The Midnight Escape from the King County Jail
When four inmates mysteriously vanished from their cells, the local authorities were left baffled and scrambling to track them down along the muddy roads of old Seattle.
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.
When Mr. Stewart, the jailor, went into the jail at an early hour this morning, he found that four of the prisoners confined therein—Quinn, Lynch, Shay, and Sullivan—had taken an unceremonious departure. They were all in the south tier of cells, together with John Moss and a Chinaman, neither one of whom escaped; Moss was found gagged and bound by them with strips of bed clothes to prevent his giving the alarm. How they got out of their cells is a mystery, but the supposition is that they had false keys in their possession. From the corridor, they escaped by cutting out the bars of the middle window, under the office of the clerk of the court. Once in the yard, they succeeded in scaling the wall in the northeast corner, whence, as their tracks show, they passed around the corner of the jail, past the tannery and the old mad house, and out along the beach road. The prisoners who escaped were serving the following sentences: Quinn and Sullivan, five years, for stealing half a cattle from Dr. Smith and dog-fish oil from the wharf; whereas Shay is in for theft; and Lynch is in for playing slavedriver. They all hang heavy shackles, and unless they have friends on the outside to assist them, they are not likely to get very far. Sheriff Wyche offers a reward of $400 apiece for the prisoners, or $200 for the crowd. He and Officer Thorndyke have gone in pursuit.
“How they got out of their cells is a mystery, but the supposition is that they had false keys in their possession.”
In 1877, the King County jail was a porous, makeshift facility where escapes were a common occurrence. This episode highlights how the city's early justice system struggled with basic infrastructure, a stark contrast to today's debates regarding modern detention facilities and the city's approach to the carceral system.
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