Until he was murdered on November 5, 1925, Victor Nelson had made little impression upon the news or records of his day. This at a time when newspapers commonly devoted many columns to brief notes that said, “Mr. Jones was promoted to vice principal at Westside Elementary” and “Miss Jane Doe just returned from a visit with her grandparents in Mudville.”
During the relevant time period, the Tacoma City Directory contained about 350 “Nelson” listings. And the southern Puget Sound region had over a dozen men named “Victor Nelson.” Few could be specifically identified by a distinctive title, occupation, or family affiliation. Still, by eliminating “candidates” who were clearly not him, we can assemble a composite from the remaining records. He was most likely from Sweden, born about 1875. He entered the U.S. between 1894 and 1904, and completed the naturalization process before about 1915. He apparently never married.
“Our” Victor had more skills than a simple laborer, or was perhaps especially frugal. By around 1922, he had the wherewithal to acquire a rooming house grandly called the “Home Hotel.” Located a mile or so south of Tacoma’s top-level business and hotel district, the property had only 15-20 rooms and did not furnish meals. It drew its clientele mostly from low-income laborers, service workers, or pensioners.
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| Downtown Tacoma, 1925. Tacoma Public Library. |
Officers captured the assailant within a couple hours after the attack. Evans was still carrying Nelson’s watch and other possessions. He also had a revolver that had been fired several times. Authorities quickly hired criminologist Luke S. May to examine the gun as the possible murder weapon. The suspect gave his name as Walsh, but he was soon identified as ex-convict Tom Evans. In a sad irony, we know a good deal more about the killer than we do about the victims. (It proved impossible to trace Shehan and his name never appeared again in news reports.)
Thomas B. Evans was born November 11, 1889 in a rural Iowa township about 125 miles northwest of Des Moines. Growing up, he attained no notable education or skills. The 1910 Census said he got by with odd jobs and spent long periods unemployed. He did play for a nearby small-town baseball team and perhaps picked up a few bucks for that.
He hit the news in late 1912 when he received a life sentence for a home invasion/burglary during which he tried to rape the middle-aged lady who lived there. Prison authorities made note of his surliness and volatile temper. He was paroled in the summer of 1917, but a parole violation had him back in prison six months later. He was let out again after two more years.
By 1920, Tom had moved to the San Joaquin Valley of California, where his older brother had opened a print shop in Stockton. Tom got by as an itinerant farm laborer. There were suspicions that he “supplemented” his income by petty theft, but no evidence. Finally, in early 1925, he beat up and sodomized an eleven-year-old boy in Fresno before being frightened off by a neighbor. Police believed he tried to persuade a taxi owner to take him to Stockton, which led to a fight that damaged the inside of the vehicle. Finally, Evans apparently pulled a gun and shot the driver dead.
Police found the battered and bloodstained taxi in Stockton the next day. County officials issued two warrants for the arrest of Evans, one for an “unnatural crime,” the other for “assault with the intent to commit murder.” When the driver’s body was found two months later – it had been dumped in a river – authorities upgraded the charge to murder.
So far as we know, Evans had no criminal record in California prior to these events. However, as a matter of routine, police would have interviewed his brother about Tom’s likely whereabouts. He would have surely told them that Tom had served time in the Iowa penitentiary. Thus, the bulletin distributed about Evans probably included a mug shot and the classification points for his fingerprints, if not the actual images.
Ten months later, he was jailed in Tacoma for the shootings at the Home Hotel. It’s worth mentioning here that the use of fingerprint evidence was a relatively “new thing” in 1925. Even two or three years later, Luke May still logged cases that required him to collect and categorize latent prints for law enforcement clients. Fortunately, Tacoma officials already had May under contract. Within hours after police had jailed “Walsh,” they knew his real identity and that he was wanted in California.
Caught with the goods, Evans made a fantastic claim. He was about to leave the building, he said, when a stranger approached him in the dimly-lit (or was it dark?) hallway. After stuffing the evidence into Tom’s pockets, the intruder handed him the revolver and told him to “Beat it.” Why would anyone accept a mysterious weapon after three shots had been fired nearby? He could not explain. Such an unlikely story almost makes one wonder if Tom was of sub-standard intelligence, but there’s no way of knowing.
The “wheels of justice” moved faster in those days, and the Evans’ murder trial was scheduled for around the third week of December. Accounts never explained where Tom had spent the ten months between his flight from Stockton and arrest in Tacoma. But he evidently connected, or perhaps re-connected, with allies in the Washington underworld. A few days before the trial was to start, someone tried to spring him from his jail cell. A deputy on patrol found where an accomplice had cut away the heavy outside screen and started sawing on the bars.
As might be expected, the trial lacked any real drama. The defense stuck to the story about the mysterious stranger in the hall, which surely impressed no one. May’s identification of the revolver as the murder weapon would have sealed the deal. The jury did spend extra time deliberating, apparently trying to decided whether or not to recommend the death penalty. They finally voted for life imprisonment, which the judge imposed. Satisfied that justice had been served, Fresno officials chose not to request his return to California.
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| Thomas "Tom" Evans. Washington State Penitentiary. |
By the time Tom died, the Evans family had fragmented. The brother in Stockton passed away in 1933. The oldest sister was the only member to stay in Iowa, but she was nearly 70 years old in 1950. Her husband was even older, and their sons were scattered across the country. The surviving younger brother was a contract painter, moving between jobs in Missouri and Kansas. The youngest sister was married and divorced before 1919. After that, she bounced all over: Denver, Duluth, San Diego, and Kansas City, Missouri … that we know of. Thomas “Tom” Evans was buried in the prison cemetery.
| References: Census records, city directory listings, and other genealogical sources were consulted extensively. Online sources included Ancestry.com and others. |
| Jeffrey G. Barnes, “History,” The Fingerprint Sourcebook, Alan McRoberts (Editor), National Institute of Justice, Washington, D. C. (2012). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
| “[Nelson – Evans News],” Ottumwa Courier, Sioux City Journal, Iowa;
Fresno Morning Republican, California; Spokesman-Review, Spokane,
Seattle Times, Bellingham Herald, Washington (November 1912 – April 1950). |
| David Wilma and Walt Crowley, “Tacoma – Thumbnail History,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (September 09, 2003).. |
