The Serial Bigamist of Front Street
A Seattle shop clerk’s sudden disappearance reveals a tangled web of multiple wives, broken engagements, and unpaid local debts.
E. P. Fife, a middle-aged man employed at O. W. Lynch & Co.’s furniture store on Front Street, left the city suddenly about three weeks ago. It was later discovered he had been something of a Lothario. Fife arrived in Seattle last October and initially claimed to be married, though he told his employer his wife had gone East. Later, Mr. Lynch received a letter from a man in Assiniboia, Canada, asking about Fife’s character because he intended to marry the writer's daughter. Confronted, Fife claimed his first wife had died in California and he had secretly married the second woman. Eventually, a local young woman visited the store in tears, revealing she had been engaged to marry Fife on the 27th of this month. Investigations suggested Fife had never been widowed, but had instead deserted his first wife. He left behind a trail of unpaid debts to local tradesmen, including a tailor, a department store, and a photographer.
“I was to be married to him the 27th of this month.”
Long before digital apps made ‘catfishing’ a modern concern, the 1893 Seattle press was already documenting the havoc wrought by serial deceivers using the city’s transient boom-town nature to juggle multiple identities. Fife’s trail of unpaid bills and broken promises captures the era’s thin veneer of social trust in a rapidly growing, mobile society.
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