The Tattooed Robber’s Bloody Trail in Mount Vernon
A man known for the words 'true love' inked across his hands kills one logger and leaves another for dead after a failed robbery attempt.
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.
Mount Vernon, Wash.—A man believed to be Charles Hopkins, known as the “tattooed robber” because of the words “true love” tattooed across his hands, killed Tony Gerb and shot and probably fatally wounded John Freeman, loggers, two miles north of McMurray, 15 miles southeast of here.
Freeman and Gerb were walking along the tracks, when the highwayman halted them and demanded their money. Neither had any and the robber obtained a razor carried by Gerb. Incensed because of failure to obtain loot, the robber drove the two men into a slough 300 yards from the track.
"Guess I’ll get rid of you right now," said the robber, and then hit Gerb on the head with his pistol, killing him. The blow broke the pistol, but the robber produced another and shot Freeman through the neck, leaving him for dead.
Freeman, when shown a picture at Hopkins, who is wanted at Seattle for the murder of Charles Hodges in a rooming-house last January, said the photograph resembled his assailant.
This 1914 account of a violent robbery in Skagit County highlights the raw danger of early 20th-century travel and the brutal nature of frontier justice. While modern true crime often focuses on forensic details, this era relied on physical identifiers like tattoos and public bounty notices to track fugitives across state lines.
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