The Unsolved Murder of John Smith
A Scottish laborer is found beaten to death on the roadside, his pockets empty and his identity a mystery to the local coroner’s jury.
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.
Yesterday morning the body of a man was found by the side of the road on Madison Street, beaten to death. The deceased was found on the plank, which had on it two deep gashes in his head, one on either side near the ears. It is the belief that he was struck by some heavy instrument. A witness, Philip Dow, testified: 'I knew the deceased, I have known him about 14 months. The last time I saw him he was at the Sound at the foot of Madison street, employed to look after a pile driver. The next I know of him he was in the morgue.' Mr. Kohlman, who works in a store, said that the deceased came into the store Monday morning and bought a cheap suit of clothes, and when he paid for them he had quite a roll of greenbacks, probably $40 or $50, and perhaps more. George Scott thought he had seen him on Broadway on Sunday evening, and he was pretty drunk. When the body was taken charge of by the Coroner he was searched, and not a dollar could be found on him. He had evidently not been to his lodgings between the time of buying the suit of clothes and being killed, for the reason that the vest he stole and tucked under his shirt while in the store was still there when his body was picked up. The Coroner's jury returned the following verdict: 'We, the jury in the case of one John Smith, deceased, find that he came to his death by violent hands, by a party or parties unknown to me, by blows inflicted on the head and body. We further find that the deceased was a native of Scotland, and aged between 35 and 40 years.'
“He had evidently not been to his lodgings between the time of buying the suit of clothes and being killed, for the reason that the vest he stole and tucked under his shirt while in the store was still there.”
Violent street crime remains a persistent anxiety in Seattle's rapidly changing downtown. The 1887 discovery of an unidentified laborer on Madison Street speaks to a long history of precarity for workers living in the city's margins—a struggle for visibility that persists today.
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