A Grave in Tacoma, a Death Across Three States, and a Lawyer Asking to Open the Coffin
Suspicions of foul play follow a woman's remains home to Tacoma from a journey through California and Oregon. But with no coroner's authority, no money and a husband's Assyrian friends standing guard at the house, her counsel can only beg for a disinterment.
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.
TACOMA, Jan. 29. — Special. — J. H. Palmer, counsel for the late Mrs. Mitchel Jasous, wants her body exhumed in order to find out if the substances in her stomach will throw any light upon her death. Ever since the remains arrived here there have been suggestions of foul play. Besides this, the newspapers in the vicinity of the place where she was killed have published rather sensational stories referring to Jasous' brother as the heavy villain, and intimating that Mrs. Jasous had been killed.
Mr. Palmer started out today to see if he could not get the county prosecuting attorney to take up the case and have the body of Mrs. Jasous exhumed. Mr. Colmer, the prosecuting attorney, was absent at Olympia and could not be seen. Mr. Palmer says:
"I am powerless to act, and the coroner can do nothing. I am having difficulty in getting my goods out of Mrs. Jasous' house, where I used to live, and where the Assyrians are now living. The coroner here can do nothing, and as far as I can learn the officers at Ashland are the proper persons to proceed in the matter. If there has been a crime committed in this connection, then it has been committed in three states, namely, California, Oregon and Washington."
Dr. Clinton Munson, administrator of the estate, says he is making an inventory of the property, and has written to Ashland for a list of the articles found on the person of the dead woman. He says it is not his business to inquire into the question of foul play. Mr. Palmer, however, says no investigation can be satisfactorily carried on without money, as he thinks the estate could be put to no better use than learning if Mrs. Jasous was the victim of foul play.
Mr. Jasous and his brother, and their Assyrian friends, feel that it is a great injustice to the husband of the dead woman to assume that he would have done anything but tenderly care for Mrs. Jasous.
“If there has been a crime committed in this connection, then it has been committed in three states, namely, California, Oregon and Washington.”
A suspicious death that crosses two state lines and lands in a third is still the hardest kind of case to open — jurisdiction is a maze and somebody has to pay for the autopsy. What is startling here is not only the mystery but the cast: a household of Assyrian immigrants in 1890s Tacoma, a community almost entirely missing from most histories of the city.
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