Trail’s End in Montana

Early in the Twentieth Century – we do not know exactly when or where – James Christianson embarked on a path that led to his premature death by violence. His life was largely a mystery, to be sketched in from scattered records, comments made to fellow criminals, and a few newspaper accounts. Authorities generally accepted that he was born in Denmark, probably around 1895. Some evidence suggests that Christianson served some time in the Royal Danish Navy, which spent World War I maintaining minefields in their national waters. (Both sides “mostly” respected Denmark’s neutrality.)

At some point, Christianson became a sailor in the merchant marine. (The Danish shipping industry had boomed during the war, and remained strong afterwards.) Then his ship docked at the port of New York. A best guess is that this was in 1920 or 1921, when the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age were taking flight. Attracted by the glamor and excitement, Christianson chose to emigrate to the U.S. … without benefit of formal paperwork. 

New York Docks, ca 1920. Library of Congress.

At first, he probably got by as a common laborer. However, there is good reason to suspect that he soon became a “yegg” or “yeggman” (the source of the term is disputed); that is, a safecracker. Safes of the day might be penetrated by a drill and other tools, or blown open with “soup” – nitroglycerine or gelignite. Because of the skills required, the yegg was considered a cut above an ordinary burglar. They typically travelled a lot to hit small town targets where expensive top-level safes and vaults were less common. There was also the expectation – too often true – that villages and towns would have few law officers, and even fewer that had any training in law enforcement techniques.

In their travels, yeggmen generally tried to blend in with the amorphous crowd of seasonal workers, hoboes, and other wanderers who rode the rails during that era. Christianson was in Minnesota in 1925. By then, he had been in and out of jail a number of times for minor offenses. These were not specifically reported in the newspapers, but got his identity and fingerprints into law enforcement records. Christianson first came to the notice of reporters on the evening of December 17, 1925, when he was arrested for stealing a car in St. Cloud. Further inquiry then uncovered his times behind bars. He pled guilty in mid-January and was sentenced to two years in the Minnesota State Penitentiary at Stillwater.

Christianson was presumably out by 1928. Most likely, he was “back in business” and slowly working his way westward. His tragic journey continued into Montana, where it would end in the spring of 1930. The lawman responsible was only a few years older than the Dane.

Walter Prochnow was born April 26, 1892 in a densely populated area of New Jersey just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Initially a carpenter, he moved to Montana some time after 1910. He married there in the summer of 1916 and claimed a homestead about twenty-five miles northwest of Miles City the following spring. However, in January 1920, he, his wife Matilda, and five-month-old daughter were living in Miles City itself. Prochnow gave his occupation as “general farmer,” but he had apparently decided farm life was not for him.

Thus, in 1922, he joined the Miles City police department. Prochnow took a deep interest in law enforcement. During that summer, he even visited the state prison in Deer Lodge to observe that operation. Reports said he might be interested in eventually becoming the warden there. He also extensively studied fingerprint techniques, in terms of both recording them from suspects or victims, and collecting latent prints at crime scenes. Prochnow became the “go to” expert in the region, often being sent to help other jurisdictions. He was promoted to sergeant after a few years on the force.

Montana law enforcement became particularly busy from 1928 on, when safecrackers apparently decided that the state was fertile ground for their operations. Every week brought reports of attacks all around Montana, sometimes hitting two or three businesses in the same town. Thus, three safes were cracked in Miles City on the night of February 6, 1929. Some yeggs were careless and left fingerprints, but their constant movement made it difficult to track down suspects.

Another hit in Miles City on March 3, 1930, spurred Prochnow to a special effort. The year before, someone had raided the Custer County High School and cracked the principal’s safe. All the revenue from the school’s annual fund-raising carnival had been stolen. The event for 1930 was only a few weeks away, on Friday, March 21. An experienced cop like Prochnow would surely know that transient camps were hotbeds of gossip and gab. Might some yegg again make a try at such a tempting target? 

Officer Walter Prochnow.
Miles City Police Department

 When the last carnival event closed down for the night, organizers gathered their take and placed it in the principal’s safe. After that, the sergeant settled in for his stakeout. Three safecrackers arrived about 3 o’clock Saturday morning. Prochnow pinned them with the beam of his flashlight and ordered them to get their hands up. One intruder immediately shot toward the officer but the slug went wide. Prochnow fired back while diving for cover. The would-be thieves sprayed several wild shots as they fled the office.

Three yeggmen entered the building; only two left it alive. Officers found the body of the third on the floor; he seemed to have been killed instantly. Thirty to thirty-five years old, he was not a local, and carried no identification. The high school Vice Principal did recall him milling about in the carnival crowd. She thought he had been accompanied by two other men, both strangers. Quick raids on trains and transient camps in the region resulted in the arrest of fifteen men. However, only one was armed and none could be identified as companions of the dead man.

Saturday afternoon, authorities convened a coroner’s jury, which found no fault with Prochnow’s actions, and praised his initiative and courage. They also sent images of the dead man’s fingerprints to the Bureau of Investigation (the future FBI) in Washington, D.C. The Bureau identified him as James Christianson and directed them to Minnesota officials for more information.

Along with his minimal history (outlined above), they said he had no known relatives in St. Cloud. However, Minnesota was then home to hundreds, if not thousands, of people named Christianson, or one of its variants. It seems likely that James might have had a distant relative there. In any case, locals were fairly sure his parents still lived in Copenhagen. Four days after his death, James “Christenson” was buried without ceremony in the paupers’ field of the county cemetery.

Most likely in early April, Miles City police hired criminologist Luke S. May to assess the firearms evidence for the case. We don’t have May’s report, but he was probably first asked to verify that Prochnow’s weapon had felled the intruder. (That would eliminate the possibility that he had been shot by one of his companions.) By then, officers should have also recovered slugs scattered about by the bandits’ wild shots. May could at least tell them the make and model of weapon(s) they needed to look for. However, the case went nowhere after that.

So far as can be determined from newspaper reports, this incident was the only time Walter Prochnow ever fired his weapon in a police incident, much less shot anybody. He retired from the force around 1942 and took a job building homes for defense workers in Seattle, Washington. Toward the end of World War II, Prochnow moved to a place about twelve miles north of Bremerton and continued working as a carpenter. In early June 1945, less than a month after VE-Day, Matilda joined him there.

Walter retired around 1957, about the time one of the couple’s three married daughters moved to Seattle. Four years later they moved to Mesa, Arizona. Matilda died there in 1973 and Walter moved back to Miles City. Two years after that, he passed away at the Custer County Rest Home.
                                                                              

References:  Jonathon Green, Crooked Talk: Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime, Random House UK, London (2011).

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

“[Prochnow-Christianson News],” Montana Standard, Butte, Independent-Record, Helena, The Missoulian, Missoula, Ravali Republic, Hamilton, Billings Gazette, Great Falls Tribune, Anaconda Standard, Montana; Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Arizona; St. Cloud Times, Minnesota (June 1922 – September 1975).

Nils Arne Sørensen, “Denmark,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War (online), Freie Universität Berlin (October 8, 2014).

Thomas Streissguth, The Roaring Twenties, Updated Edition, Facts On File, Inc. New York, New York (2007).

 

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A Car Was The Key

The small Manito Pharmacy, located about two miles south of downtown Spokane, was a typical neighborhood drug store. The owner, Mrs. Alice Sherrard, had depended upon part-time registered pharmacists since her husband died in the spring of 1933. On this day, July 30, 1935, a Tuesday, Harry Phillips arrived shortly after noon to cover the afternoon and evening hours. They could not know that death lay in wait just across the street. 

Harry Phillips.
Spokane Chronicle
(September 16, 1935).

Harry J. Phillips was born around 1887 in Whitman County, Washington, in a village about forty miles south of Spokane. After high school, he attended Washington State College, conveniently located about thirty miles from his home. He graduated with a degree in pharmacy in June of 1910 and quickly set up a drug business in Walla Walla. Less than a year after graduation, Harry married Lillian Mae “Mamie” McFadden. Eight months later, they sold the Walla Walla venture and had a small store built in a tiny town near where he was born.

For many years afterwards, Harry split time between pharmacy and wheat farming at various locations around Whitman County. By 1920, the couple had two sons. Around 1927, Harry moved the family to Spokane to find work as a contract pharmacist. He also seemed to have dabbled in real estate. Thus, in 1929, he purchased and modernized a “fixer-upper” that would remain the family home for over a quarter century. On July 30th, Harry had been working at the Manito Pharmacy for quite some time.

After he arrived at the store, Mrs. Sherrard backed her car out of an adjacent garage at about 12:30. That maneuver proved somewhat awkward because of a vehicle parked directly across from the store door. She noticed a man sitting in the car, but thought nothing more about it as she drove off. However, other observers had also noted the rather unusual car, a 1933 Willys sedan. Later, they would recall that the same vehicle had been in the area the day before, a Monday.

On Tuesday, the Willys first appeared about 8:30 in the morning. Some saw the driver inside, others not. Spokane was suffering from a sweltering wave of moist heat, so he probably got out now and then to cool off. Shortly after Sherrard left, the man strolled across the street into the store. Only the perpetrator knew the details of what happened next. But several witnesses reported three shots fired during a struggle between Harry and the intruder. Then the shooter calmly returned to his car and drove off (in no particular hurry).

When police officers responded to calls, they found Harry dead on the sidewalk from a single gunshot wound that passed side to side through the chest. Three bullets were found at the crime scene. All were probably somewhat distorted … two had embedded into wood while the fatal bullet had fractured ribs on both sides of Harry’s body.

Officers recorded descriptions of the killer from several witnesses. A farmer delivering produce to a grocery story near the pharmacy had the best look. He drove up just in time to stop while the shooter returned to his car. He sensed that something was wrong and made a point of getting a good look at the man. Still, those accounts provided no outstanding traits to focus on: slender, somewhat tall, clean shaven, and wearing muted gray clothes … including a gray tweed cap that obscured his hair color.

They struck potential gold with the getaway car, however. First of all, an alert filling station attendant had recorded the license plate number and gave the specific model as a “Willys 77.” More to the point, it didn’t require a pro or a car buff to see that the vehicle was quite different from the ordinary. Designed as an inexpensive Depression-era auto, the Willys was over a foot shorter and five or six inches narrower than anything else on the road. Witnesses particularly noted its unusually narrow windshield, along with other distinctive features.  

Willys 77. Willys-Overland Sales Brochure.

Also, despite its low price – lowest on the market for a new car – fewer than 22 thousand had been sold. Thus, the very next day, Spokane police learned that the car had been stolen in Everett, Washington on July 21st. Also, someone burglarized a garage that night, taking an old typewriter and the license plates used on the Willys. Everett officials had a prime suspect, whose photo was shown to the witnesses in Spokane. The results were inconclusive, with some saying yes, maybe; others being not so sure. Significantly, the farmer who had obtained the best view was among the doubters.

Nevertheless, with nothing else to go on, officials issued a murder warrant for the suspect on August 3rd. However, nine days later, they learned that he had been on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico when the killing occurred. That same day, Spokane police located the Willys, which had been wiped clean of fingerprints and abandoned in a rented private garage. The owner had rented it on July 23rd to a man who gave his name as “G. Jacobsen.” She thought he was “about 30” years old. Thus, officials had another description, but still no actual suspect.

Ultimately, the vigilance and intuition of Leslie M. Carroll, Deputy Prosecutor for Spokane County, broke the case. A few days before the Everett suspect was eliminated, Carroll had handled a routine burglary case. One Tom Eskridge (alias George Gregory, alias George Edwards, alias John Lowry) had been arrested in Boise, Idaho, while trying to pawn a typewriter stolen from a school about fifteen miles south of Spokane. Eskridge did not resist extradition and readily chose to plead guilty rather than undergo a trial. In fact, when there was some delay in his processing, Tom basically told the prosecutor to “get with it.” The judge imposed a stiff fifteen-year sentence after learning that the burglar already had a prison record.

Carroll surely knew about the frustrating, unsolved Phillips murder, although he does not seemed to have been directly involved. After the case fell apart on August 12th, Carroll explored a new possibility. We may infer his thoughts: “That guy Eskridge generally fits the description, and he left town shortly after the murder. Then he was sure anxious to get out of our jail and on to prison. I wonder why?” Officers showed Tom’s mug shot to the rental garage owner. She declared, “That’s the man.” The investigation had new life.

Nine days later, an article appeared in the Spokane Chronicle. Anyone who had bought or found a .38-caliber pistol, “possibly a Smith & Wesson or Colts,” between July 30 and August 4 should notify authorities right away. It might be the weapon that murdered Harry Phillips. They had clearly not yet sent the three slugs found at the crime scene to criminologist Luke S. May. He would have had little trouble identifying the make and model. The very next day, newspapers reported that police had received a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. They were sending it to criminologist May in Seattle. But the revolver was not the murder weapon.

Three weeks passed with no further mention of the Phillips case in the newspapers. Behind the scenes, however, police were busy adding to their case. They now knew that Tom had rented an apartment less than a block away from the garage. He had been accompanied by a woman, and they registered as Tom Jacobs and wife. Despite much effort, she was never tracked down, or even identified. They also found a pawnbroker who had bought the old typewriter stolen in Everett. Tom had used yet another assumed name for that. However, despite all the effort, they never did recover the murder weapon. (We don’t know how many weapons May examined for the case.)

Tom Eskridge.
Spokane Chronicle
(September 14, 1935).

 Finally, on September 14th, officials felt they had enough and issued a warrant charging Tom Eskridge with the murder of Harry Phillips. Thomas T. Eskridge was born around 1905 in eastern Virginia. His parents separated not long after that, and the mother moved the family to eastern Oregon. His mother remarried in the fall of 1919 and they were living in Yakima, Washington in 1920. After that, Eskridge disappeared from available sources for almost a decade, until we find him listed as a glazier in the 1929 City Directory for Santa Barbara, California. During that gap, he may well have compiled a criminal record. However, given his propensity for fake names, we’ll never know for sure.

In any case, sources show that, in 1930, he spent three months in the Salt Lake City jail for robbery. Not long after he got out, he and an accomplice held up a grocery store there. Soon caught, Tom received a prison sentence of five to twenty years. The judge then paroled them with the proviso that they identify out-of-state “custodians.” He chose a brother-in-law living in Ojai, California.

Six months later, Tom was arrested for burglaries in nearby Ventura, California. He received a five to fifteen year prison sentence. He served several months in Folsom prison, but was then transferred to San Quentin. He was released in June 1935 and headed north to Everett, Washington. (We don’t know why.) There, he was believed to have committed several burglaries, along with stealing the Willys. Tom then continued on to Spokane.

Tom’s defense in court was feeble, to say the least. His attempt at an alibi was easily refuted. His lawyers then tried to raise “reasonable doubt” based on the witnesses who had erroneously fingered the suspect from Everett. None of that worked and he received a life sentence. After a failed escape attempt in 1936, Tom fell to studying ways to use loopholes in the legal system to get out of prison. The last of several appeals was denied on June 14, 1965. There’s no record that he died in prison, so he might have finally been released (or escaped). He then perhaps chose to live under an assumed name.

After Harry was shot and killed, Mamie (McFadden) Phillips became a clerk at a JC Penneys department store in Spokane. She never remarried and stayed with the company until her retirement around 1956. Her sons both married and gave her a total of five grandchildren before her death in the spring of 1966.
                                                                               

References:  Patrick R. Foster, Bill Tilden, Willys: The Complete Illustrated History 1903-1963, Enthusiast Books, Pepin, Wisconsin (2016).

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

“[Phillips Murder, Background and News],” Daily Olympian, Olympia, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Seattle Times, Spokane Chronicle, Pullman Herald, Colfax Gazette, Washington; Idaho Statesman, Boise, Idaho; Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Salt Lake Tribune, Utah (June 1910 – November 1963).

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Murder At The Haven

Every life tells a story. That tale gains extra poignancy when it’s cut short by an untimely death. Such was the case for E. D. “Spike” Hennessey, shot to death in the summer of 1930. There was also a sad kind of irony in his story.

Edward D. Hennessey was born around 1873 about fifteen miles west of New York City, in New Jersey. His father, born in Ireland, was originally a blacksmith but had switched to carpentry by 1900. At that time, the family lived in lower Manhattan, near the entrance/exit to the Holland Tunnel. Around two years later, Spike was in Aberdeen, Washington. Records suggest that his oldest brother had a job in the area with the Northern Pacific Railway. 

Aberdeen Shipyard, 1901. Wikipedia.

Aberdeen, platted in 1884, had enjoyed steady success with an economy based on salmon fisheries and timber. Schooners – many of them locally built – hauled lumber and canned fish up and down the coast. Then, in 1895, a railroad spur was completed into town, igniting a boom. Soon, Aberdeen had a half dozen sawmills, three canneries, and two shipyards. Also, besides the usual array of saloons, the town had two theaters. Spike found work as a longshoreman.

In the summer of 1903, Hennessey married Cora Lee Ray. Born in Virginia, Cora gave her occupation as “singer,” but did not list her employer. Some time in the following two years, the couple moved to Tacoma, where Spike continued to work as a longshoreman. Starting around 1915, he served two years as a deputy sheriff assigned to the local Water Department. After that, he went back to work on the Tacoma docks.

Around 1929 or 1930, Spike and Cora began operating a tourist camp about twelve miles south of Tacoma on what was called the “Mountain Highway.” The road was a primary route between the cities on Puget Sound and Mount Rainier National Park. After decades of physically demanding labor, Spike had entered the small business class, a fine instance of upward mobility for a first-generation American.

The Roaring Twenties had seen explosive growth in “auto tourism,” as more and more families acquired cars and took to the road. Cities and towns soon began offering public spaces to attract travelers to local businesses. Features ranged from bare-bones camping spots to elaborate facilities with showers, cooking grills, recreational equipment, and more. Some even offered cabins for those who didn’t want to bother with a tent. (Motorhomes as we know them were then almost all custom built and far too expensive for the average family.)

The Hennesseys’ venture benefitted from another trend that developed around the middle of the decade: A drastic switch from public to private ownership. (The reasons were complex, and beyond the scope of this blog.) Thus, Spike and Cora were able to rent and operate what they called “Fir Haven.” It’s unclear if they had cabins on the property, or only offered camping spots. They did have a gas station, and Cora prepared food at an attached diner.

Prospects seemed bright because Rainier Park was, even then, a very popular tourist destination. And no one really knew that the country was entering the Great Depression. In 1930, most people thought they were in just another recession … which would soon pass. In fact, with money tight, even more tourists might choose an inexpensive auto vacation over a train and hotel getaway. But sadly, selfish and violent greed robbed Spike and Cora of their dream.

Mount Rainier, 1930. National Park Service.

One of the two thieves was Caulie Avera. Born March 21, 1903 in southwestern Georgia, the young man was working on his father’s farm near Moultrie, Georgia at the time of the 1920 census. Some records suggest that he joined the Army around 1925. However, perhaps because of his later status as a deserter, we know very little about his military career. We do know that at some point he began serving in the U.S. Army Tank Corps.

Avera’s partner in crime was George A. Weyrauch. George was born December 25, 1898 in eastern New Jersey. At the time of the 1900 census, the family lived in Hoboken, along the Hudson River. George was a mere infant, of course. But in a sad irony, Spike Hennessy – his future victim – was then living and working about three miles away, across the river in lower Manhattan. Surely neither knew the other existed, but they would meet, tragically, thirty years later on the other side of the continent.

When Weyrauch signed up for the draft in 1918, he was working as a cook at a psychiatric hospital in eastern Long Island, New York. Like Avera, we know very little about Weyrauch’s military service. Still, transport records indicate that he was in the U.S. Army in 1926. Also, at some point, he too began serving in the Tank Corp. He and Avera were both stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington in the summer of 1930.

News reports never said why the two men decided to desert. Part of Fort Lewis extends all the way to the Mountain Highway, so the two probably already knew about the Hennessey place. They drove up late on the evening of June 30, 1930, entered the diner, and ordered sandwiches. After the two finished, they walked to the cash register. As soon as Cora opened the register, the men drew weapons and waved her away so one could scoop up all the money. When she protested, the other bandit hit her with his gun, severely cutting the side of her head. Cora staggered and screamed.

Spike must have been suspicious of these late-evening customers, because he had already armed himself with a revolver. He now burst in through the back door and fired two shots at the robbers. The crooks answered with a hail of bullets. Hit twice, Spike died almost instantly. A third slug struck Cora, shattering her hip. The bandits leaped into their car and sped away, taking about $25 in loose change with them. Cora couldn’t get up, so it’s not clear who called the sheriff’s office. She gave officers a detailed description of the attackers while they waited for an ambulance. That information was quickly transmitted to area law enforcement.

The next morning, George Weyrauch and Caulie Avera failed to report for roll call at Fort Lewis. A search of their footlockers highlighted the ominous fact that their service weapons, .45-caliber automatic pistols, were also missing. At this point, someone put the pieces together and showed Mrs. Hennessey photos of the two soldiers. She immediately and vehemently identified Weyrauch as the man who had shot her and Spike. She was less certain about Avera … but even that showed “a close resemblance.”

An intense manhunt began for the two men, who were now wanted as murder suspects as well as deserters. Oddly enough, the killers seem to have borrowed and then returned the car they drove. Nothing like it was reported stolen or found abandoned around the area. The active search extended as far as Boise, Idaho, but then went dormant for eight months.

Later testimony revealed that George Weyrauch made his way to Florida, then backtracked to Texas. There, he and another man stole a car. Texas authorities lost their trail when they fled west. Finally, in March 1931, an alert traffic cop in San Jose, California spotted the license plate and arrested the two. Weyrauch gave authorities a fake name at first, but soon pled guilty to auto theft and was sentenced to a year and a day at McNeil Island federal prison.

At some point, officials also discovered that he was a prime suspect in the Hennessey murder. Thus, in early April, Weyrauch was transferred from the penitentiary to stand trial in Tacoma. As soon as she saw him face-to-face, Cora exclaimed, “That’s the man!” She then declared that she had “seen his face every day for more than a year.”

Criminologist Luke S. May logged his “State vs Weyrauch” firearms case about this time. We may thus infer that authorities had recovered the suspect’s weapon, but available newspaper reports do not explicitly say so. At the very least, he would have been able to testify that the death bullets came from an Army standard-issue Colt .45-caliber automatic.

Colt .45-Caliber Automatic. U.S. Army Photo.

In any case, the testimony of Spike’s widow, delivered from a stretcher brought into court, would have surely sealed the State’s case. Weyrauch tried to throw all the blame on his accomplice, and even claimed that he himself had not fired a shot. Unimpressed, the jury found him guilty of first degree murder. They apparently had a long discussion about the punishment. Finally, on May 17, 1931, they recommended a life sentence.

Another fifteen months passed. Later, authorities learned that Caulie Avera had spent about half that time in Buhl, Idaho. It’s not clear where he went after that. However, in August 1932, he was captured in Moultrie, Georgia, where he had gone to visit his parents.

Brought back to Tacoma for trial, he was able to arrange a plea deal for a reduced charge of second degree murder. Prosecutors wanted to avoid the expense of another trial. Moreover, Cora Hennessey’s condition had apparently deteriorated to the point that she might not be fit to appear in court. Without her testimony, authorities feared they would not be able to get a conviction.

Despite the lesser charge, Avera also received a life sentence. He and Weyrauch were in the Washington State Penitentiary at the time of the 1940 census. In 1947, Avera benefitted from a change in Washington law that allowed the parole board to reconsider his sentence. He was released, and back in Georgia by 1951. About four years after that, he married a widow with three grown children. The couple had no children of their own. Caulie Avera died in 1978. Weyrauch did not immediately benefit from the new law in 1947. He was, however, released in 1950 or shortly thereafter. In 1953, he married a widow with two children. They too had no children of their own. George Weyrauch died in 1987.

As indicated above, the widow’s health had steadily declined. Cora Lee (Ray) Hennessey died March 6, 1935. With her gone, and no children to carry on, no one was there to protest the cancellation of the killers’ supposed “life” sentences.

                                                                               
References: “[Hennessey Murder Related News],” Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Bellingham Herald, Seattle Times, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland, Statesman Journal, Salem, Oregon; San Francisco Chronicle, California (July 1, 1930 – July 9, 1947).
Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, Encyclopædia Britannica, Chicago, Illinois (2012).
Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969.
Jennifer Ott, “Aberdeen – Thumbnail History,” Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (November 2, 2009).
Terence Young, Heading Out: A History of American Camping, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York (2017).

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Tragedy on the 4th of July

Seattle began its 1924 Fourth of July celebration around 10 o’clock in the morning, with a flyover of four airplanes piloted by veterans of the World War. That launched a parade of an estimated 5,000 members, headed by an “advance guard” of motorcycle policemen. The afternoon and evening programs were the usual mix of band concerts, singing, demonstrations, and (of course) speeches. They were to climax with “a grand pyrotechic display.”

The city was blessed with splendid weather, if perhaps a bit on the warm side, for its celebration. Drink vendors of all kinds, legal or not, surely did a fine business. Patrolman Amos J. Comer was not part of the advance motorcycle guard; he was just a regular beat cop. Comer was born February 22, 1878 in northwest Missouri. He married Sarah Elizabeth Worden in 1897. (She generally went by Elizabeth or “Lizzie.”) By 1902, the couple had three children – son Louis, and daughters Alta and Etta. Around 1906, the family moved to Seattle, where Amos found work as a teamster for a freight company. Ten years later, the couple would have another daughter, Ruth. 

Officer Amos J. Comer.
Officer Down Memorial.

Comer was commissioned as a Seattle police officer on January 1, 1912. He proved to be a steady and reliable patrolman. Not noted for any high profile cases, Amos handled his job with conscientious efficiency. In fact, a week before the Fourth, the police chief had assigned the patrolman to a squad of officers tasked with examining several key beats and recommending how police coverage could be improved.

On the Fourth, however, Comer would have been busy with normal duties: Breaking up fights, hauling drunks off to jail, and just generally getting people to tone down their festivities. Prohibition was in force, but no one paid much attention to that, not even the police.

Newspapers failed to report the exact time when the owner/operator of a black gentlemen’s club in the minorities’ district called the police. The best estimate suggests that it was about 9 o’clock in the evening. A disgruntled customer was disturbing their other patrons, but refused to leave. Could an officer lend his authority to resolve the problem? For some reason, the message passed along to Comer included the man’s description, but not his name.

As it happened, Officer Comer knew the man, Lee E. Moseley. He had appeared on Comer’s beat within the past month and Amos had made it his business to learn more about him. Moseley was a hard-core criminal, and had just completed a stretch in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla on a murder conviction.

Born in east-central Mississippi around 1883, Moseley left home some time after the summer of 1900. Ten years later, we find him at the prison in Walla Walla, serving a two-year sentence for robbery. His release date is unknown, but he was out by December 1913, when he stabbed a tailor in Tacoma. The victim, a prominent member of the local Japanese community, died two days later.

In a small historic footnote, Moseley’s defense attorney was also “colored,” becoming the first black lawyer to handle a murder trial in the state. They tried to make a case for self-defense, and Moseley even acted out, in court, the claimed attack on him. However, Moseley also had to admit on the stand that he had served time at California’s Folsom Prison and in a “correctional facility” in British Columbia (no dates reported). Moseley was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to ten years in prison. Thus, he was again in Walla Walla for the 1920 census, being released in June 1924.

On the evening of the Fourth, Moseley was playing craps at the gentlemen’s club … and losing steadily. Accounts varied somewhat, but all agreed that Moseley became surly and quarrelsome as his losses mounted. He ignored calls for him to calm down. Some said he then waved a revolver around and threatened to shoot anyone who touched him. Others said he did that only after the owner called police. Either way, many patrons left at that point.

The club was located in the northern part of the minorities’ district, only a few hundred yards southeast of the King County Courthouse. By the time Comer arrived and looked around inside, the troublemaker was nowhere to be seen. After a bit, the officer went back outside to check there.

News reports would say that Moseley “hid” while the officer looked around. That was probably true, but perhaps not in the normal sense of the word. Such a club would almost certainly have had a concealed bar where they served booze. Thus, Moseley was probably there having a drink. Once the coast was clear, he left the bar and started for the exit. The club cook followed, just to be sure he left. Moseley stepped out onto the sidewalk, where Comer immediately recognized him.

The last thing Comer needed was a touchy ex-con on his beat. But when the officer tried to get the black’s attention, Moseley drew the revolver and shot him twice. Comer collapsed, and Moseley began beating on him. Alarmed, the club cook rushed out to pull the attacker away. Before escaping down an alley, Moseley tried to shoot the cook, but the weapon misfired.

Hit in the chest below the heart, Comer survived emergency surgery but died the next day. His dying statement affirmed that the shooter was Lee Moseley. Other witnesses supported that identification. Two days after the shooting, officers were on the hunt in Tacoma, having traced Moseley’s movements that far. They arrested the fugitive at a rooming house around 2 o’clock on the morning of the 7th. He had a revolver under his pillow.

Because of Moseley’s previous murder conviction, prosecutors announced right away that they would ask for the death penalty. They relied upon Comer’s dying statement and the other supporting witnesses. The defense did not put the black man on the stand, nor did they call any other witnesses of their own. All they could do was highlight some inconsistencies in the stories told by the various prosecution witnesses. They hoped, at best, to avoid a death sentence. In this, they failed. The jury of seven women and five men recommended the death penalty.

The state Supreme Court rejected the usual appeal on December 8, 1925. Moseley’s defense began preparing an appeal to the governor. Then, on February 2, 1926, newspapers reported startling new evidence. A couple who had been staying in a second-floor room of the Bush Hotel, across the street from the club, claimed that they had witnessed the shooting. They said the shooter was a Filipino dressed in a sailor’s uniform. They were both white, so some kind of a “deal” seemed highly unlikely.

During this new furor, the state attorney general’s office contracted with criminologist Luke S. May for a firearms case that May logged as “State vs Mosely [sic].” Of course, the supposed eye-witness assertion had problems: Depending upon where their room was, they were at least 90 feet away from the action. Plus, they would have depended mostly upon dim street lights and business signs. How much could they actually see? Still, the story might cast “reasonable doubt” on the state’s case. 

Bush Hotel, ca 1925. Aiko Photographic Studio.

Thus, officials wanted more confirmatory evidence. And they apparently got it. Just under two weeks after the alternate story broke, the prosecutor told reporters that they too had new evidence that would leave “no doubt as to the justice of Moseley’s conviction.” He did not describe what they had, but May had surely confirmed that the black man’s revolver had been the death weapon. The governor denied a stay and Moseley was hanged on the morning of February 19, 1926.

Patrolman Comer’s widow, Lizzie, did her best to maintain the family after the tragedy. She worked at a succession of jobs before opening a Seattle restaurant in 1928 or 1929. Her three daughters were all working there in 1930. Son Louis had married about eight months after his father’s death, but was divorced at the time of the 1930 census. He was then living in northern Wyoming near where one of Lizzie’s brothers had a place. A truck driver, he never married again and seemed to move around between Wyoming, western Washington, and central California. Louis Comer died August 30, 1952 in Fresno, California.

Around 1937,  Lizzie had relocated her restaurant to Shelton, a small town about 16 miles northwest of Olympia. The daughters followed her there to work as waitresses and other help. However, in 1936, Etta married again … for the third time. She had had two sons by her second husband, but did not receive custody in the divorce. She and her new husband moved to Long Beach, California around 1938.

The other two daughters remained with their mother in Shelton. Alta had married in 1930, but was divorced by 1940. She remarried the following year, when she had taken on more responsibility for running the café. Lizzie apparently still did a lot of the cooking. Alta had no children with either husband. By this time, Ruth had been married twice. It’s not clear when she divorced her second husband, but she married yet again in 1941. She was granted a divorce in the spring of 1944 and apparently married a U.S. serviceman. Ruth married for a fifth time in 1959. Despite all those marriages, she never had any children of her own.

Sarah Elizabeth (Worden) Comer died April 26, 1963 in Shelton. Etta and her husband returned to Shelton about that time (perhaps because of that event). She and her sisters remained there until their passings: Alta May in 1977, Etta Alice in 1984, and Ruth Elizabeth in 1997.

In May 1998, Amos J. Comer was posthumously awarded the Washington Law Enforcement Medal of Honor.

                                                                               
References: Norma H. Clark, The Dry Years: Prohibition and Social Change in Washington, University of Washington Press, Seattle (1965, 1988).

“[Comer Murder Background and News],” The Olympian, Olympia; Tacoma Times, Seattle Times, Bellingham Herald, Washington (December 1913) – May 1998).

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

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An Immigrant Tragedy

A Luke May death case in the spring of 1923 came during a key period in the history of firearms evidence use. By then, private criminologist May had handled over thirty death cases that involved firearms. He had started his vast gun collection and could identify the make and model of most commonly-used firearms from the bullets they fired. In over a dozen cases, he was able to tie a specific gun to a death. About a year and a half before our current case, May described his approach to a newspaper reporter. The key, he said, were the microscopic marks in the bullets and the shells that were unique to a particular weapon … what we now call the “individual characteristics.”

A few months later, Professor Victor Balthazard at the Sorbonne, in France, published a technical paper on the subject. When suspect weapons are of the same make and model, he wrote, “One must resort to the study of the fine scratches” inscribed by a particular gun. In fact, the year 1922 was pivotal in the history of the technique. Among other milestones, Arizona courts ruled that such evidence was admissible, even in a capital case. Still, it was not until three years later that the general public in this country heard about it. That summer, The Saturday Evening Post published a long two-part article about the advance: “Fingerprinting Bullets: The Expert Witness.”

May’s case in 1923 illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of the technique. The dispute revolved around the family of Karl Kirsch. Born about 1880 in Hanover, Germany, Kirsch immigrated to the United States in 1903. He made his way to Seattle, where, in 1908, he married local girl Minnie Williams. Over the next seven years the couple had four children: Alice, Irene, Arthur, and Caroline. Karl started out as a common laborer. However, by 1918 he was operating a dairy farm about two miles from Hoquiam, Washington. Hoquiam is a logging and mill town on Grays Harbor Bay, about 45 miles west of Olympia. 

Kirsch Family, ca 1922. Family Archives.

Karl’s oldest daughter, Alice, was fourteen years old in the spring of 1923. She was tasked with minding the dairy cows in a nearby meadow. There, however, she attracted the attention of a middle-aged neighbor, Pedro Panichini.

Panichini was born around 1873, somewhere in Chile. He seems to have moved to the United States around 1901, or perhaps before. (The records are somewhat muddled.) From at least 1910 until after 1920, he worked as an unskilled sawmill laborer on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle. But in the spring of 1923, Panichini was living alone in a cabin near Kirsch’s place. (There is no record that he ever married.) He probably worked as a firewood cutter and bay fisherman.

The third player is this drama was Maximo Valverde Perez, who also lived nearby and may have worked part-time for Kirsch. Born in Mexico in 1885, he entered the U.S. as a farm worker in 1912. Six years later, he was living in Seattle and doing seasonal work at a fish cannery in Alaska. It’s unknown when he moved to the Grays Harbor area. In any case, he and Panichini did not get along, although Perez never said why.

Newspaper accounts were vague about Panichini’s behavior toward Alice, but it made her uncomfortable and she had complained to her parents. In the late afternoon of May 25, 1923, she, as usual, went out into the meadow to shoo the cows into the barn. Panichini appeared and began to follow her. Her mother was apparently watching and alerted Karl. Kirsch called to Perez for help and hurried out to confront the Chilean.

Matters quickly escalated to the point where Karl received a blow to the head, probably from the revolver Panichini had drawn. Kirsch and Perez tried to wrestle the gun away, and during the struggle, Panichini was shot fatally in the chest. Karl later said Perez had control of the weapon when shots were fired, but he had been dazed at that point … and Perez denied it.

Luke May received evidence for the case on May 31, the day authorities charged Perez with murder. He recorded: “One Imperial Arms Company 38 Calibre Revolver #A-1486 and one fired 38 calibre deformed lead bullet and two empty brass cartridge cases.” The package also included three unfired cartridges for the gun, “one cartridge having the primer slightly dented, apparently a miss fire.” 

Imperial Arms .38 Caliber Hammerless.
Classic Firearms Sales Site. 

 The brand name on the weapon was used by a large gunmaker in Connecticut for their line of cheap, low-quality hammerless revolvers. And, indeed, May found that the death weapon misfired twice before each successful test shot. Still, its individual traits were clear enough that he “was able to pick out the bullets from this revolver each time.” The same assertion could not be made for the actual death bullet, although he was satisfied that it had come from the submitted weapon. However, because of the deformation, he was only willing to testify that the bullet had been fired from the same make and model of revolver.

Luckily, that distinction mattered little when the case went to trial in July. The context – an older, nonwhite foreigner pestering an attractive white teenage girl – would have surely set a lenient tone, even though the accused was also a nonwhite foreigner. Perez was acquitted with virtually no notice in the larger regional newspapers. Some time after the acquittal, he left the state and disappeared from public records for seventeen years. Perez told the 1940 census taker that he’d been in western Nebraska in 1935. In 1940, he was staying with a married niece in El Paso, Texas.

Sadly, Panichini indirectly caused yet more trouble for the Kirsch family. Karl paid his estate for title to the Chilean’s rowboat. However, a neighbor who thought he had bought the entire estate felt it should include the boat. When Karl tried to retrieve the craft from the neighbor’s property, he was wounded by a shotgun blast. Charges were filed against the neighbor, but nothing further seems to have come of that. Karl died a bit over a year after the shooting.

With the main bread-winner gone, the family splintered. Alice married in late 1925, presumably with Minnie’s consent. The youngest daughter, Caroline, died the following year. Irene married in early 1927, with her mother attesting that she was 18 years old. She was, in fact, only a couple months over 17.

Both girls would marry three times. In fact, Alice was listed as already divorced in the 1930 census. She married a second husband in 1936, divorced him (date unknown), and then outlived her third. She died in 2006. Irene’s first marriage lasted less than two years; she divorced in March 1929. She married again in 1937, that husband passing away in the summer of 1967. She married again in early 1969, but died six years later.

Arthur would have been 19 at the time of the 1930 census. He was not at his mother’s home in Hoquiam at that time, and cannot otherwise be located. He wed in 1935, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1980. Mother Minnie (Williams) Kirsch remarried in 1934, but that husband died in 1956. She married again a little over a year later. He passed away in 1966, leaving her a widow again until her own passing in 1983.
                                                                               

References: Evan E. Filby, American Sherlock: Remembering a Pioneer in Scientific Crime Investigation, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland (2019).

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

“[Panichini Death News],” The Oregonian, Portland; (May 26, 1923 – August 17, 1923).

Ned Schwing, Standard Catalog of Firearms, Krause Publications, Iola, Wisconsin (2002).

Wesley W. Stout, “Fingerprinting Bullets: The Expert Witness,” The Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (June 13 & 20, 1925).

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A Fatal Blunder

To this day, the shooting death of Seattle police officer Fred Ivey on May 10, 1928 is described as an unsolved murder. Yet, eight months after his death, the probable killer was identified by a competent witness. The likely reasons for still calling it “unsolved” are instructive.

Fred Ivey was born March 13, 1879 in Missouri. When he was about twenty years old, the family moved to Granite Falls, Washington, a small town thirteen miles northeast of Everett. In 1909, he married Katherine Sybella Brown there. Four years later, they moved into Everett, where Fred worked as a power system operator and then served as town marshal for a couple years. Between 1911 and 1917, the couple had two sons and a daughter. In July 1917, Fred became an officer for the Seattle police department. He proved to be an effective and highly-respected patrolman.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m. on May 10th, a quick-witted citizen alerted Officer Ivey to the flight of an armed robber. The informant was Curtis E. “Jack” Howell, a (former?) private detective and deputy sheriff. Although the heads-up was justified, it would lead to tragedy.

Howell was born September 28, 1888 in New York City. He ran a detective agency for several years before catching the “flying bug.” He became proficient enough to open a flight training school in Richmond, California, backed by the [Glenn] Curtiss Aeroplane Company. Then a flying accident kept him out of the air for several months, so he moved to Fargo, North Dakota and started a new detective agency. When World War I began, Howell enlisted in the aero corp and was assigned to an aviation training base in Texas. However, he received a disability discharge in the spring of 1918. Records do not say whether or not he suffered another accident, or simply became ill. 

Curtiss Biplance ca 1911. Library of Congress.

Howell evidently spent the next several years in North Dakota and eastern Montana before moving to Seattle. He continued to promote aviation, but did not try to compete with freelance barnstormers, who now performed ever more dangerous stunts. Accounts show him in a wide variety of unrelated short-term jobs, a pattern that suggests he might have been working as an undercover private investigator. (For obvious reasons, he never said anything to confirm or deny this possibility.)

On the evening of May 10, Howell was in a drug store near downtown Seattle when a man we’ll call “Slippery Slim” entered. He barked, “Stick’um up!” and waved a pistol around. Howell had time to carefully note the robber’s appearance before he made off with about $50 from the cash register. After a momentary wait, Jack began to trail the crook. He persisted long enough for the fugitive to spot him and threaten him from a distance. Jack dropped back, then persuaded the driver of a passing car to help. Next, the thief boarded a streetcar headed north.

Luckily, Patrolman Ivey happened by just as Howell ran into a store to call for help. Flagged down by the driver, Ivey quickly joined the pursuit, which continued for several blocks. Frustrated, the officer had the driver pull alongside the streetcar so he could signal the conductor to pull up. For reasons that were never explained, the conductor ignored him and went on to his next scheduled stop. By then, the fugitive had noted the police uniform and hurried to the rear platform of the trolley. Ivey was fatally wounded in the ensuing exchange of gunfire. The shooter ran off into the darkness.

Despite a huge manhunt then and for days afterwards, the fugitive eluded capture. Between Howell and the other witnesses, “Slim” was described as: In his late twenties, about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, an estimated weight of 140 pounds, and a dark complexion. Police hired criminologist Luke S. May a few days after the shooting. He identified the murder weapon as a .38-caliber Colt automatic pistol. The trick, of course, would be to find it and its owner.

Sadly, armed robberies were all too common in Seattle at the time, although only those with special features made the newspapers. Thus, on July 15, a bandit shot it out with a pharmacist at a drug store about two miles west of the University of Washington. The crook hit the victim in the foot, but got away with just $30. The description of the shooter was said to be “identical” to that of the Ivey killer, Slippery Slim. His weapon was identified as a .38-caliber Colt automatic pistol, but the slug was apparently too distorted to try a specific match with the Ivey death missile. Still, the news article also noted that the same bandit had been implicated in a number of holdups around the city. In every case, Slippery Slim proved to have an uncanny ability to evade pursuit.

Over the next several months, police followed many possible leads, but none of them panned out. The shocking denouement came around noon on January 9, 1929. Two masked men tried to hold up the Barto Company, an insurance and small loans firm located near the southern edge of downtown Seattle. This proved to be a fatal miscalculation. The owner-operator, Thomas C. Barto, had lettered in baseball at the University of Washington (he graduated in 1914) and was an outstanding all-around athlete. He was also a highly skilled hunter, and known as a fine marksman with rifle, pistol, and shotgun.

Available records contain no systematic reconstruction of events in the office. We cannot even be sure when the shooting started. But most accounts agree that Barto and a male clerk retrieved weapons from desk drawers and scored multiple hits on the two crooks. There is also agreement that two female customers fled the scene and summoned police. An officer passing by on the street responded quickly enough to exchange shots with one bandit and block his escape. He was later commended for his swift action.

In any case, Barto ended up badly wounded and the clerk had been stunned by a blow to the head. The two would-be thieves, however, were both fatally wounded. There names were Robert Byrne and James M. Fare. Unlike Byrne, Fare had no known criminal record. More importantly, Jack Howell saw Byrne’s picture in the news, went to the funeral parlor, and positively identified him as the killer of Patrolman Ivey. The next day, officials conceded that Howell was probably right. They (and possibly Luke May) had perhaps traced some of Byrne’s underworld contacts and associates.

Robert Byrne was born in Chicago in 1899. His father died less than six months later. Around 1914, the mother moved the family to Seattle. Two years later, Robert was sent to reform school for robbing a grocery store. He displayed his slipperiness early, jumping from a moving train to escape. Authorities apparently didn’t bother to pursue him further.

At some point, Byrne returned to Chicago and lied about his age to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station. However, in the spring of 1918, postal inspectors tracked down Byrne and another youth as the robbers of a Chicago post office. Byrne was dishonorably discharged and turned over to civilian authorities. A judge sentenced him to six to ten years in Joliet Prison. He was back in Seattle by 1927 or 1928.

Byrne never regained consciousness after the Barto fiasco (neither did Fare). Thus, there was no way to verify, or disprove, that he really was Slippery Slim. Police did not ask Luke May to make any further bullet comparisons, so that too was a dead end. In fact, authorities chose not to incur the expense of further testing to see who was shot with what. (Some reports speculated that Barto might have been hit by a bullet from the clerk’s weapon.) 

Robert Byrne. Seattle Times.

In the months after Ivey’s murder, various organizations around Seattle had sponsored benefit events for the family: a play, dance, “smoker,” and even a boxing card. Katherine (Brown) Ivey also received what amounted to a lifetime job as a cleaning lady at the Seattle public library. She never remarried, retired around 1952, and passed away in 1968.

Her oldest son, Quentin, had a job as a typist at the King County jail while he attended the University of Washington. Later, he worked as a food company salesman, at least some of that time for the H.J. Heinz Company. The other son, Eugene, drove a truck for the Coca Cola Company, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Afterwards, Eugene joined the Seattle police department, retiring around 1976. Daughter Dolores worked as a beautician until her marriage to a shipyard craftsman in 1941.

Evidence suggests that Curtis “Jack” Howell continued to work as an undercover investigator. Although he appeared in various city directories, he listed no occupation for the 1940 U.S. Census, and called himself a “retired aviator” on his 1942 draft registration. He died from injuries suffered in an automobile accident in May 1944. His obituary mentioned only that he had once worked as a circus clown.

Thomas Barto recovered well enough from his wound to continue in the loan and insurance business for at least another thirty years. He died in May 1983 … at over ninety years old.
                                                                               

References:  “[Criminal Case Activity],” Seattle Times, Washington (May 11, 1928 – January 13, 1929).

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

Officer Fred Ivey, Behind the Badge Foundation – https://behindthebadgefoundation.org/rollcall/ivey-officer-fred/ [Downloaded January 9, 2021.]

“[Participant Background],” Oakland Tribune, Santa Maria Times, California; Chicago Tribune, Illinois; Eugene Guard, Capital Journal, Salem, Oregon; Fargo Forum and Daily Republican, Williston Graphic, Ward County Independent, Minot, North Dakota; Seattle Times, Seattle Star, Washington (March1914 – February 1988).

C. R. Roseberry, Glenn Curtiss, Pioneer of Flight, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York (1991).

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Victim of the Great Depression

The United States, indeed the entire world, faced a dire future in the summer of 1930. The stock market crash was now rippling through the economy, signaling the onset of the Great Depression. The number of workers without jobs would almost triple before the year was out, and get worse from there. Those losses hit logging and sawmill work particularly hard. The response to that pain would prove fatal for storekeeper and Postmaster Carl Krummel.

Carl Heinrich Krummel was born in late 1868, in western Germany. It is estimated that he married around 1892, and known that the couple had a son, Carl, Jr., in the spring of 1895. We cannot date anything specific during the next seven years. They spent some time in Chile, but we don’t know when or how long. It most likely began in 1895-1897, when German “colonies” in southern Chile were being strongly promoted. At some point, Krummel’s first wife died, but available records don’t say when.

Thus, in the summer of 1902, Carl and his son took ship from Chile to the U.S., landing in Seattle. Carl then found work as a bookkeeper at a Tacoma brewery. He completed their naturalization process in 1908. The following year, Krummel married Adele Utz, a Tacoma schoolteacher. She too was a German immigrant, having arrived in 1904. They had two children: Bernhard in 1911 and Elisabeth in 1919.

About a year before their daughter’s birth, Carl built or purchased a small general store in Adna, Washington.  A logging town located about six miles southwest of Chehalis, Adna was then a branch station on the Northern Pacific Railway. The store included a postal cubicle and, in November 1920, Krummel was appointed Adna Postmaster. 

Early Logging Site. Lewis County Historical.

Carl, Jr. clerked at the store some, but apparently disliked or proved unsuitable for that work. Before 1926, he began twenty years of work as a laborer for the Northern Pacific Railway. At the time of the 1930 Census, Carl, Sr. seems to have been grooming Bernhard to handle the business. They were together in the store when three young men tried to rob it.

One of the three was Matt Simila – actually, Toivo Matthew Simila (his parents were immigrants from Finland). Matt was born in late 1905 in a small coal mining town located a bit over twenty miles southeast of Tacoma. The family seems to have moved around some, but they had a farm about three miles south of Adna in 1920. The hamlet was the nearest source of supplies, so Matt came to know the Krummels fairly well.

Within a few years, Matt became a logger. He soon earned a name as a skilled “high climber” or “topper,” one the most dangerous specialities in an already hazardous line of work. The topper prepared the “spar tree,” the tall anchor pole for the overhead cables used to move raw logs around the cutting area. He had to go up with just climbing spikes and a rope around the trunk. He cleared all the lower limbs on the way up and then cut off the top. The sudden release of weight causes the pole to oscillate wildly and the topper must – literally – hang on for dear life. The job is not for the faint of heart, but it paid well.

By about 1927, he and fellow loggers Stanley Filipiak and Blaine McCoy had become pals. Filipiak was born in 1908 in another tiny town about 12 miles southwest of Adna. His father, a Polish immigrant, worked in a sawmill there. (The family often gave their name as “Phillips.”) His mother died in 1914, when Stanley was not yet six years old. Then, in 1927, his father died. That was probably about a year after Stanley became a logger.

John Blaine McCoy (he went by “Blaine” in the camps) was born in 1906 in West Virginia. About a year later, the family moved to a place about nine miles west of Adna. Sadness soon visited them, as Blaine’s infant brother died in September 1910. The mother died less than four years later. Blaine was essentially orphaned at that point. He was not with his father for the 1920 Census, and cannot otherwise be found.

McCoy had no known criminal record by 1930. Nevertheless, two or three years before, he had begun to badger Matt Simila to go into the robbery “business” with him. He probably reasoned that holding people up was far less dangerous than working timber, and would probably pay better. Also, it was he who bought two revolvers from a pawn shop on a visit to Portland in the summer of 1929.

After the spring of 1930, the three might have had part-time work, but news reports imply that they had no steady employment. That would make sense if they were caught in the early layoffs in the industry. Simila later told authorities that they had held up a service station a week before the confrontation in Adna.

Saturday July 5, 1930 was a fine summer day, clear and sunny. That evening, they went looking for some entertainment. They knew of two dances, one in Adna and one further south. As they cruised through Adna, they didn’t see much. In fact, Filipiak commented (more or less), “This place is dead. Be a good time to hit the store.”

McCoy quickly agreed, and even pushed the idea. Simila objected, mostly because he was sure Krummel would recognize him. Conceding the possibility, McCoy and Filipiak grabbed the two revolvers and headed for the store. McCoy wore a rudimentary mask. Matt positioned the car with the motor running for a quick getaway, then doused the lights.

The would-be robbers assumed their guns would cow Carl and Bernhard into submission. But “Hands up!” was hardly out of their mouths when Carl grabbed a .32-caliber pistol from under the counter and shouted something. Startled, the crooks opened fire. Two of their seven bullets hit Carl; either would have been fatal. Totally flummoxed, the two fled to the car, which raced away.

When they saw no pursuit, the three went on to the dance south of town. They were there when word came that Carl Krummel had been killed. The two shooters had already changed clothes, now they ditched the revolvers in a slough. Between running around half the night, and considerable moonshine, the three were sound asleep in their Centralia apartment when police came for them.

A witness had seen their car drive slowly back and forth through Adna shortly before the shooting. And, as noted above, it was the only vehicle moving in town at the time. Officials broadcast the description all around the area and a patrolman found it parked near the apartment building. The manager explained who normally used the car and their appearance generally matched what Bernhard had been able to tell police. (The son had dived for cover after the shooting started.)

Simila cracked first, after two days of steady interrogation. He outlined their activities that night and even led police to where they had tossed the weapons. The other two finally gave in too, and generally agreed with Simila’s account. McCoy, however, claimed he had fired because a bullet from Krummel’s gun had “whizzed past his ear.”

Officials brought criminologist Luke S. May into the case within a day or so of the attack. He quickly identified which of the revolvers had been the death weapon. He also found that Krummel’s pistol had not been fired. It even had a bit of undisturbed rust in the barrel. Later, McCoy and Filipiak would not, or perhaps could not, say which of the guns each had used.

The trial was rather straightforward. But then one juror refused to budge from a first-degree murder conviction, and possible death sentence. The others were swayed by the fact that the shooters had become motherless at a “tender age.” (The fact that Elisabeth was made fatherless at the age of ten somehow didn’t count.) After a long consultation among the legal teams and the judge, the three were “allowed” to plead guilty to a second degree murder charge. They all received life sentences.

Despite that, Simila was out before 1940, had a job in Walla Walla, and was learning to fly. He later became a flight instructor and airport manager. In 1948, he married a divorcee with two children. He died in 1972 in Pacific County, Washington (near the mouth of the Columbia River).

Filipiak was free and living back in Lewis County when he registered for the draft in October 1942. He married about five months later. After that, he operated a barber shop, first near the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula, then in Longview, Washington. He died there in February 1985.

McCoy was also free, living in Centralia, when he registered for the draft in October 1942. He got married two years later, while still employed as a logger. John Blaine McCoy died young, when he was just 47 years old.

For several months after the murder, Mrs. Adele Krummel served as Acting Postmistress at Adna. She soon – perhaps within a matter of months – sold the store. Carl, Jr. got married about seven months after the murder and the couple moved into Tacoma. He continued to work for the Northern Pacific for over a decade. They had a daughter in 1932, but she died after just a few months. They do not appear to have had any more children.

Bernhard got married in 1936. More ambitious and talented, he went to Harvard Business School and then worked for a large national accounting firm for at least twenty years. They had a daughter in 1939. Available records do not say whether or not they had any more children.

Daughter Elisabeth earned degrees in social work and served as a program manager for the YWCA in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. In 1953, she married civil engineer and surveyor James Carey. They had two children (in 1955 and 1957), both born in Washington state. Thus, widow Adele (Utz) Krummel could at least cherish three grandchildren before she died in February 1959.
                                                                               

References:  Edward Echtle, “Carbonado — Thumbnail History,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington  (January 24, 2018)..

“[Krummel-Related News],” Daily Chronicle, Centralia, Seattle Times, Chehalis Bee-Nugget, Bellingham Herald, Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, Longview Daily News, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland (February 1927 – February 1985).

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

David Tock, German Immigration and Adaptation to Latin American, Senior Thesis, Honors Program, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia (1994).

Elmus Wicker, The Banking Panics of the Great Depression, Cambridge University Press, New York, New York (1996).

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