:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/adn/QFUKPAMZWJAWDAUF5NDHXBQHYE.jpg "Book review: 10 Southeast murders provide the framework for understanding Alaska history")
“Forgotten Murders from Alaska’s Capital”
By Betsy Longenbaugh; Epicenter Press, 2022; 135 pages; $16.95.
Writer Betsy Longenbaugh, a lifelong Alaskan and former newspaper reporter, has utilized her passions and super analysis expertise to research and share the tales of 10 murders that befell in Juneau or Douglas between 1902 and 1959. “Forgotten Murders from Alaska’s Capital” not solely presents what might be identified concerning the murders themselves however uncovers an excessive amount of Alaska’s social historical past on the time. That historical past, seldom fairly, turns into the true story of this fascinating guide.
The ten chapters, organized chronologically, contain murders of ardour, greed, revenge and psychological instability. They had been chosen, the writer explains, from greater than 80 she’s chronicled and are ones that resulted in arrests and closure.
Readers will encounter a well-known model of Alaska — a spot that has at all times attracted what we typically seek advice from as “end-of-the-roaders,” people both fleeing from their pasts or trying to find contemporary alternatives, typically outdoors of what’s strictly lawful. This recognizable Alaska additionally, sadly, options appreciable violence, a lot of it home or towards girls. Additionally notable within the tales is the stupidity of a lot of the murderers and the velocity with which they had been apprehended, tried and sentenced; that is maybe a results of selecting tales that resolved reasonably than trailing into unsolved mysteries.
The earliest story, of a 1902 homicide, takes place in what was then the town of Treadwell, the corporate city situated on the Treadwell Mine in present-day Douglas. There, the mine superintendent shot and killed an unemployed miner in town plaza, in full view of witnesses. That is, largely, a narrative of energy imbalances; the superintendent claimed “self-defense,” and the coroner’s inquest, based mostly on a single eyewitness account, dominated that it was. Newspaper headlines on the time learn “MacDonald Kills Insane Assailant” and “A Lunatic Assaults Supt. MacDonald.” Eleven years later, when MacDonald was dwelling in Mexico, a Juneau grand jury indicted him for homicide, based mostly on appreciable proof that he’d repeatedly shot at shut vary an unarmed non secular man protesting work on Sundays. After what seems to have been jury tampering, MacDonald was discovered “not responsible.”
Other than the homicide and trial particulars, this primary chapter tells the bigger story of the Treadwell Mine, which employed greater than 1,000 males. In 1917, the mine collapsed and crammed with water, bringing that historic period to an finish.
The second story, from 1914, options the homicide of Lucy Shellhouse, a Tlingit girl who’d been educated on the Chemawa Boarding College in Oregon and labored as a housecleaner in Douglas. As she was leaving the Douglas film theatre with a person good friend, her former husband shot and killed each Shellhouse and her good friend. When marshals went to the killer’s cabin to arrest him, he shot himself. The newspaper headline for this one was “Three Die in Douglas Tragedy.” Along with the homicide narrative, this chapter describes the lives of Alaska Natives on the time, together with the training system at boarding colleges.
A number of of the homicide tales happen in an underworld of playing, scamming and prostitution. In 1919, a girl named Myra Schmidt was working “the road” in Juneau when she was discovered lifeless in her cabin. The place had been ransacked and her valuables stolen. The identical day, a person referred to as Whiskey Jack was seen settling money owed and shopping for new garments, then boarding a ship for Skagway. When his baggage was searched, it was discovered to be filled with Schmidt’s belongings. In a separate story from 1923, two girls working a Juneau “cigar retailer” — a common euphemism for a brothel — had been shot to demise by a person who stole their cash. Each tales present background within the lives of intercourse staff and their shoppers throughout that tumultuous period.
One chillingly weird story issues what the writer calls “Alaska’s first serial killer.” In 1915, a person named Slompke was implicated within the disappearance of a married man who labored for the Treadwell Mine as an amalgamator. Investigations quickly found that Slompke was related to extra disappearances — principally of single males with appreciable belongings — and that he ended up with the belongings, in addition to typically assuming the names of his victims. Though no our bodies had been ever discovered, Slompke was convicted of homicide. He escaped from a jail cell and was shot by a person who discovered him lurking outdoors his cabin. It’s thought that his victims numbered as many as a dozen — or extra.
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The penultimate homicide story, “The Dying of a Remittance Lady,” dates from 1946 and is yet one more instance of home violence. The Juneau couple concerned, Man and Marjorie Prince, had been each kids of well-to-do California households and identified to be heavy drinkers. As Longenbaugh explains, “Remittance women and men are a phenomenon that’s nonetheless obvious in Alaska right now. Upset by irresponsible or embarrassing habits, households pay an allowance to their troublesome kinfolk to dwell someplace distant, and for a lot of, Alaska is way sufficient.” Within the Prince case, Man strangled Marjorie, then known as police to inform them he had and that “she wanted killing.” Man finally served about 10 years.
The ultimate story, from 1955, is that of the random homicide in a state workplace of an worker, Elizabeth Cornell. On this case, the assassin believed the federal government was responsible of “graft and corruption” and got down to kill the commissioner of Alaska’s well being division. When the commissioner wasn’t accessible, he shot and killed the girl who had greeted him on the door. This story gives some glorious backstory concerning the excessive charge of tuberculosis in Alaska — the assassin had been in a sanatorium — in addition to the dealing with of psychological well being points. The assassin was dedicated to the Morningside Hospital in Oregon, the place mentally in poor health Alaskans had been despatched between 1904 and 1967. He was transferred to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute when it opened, and he died there.
Alaska’s historical past is full of intriguing, if typically disturbing, tales. One technique to find out about our previous is thru the lives of little-known and notorious people and their unlucky circumstances. “Forgotten Murders,” with its accompanying black-and-white pictures, generally is a good place to start — particularly if we remember the fact that murders finish harmless lives and have an effect on households perpetually.
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