That was good news for Earl Anable, a taxi and “rent-car” driver. Party-goers or shoppers would hire a rent-car, with driver, when they had a big day or evening planned. That way, they wouldn’t have to flag down cabs to get around. Earl could not know that death lurked behind him on one cool July evening.
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| 1924 Cadillac Limousine. Classic Car sales Site. |
Charles Earl Anable was born April 19, 1893 in Mount Vernon, Washington, a small town about 55 miles north of Seattle. He enlisted for World War I and went to France as a “motor mechanic” in the spring of 1918. There, officers discovered that he was an excellent driver. Of course, he also had the skills to fix the vehicle when it broke down (a not uncommon event). After the war, Earl found work as a chauffeur.
Anable married in early 1920, and the couple had a daughter about seventeen months later. In 1923, Earl landed a job with a Seattle taxi company. Then a better opportunity came along, so he resigned as of the end of June, 1925. However, the new job would not start for several weeks. Thus, on July 22, Earl was serving as a relief driver for another rental outfit.
That evening, a slight young man in a sailor uniform stopped at the rental stand and hired a company limousine with Earl as the driver. Earl’s boss saw the car leave at about 8:30. Puzzling second-hand accounts tell us very little about what happened in the next hour or so. A few minutes after the limo left the stand, a soldier at Fort Lawton saw it pass back and forth several times near his barracks. Since Lawton was located 5 to 6 miles northwest of downtown Seattle, Earl must have driven straight there.
Lawton did not have any actual fortifications. Except for a core of buildings and some cleared drill space, most its 703 acres were covered with brush and trees. It’s unclear if any of its roads were even paved in 1925, and there were points where vehicles could come and go as they pleased. Around a half hour later, another soldier also saw the limo, this time with three passengers dressed in civilian clothes.
Finally, about 9:30 or so, the wife of a soldier who had a home just off the reservation saw headlights on the rough road inside the unmarked boundary. The vehicle stopped and then, after a short pause, she heard a shot and the lights went out. It happened that the Army maintained a rifle range less than thirty yards beyond where the lights had stopped. Perhaps they were trying some night practice. The next morning before 6 o’clock, a boy delivering newspapers to the base discovered Earl Anable’s body inside the car. He had been shot once in the back of the head.
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| Earl Anable. Family Archive |
The base commander immediately mustered every man for cross-examination by Seattle police detectives. That included over 100 sailors and marines living in tents near the rifle range. With men vouching for each other, the interrogation seemed to establish “unshakable alibis” for everyone. That afternoon, searchers scoured the woods near the rifle range, hoping to find a sailor’s uniform discarded by a civilian perpetrator.
When that didn’t pan out, officers at the base began to revisit the supposedly iron-clad alibis. They soon discovered gaps in the story for one sailor, 20-year-old Lloyd Hudson. That evening, police arrested Hudson at a café where he was dining with his new bride. He naturally denied any involvement. However, under questioning, he began to contradict himself about his actions on the day of the murder … and finally confessed. But that was hardly the end of the story.
Lloyd LaRaine Hudson was born October 12, 1905 in Ardmore, Oklahoma. When he was old enough, he joined the U.S. Navy. After basic training, he was assigned to the battleship USS Arizona, which was then based in San Pedro, California. Each summer, the vessel docked at the Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington, for refit and repairs. In 1925, her normal stay was extended to two months for some scheduled modernization.
Lloyd was among those sent to Fort Lawton for rifle practice. After less than a month ashore, Lloyd met 18-year-old Katherine Fries, quickly proposed, and they were married on July 11. Lloyd was busy at Fort Lawton, of course, but the couple rented an apartment on Lloyd’s meager Navy pay. The new wife’s life story was rather more complex than his.
She was born October 28, 1906 in a German-speaking enclave on the southern Volga River in Russia. The family emigrated to the U.S. when she was six years old, settling first in Nebraska. They spent some time in Montana before moving to the Yakima Valley of Washington around 1919. Katherine was apparently a troubled youth. Some time in early 1925, she fell under the jurisdiction of the Juvenile Court in Yakima. (We don’t know why since such records are hardly ever made public.) The court placed her in the custody of the Pacific Coast Rescue and Protective Society (PCR&P).
The initial focus of the PCR&P, first incorporated in 1909, was to provide medical services and counseling for unwed mothers. Over time, their role expanded to include shelter and social services for so-called “wayward” girls and young women. Fries was sent to a PCR&P facility located across Lake Washington from Seattle. We don’t know how long she was there, but she walked away to the big city in early July. How she met Seaman Hudson is unknown.
In any case, her new husband first claimed that Earl Anable had “insulted” his bride-to-be during their ride to the county clerk’s office to get married on July 11. He and the driver had met a couple times after that, he claimed, and Anable had continued to make vulgar and disparaging remarks about Katherine. Lloyd had finally “snapped,” lured him to a lonely spot, and shot him with his service pistol. He repudiated that confession the day after his arrest, but later returned to a version of the same story.
The initial confession had two major holes. First, Katherine said that she did not recall any insults from their driver. Living in a mostly German-speaking household, she perhaps didn’t understand some key slang and vulgarities in English. That, however, seems unlikely, given how long she had lived in this country. More importantly, Anable’s wife declared that Earl had not worked on July 11. Newspapers did not report how Hudson addressed these discrepancies (or if he even bothered to do so).
Police and prosecutors figured the motive might have simply been robbery. However, rent-car drivers did not generally collect fees along the way, so they carried very little cash. Beyond that, federal authorities probably figured that Hudson might dream up yet another story. Thus, about two weeks after the killing, they retained private criminologist Luke S. May.
Besides having agents interview more potential witnesses, May could assess the death scene and the murder weapon. Fine marks on an ejected shell casing, found on the floor of the back seat, and on the fatal bullet identified Hudson’s .45-caliber automatic as the death weapon. It’s worth mentioning here that the notion of “fingerprinting bullets” was just then being recognized nationally. May had been providing that service in his region for five years. To further make the point, May found a stain of human blood on the pistol, in a pattern consistent with blow-back from the victim’s death wound.
Aside from stumbling over some details, Hudson never wavered from his story about insults to his wife. Yet continued investigation strongly suggested that there was far more to the case than what appeared on the surface. For example, another shipmate claimed that Lloyd had told him that his dispute with Anable “was of two years standing.” Moreover, “persons unknown” had threatened two prospective witnesses, trying to squelch their testimony in the affair.
None of these aspects were thoroughly explored because the case never went to trial. Hudson’s defense team surely warned him that a conviction for first degree murder could lead to a death sentence. He chose instead to plead guilty to second degree murder and take his chances. He received a life sentence, but probably expected to be released much sooner.
Authorities moved Hudson to the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas after about eight months at McNeil Island. He was still there fifteen years later. Then, in early 1943, a special panel logged his draft registration at the prison. He enlisted, or was drafted, less than a year later. He served on naval landing craft (LCI and LCT) and probably participated in the invasion of the Philippines and Okinawa.
Hudson remarried some time after the war. His second wife passed away in 1983; he followed in 1995. They are buried in a rural cemetery located 10-11 miles south of St. James, Missouri. The small town provides a base for several award-winning wineries.
Katherine (Fries) Hudson returned to the Yakima Valley and spent the rest of her life there. We don’t know when she divorced Hudson, but she had remarried by 1927 or 1928. She and her second husband had four children together before she divorced him around 1937. She married again four years later. Katherine married for a fourth, and final, time in late 1949. She passed away in the spring of 1995.
Earl Anable’s widow, Esther, worked for over twenty years in various positions at a large department store in downtown Seattle. She remarried in 1933, and passed away in 1979. Daughter Nadine was out on her own in 1940 as a waitress at a drugstore food counter. She married two years later.
| References: “[Anable–Hudson News],” Seattle Times, Seattle; Bellingham Herald, Washington (April 5, 1920) – (August 9, 1925). |
| Duane Colt Denfeld, “Fort Lawton to Discovery Park,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (September 23, 2008). |
| David E. Kyvig, et al, Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939, Greenwood Press, Santa Barbara, California (2002). |
| “Louise Home Hospital and Residence Hall,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, National Park Service, Washington, D. C. (1987). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| Wesley W. Stout, “Fingerprinting Bullets: The Expert
Witness,” The Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (June
1925). . |
