The Mystery of the Sands
A decomposed body found bound and weighted on the beach near Bay Center leaves investigators with a gruesome crime and no suspect.
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.
A man's body, much decomposed, was found on Ellen Sands, about two miles north of Bay Center. The skull was deeply split across the top as if by an ax, the lower jaw was crushed, and over the heart was a knife wound. The ankles were bound together with a small rope, and attached to the feet by a wire was a cast-iron plate weighing 14 pounds, part of a stove fire box. The corpse wore two pairs of drawers and a woolen vest and pantaloons of pepper-and-salt color. It was in such a condition that none could tell whether it had been a white man or a Chinese. Ging, an intelligent man at Bay Center, says it is a Chinese. It had apparently been in the water at least six months. Coroner Mower and County Attorney Egbert conducted an inquest Tuesday evening, but there is no plausible conjecture as to the identity of the dead man.
“The ankles were bound together with a small rope, and attached to the feet by a wire was a cast-iron plate weighing 14 pounds.”
This discovery highlights the brutal, often anonymous dangers faced by workers—particularly immigrants—in the Pacific Northwest's remote logging and fishing industries during the 1890s.
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