Topic: Crime
Romantic tales of bank heists, train robberies, and hold ups were favorites of American newspapers, large and small, in the early part of the twentieth century. Among these is a story set in Ballard, ...
Luke May, known as America's Sherlock Holmes, was a pioneering "scientific detective" who moved to Seattle in 1919. He was an independent private consulting detective whose work represented a radical ...
John H. McGraw was elected Washington state's second governor in 1892. He arrived in Seattle from Maine during the 1870s at the age of 26, and got a job as a clerk in the Occidental Hotel. He joined S...
With a brassy street name like that of some improbable superhero, Ed "Tuba Man" McMichael made a remarkable impact on the Puget Sound region during a two-decade-long career as a Seattle musician who s...
McNeil Island, located in southern Puget Sound, was named in 1841 by Lt. Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition in honor of William Henry McNeill. McNeill (the name, but not the isla...
The McNeil Island Corrections Center, located in southern Puget Sound, 2.8 miles from Steilacoom, Washington, was the oldest prison facility in the Northwest. Built in 1875, it began as the first fede...
On June 17, 1926, a carpenter walking the north end of Seattle's Green Lake on his way to work finds a pair of women's shoes in an alder grove on a point of land next to the lake. He walks a few feet ...
Former Teamsters Union leader Dave Beck (1894-1993) was tried in federal court in Tacoma on charges of income-tax evasion. Murray Morgan (1916-2000) covered the trial for his daily radio news program....
HistoryLink historian John Caldbick started working as a copyboy at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on November 21, 1963. This People's History is his account of the next day.
The Pierce County Courthouse designed by Proctor & Dennis and built in 1893 stood as a landmark in Tacoma until its demolition in 1959. After the county seat was moved to Tacoma in 1880, Pierce Co...
Pinball machines were introduced nearly a century ago and immediately became wildly popular. Unlike today's versions, though, early pinball games were played for gambling purposes, which proved to be ...
In June 1986, two Auburn residents were killed by painkillers laced with cyanide. America immediately thought of the unsolved 1982 Chicago Tylenol product-tampering murders in which seven people died....
During Prohibition, which began in Washington state on January 1, 1916, and ended in 1933, Spokane was a major center for receiving and distributing contraband liquor. Prohibition in the area spawned ...
Five years before the 18th Amendment kicked off national Prohibition, Washington voters approved a state initiative banning the sale and manufacture of alcohol. Within days of this new state law, a th...
In Washington -- as in the rest of the country -- the question of who, if anyone, should control, manufacture, import, possess, and consume alcoholic intoxicants has been contentious and complicated b...
As a treaty-rights activist and tribal entrepreneur, Robert Satiacum's influence and notoriety spread far beyond his Puyallup Tribe. He was first known as a local athlete and then, along with family m...
Early in the morning of May 7, 1906, Oregon mill worker George Mitchell spotted the man he had been looking for in Seattle since he had arrived from Portland on May 2. Franz Edmund Creffield was walki...
More than a century ago, a debate about the ethics and authority of law enforcement began in Seattle as citizens, mainly women, voiced concerns about the abuses of power committed against women and gi...
David Wilma was a University Police Officer during the protests that broke out in early May 1970 in response to the United States entry into Cambodia, a neutral country, and in response to the killing...
Throughout its history, Seattle has often been a hotbed for narcotic and stimulant drugs. In recent times, heroin was a popular drug in the city’s music scene and caused several notable deaths. ...
This reminiscence by the then-bank teller Dorothea Pfister (later Nordstrand) (1916-2011) recounts the events of a rather alarming day at the Green Lake State Bank, located in the Green Lake neighborh...
Jeffrey Lee Smith, nationally known as The Frugal Gourmet, was an immensely popular cooking-show host and cookbook author who attracted a near cult-like following. Born in Seattle in 1939, he was rais...
From 1978 to 1981, a rapist who committed as many as 37 brutal assaults kept the city of Spokane terrified. Police scoured the city for the "South Hill rapist" so-named because many of the rapes took ...
Matt Starwich was a colorful King County sheriff who left a wealth of stories to delight historians. He first rose to prominence as a deputy sheriff in the coal-mining town of Ravensdale in southeast ...