July 15, 1935 dawned warm and muggy in Orting, Washington, about 16 miles southeast of Tacoma. The temperature would later soar into the nineties and thunder would rumble in the mountains to the east. Shortly before noon, Leslie Stone, teller for the Orting State Bank, found himself staring down the barrel of a compact automatic pistol. A curt command demanded everything from his cash drawer and Stone quickly complied. Then the bandit, who wore no mask, jumped into a distinctively-painted Buick sedan and fled north.
Stone had been robbed before and now kept a rifle in the vault. Before the car disappeared, the teller let off a wild shot at it. Then he called Puyallup and reported the robbery, giving a description of the crook and his car. Police Chief Frank Chadwick and Officer Harry Storem piled into a police cruiser and hurried east along the main east-west highway. With luck, they could cut the bandit off before he reached more populated areas.
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| Chief Chadwick. Puyallup Police Department. |
Harry William Storem was born August 22, 1892 near Shelton, Washington, and the family moved to Puyallup before 1900. He married Mary Caroline “Mollie” McFarland in the spring of 1910. Aside from a two-year attempt at vegetable farming near Medford, Oregon, Harry worked at various times as an electrical lineman, timber worker, and truck driver. He was driving truck in 1930, by which time the couple had two daughters and three sons. Harry joined the Puyallup police department in April 1932, and his name began to appear in news reports that summer.
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| Officer Storem. Puyallup Police Department. |
The officers turned south onto the main north-south road and passed the Buick less than two miles from the intersection. They quickly reversed course and a high-speed chase ensued. Then the Buick stopped abruptly along the shoulder. The officers pulled off just ahead of the car to cut off further escape. But as they tried to leap out and confront the fugitive, the criminal raced up and opened fire. Chief Chadwick was killed instantly by a single shot. Storem was hit three times and died before reaching the Puyallup General Hospital. Despite an extensive manhunt, the shooter vanished. His car, with a badly damaged tire, was found 2-3 miles northeast of Puyallup. Authorities concluded he had escaped aboard a freight train headed towards Seattle.
Besides bank teller Stone, five witnesses got fairly close views of the killer. Two observed him sitting in the Buick near the bank just before the robbery. One saw the shooting from beside his rural mailbox and had a good look as the killer drove by him. Another was coming home for lunch and saw the speeding Buick. His young daughter happened to be along the road, so he stopped to make sure she was safe. He too marked the driver as he hurtled by. Finally, a real estate agent encountered the man standing next to the disabled Buick, trying to flag a ride. Not liking the hitch-hiker’s looks, the agent drove on.
Three other witnesses also saw the perpetrator. One was a police officer who saw the shooter from a distance. Two others were railroad employees interviewed later. About twenty minutes after the shooting, a conductor saw a man hop a northbound freight. When the train reached Renton, about twenty-five miles further north, he and a brakeman ordered several riders off the train. One of them “fit the description” of the fugitive, but the trainmen had no reason to suspect anything more at that time.
Officers interviewed many potential witnesses and pressed underworld contacts for more information. Soon after the shootings, authorities contracted with private criminologist Luke S. May. His advanced techniques could extract better fingerprint evidence from the Buick. The car had been stolen in Tacoma on the morning of the robbery.
May’s tests also identified the murder weapon as a .32-caliber automatic pistol of Belgian or Spanish make. As it happened, weapons maker Fabrique Nationale in Belgium, and several Spanish gun producers sold variants of a hammerless automatic designed by the legendary American firearms guru John Moses Browning. They all had the same class characteristics, so even May could not tell the brands apart just from the bullets and shell casings.
Available records do not say how many suspects the police brought in for further questioning. One set of three names did appear in the newspapers less than a week after the murders. Police didn’t know it, but they had the killer in custody.
All three were ex-convicts, with lengthy criminal records. The youngest had multiple convictions for car theft, but also engaged in forgery and probably armed robbery. He was out on parole at the time Chadwick and Storem were murdered. The next oldest first went to jail for an assault during an attempted robbery when he was 19 years old. But his big claim to fame was liquor: moonshine production, rum-running, and highjacking other rum-runners. Prohibition Officers seemed to know a lot about his activities, but apparently no one was willing to testify. The oldest suspect was a decorated veteran of World War I. After the war, he became part of an armed robbery gang. He was in and out of prison after that. In fact, he had been paroled from prison on a robbery conviction about ten weeks before the shootings.
Opinions from the eye-witnesses were the usual mix of surety and equivocation. Moreover, seemingly reliable sources provided alibis for all three men. After checking everything they could, police finally removed them from the suspect list. They would not correct their error for almost seven years.
Still, police did not release the actual shooter – for now, we’ll call him “Perp” – when they turned the other two loose. Not because they had possible evidence in the murder case, but because Yakima County had issued an arrest warrant for him on a fraud charge. He had persuaded a sucker to furnish him a car to hunt for buried treasure in Oregon. Instead, Perp sold the car in Seattle. With his record, Perp knew that another felony conviction could “earn” him a life sentence under Washington’s Habitual Criminal Act.
An “out” appeared in an odd way. Perp’s main alibi had been furnished by Peggy, the 18-year-old girl he was living with at an auto-court in Kelso, Washington … even though he was already a married man. On at least three occasions, they had made jaunts to Portland. Federal officials ruled that a violation of the “Mann Act,” which prohibited the transportation of a female across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Charged with that crime, Perp quickly pled guilty. Somehow, the fraud charge went away. Perhaps Yakima authorities allowed him to make restitution, knowing he was going to prison anyway … and saving the county the cost of a trial. Perp received a three-year sentence in federal prison.
Puyallup police did not entirely give up on the murder case, but made no progress. Still, in early 1937, they thought they might have a strong lead. A man who fit the general description of the Orting bandit had been convicted of bank robbery in California. He had in his possession a .32-caliber automatic pistol of Belgian make. Finally, after five weeks of discussion, the weapon was passed to Luke May for his assessment. He quickly determined that it was not the murder weapon. All of this was widely reported in the newspapers. If Perp still had the actual murder weapon hidden away somewhere while he was in prison, he would have surely ditched it at the first opportunity.
Perp was free for a time in 1938, but violated his parole and was soon back in. He was finally out on the streets by the summer of 1939. The next record we have of him is the announcement that he and his wife had divorced, in June 1941. By then, Peggy was married to a police patrolman in Toppenish, Washington.
In the summer of 1942, Puyallup police got a tip that seemed to apply to the Chadwick-Storem murder. They re-opened the cold case, but the new information led nowhere. Still, a fresh review of the case file convinced detectives that the Mann Act violator, one Roy Willard Jacobs, had killed the two officers. Roy (“Perp”) was arrested on July 6, 1942. New interviews of the eye witnesses fueled their confidence that they had the right man.
Then, under close examination, Roy’s alibi fell apart. Peggy had originally told police that Roy was with her at the Kelso auto-court on July 15, 1935. Later, she stated that she didn’t actually know where he was on that day. That was further supported by the manager of the auto-court, who had found him gone when she came by to collect rent on July 14, 15, and 16. Another supposed corroborator admitted that her recollection of his presence in Kelso might have for a week after the shootings. Roy’s other attempts to bolster the alibi also failed.
With the alibi blown up, the parade of eye witnesses allowed prosecutors to trace his movements from before the robbery, to the murder scene, and even to his final escape route. The defense could only counter with claims that some witnesses had been coached and perjured themselves, or were simply mistaken. On October 29, 1942, the jury took less than three hours to reach a verdict of guilty and recommend the death penalty.
The usual appeals followed, all the way to the state Supreme Court, as well as an appeal to the governor. All failed, and Roy Willard Jacobs was hanged in the early minutes of April 7, 1943. He proclaimed his innocence to the very end.
Mrs. Harry Storem, “Mollie,” evidently had enough to live on after Jacobs murdered her husband. (She probably had a widow’s pension, but available records do not say.) One of the couple’s three sons was already married when Harry was killed, and the other children would marry in the following three years.
The Storems’ oldest daughter had opened a beauty shop near Puyallup several years before her marriage in the spring of 1936. Accounts suggest that Mollie helped out there for a number of years. The other daughter also worked as a beautician before her marriage in late 1937. Two of Mollie’s sons worked as mechanics, first in the aircraft industry and then on automobiles. The youngest son was a professional photographer. Mollie never remarried and lived in the family home until the late Fifties, when she moved to a Tacoma nursing home. When she died there on August 2, 1964, all her children were still living and she had sixteen grandchildren.
| References: “[Chadwick-Storem Background],” News Tribune, Tacoma, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Tacoma Daily Ledger, Seattle Times, Spokane Chronicle, Tacoma Times, Washington (September 1912 – September 1993). |
| “[Chadwick-Storem Murders],” News Tribune, Tacoma, Tacoma Daily Ledger, Seattle Times, Washington; Bend Bulletin, Oregon (July 1935 – October 1942). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| Daryl C. McClary, “Police Chief Frank Chadwick and Patrolman Harry Storem Shot and Killed,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (December 2009). |
| Garry James, “The Spanish-Built Ruby Pistol,” Guns & Ammo, Outdoor Sportsman Group, Peoria, Illinois (July 28, 2016). |
