by Jason Lucky Morrow During the spring of 1928, Catherine Clark was lonely and looking for love. Things hadn’t worked out with her first husband, Ralph, whom she divorced in 1925. Nearly every day for the next three years, Catherine would wake up early, go to work at her small business repairing genuine fake […]

In 1912, forty-two-year-old Private James Stine was sentenced to life in prison for the first degree murder of Corporal David Austin who he shot and killed on the parade grounds of Fort George Wright in Spokane, Washington. Stine said he killed Austin because of his harsh methods of disciplining soldiers of the all black 25th […]

In August 1919, Mark Maxwell worked for the railway division of the US Postal Service when he embezzled $9,000 from registered banking deposits bound for the Federal Reserve. Stationed in Mansfield, Washington, Maxwell tried to evade capture by traveling across the country to New York City. Distancing himself from the crime didn’t help and the […]

Paul Clein On March 1, 1909, thirty-six-year-old German immigrant, Paul Clein, and Polish immigrant John Saudawski, also in his late thirties, were seen together eating supper at a German bakery in Spokane, Washington. Three weeks later, Saudawski’s partially burned body was found on the Fort George Wright military reservation[1] on the outskirts of Spokane. When […]

: Wesley Leroy Sischo was a former maritime customs agent who decided it was more profitable to work on the other side of the law. During World War I, he began working with a Seattle Chinese gang to smuggle opium into Washington State. As the captain of a small coastal vessel, it was his job […]

Ed Hagen was a former semi-professional boxer and hero policeman turned bootlegger. He was caught in April of 1919 trying to break into a government liquor warehouse. He was sentenced to two years in McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. He appealed his sentence but eventually lost and began serving his sentence in March, 1921. The article […]

The Mass Murder of Six People in a Washington State Cottage Story by Sam D. Cohen, for his syndicated column Today’s True Detective Story, “Killer of Six Captured, Brutal Murders are Solved,” July 11, 1941, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Peach Section, page 2. ON A SATURDAY in March 1934, Tom Sanders stepped out of his Erland Point, […]