The Tragedy in the Shantytown
An elderly woman is beaten to death in her South Seattle home for a small cache of gold.
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.
Within the four hours preceding midnight, there was committed in South Seattle one of the most brutal murders in the history of the city. Charlotte Fetting, 80 years of age, had her brains beaten out with an iron stove plate, and her little trunk was robbed of the savings of herself and her son for years—$70 in gold coin. Mrs. Fetting, with her son Ernest Fetting, lived at the crossing of the broad gauge and narrow gauge tracks in the southern part of the city, in what is known as the 'shantytown' district. When the son and his brother-in-law, James King, returned home after an evening at the People's Theater, they found the door unlocked and the interior ransacked. They discovered the victim on the floor, gagged with a handkerchief and severely beaten. Despite the presence of hundreds of shacks huddled nearby, no one heard a sound. The perpetrators remain at large, likely having fled the city with the stolen gold.
“The door with the key still in it was found partly open, there was no light left burning and a small window was half pushed back, why, no one can say.”
This 1893 tragedy highlights the precarity of life in Seattle's early 'shantytowns,' where marginalized laborers lived on the margins of the industrial tracks. The vulnerability of the elderly and the poor in these transient, makeshift neighborhoods remains a haunting echo in our city’s ongoing struggles with housing and safety for our most vulnerable residents.
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