The Prisoner Who Might Be a Duke
A mysterious Austrian locked up in Tacoma declines to deny that he is the missing Duke John of Austria — and two visiting Austrian officials only deepen the rumor.
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.
Is the mysterious Jonas Klein of royal blood?
Evidence indicating that the eccentric prisoner has some powerful connections in the old world continues to accumulate, and today the Times obtained information leading to the belief that the Austrian government has interested itself in his case.
Two Austrian officials have been in Tacoma this week, presumably looking into the Klein case, and their visit here has revived the story of the strange disappearance of Duke John of Austria.
Duke John, twelve years ago, married a woman not of the people and soon afterward left for the United States. Later he was declared to be legally dead and nothing more was heard of him. The possibility that Klein is this missing Duke John, who was a highly educated man, is arousing much speculation and interest today.
Klein, when questioned today, admitted that he knows the story of Duke John's mysterious disappearance and reported death, but he was reticent when asked if there is any relationship between himself and the duke. Klein was then asked if there could be any foundation to the rumor that he is the duke, and hesitated a full half minute before replying.
"I see that you are trying to weave a sensation out of this," he said. "It is true that I am an Austrian, and that I left Austria for America about the time of the disappearance of Duke John, but further than that I cannot tell you. It is against my attorney's orders to make any statement of that nature."
"You may be sure, however, that when I am released from prison I will remain in this city, and that developments will arise which will make a world-wide sensation. No, I cannot say anything about the nature of the sensation at present."
“"It is true that I am an Austrian, and that I left Austria for America about the time of the disappearance of Duke John, but further than that I cannot tell you."”
A stranger in the city jail who hints, without quite claiming, that he is royalty is a very Tacoma kind of story: a place that has always drawn people reinventing themselves on the far edge of the map. The newspaper's hungry half-minute of silence — the prisoner hesitating before he answers — is the whole engine of the piece, and it is the same engine that drives a modern viral mystery. Then as now, the city's curiosity did most of the work.
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