The Man Who Was Hanged Twice
A condemned murderer facing execution in Colfax reveals his harrowing, accidental survival of a previous lynching by an angry mob.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Theodore Baker, who was hanged here Friday for the murder of Frank Lursh in Colfax, clearly wished to be remembered as the one American who was hanged twice for a single crime. In conversation with the Sun correspondent, shortly after he had received word from the Governor that there was no hope for him, Baker said: 'It is not the pain I fear at all. I have been hanged, and I know what I am talking about. What ails me is that I don't want to die, and I don't think I ought to. Why, when they hanged me first down there by the railroad track, I scared half to death. The rope swayed me off from a telegraph pole like they would a log, and then one or two of them pulled my legs. That isn't so almighty nice, but still it don't hurt as you might think it would. I must have hung there ten or fifteen minutes before the Sheriff and his posse found me and cut me down. Of course by that time I was unconscious, but I remembered enough of what had occurred to finish any fear that I might have of death on the gallows.' Later on, speaking about his crime and his two punishments—one by the mob and one by the law—Baker said: 'Under all the circumstances my crime was not murder, anyway. I had become involved in a quarrel between Lursh and his wife, and foolish as that was, it would have led to nothing more if Lursh had not attacked me. I had to kill him or be killed. The woman swore against me in order to save herself. She was scared to death because they lynched me, and she was afraid that unless somebody swung for the crime she might be called on some dark night.'
“What ails me is that I don't want to die, and I don't think I ought to. Why, when they hanged me first down there by the railroad track, I scared half to death.”
While legal standards for capital punishment and due process have shifted significantly since the 1880s, the story reflects the brutal, often lawless atmosphere of frontier justice in Washington Territory. This account underscores the trauma of extrajudicial violence, a grim historical reality that existed alongside the growth of fledgling civil institutions in the Pacific Northwest.
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