The Iron Hotel: Seattle's Jail Let Convicted Killers Wait Out the Law

THE IRON HOTEL. Where the County Supports Its Criminals in Idleness.

The steel cage at the King County jail has held at one time ten convicted or alleged murderers. Three of the convicted men were from Alaska and were soon taken away by a deputy United States marshal, but the rest stayed—some for years—while the law's delays worked in their favor. Thirty-four was the highest number of convicted felons in the cage at one time. At the time of the jail break there were forty-four prisoners in the two cages: seven convicted murderers, one convicted gold-brick swindler, one convicted wife slasher, three convicted bunko men, one convicted of incest, one awaiting trial for murder, one for burglary, two for counterfeiting, and one for horse stealing. The rest were serving short terms for petty crime.

The reason is the law. A convicted prisoner almost invariably gives notice of appeal to the supreme court, and an appeal stays execution of the judgment. The prisoner therefore remains in the county jail instead of going to Walla Walla. There he can lie around in idleness, play cards with the jailer's consent, and eat three meals a day, while the county pays. The sheriff receives seventy-five cents a day for feeding each prisoner; the state pays nothing toward the board of a convicted prisoner. The county allows about twenty-five cents a day for each man's food. Breakfast is bread, coffee, and hash; dinner is soup, meat, and vegetables; supper is bread and butter with cold meat or stew. On Sundays there is fresh meat and a fine mutton stew.

Tom Blanck was the greatest criminal that ever entered the cage. He had committed several murders, and while the blood of a peace officer he had shot down in cold blood was still fresh on his hands, he raged through the corridor. He made a gun from a steel shank taken from the sole of his shoe, glass from a broken bottle, and wire from a broom, heated at a gas jet near his cell. Jailer Verhury, held up by the counterfeit pistol, still insists it was the real thing. Blanck escaped, and four prisoners were still at large when this account was written.

Other cases show the same pattern. Nordstrom was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang; his case went to the United States Supreme Court. James Murphy was tried twice for killing Phil Dawf and convicted both times of murder in the second degree; his second appeal was expected. Willie Holmes, convicted of murdering a man named Russell at Franklin, was awaiting a supreme court hearing. The three bunko men—Louis Goodfriend, Mike Golden, and Frank Hart—robbed the Anvek sisters of their little fortune and were sentenced to seven years. Golden refused to join the jail delivery because his old mother visited him every day; Goodfriend stayed because he had hopes of a reversal. Harvey Knowlton, the gold-brick swindler, had worked off a fake brick on Wooding, the Aberdeen banker, and got two years.

Rajar, convicted of assault after knifing a man in the Cedar Mountain saloon, deliberately delayed his appeal until he had served nine months in the county jail, then obtained a writ of habeas corpus and was released. Salvador Picani, the Pierce County murderer, was freed after a second-appeal law was passed for his case.

The jail itself was insecure. The steel tank was surrounded by a passageway nowhere more than three feet wide, and in some places only thirty inches, so that a prisoner could reach out and strike a passerby. The windows were fastened on the inside with a catch that a prisoner could unfasten with a broom handle. Tools had been smuggled in. On one earlier escape attempt, convicts had filed the iron rivets that held the roof of the cage to the sides. The article called for reform: shorten the time to give notice of appeal, abolish the second-appeal law, and send convicts to the penitentiary while their appeals are pending.