Who Killed Zens Mayeda? The Footprints in the Potato Patch
A Japanese man is found murdered in Seattle. A sullen suspect gives little away, and a deputy sheriff finds three sets of hurried footprints — one pair barefoot — leading away from the house.
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.
Joe, the Japanese who was arrested on Monday in connection with the murder of Zens Mayeda, was questioned yesterday in the presence of Prosecuting Attorney Miller and Deputy Prosecuting Attorney McBride, by Mrs. F. W. Harrell, the interpreter. Joe is a dogged, sullen fellow and but little was ascertained. It was thought, however, from what he said that, while he did not commit the murder, he does know something about who did commit it.
Deputy Sheriff Jack McDonald yesterday made another examination of the premises in the vicinity of where the murder occurred. He found the marks of feet in a potato patch near the house and leading away from it. The marks show that three persons had gone hurriedly from the house and are of two different types, the impressions in the soft sod showing that some of the marks were made by a person wearing a very small shoe, and the other impressions were made by a barefooted man. It is thought the smaller tracks were made by Japan and the barefooted tracks by an Indian. It is therefore suspected that the murderer, or one of the murderers, is an Indian.
“Joe is a dogged, sullen fellow and but little was ascertained. It was thought, however, from what he said that, while he did not commit the murder, he does know something about who did commit it.”
An unsolved killing, a language barrier, and a suspect pool sorted by footwear and ethnicity — this is how a murder investigation read in 1894 Seattle. The ready leap from bare footprints to 'an Indian' shows how quickly the era's policing turned to racial shorthand, and how a victim from the city's small Japanese community could be reduced to a few lines of type.
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