The Corpse in the Chicken Yard
A bungled insurance swindle in 1890s Seattle turns grisly when an amateur conspiracy, a stolen body, and a coded German letter unravel in a courtroom inquest.
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.
The inquest into human remains found in the ruins of William Radloff’s house concluded that the victim was R. B. Lewin. The evidence proved Radloff had conspired with an associate, L. Kostrauch, to defraud life insurance companies by faking his own death. Kostrauch, who turned state's evidence, detailed how the pair dug up Lewin’s body from a cemetery, buried it in a chicken yard for a month, and ultimately placed it in Radloff's home before setting the building ablaze. Radloff, meanwhile, fled toward San Francisco, leaving behind a coded letter translated by City Treasurer Adolph Krug, who had grown suspicious of Kostrauch’s contradictory stories. Following the inquest, Mrs. Radloff and Kostrauch were arrested on charges of arson. The public's morbid curiosity was such that a massive crowd mobbed the arrest on Third Street, nearly turning violent as they clamored for a glimpse of the suspects.
“He argued that the candle would burn forty minutes. At the base of the candle was a line of cotton string, greased so that it would burn sure. At the end of the string was a pile of shavings saturated with coal oil.”
This 1892 insurance fraud case highlights the extreme lengths to which people would go during early Seattle's boom-and-bust cycles to escape financial ruin. While modern insurance fraud is rarely as gothic as digging up graves, the story echoes a recurring theme in Pacific Northwest history: the volatile intersection of desperate ambition and the city's rapidly hardening legal and civic institutions.
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