Almost a Triple Murder

Pomeroy, Washington was (and still is) a small, quiet farm town, about 45 miles northeast of Walla Walla. It is, in fact, the only incorporated town in Garfield County, the least populated county in the state. As you could expect, it is also the county seat. But an evening in the spring of 1924 proved that violence could strike anywhere.

Garfield County Courthouse, Pomeroy, Washington.
Vintage postcard

Henry and Barbara Waldman came to the U.S. from Germany – Henry in 1880, his future wife ten years later. Unfortunately, available records do not show Barbara’s maiden name. They married in 1894 and had their one son about a year later. By 1910, they were farming in the Pomeroy area. Crops suitable for the region were wheat, barley, and potatoes, and stockmen also raised cattle and sheep. There is some evidence that the Waldmans mainly raised wheat. Over the years, they added more and more acreage to their holdings.

But Henry died in December 1923, leaving Barbara and son Alfred to run the farm. She did have one source of contentment. Finally, at the age of 32, Alfred had gotten married, and to a nice German girl who had once lived just five doors away. Twenty-two years old, Ida Behlau was the second oldest daughter in a family that had come to Pomeroy straight from Germany in 1909. The father died three years later, but the mother had married a local man the following year. Ida left the area in late 1922 or early 1923.

Then, in March 1924, she returned to Pomeroy and quickly married Alfred, on the 19th. Available news reports don’t say that the two had courted before, but that seems highly likely. The marriage was performed in Lewiston, Idaho, about 28 miles east of Pomeroy. As we’ll see, that was most likely to complete the ceremony as soon as possible. After the wedding, they had rejoined Mother Waldman at the farm.

Thursday, April 3 was cool, in the mid- to high-forties, with a breeze from the southwest. That evening, Alfred walked to the door to answer a knock. The stranger standing outside said, “Here’s a letter for you.”

Curious, Ida had followed him. Looking over his shoulder, she screamed. The stranger instantly shot her husband, and then her. Knowing only that something was terribly wrong, Barbara Waldman hurried toward the telephone … and the man shot her too. The door closed, and she tried again to reach the phone. Moments later, the killer returned, shot her four more times, then left.

Despite her wounds, Barbara found the phone and gasped out the awful news. In short order, every man in Pomeroy, armed with rifles and shotguns, was out looking for the shooter. Luckily, the stranger had asked several people how to get to the Waldman place, so officials were soon able to put out his description. Ralph M. Waller was captured the very next day in Lewiston.

The day after that, the Garfield County sheriff hurriedly transferred his prisoner to the state prison at Walla Walla to avoid a possible lynching. Even before he was moved, Waller confessed freely to the shootings and told a bizarre story. The strange account would need verification for the jury trial required for a capital crime. Thus, on April 8, officials contracted with criminologist Luke S. May to investigate. The next day, May was in Walla Walla to hear Waller’s story first-hand.

He then set out to assess the account, along with other evidence officials had collected. That included Waller’s weapon as well as some torn-up letters. Authorities hoped he’d find fingerprints on the letters, but none could be retrieved. However, May’s analysis of the handwriting and content showed that the letters had been written by Ida (Behlau) Waldman and addressed to Waller. Her words supported, and added to, Ralph’s narrative.

Born around 1890 in German Bohemia, Waller probably came to this country as a child. When he grew up, he worked mostly in Butte, Montana, as a miner. But he also moved around a lot, including trips out to California. News reports did not say if he was seeking better-paying work, liked to visit scattered family members, or simply had a bit of wanderlust.

In February 1921, Ralph married Ida’s older (by a year) sister Lucille. The ceremony took place in Spokane and it’s not clear that anyone else in the family had actually met Ralph. In any case, Ida visited the couple in Butte about a year or so after the marriage. Ralph discovered he liked the sister better than his wife, and she was attracted to him. No one ever explained what the living arrangements became after that. However, by the end of 1923, Ida and Ralph had an “understanding” that she would marry him as soon as Lucille gave him a divorce.

The following spring, Ralph and Ida left Lucille in California and headed north. They separated at some point, and Ralph went on to Butte. Ida, of course, returned to Pomeroy and married Alfred. Ralph called that a “double-cross” of their “agreement.” However, her letters to him showed that, as May put it in his report, “Ida was evidently in a delicate condition through living with Waller.”

May’s notes do not suggest how far advanced she was in her pregnancy. Still, she surely must have decided she did not have time for Ralph to get a divorce. But Ralph was infuriated when he heard the news and raced back. Along the way, he bought a gun in a small town about 30 miles from Pomeroy (easily traced, later). May quickly verified the death weapon, including one particular feature. The action was cranky and the gun would sometimes misfire. He asked Waller about that, and the killer agreed that “it did not always fire the cartridge the first time he pulled the trigger.”

Since the evidence was so conclusive, May did not feel they would need him at the trial. (A considerable savings for the county, since May charged $100 per day, plus expenses, when he had to appear in court.) Authorities originally planned to expedite the trial. However, they held off a few weeks when doctors said that Barbara Waldman, a tough pioneer lady, would soon recover enough to testify in court.

The trial was the expected formality, and Waller refused to appeal. The killer went to the gallows on the morning of June 27, 1924, less than three months after the shooting.
                                                                                

References: Paula Becker, “Pomeroy – Thumbnail History,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (September 24, 2010).

Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969).

“[Waldman Murder News],” Seattle Times, Bellingham Herald, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland (April 4, 1924 – June 27, 1924).

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Shooting Death in Pasco

Times were tough in the summer of 1935. Tough everywhere and even more so in Pasco, Washington. For Pasco was a railroad town and the Great Depression hit railroad companies especially hard, with many of them going under. Those hard times were probably at least partly to blame for a tragedy early on the morning of August 6th.

A couple hours before sunrise, two patients arrived at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. There was a connection between the men’s injuries, but no one knew quite what it was. Isaac I. “Ike” Turya had been shot in the abdomen and was near death. As quickly as possible, surgeons worked to repair the damage, hoping to preserve his life. The other patient, Earl B. Mooney, did not have life-threatening wounds. Still, he had been badly beaten, with severe contusions around the eyes.

Originally from Minnesota, Turya had briefly served in the Army during World War I. He, his wife, and a son arrived in Pasco around 1919. A Kentuckian, Mooney and his wife moved to Pasco some time before 1920. When the 1920 census was recorded, both men worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Turya, then aged 22, was a brakeman, while Mooney, age 38, was a rail yard switchman.

Northern Pacific Steam Locomotive.
Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association.

The two were friends for many years after that. However, the relationship had apparently cooled by the early thirties. At about that time, Turya’s wife divorced him and remarried. Meanwhile, Mooney and his wife had become estranged. At least Turya still had his job with the railroad. Mooney did not, but we don’t know whether he had been laid off (most likely) or terminated for other reasons.

Although badly wounded, Turya lived about five days and gave a strange account at first. Around 2 o’clock in the morning, Turya said, he had walked home after a night on the town. At his doorstep, a masked gunman robbed him and then forced him to walk toward the edge of town. Fearful for his life, he had turned suddenly and punched the follower. That dislodged the mask, revealing the thief to be Mooney. But, even as Turya struck, Mooney shot him. Despite his wound, the much younger Turya proceeded to beat Mooney senseless. He then stumbled toward his home, but did not quite make it. He came to in the hospital.

Mooney told a different story. He too had been out late and happened to run into Turya near the latter’s home. They began a conversation while walking along the street away from Turya’s place. Then, Mooney said, some remark of his caused Turya to turn and slug him. When Mooney began to get the worst of the ensuing fight, he pulled out a revolver and tried to beat Turya with it. They scuffled over the weapon, which went off and wounded Turya. Even so, Turya knocked Mooney down and out. When Mooney came to, he staggered back to Turya’s place, found him outside on the ground, and called an ambulance.

These conflicting accounts had everybody puzzled. One of the first newspaper articles said, “Trouble is said to have been over liquor.” But then the story changed to one where the two argued “over private matters, which both men refused to disclose.” Finally, during the trial, Mooney asserted that Turya had made an offensive remark about Mooney’s estranged wife. The ensuing fight ended with Turya shot “accidentally,” and Mooney unconscious on the ground.

None of the accounts mentioned how the revolver ended up in an alley near Turya’s home. Turya may have grabbed the weapon to keep Mooney from using it again, then tossed it as he neared home. Or Mooney still had it when he came to and followed Turya, but slung it into the alley at the last. In any case, the sheriff found it there during his investigation. At the trial, criminologist Luke S. May testified that a bullet from that weapon had killed Turya.

Authorities prosecuted Mooney for both robbery and first degree murder. The jury labored over the verdict for many hours, trying to sort out what happened. It appears they quickly discounted the supposed robbery, finding little to support that story. However, the inarguable fact remained that Mooney had shot and killed a man during what started as a fist fight. The jury finally said “not guilty” on the robbery charge and reduced the other to a second degree murder conviction.

Mooney was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and his appeal was denied. However, he served a much reduced time, being back in Pasco to register for the World War II draft in the summer of 1943.
                                                                                

References: Susan Davis Faulkner, Images of America: Early Pasco, © Susan Davis Faulkner, Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, South Carolina (2009).

Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969).

State v. Mooney, 185 Wash. 681, 56 P.2d 722 (1936).

“[Turya Shot by Mooney, Mooney Charged],” The Oregonian, Portland (August 12-17, 1935).

“[Trial and Conviction of Mooney for Turya Murder],” Olympian, Olympia; Seattle Times, Washington (November 13-18).

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Mercer Island Murder

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.

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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