied on an encyclopedic memory for criminals and cases. Thus, he kept few written notes, making it difficult to tell when he began to dig into the “Muggles Mob.” Back then (and still today, in some quarters) the term “muggles” meant marijuana. The “Mob” appeared to be a loose band of youthful burglars, 17 to 20 years years old. All seemed to be solo operators who specialized in daytime or early evening hits. They also dropped butts from the reefers they smoked to bolster their courage while they cased a possible target.
When they got together, it was mostly to smoke muggles and brag. They would also gab about various entry methods, how to insure that nobody was home, and (probably) where to fence their loot. The informal structure made it difficult to pin down who might be a “member.” Still, Donlan knew several likely names, and Eddie Griffis (sometimes rendered as Griffiths) was on his list.
Charles Edward Griffis was born in Vancouver, Washington on February 17, 1914. His parents divorced in 1917 or 1918, then his father remarried in May 1919. Eddie displayed a wild streak early on, starting with the theft of materials from an elementary school supply room. At the age of nine, he learned how to “earn” an “allowance” by shoplifting. Three years later, his stepmother died. All through the period before about 1932, he was in and out of a reform school or the state reformatory. By around 1933, he seems to have become a skilled daytime burglar.
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| Eddie Griffis. Seattle Times (November 22, 1934). |
Obviously, a daylight thief can thoroughly search a house without using a flashlight, which would arouse suspicion. But the intruder must do his (or her) “homework” … making sure the house is empty. Griffis took up a hiding place near the Donlan home shortly before 4 o’clock. With the family car gone, he figured the coast was clear, but still watched long enough to smoke at least one reefer. At that point, Donlan was surely settled into his nap, so Eddie would have seen no activity.
Griffis used his “good luck” jimmie to force open a basement window. After a cursory search there, he started up the stairs to the ground level. And that’s where matters came unstuck. For the sergeant had heard something and faced the intruder as soon as he stepped off the stairs. Griffis later claimed that Donlan immediately recognized him and said, “I’ve been looking for you, Eddie, for jobs just like this.” Then Donlan tried to reach a closet where his service revolver was. Griffis moved closer and shot him three times.
Griffis then bolted from the house and hurried back to his rooming house. He had told his landlady that he was a jeweler’s apprentice, in case she happened to see any of his loot around. Now he said he had to go out of town, and paid a month’s rent in advance. He fled Seattle, throwing his weapon in Lake Washington on the way out.
That evening, about 9:30, the sergeant’s wife and daughter got home, found the body, and immediately called the police. At the time, private criminologist Luke S. May was acting as Chief of Detectives for the Seattle Police Department. He had agreed to take the temporary position because he saw it as his public duty. May arrived at the crime scene just as two regular patrol cars pulled up.
Then and the next day, they found four important clues, besides the body: an empty shell casing, the jimmied window, a clear footprint near that window, and a muggles butt where the intruder had hidden. May had the entire window casing taken to his private lab so he could take microphotographs of the tool marks left by the jimmie.
The shell casing and two bullets from Donlan’s body allowed him to identify the murder weapon as a 7.65 mm Ortgies semi-automatic pistol loaded with .32-caliber ammunition. The Ortgies (named for the designer, Heinrich Ortgies) was made in Germany. Although production ran for only five years (1919-1924), a fair number had been exported to this country. Ironically, police later discovered that Griffis had stolen the weapon during an earlier burglary. The unusual weapon was a key element when investigators began to question suspects and underworld contacts.
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| Ortgies 7.65 Semi-Automatic. Gun Collectors' WebSite. |
As could be expected, the department went all out in pursuit of the cop-killer. After many false leads, tips put them on the trail of Edward Griffis. Learning that he had left town on the very evening Donlan had been shot, they surmised that they were on the right track. Police units all along the Pacific Coast received a photo of Griffis, a description of the murder weapon, and an image of the jimmie tool marks.
Griffis did head south, after a couple weeks in Everett. He spent some time in Portland and then in Oakland, before moving on to Los Angeles. It’s unknown how many burglaries he committed along the way. In late June, Griffis made a return trip to Oakland. There, he and an accomplice pulled off a series of armed robberies. The other man was soon caught. However, he identified his partner only as “Eddie,” so Griffis’ role in the crimes was not known until later.
Griffis managed to stay out of sight in July. Then, key events began to happen fast. First, Portland police called to say that the suspect tool marks had been found at a local burglary. (There may have been more, but reports are a bit confused.) Then police in Los Angeles arrested Griffis in connection with an armed robbery. He used an alias, but his resemblance to the man wanted in Seattle drew extra police attention. They quickly checked bullets from Griffis’ weapon against the Donlan murder slugs. That, of course, drew a blank. Then officials found several local burglaries that had tool marks from Griffis’ jimmie.
Faced with the evidence against him, Eddie confessed and was sent back to Seattle. A jury at the required murder trial recommended a life sentence rather than the death penalty. Griffis was unfazed, because underworld sources had him convinced he’d be out in seven to ten years.
The fact that he’d killed a policeman negated that, however. When the incarceration stretched out to over 14 years, Griffis decided “enough was enough.” He escaped while being allowed outside the walls as a trusty. Caught after a month on the run, he tried to tunnel out in the summer of 1949. Thwarted in that attempt, he walked away from an outside work detail in the fall of 1952. He was captured in less than three weeks.
In the spring of 1954, a juror from the original conviction began agitating for his parole, saying he had “paid his debt to society.” At that point, the widow Donlan was still alive and the plea was denied. However, Mrs. Donlan died that summer. It’s not clear if daughter Lillian, who had married during the war, even followed parole board activities. Thus, Griffis was a free man by about 1958. He married three years later, but that lasted less than ten years. Charles Edward Griffis died in 1992, in Seattle.
| References: Christopher T. Bayley, Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, Washington (2015). |
| “[Donlan – Griffis News],” Seattle Times, Bellingham Herald, Spokane Chronicle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon; Oakland Tribune, Los Angeles Times, California (June 1908 – April 1954). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| Stuart Whitehouse, “Death of a Policeman,” Master Detective Magazine, New York, New York (October 1954). |
