The Mobility Murder

By the summer of 1925, the “Roaring Twenties” were in full swing. Despite Prohibition, people craved novelty, excitement, and freedom. The automobile craze made one kind of freedom possible, with Ford Motor Company selling Model T’s almost as fast as they could build them. The number of cars on the road had doubled since 1920, to over 16 million registered. Yet with all that, many millions more did not own a car and didn’t even know how to drive.

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.

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.

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). .

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Death On A Sunday Afternoon

May 20, 1934. Sergeant John Donlan of the Seattle Police Department looked forward to a relaxed Sunday off. Plenty of time to peruse the newspaper, followed by a restful afternoon nap. He could not know that one of his major investigations would come full circle to end in tragedy.

But life was good, and perhaps the case would provide a fitting close to his long career. Donlan could retire in a couple years, and he had a good nest egg to go with his police pension. His wife and daughter had gone off to visit friends in Olympia. His only “honey-do” was to turn on the oven at 5 o’clock to start cooking a nice leg-of-lamb for a late supper.

Comfortably dressed, including loose house slippers, Donlan took his time reading the newspaper. There had been a huge, costly fire at the Chicago stockyards. In and around Seattle, sheriff’s deputies had seized about fifty illegal slot machines. At some point, he dozed off, comfortably warmed by a rich purple lounging robe.

Sergeant John Donlan.
Seattle Times (May 21, 1934).

John Sylvester Donlan was born January 27, 1870 in New York City. The family moved to Washington around 1877. He married in early 1895 and the couple had a daughter, Lillian, about nineteen months later. For a time, he drove a laundry truck in Seattle, as well as playing in a band. Donlan joined the Seattle Police Department in 1904. Despite his minimal education and lack of formal police training, he became an effective member of the force. Known as a dogged investigator, he nevertheless showed compassion for the down-and-out people he encountered on his beat.

In 1908, Donlan passed the civil service exam to be eligible for promotion to sergeant. However, despite several commendations, he had to wait a long time. One wonders if that was because he was a clean cop on a force that was sometimes anything but. He was finally promoted to sergeant in January of 1919. Before and after he made sergeant, Donlan suffered from the political machinations in the department and the city government.

On one occasion, he submitted a report on what he suspected was the construction of a gambling den and speakeasy. Somehow, that report did not make its way to the police chief (or the mayor, apparently). Then the mayor learned about the problem from other sources. After a tour, which included the chief and two other city officials, the mayor ordered the chief to immediately reassigned Donlan to another district. They soon had to backtrack when the “phantom” report came to light.

An “old school” cop, Donlan relied on an encyclopedic memory for criminals and cases. Thus, he kept few written notes, making it difficult to tell when he began to dig into the “Muggles Mob.” Back then (and still today, in some quarters) the term “muggles” meant marijuana. The “Mob” appeared to be a loose band of youthful burglars, 17 to 20 years years old. All seemed to be solo operators who specialized in daytime or early evening hits. They also dropped butts from the reefers they smoked to bolster their courage while they cased a possible target.

When they got together, it was mostly to smoke muggles and brag. They would also gab about various entry methods,  how to insure that nobody was home, and (probably) where to fence their loot. The informal structure made it difficult to pin down who might be a “member.” Still, Donlan knew several likely names, and Eddie Griffis (sometimes rendered as Griffiths) was on his list.

Charles Edward Griffis was born in Vancouver, Washington on February 17, 1914. His parents divorced in 1917 or 1918, then his father remarried in May 1919. Eddie displayed a wild streak early on, starting with the theft of materials from an elementary school supply room. At the age of nine, he learned how to “earn” an “allowance” by shoplifting. Three years later, his stepmother died. All through the period before about 1932, he was in and out of a reform school or the state reformatory. By around 1933, he seems to have become a skilled daytime burglar.

Eddie Griffis.
Seattle Times (November 22, 1934).

Obviously, a daylight thief can thoroughly search a house without using a flashlight, which would arouse suspicion. But the intruder must do his (or her) “homework” … making sure the house is empty. Griffis took up a hiding place near the Donlan home shortly before 4 o’clock. With the family car gone, he figured the coast was clear, but still watched long enough to smoke at least one reefer. At that point, Donlan was surely settled into his nap, so Eddie would have seen no activity.

Griffis used his “good luck” jimmie to force open a basement window. After a cursory search there, he started up the stairs to the ground level. And that’s where matters came unstuck. For the sergeant had heard something and faced the intruder as soon as he stepped off the stairs. Griffis later claimed that Donlan immediately recognized him and said, “I’ve been looking for you, Eddie, for jobs just like this.” Then Donlan tried to reach a closet where his service revolver was. Griffis moved closer and shot him three times.

Griffis then bolted from the house and hurried back to his rooming house. He had told his landlady that he was a jeweler’s apprentice, in case she happened to see any of his loot around. Now he said he had to go out of town, and paid a month’s rent in advance. He fled Seattle, throwing his weapon in Lake Washington on the way out.

That evening, about 9:30, the sergeant’s wife and daughter got home, found the body, and immediately called the police. At the time, private criminologist Luke S. May was acting as Chief of Detectives for the Seattle Police Department. He had agreed to take the temporary position because he saw it as his public duty. May arrived at the crime scene just as two regular patrol cars pulled up.

Then and the next day, they found four important clues, besides the body: an empty shell casing, the jimmied window, a clear footprint near that window, and a muggles butt where the intruder had hidden. May had the entire window casing taken to his private lab so he could take microphotographs of the tool marks left by the jimmie.

The shell casing and two bullets from Donlan’s body allowed him to identify the murder weapon as a 7.65 mm Ortgies semi-automatic pistol loaded with .32-caliber ammunition. The Ortgies (named for the designer, Heinrich Ortgies) was made in Germany. Although production ran for only five years (1919-1924), a fair number had been exported to this country. Ironically, police later discovered that Griffis had stolen the weapon during an earlier burglary. The unusual weapon was a key element when investigators began to question suspects and underworld contacts.

Ortgies 7.65 Semi-Automatic.
Gun Collectors' WebSite.

As could be expected, the department went all out in pursuit of the cop-killer. After many false leads, tips put them on the trail of Edward Griffis. Learning that he had left town on the very evening Donlan had been shot, they surmised that they were on the right track. Police units all along the Pacific Coast received a photo of Griffis, a description of the murder weapon, and an image of the jimmie tool marks.

Griffis did head south, after a couple weeks in Everett. He spent some time in Portland and then in Oakland, before moving on to Los Angeles. It’s unknown how many burglaries he committed along the way. In late June, Griffis made a return trip to Oakland. There, he and an accomplice pulled off a series of armed robberies. The other man was soon caught. However, he identified his partner only as “Eddie,” so Griffis’ role in the crimes was not known until later.

Griffis managed to stay out of sight in July. Then, key events began to happen fast. First, Portland police called to say that the suspect tool marks had been found at a local burglary. (There may have been more, but reports are a bit confused.) Then police in Los Angeles arrested Griffis in connection with an armed robbery. He used an alias, but his resemblance to the man wanted in Seattle drew extra police attention. They quickly checked bullets from Griffis’ weapon against the Donlan murder slugs. That, of course, drew a blank. Then officials found several local burglaries that had tool marks from Griffis’ jimmie.

Faced with the evidence against him, Eddie confessed and was sent back to Seattle. A jury at the required murder trial recommended a life sentence rather than the death penalty. Griffis was unfazed, because underworld sources had him convinced he’d be out in seven to ten years.

The fact that he’d killed a policeman negated that, however. When the incarceration stretched out to over 14 years, Griffis decided “enough was enough.” He escaped while being allowed outside the walls as a trusty. Caught after a month on the run, he tried to tunnel out in the summer of 1949. Thwarted in that attempt, he walked away from an outside work detail in the fall of 1952. He was captured in less than three weeks.

In the spring of 1954, a juror from the original conviction began agitating for his parole, saying he had “paid his debt to society.” At that point, the widow Donlan was still alive and the plea was denied. However, Mrs. Donlan died that summer. It’s not clear if daughter Lillian, who had married during the war, even followed parole board activities. Thus, Griffis was a free man by about 1958. He married three years later, but that lasted less than ten years. Charles Edward Griffis died in 1992, in Seattle.
                                                                               

References: Christopher T. Bayley, Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, Washington (2015).

“[Donlan – Griffis News],” Seattle Times, Bellingham Herald, Spokane Chronicle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon; Oakland Tribune, Los Angeles Times, California (June 1908 – April 1954).

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

Stuart Whitehouse, “Death of a Policeman,” Master Detective Magazine, New York, New York (October 1954).

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The Fog of War? No, Politics.

The town of Kelso, Washington simmered going into the summer of 1925. Not the weather – daily highs were a pleasant 65-70º – but politics. The infighting became so widespread and contentious that one would need a “program” to keep track of the names. All of that befogged the search for who really murdered newspaper editor Thomas Dovery

Kelso, 1925. Washington State Historical Society.

Logging and lumber were the economic lifeblood of Kelso, located just over 60 miles due south of Olympia. Beyond the products themselves, all those loggers and mill workers fueled a booming demand for booze and female “companionship.” Prohibition was in full force, yet the Roaring Twenties were also in full roar. As usual, payoffs to protect the illegal trade lurked just beneath the surface, revealed by periodic exposés.

Thus, a reform mayor took office at the beginning of 1925, and immediately got into a huge fight with the City Council. Several councilmen were suspected of accepting bribes from bootleggers and speakeasies. Heated arguments followed and the mayor finally initiated recall campaigns against five councilmen. They countered with a recall petition against him, as well as other charges that briefly put the mayor in jail. With city government at a standstill, a compromise was (reluctantly) worked out. The mayor would not fight the recall election if the five councilmen would resign.

On June 4, Kelso had a mostly-new City Council, which then selected a mayor. This “settled” the matter administratively, but only intensified the unrest that seethed just below the surface. Reform efforts continued through what we would now call a political action committee (PAC). Thomas Dovery, the editor/owner of the Kelso-based Cowlitz County News, strongly supported the deposed mayor and was a zealous advocate for reform. Two weeks after the town got a new mayor, he attended an evening meeting of the PAC. Minutes after he started home on foot, a pedestrian heard what he thought was a car backfire. He then found Dovery’s body on the sidewalk. The editor had been shot to death.

Thomas J. Dovery was born in May 1866, in Norway. The family immigrated to Canada when Thomas was about seven years old. A year later, they settled on a farm about 30 miles southeast of Green Bay, Wisconsin. With an early start, Dovery mastered English well enough to become a successful newspaper owner and editor. By 1905, he had operated several small-town papers in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The next year, Dovery bought farmland near Buhl, Idaho and moved his family there. Within a few years, he had a newspaper in that town and another in Twin Falls. He was known as “an aggressive political writer,” who “engaged in many political controversies.” After about ten years, he began to phase out his Idaho holdings and, in 1920, opened a general printing shop in Eugene, Oregon. Finally, near the end of 1923, Dovery traded that firm for the Cowlitz County News. He brought his aggressive and controversial style with him.

The unstable situation in Kelso absolutely exploded after the murder. Surely this had to be a political assassination! It didn’t help that the subsequent investigation discovered that the head of the water department had embezzled funds from his office. Another of Dovery’s crusades had been a demand that the water department’s books be audited. So, resources were diverted to trace that suspect’s movements on the day of the murder. For a time after the shooting, Kelso had an extra “government,” including one selected by the ex-mayor. In fact, the ex-mayor lodged a criminal conspiracy charge against the official city engineer. In retaliation, the ex-mayor was hit with a “malicious prosecution” indictment. At one point, the governor was asked to send troops to maintain order (he refused).

Meanwhile, a day or so after the shooting, the county sheriff hired criminologist Luke S. May to examine the only worthwhile clue they had. Not too far from the body, officers had found a .41-caliber Colt revolver. Newspapers described the weapon as an “old” or even “ancient” style, so it was most likely a Colt Model 1877 “Thunderer.” May first verified that the revolver was indeed the death weapon, and then began to laboriously trace its ownership. About a week after the shooting, further distractions came in the form of threatening letters to May and the sheriff.

With all the political tumult and acrimony, tracking genuine leads on the revolver went slowly. Finally, in late September, the state Attorney General appointed a special prosecutor to pursue the case. Ten days later, a headline read, “Luke May Finds Kelso Slayer.” The zigzag path began with the long-time owner of the revolver, a fireman at a Kelso mill. Several months before the murder, he had sold the old firearm to a twenty-year-old apprentice carpenter in Portland, Oregon.

Luke clearly established the links from there to the shooter, but answers to a couple questions did not make the news. Why did the youth, who was never in trouble (before or after), buy the gun? Perhaps he saw some historical value in the artifact. Next, why did he loan the gun to Bill Thompson, an ex-convict? He might not have known about the man’s criminal record, but what story did Thompson use to get the revolver? We don’t know.

The next stage was easy: News reports noted that Thompson was a “former jail acquaintance” of John W. Owens aka John W. Smith. Thompson loaned the gun to Owens, who said he had a big hit planned. Born in Ohio around 1872, Owens probably had a worse criminal record than Thompson, who had been in prison for burglary at least twice. However, we do not have many details because Owens had a fondness for phony names. His most recent known imprisonment was for complicity in the death of a Salt Lake City policemen during a robbery in 1907.

Owens was apparently released from the Utah State Penitentiary in late 1918. After that, he dropped out of sight. Later, officials learned that he’d been employed for over a year as a cook in Walla Walla, Washington. During that time, he was cited twice for disorderly conduct, but stayed out of trouble otherwise. He next appeared as a cook at a Kelso restaurant in 1925. There, he joined up with another ex-convict, Frank T. Hart.

Frank Thomas Hart was born March 11, 1894 in Portland, Oregon. Again we don’t know all the details of his criminal career. But between 1916 and late 1924, he spent: several months in the Nevada State Penitentiary, almost a year in San Quentin Prison, and six years in Folsom Prison. By 1925, he had a job in Kelso as a waiter or cook.

The two decided to hold up the payroll car of the largest lumber company in Longview, just west of Kelso. But that plan fell through for some reason. (Perhaps the managers heard rumors and beefed up their security.) Frustrated, they looked for someone else to rob. It was just bad luck that Dovery happened to come along. Neither ex-con ever consistently described how the robbery “went down,” but the editor ended up shot to death. It’s also unclear why the shooter left the revolver near the victim.

Afterwards, the two rented a car and drove to Portland. They then abandoned their ride, probably continuing their flight by train. Owens later said that he last saw Hart in Laramie, Wyoming. If so, he then doubled back, because his next known contact was in Moscow, Idaho. Owens stayed a week or so with a lady friend he had lived with before. Although he was long gone when investigators got there, they found an informant who could let them know if the lady heard anything from the fugitive. That finally provided a tip that Owens was headed for, or already in, St. Louis, Missouri. With the help of two members of May’s nationwide web of affiliate private detectives, police arrested him there on July 17, 1926.

Brought back to Kelso, Owens admitted that he’d been a part of the Dovery shooting as an accomplice of Frank Hart. But only one part of his story remained consistent: He insisted that he’d passed the revolver on to Hart and he had fired the fatal bullet. Hart wasn’t there to confirm or dispute that claim, but the jury convicted Owens of first degree murder anyway. He was sentenced to life (“99 years”) in the state penitentiary.

And so matters stood for almost eleven years. Then, in March 1937, one Fred Hall, described as a “race track follower,” was picked up in Columbia, South Carolina. He was routinely processed on a “drunk and disorderly” charge, paid his fine, and was released. As a matter of further routine, “Hall’s” fingerprints were transmitted to the FBI in Washington, DC. They quickly identified the man as Frank T. Hart, wanted on an open murder warrant in Washington state.

Frank T. Hart.
California Prison Records

Hart went on trial at Kelso in May. Owens was brought back from prison to repeat his claim that Hart had fired the fatal shot. The defense countered with two key points: First, Owens was the one who borrowed the death weapon. Second, a fellow prison inmate testified that Owens had admitted to him that he had shot Dovery. The jury deliberated only about ninety minutes before returning a “not guilty” verdict.

Owens was, of course, sent back to prison and seems to have died there some time before the spring of 1940. Hart went east, where he began dealing in race horses in Maryland, New York, and other states. However, around 1946-1948, he returned west to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and found a job as a cook. He died there in early 1956.

After the Owens trial in 1926, Dovery’s widow and two daughters moved to Tucson, Arizona. The daughters, both school teachers, never married. The widow died in 1956, the daughters in 1982 and 1985.
                                                                               

References: Rita Cipalla, “Kelso – Thumbnail History,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (October 21, 2019).

Commemorative Biographical Record of the Upper Lake Region, J. H. Beers & Company, Chicago, Illinois (1905).

“[Dovery - Hart - Owens Background], Dunn County News, Menomonie, Wisconsin; Minneapolis Journal, Worthington Advance, Minnesota; Twin Falls Weekly News, Twin Falls Times, Idaho Evening Times, Twin Falls, Idaho; Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake Telegram, Utah; Eugene Guard, Morning Register, Eugene, Oregon (February 1895 – December 1923).

“[Dovery Murder And Afterwards],” Seattle Times, Spokane Chronicle, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Daily Olympian, Olympia, Washington; Idaho Evening Times, Twin Falls, Idaho; Oregonian, Portland, Oregon (June 1925 – May 1937).

Jim Gentry, In the Middle and On the Edge: The Twin Falls Region of Idaho, College of Southern Idaho, Twin Falls (2003).

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

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Murder For A Pittance

The senseless death of youthful Richard Cadle in Seattle on February 18, 1938 can legitimately be blamed on the ravages of the Great Depression. The full story of the Depression is obviously far beyond the scope of this blog. Still, by the spring of 1937, the economy itself – the GDP – had returned to pre-Crash levels. However, unemployment remained high, over 15% … and that was key. Nearly one in six Americans could not find work, and that didn’t include those who had given up trying.

Cadle was actually somewhat better off than most. Richard Dale Cadle was born July 21, 1915 in Sheridan, Wyoming. His family was originally from Iowa, where Richard’s grandfather was a postmaster and successful attorney. A considerable block of the family had moved west around 1906. They settled in Sheridan, where Richard’s father and an uncle were clerks for the railway company. Just before World War I, the two brothers, now both with large families, resettled in Washington state. By 1920, they were living in Seattle, and were still there for the 1930 census.

Richard Cadle.
Seattle Times (February 18, 1938).

In late 1934, Richard married Lucille May Munday, and they had a daughter, Barbara Marie, a year later. At the time, at least ten close Cadle relatives and in-laws were listed in the Seattle City Directory. That included Richard’s grandmother, who had moved to Seattle after her husband died in 1920. He thus had a large family support group, and he and an older brother found work at the Community Garage, located about a half mile north of the King County Courthouse. Richard’s brother was an auto mechanic, while he was a “floor man.” Thus, Richard had to be there to greet customers who needed to drop their cars off before they went to work. That, unfortunately, made him a target.

The two who targeted him were James R. Lewis and Floyd O. Grable. Despite extensive research, very little is known about Lewis. He said he was born around 1911, in Oklahoma. However, his name is common enough that neither statement can be reliably verified. He also said he was in Clifton, Arizona, in 1935. The town’s economy was based almost entirely on nearby copper ore beds, so Lewis probably had a job in the mines.

Oddly enough, Grable was also working at an Arizona copper mining town in 1935. Floyd Oren Grable was born November 1, 1907 in Vallejo, California. The family was originally from Missouri, but claimed a remote homestead in Oregon, about 50 miles southwest of Pendleton, in 1891. Floyd’s father married the year before he was born, but available records do not say where. Another boy was born in Vallejo in September 1910. Sadly, Floyd’s mother mysteriously disappeared from their home on the evening of June 2, 1911 … and was never heard from again. Then, two years later, his father was killed in a train wreck about a mile north of Vallejo.

Floyd and his brother returned to live with their grandparents at the family homestead in Oregon. He enrolled at Oregon State College (now University) in 1926. The college yearbook for 1929 listed him as the Treasurer for the class that was to graduate in 1930. However, the Great Crash of 1929 ended his dream of a college education. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army and was assigned to duty in the Philippines. He returned to the U.S. in early 1932 and was discharged. After that, like so many others, he sought work where he could find it.

Thus, Floyd was in Miami, Arizona, in 1935, probably working in the copper mines there. And copper was doing well, although output was still below pre-Crash levels. Production increased the following year and the early part of 1937. Then, for reasons that are disputed even now, the U.S. suffered a recession within the Depression. That pullback wiped out the gains of the previous two years, as over a million production jobs were lost. In Arizona, copper companies laid off over a thousand workers in October alone.

There is no way to be sure that Grable or Lewis were still in Arizona when the recession hit. Nor do we know how the two met. However, they were together – and unemployed – in Mullan, Idaho, in early 1938. In February, they drove west into Washington. (It was never clear who owned the car.) They were almost totally broke. In Spokane, Floyd went off on his own and robbed a service station. He netted just $15, and ended up exchanging gunshots with the attendant as he fled. The two arrived in Seattle on February 14, but were unable to find work.

Four days later, down to perhaps ten cents between them, they desperately went on a robbery spree. Some time after midnight they held up a hotel office and then, about 3:30 in the morning, a garage attendant. They drove up to the Community Garage shortly before 5 o’clock, and asked Richard Cadle if they could use the telephone. When they entered the garage office, Grable waved his .32-caliber pistol and demanded money from the cash register. Richard handed over everything, all of $2.25.

Here, the stories diverge. Richard told police that the bandits were angry about the small take and ordered him to the back. He complied, although he feared they were going to shoot him. When he hesitated after a few steps, Grable shot him. Grable later claimed that he was just nervous and “the gun went off” accidentally. The robbers hurriedly fled. Richard, hit in the arm and stomach, staggered to the phone and called a friend at another garage two blocks down the street. The friend rushed him to the hospital, where Richard told his story to an officer before becoming incoherent from loss of blood.

Police had good descriptions of both robbers and their vehicle, and the two were soon captured. They immediately confessed and expressed the hope that the wounded man was going to be all right. But that was not to be. Despite blood transfusions from two of his brothers, Richard died the following evening.

Grable and Lewis went on trial for first degree murder on May 16. Prosecutors said they would not frame their case in terms of any specific penalty. They would leave the choice between the death penalty or life imprisonment strictly up to the jury. Since their clients had confessed, the defense sought mainly to insure that neither was sentenced to die. Thus, they emphasized how hard up and desperate the two were, something that would surely resonate with most members of the jury. They also pointed out that neither man had any known criminal record.

Newspapers gave no details of the testimony offered by criminologist Luke S. May. Police had found the death weapon in the bandit’s car, so its identity was not really in question. May probably verified that in passing, and then assessed the shooting scenarios – accidental or deliberate – based on the bullet trajectory and blood spatter evidence. The jury took about four hours to deliver the guilty verdict, and recommend life imprisonment for both.

In the summer of 1950, the state Parole Board recommended a “conditional  pardon” for James Lewis. The warden noted that he had performed “outstanding service” as a trusty in the maintenance department of the prison. The governor agreed, and his decree even called it an “earned pardon.” The news report said that it was “one of the few ever granted by any governor” for someone “convicted of first degree murder.” James returned to Texas with his father, who said he planned to “establish the son in the service station business.”

Floyd Grable.
The Beaver, OSU Yearbook, 1929.

Significantly, Floyd Grable is listed in the 1951 City Directory for Pendleton, Oregon, as a grower for a flower nursery. It’s not mentioned in any available newspaper, but it appears that Lewis’s good behavior earned his partner in crime at least a parole. Floyd got married in 1956 and lived in Pendleton until his death in 1997.

Richard Cadle’s widow, Lucille, lived alone with their daughter until early 1942. She then married Malcolm Andresen, an inspector for the Washington state highway department. Malcolm tried to enter the Army, but was apparently turned down. Lucille and Malcom had two sons, Larry and Donald. In 1953, seventeen-year-old daughter Barbara Marie Cadle married a young man in Seattle. One wonders if the bride perhaps felt some element of sorrow that her natural father wasn’t there to give her away. Lucille died in August 1988, after a long struggle with cancer.
                                                                                

References: Census records, city directory listings, and other genealogical sources were consulted extensively. Online sources included Ancestry.com and others.

“[Cradle-Gable-Lewis Background],” San Francisco Call, California; Arizona Republic, Phoenix, Arizona Star, Tucson, Arizona; Seattle Times, Washington (June 4, 1911) – (June 2, 1950).

[Cradle Murder and Trial]” Seattle Times, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Washington (February 18, 1938) – (May 21, 1938).

Brian Duignan (ed.), The Great Depression, Britannica Educational Publishing, New York, New York (2013).

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

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The Locked Room Mystery – Seattle Style

The mysterious death of Patrolman Charles O. Legate in March 1922 almost certainly arose from the graft and corruption that was pervasive in the Seattle Police Department at the time.

Sadly, Seattle has a long history of government corruption, police and otherwise. (Recent headlines suggest that the “legacy” may still be with them, despite periodic reform efforts.) Founded in 1851, the city soon became known “for the quality, quantity, and variety of its vice.” For many years, the city was wide open and simply collected license fees from brothels and gambling joints. Thus, since it was all legal, we perhaps shouldn’t call that political “corruption.” One history states that in the 1880s, collections from vice and saloons provided as much as 87% of the city government’s revenue.

Seattle, ca 1922. Museum of History and Industry, Seattle.

Eventually, however, many citizens came to resent the city’s wide open reputation. They demanded “reforms” so they could at least appear clean. They got their way (at times), but those efforts in no way reduced prostitution or gambling … and the lawful fees became under-the-table payoffs. Often, the beat cops were the collectors, passing a portion of their take up the chain of command. Sometimes, all the way up. Thus, when voters elected a reform mayor in 1892, a group of senior police officers showed up in his office to ask him how much he expected to get. He “indignantly” rejected the offer, but resigned in less than a year.

For decades, the situation went back and forth between wide open and (ostensibly) closed. Charles Legate joined the department full-time in the spring of 1907. The son of a Civil War soldier, Legate was born in 1872, in Illinois about thirty miles north of St. Louis, Missouri. The family farmed in southern Nebraska before Charles moved to Seattle in 1904. He was then a widower, his wife having died five years earlier. Legate worked as a trolley car operator before joining the police force. He remarried in 1909.

Thus, he was there when one mayor tried to straddle the fence. Taking office in 1910, he created “vice districts” to regulate the business – with suitable fees – and hopefully keep it restricted to certain parts of the city. But even some of the tolerant citizens were shocked at the results, so that experiment did not last long. Payoffs went back under the table. In 1916, the state of Washington passed its “early” prohibition of alcohol. The operation hardly missed a beat, simply adding a cash stream from bootleggers and speakeasies to the mix … financing a new round of payoffs.

Legate became a member of the “Dry Squad,” a unit of the Seattle police specifically tasked with enforcing prohibition. Nationwide Prohibition went into effect in 1920, with generally tougher provisions than the state law. In a perverse irony, making liquor harder to get simply made it more desirable, and led to widespread corruption in the U.S. Prohibition Service, and among local Dry Squads. According to one Seattle chief’s “tell all” story, one man offered him $60,000 (about $900,000 in today’s money) to be appointed head of the Dry Squad.

Despite his long experience on the force, Legate was, at heart, a midwestern farm lad and does not seem to have been a part of that seamy side. But he knew about it, and that probably cost him his life. We can infer the events and motivations that led to his death from scraps that leaked out. Later, it would be stated that “Legate had talked too much to Chief of Police Searing regarding conditions in the district.” The first overt sign of trouble came in late 1921, when officials kicked Legate off the Dry Squad and sent him back to walking a beat.

The area they assigned him was near the north edge of a notorious (former) vice district. Then, in February 1922, Legate was placed on unpaid leave because he had failed to clear the district of prostitution. Yet it was a known fact that informers regularly tipped the “houses” off when a raid was on its way. One can’t help but suspect that someone, or several someones, wanted Legate off the force. Offering him a bleak future might do that.

But the officer persisted and, on March 17, 1922, a  Seattle Times headline read, “Slayer of Policeman Fails in Suicide Ruse.” Patrolman Charles O. Legate had died from two gunshots to the head. The body had been found slumped on the back seat and floor of a large car inside a locked garage. (Searchers had to force their way in.) One shot had hit him directly in the forehead, another entered through the right cheek. Investigators also found a deep gash in his head that looked like it had been inflicted by a gun butt. In an apparent attempt to make the death look like a suicide, his service revolver, with two empty shells in it, had been placed beside the body.

Searchers eventually recovered three bullets, including one from Legate’s head and another that had passed through the back window of the car and out the garage wall. The third was found inside the garage, but reports don’t say where, or how it was otherwise linked to the case. All were distorted to some extent, but seemed to be of the same caliber. Investigators found no empty shell casings. They did not, at this point, consult with criminologist Luke S. May to learn more about that evidence.

Despite much activity, the case stalled after a couple weeks. The official position leaned more and more toward the notion that Legate had committed suicide after all. Legate’s widow, and others, began to complain about a possible cover-up. Finally, over two months after Legate’s death, a grand jury was convened to consider the case. But organizers carefully controlled the evidence and witness list. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the coroner’s jury ruled that Legate had shot himself.

The attempt to sweep matters under the rug failed. In mid-June, a special grand jury re-opened the issue. This time, Luke May was among the witnesses called and, the Seattle Star noted, “recalled many times by the jury.” May had not yet had time for a full assessment, but he declared right away that only the bullet in the forehead had come from Legate’s weapon. The others, although they were of the same caliber, had not. This jury concluded that Legate had been murdered. But the powers-that-be still resisted, mainly by denying Legate’s widow, Anna, a police pension. (Charles also left behind a stepson and two daughters.)

Officer Legate.
Seattle Times (March 17, 1922).

That sent the case back to the courts, this time with criminologist May on board. His assessment, however, was hampered because the original crime scene investigation had been perfunctory and inept. The available data allowed for only a rough determination of the bullet trajectories. Over his career, Luke May used bullet trajectories and blood spatter patterns to recreate death scenes with uncanny accuracy. That was not possible in this case because all traces of blood had been cleaned up and there were apparently no blood spatter photos or diagrams.

As noted above, May found that the bullet in Legate’s head was from the officer’s own revolver, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. The other bullet found inside the garage was from the same make and model, but not the same weapon. The third bullet that pierced the back window of the car was from a .38-caliber Colt. With two wounds from different firearms, the suicide alternative was simply not credible. Finally, nine months after her husband was murdered, the city pensions board granted Anna Legate a monthly allowance.

While all that was going on, a new mayor appointed a new police chief, William B. Severyns. Business as usual prevailed for a time. Then a reform mayoral candidate became the favorite to take office in the summer of 1926. To improve his job prospects, Severyns wrote, or commissioned, a series of newspaper articles touting all the things he had done to clean up the department. That included a new look at the Legate case. Underworld contacts declared that two men – a fellow police officer, and a notorious bootlegger and drug dealer – had killed Legate. Of course, no one would talk for the record and no evidence was offered. (The new lady mayor fired the chief anyway.) The case went cold and has never been re-opened.

Anna Legate remarried in early 1929, a few months before her daughters also got married. She lived out her life in Anacortes, a small town about 64 miles north of Seattle.
                                                                                

References: Christopher T. Bayley, Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, Washington (2015).

Charles O. Legate, Behind the Badge Foundation, Issaquah, Washington (2012). behindthebadgefoundation.org

“[Legate News Items],” Daily Olympian, Olympia, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Seattle Star, Seattle Times, Spokane Chronicle, Washington; The Oregonian, Portland (January 1917 – November 1926).

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

David Wilma, “Officer Charles O. Legate is found murdered on March 17, 1922,” Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, HistoryLink.org, Seattle, Washington (May 17, 2002).

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A Wasted, Misspent Life … Ending In Tragedy

Sadly, we don’t know a lot about Arthur Erickson, a Good Samaritan who was murdered in Puyallup, Washington in 1935. And we know only the name of the service station operator he tried to help. But, for reasons that will become perfectly clear, we know all too much about the career criminal who shot them.

Erickson was born around 1878 in Minnesota. It’s unclear when the family moved, but they were in Tacoma, Washington by the spring of 1892. Arthur found work at a sawmill and then as a teamster. He got married in 1903, but the couple had no children and were divorced by about 1917. Besides working on his father’s farm near Puyallup, Arthur also operated a moving van. After his father died in 1923, he ran the family farm and took care of his mother, who was then about 64 years old. When the Great Depression struck, he apparently spent more time driving a delivery truck to make ends meet.

Saturday March 23, 1935 was not a pleasant day in Puyallup (about 10 miles southeast of Tacoma). They’d had misty rain for most of the week and the temperature was dropping into the low forties. That evening, Erickson pulled into the service station operated by Elmer Harris. As he did, he saw Harris struggling with a young man.

Service Station, ca 1935.
Library of Congress.

By the time Arthur got inside, the operator had wrested a gun away from the would-be robber. Arthur grabbed the prisoner while Harris picked up the phone to call the sheriff. Desperate, the youth yanked out another pistol and sprayed the two men with bullets. He then stole a car at gunpoint from two lady school teachers, and fled. The next day, searchers found the car in a railroad yard in Auburn, about 10 miles north of Puyallup. Erickson died at the scene, while Harris eventually recovered from two wounds in his back.

Officials showed various witnesses a photo lineup based on verbal descriptions of the shooter. They picked out John McGuire, a youth who seemed about the right age and general build. He also had a criminal record, having spent two years in the state reformatory.

John Thomas McGuire was born John Fox in Tacoma, Washington on August 31, 1908, but his parents divorced less than two years later. Then, in early 1915, his mother married John Patrick McGuire. John eventually chose to take his stepfather’s last name. The family lived in Calgary, Alberta for a time but were in Seattle by 1922.

The beginning of the Great Depression threw John’s father out of work. Like many, all he could find were odd jobs. Thus, in the fall of 1930, John Thomas robbed a taxi driver for some ready cash. Caught and convicted, he was sentenced to five to seven years in the Washington state reformatory. He was paroled in October 1932. After he got out, he made it a practice to travel to Alaska for the commercial fishing season. That difficult and dangerous job paid him the equivalent of over $28,000 in today’s money for a summer of work. The rest of the year, John mostly worked as a cook. He got married in the spring of 1934, but that didn’t last.

The accusation became a nightmare for McGuire. Criminologist Luke S. May logged this as a firearms case. That involved an examination of the shell casings found at the crime scene and the bullets taken from the victims. From that he could tell officials what kind of pistol they should look for. Apparently, there were no fingerprints on the weapon the perpetrator left behind and it could not be traced. As it happened, McGuire did not have a weapon when he was arrested. Nor had he ever been known to own one.

The trial began in mid-June. John’s family insisted that he’d been in Seattle on the day and evening of the murder. Friends testified that he’d celebrated the weekend enough to get more than a bit tipsy. He then headed for his apartment, an alcove on the front of the family home. But first, his younger siblings persuaded him to play cards before he finally got to bed.

Prosecutors discounted all of that, although the McGuires were known as devout Roman Catholics. His mother said she could understand that authorities might think that a mother would lie to protect her child. But she was appalled that “they believed that I would put my Theresa and Mary on the witness stand – my babies – and tell them to break the Eighth Commandment that I’d taught them to obey since they were old enough to understand.”

The prosecution countered with five witnesses who asserted, under oath, that McGuire was the man who fired the shots that killed Arthur Erickson. The case went to the jury on June 18. They finally called it quits after around 45 hours of wrestling with the issues. The official excuse was that a juror simply cracked and “his mind went blank.” In reality, one juror, a housewife from Tacoma, believed the family alibi. She stuck with her “not guilty” vote, despite angry bullying by the foreman and other members of the jury. Finally, an “elderly juror from Puyallup” couldn’t stand the strain and basically collapsed.

Officials scheduled a new trial for September. Perhaps a new jury would do “better.”

Then, on September 2nd, a dramatic report completely changed the course of events. Two men, father Joseph A. Reed and his son Wallace, told prosecutors they had the wrong man. Both originally from California, Wallace had worked in Oregon for a time before moving to the area south of Renton, Washington in 1934 or early 1935. At that time, he worked as an upholsterer for a furniture company. Joseph lost his wife in the late 1920s and began living with or near Wallace around 1934, when he was over 70 years old.

Their account began before the murder, when a man named Mike Mooney was a lodger at the Reed place in Auburn. Mooney had been out on the evening of the shooting in Puyallup, returning shortly after 10:00 o’clock. The Reeds had heard about the event on the radio. When they mentioned it to Mooney, he basically admitted his involvement but also said, “You keep this under your hat and don’t mention it to nobody!”

About a week of tension followed, during which, apparently, more than hints confirmed that Mooney had done the shooting. Moreover, Wallace Reed saw Mike toss an automatic pistol into a nearby lake. They finally got up the courage to tell Mooney to get out. But they were still too frightened to report him, judging that he really was a dangerous man.

And they were not wrong in that surmise. Born October 7, 1910 in Portland, Oregon, Michael Lawrence Mooney began a life of crime with the theft of a bicycle when he was sixteen years old. He was jailed for burglary in late 1928 and served his sentence, but was back in the county jail at the time of the 1930 census. After he was released, he stole a car, was caught, and received a fifteen-month prison sentence. He was free again by the fall of 1931, but then went to jail for four months on a vagrancy charge.

Mike then kept his name out of newspapers until March 1933, when he married a young lady in Portland. But, three months later, he held up a Safeway store. Caught and sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary, he was out by early 1935. Unable or unwilling to find work, he supported himself and his wife by robbing streetcars. Then, on March 23, he tried to hold up the Harris service station … and botched the job. It’s telling that he carried two handguns on what should have been a “simple” armed robbery.

Two months later, Mooney robbed a bank in Woodland, Washington (located about twenty miles north of Vancouver), but was soon tracked down. He confessed to the crime so his accomplices (including his wife and a brother) would be set free. A judge imposed a 10 to 20 year prison sentence.

News reports never said why the Reeds finally decided to come forward. Perhaps they didn’t know until then that Mooney had been put out of circulation. Still, despite their gesture of good citizenship, police were highly skeptical. After all, they had all these people testifying against McGuire. Still, they did begin dragging the lake to find the weapon and digging into Mooney’s activities at the time of the murder. (The investigation probably brought Luke May’s agents back into the case, especially if they did find the pistol.)

All that effort clearly paid off, although we do not know exactly what they found. A week after the Reeds spoke up, Mike Mooney pled guilty to a charge of second degree murder. He surely wanted to avoid a trial for first degree murder, which might well send him to the gallows. A judge then imposed a life sentence.

Later, a court overturned that sentence as excessive for a second-degree murder conviction. (One rather doubts that a life sentence was a part of Mooney’s plea deal … but judges don’t always go along with prosecutors on those.) He was paroled in November of 1948, but was back in an Oregon prison three months later on an assault-and-robbery conviction. He was paroled in September of 1958. Six months later, he tried to hold up a liquor store near Seattle and was shot and killed in the resulting gun battle. By my reckoning,  Mooney spent over 27 years of his relatively short life – he was 48 when he died – behind bars.

John McGuire, Mike Mooney.
Seattle Times (September 10, 1935).

After the revelation about Mooney, the prosecutors and so-called eyewitnesses still asserted that he and John Thomas McGuire looked a lot alike. Some witnesses even said that the resemblance “was striking.” However, the Seattle Times published side-by-side photos of the two, which showed that those claims were merely sops to their guilty consciences.

John served  three years in the Army during World War II (probably as a cook) then returned to Anchorage, Alaska in 1946. He most likely worked in the fishing industry as long as he was able, spending the rest of his time in construction. He returned to Seattle in 1967, where he died two years later.

The elder Reed died in 1946 and was buried in Renton. Wallace Reed became a stockroom manager for Boeing Aircraft. He retired and moved to Reno, Nevada in 1969. He died there three years later, and his ashes were buried in Renton.
                                                                               

References: “Area Death: Wallace A. Reed,” Gazette-Journal, Reno, Nevada (October 14, 1972).

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

“[Mooney-McGuire Background],” Seattle Times, Washington; Oregonian, Portland, Albany Democrat-Herald, Oregon (August 1926 – August 1967).

“[Murder in Puyallup],” Spokane Chronicle, Seattle Times, Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Daily Olympian, Olympia, Washington (March 1935 – March 1947).

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Another Casualty of Prohibition

Prohibition came early to the Northwest, with three states – Idaho, Oregon, and Washington – passing “dry laws” that went into effect at the start of 1916. Montana and Wyoming would follow, also before national Prohibition arrived with ratification of the 18th Amendment. For true believers, Prohibition was not just an attempt to improve America’s health and productivity. No, it was an impassioned campaign to exorcize “Demon Rum.” This at a time when many, perhaps even most, people felt sure that demons and other malign spirits were real.

Thus, some officers sent to enforce the dry laws embraced their job as a sacred crusade, with few limits on their behavior. In the fall of 1919, a police officer in Pocatello shot and killed a moonshiner during a raid on his still shed. He claimed self-defense, although the unarmed victim was just trying to escape. Then, in the spring of 1921, another Pocatello officer tried to arrest a man who was a bit tipsy and perhaps had a liquor bottle on him. He too tried to run away and was shot in the back, dying a few days later. The officer claimed it was an accident. Juries did not convict either shooter of anything.

Moonshiners and bootleggers surely took note of these (and other) events, but there was simply too much money to be made. Around Idaho Falls, Idaho, it was widely believed that Bill Wilson was one of those bootleggers. He was said to be quite familiar with the preferred routes to the Canadian border. And his large touring car – used as an “auto taxi” – would be able to haul a considerable load.

William C. Wilson was born June 16, 1875 in Weber County, Utah, near Ogden. At some point, he moved to Montana and, in 1903, got married in Billings. By 1910, he was serving as an apprentice plasterer in Idaho Falls. Then he and his father invested in the theater business. That did not last long, however, and by 1918 Wilson mostly drove a taxi. During lulls, he worked as a farm laborer. He had, indeed, been arrested and fined for minor “possession” offenses, but had never been caught transporting a load of liquor.

Nevertheless, in late May of 1924, authorities issued a warrant for his arrest on a bootlegging charge. (News reports never did explain the basis for the accusation.) At that time, Wilson was in Salt Lake City. When he returned, an informant told Deputy Sheriff Neil Simpkins. On June 2, 1924, the deputy retrieved the warrant and drove to Wilson’s house to serve it. Unfortunately, Simpkins and Wilson had butted heads before.

Neil Simpkins. Family Archives.

Cornelius “Neil” Simpkins was born February 1, 1873 in a village located about 18 miles southeast of Glasgow, Scotland. The family immigrated to the U.S. in 1888 and settled in Rock Springs, Wyoming. It’s unknown when Neil moved out on his own, but in 1899, he got married in Idaho Falls. At that time, he drove a delivery wagon and sometimes acted as an express messenger. Like Wilson, he was a member of the Mormon church, but neither seems to have been active in that organization.

Around 1911, Simpkins also began to serve as an Idaho Falls constable. Over the next decade, he apparently spent less and less time in the delivery business and more in law enforcement. Neil became a deputy sheriff around 1921. Newspaper accounts suggest that he had a particular interest in enforcing Prohibition.

In 1922, he had appeared at Wilson’s door and demanded the right to search the premises, although he had no warrant. Wilson, unworried, let him in. A thorough search turned up one bottle of prescribed “medicinal” alcohol. Yet Simpkins took Wilson to the police station, where he had to post bail to avoid spending a night in jail. Prescription booze was perfectly legal under the Volstead Act, so that charge was almost certainly dismissed. However, Simpkins also searched Wilson’s car and either (illegally) confiscated a pistol, or allowed a third party to steal it.

Exactly what happened when Simpkins arrived at the Wilson place on June 2nd cannot be assessed with certainty. Mrs. Dora Wilson met him, by herself, in the yard. Some neighborhood witnesses, who could not have seen very well, claimed that she “scuffled” with the deputy and that he may have struck her with his pistol. There was general agreement that the wife at least argued with the officer, perhaps on the order of, “Would you leave my husband alone?”

Then Wilson backed his car out of the garage. (There’s a good deal of evidence to indicate that Bill didn’t even know the officer was around.) Deputy Simpkins immediately fired into the back of the vehicle. Wilson found himself staring down the barrel of a gun and fully expected another bullet, so he threw up his own automatic and shot back. Later, he couldn’t recall how many times he fired, but three empty shell casings were retrieved from inside the car.

Witnesses gave confused testimony as to how many shots they heard, with some claiming as many as six from Wilson. That was not impossible, given that Wilson might have extended the weapon outside his window. In any case, he quickly fled the scene in his car. Examination showed that Simpkins had indeed tried to fire again, but his gun jammed. Hit twice, the deputy stumbled against a tree and fell. He died on the way to the hospital.

Wilson soon discovered that Simpkins’ shot had punctured the gas tank, and he tried to plug the hole with a willow stick. But he finally parked the car at a friend’s house about ten miles north of Idaho Falls. He caught a ride and then fled on foot into rough country about ten miles further north.

Officers and volunteers began scouring the countryside, and Wilson surrendered three days after the shooting. Searchers discovered he had discarded his pistol before walking across a field to give himself up. He was charged with first degree murder. Mrs. Wilson was charged as an accessory, but that was eventually dropped. No liquor was found in the Wilson house or in the car.

Criminologist Luke S. May logged this case as a firearms investigation, but the county apparently chose not to pay his fees to appear on the witness stand. Wilson had admitted shooting the deputy, but claimed it was self defense. May could have perhaps elaborated on how the deputy’s gun jammed, but that might have only weakened the prosecution’s case.

Besides the self-defense claim, Wilson’s attorneys also asserted that Simpkins could not, legally, act as a deputy. They noted that he was not a U.S. citizen. Born in Scotland, he had never applied for naturalization. Moreover, he had resigned from his (illegal) position a couple months before the shooting after a dispute with the sheriff. The sheriff agreed that they’d had a “slight difference” of opinion, but denied that Simpkins had actually resigned. And the prosecution cited precedents that waived Simpkins’ lack of formal citizenship.

Still, the sheriff’s admission did bolster the defense’s contention that Neil Simpkins was a man of uncertain, sometimes testy, temperament. That added to other testimony along those lines, including the account of the arrest for legal alcohol and the missing pistol. Still, the jury rejected the self-defense plea. They found Wilson guilty of second-degree murder, and a judge imposed a ten to twenty year prison sentence. After failed appeals, Wilson was transferred from the Bonneville County jail to the Idaho Penitentiary in February of 1926.

Deputy Simpkins left a widow, Della, and eleven children. Della did not remarry, but held the family together as the children grew up and got married. She moved the core to Boise around 1933. Her second-oldest son, Cornelius, remained with her until her death in August 1940. Cornelius returned to Idaho Fall, where his mother was buried.

William C. Wilson was pardoned and released after less than six years in the state Penitentiary. He maintained a home in Pocatello for six or seven years, then the family moved to California. By 1940, they were living in Fresno, where Wilson died in 1953.
                                                                                

References: Sean Beienburg, Prohibition, the Constitution, and States' Rights, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois (2019).

“Killings Resulting from Prohibition Enforcement,” Congressional Record – Senate, January 18, 1930, Volume LXXII, Part 2, United States Printing Office, Washington, D.C. (1930).

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

“[Simpkins-Wilson News],” Post-Register, Idaho Falls, Daily Post, Idaho Falls, Times-Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho Republican, Blackfoot, Bingham County News, Blackfoot, Idaho Statesman, Boise, Idaho; Salt Lake Tribune, Standard-Examiner, Ogden, The Telegram, Salt Lake City, Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah; Fresno Bee, California (November 1919 – October 1953).

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