The Fugitive of Coos Bay
A man who lived under an alias in Oregon is arrested for a two-year-old murder in Cowlitz County after being tracked across the region.
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 who has been in Marshville since last April was arrested on a charge of having murdered one Anderson Patton at Freeport, in Cowlitz County, W. T., two years ago. The man’s name is said to be A. J. Leonard. Patten, the murdered man, was Leonard’s brother-in-law. Patten was a worthless character who was in the habit of maltreating his wife and father-in-law. Soon after one such incident, Leonard went for Patton with a shotgun, and he was found dead. No one witnessed the murder, but suspicion pointed so strongly at Leonard that he soon fled the country. He eventually turned up in Coos Bay under the name of Charles A. Stanley. Upon his arrest, Leonard acknowledged his identity, pleading extenuating circumstances for the crime.
“Patten was a worthless character who was in the habit of maltreating his wife and father-in-law.”
Long-distance manhunts were common in the 19th century, where changing your name in a new town was the primary way to escape a violent past. The 'extenuating circumstances' defense—in this case, protecting family from domestic abuse—remains a classic component of frontier-era homicide trials.
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