Stuck Inquest Clears Family of Wrongdoing
A jury finds that the death of a woman on the railroad tracks near Stuck was a tragedy, not a crime.
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 coroner's jury which held an inquest into the death of Mrs. Henry Kalem, whose mangled body was found last Friday morning on the railroad tracks at Stuck, rendered a verdict today that the woman had met her death by being run down by a Northern Pacific train while she was temporarily insane. The jury attached no blame to Henry Kalem, the dead woman's husband, his brother John and his nephew, who have been held in the county jail pending the result of the investigation into the woman's death. The three prisoners have been released.
“The jury attached no blame to Henry Kalem... who have been held in the county jail pending the result of the investigation.”
The community of Stuck, once a distinct stop along the rail lines, has long since been subsumed by the development of the Puyallup Valley. The case highlights the era's legal practice of holding family members in custody pending inquests into suspicious deaths, a practice that would be heavily scrutinized by modern civil rights standards.
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