The $35 Alibi in Seattle's Miller Murder
Henry Craemer says a Tacoma prospector repaid an old debt just before Mrs. Philipena Miller and her baby were killed; detectives are trying to break the story.
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.
The last of the stories invented by Henry Craemer, accused of the murder of Mrs. Philipena Miller and her babe, to explain away the charge against him, is an attempt to account for the $35 given to Mrs. Craemer immediately after the murder was committed. He says he was paid the money by Jack Quincy, a prospector, in Tacoma, who had owed it to him since Craemer was a saloon keeper in Los Angeles. He goes on to say that he changed a $10 piece in Tacoma, and gives other details attending his supposed visit to that place. The Tacoma story evidently will be his defense. He repeatedly conversed with his wife for a week previous to the murder about the trip he was to make and collect the money from Quincy, and unless this account can be substantiated, this fact will show that the crime was conceived at least seven days before it was committed.
Craemer has slept little since his confinement, and the nervous strain to which he has been subjected is beginning to tell on him. His face has become sallow, his cheeks sunken, and he has lost fully ten pounds in weight. He eats almost nothing, and night before last he spent the greater portion of the time in writing. He was confined Thursday in a cell in the southwest corner of the jail, and in the corridor to the front was Frank R. Passick, a crazy man adjudged insane yesterday, whose hallucination is that the sun is the only perfect thing in the universe. "The sun is pure!" exclaimed Passick, and then he would gaze with unshielded eyes at the blinding light until he quivered like an aspen leaf. It is not known how Craemer liked his companion. Craemer's face is well known among the morbid crowd of hangers-on at the police court.
Mrs. Craemer again called at the courthouse yesterday. She spent but a few moments in the company of the prisoner, pausing only long enough to ask him how he felt. "Not very well," he answered. "I sleep but little."
Mrs. Craemer is in destitute circumstances, and her object in visiting the courthouse yesterday was to ask for aid from the county. The commissioners were not in session, and she could not secure anything.
Detective Ed Cudihee is in Tacoma forging links in the chain of evidence against the murderer.
“Not very well. I sleep but little.”
Seattle's 1894 press treated the Miller murder as a moral drama of debt, deception, and a destitute wife, while the accused's fate hung on a $35 alibi. Today, pretrial detention, public defense, and the pressure on families of the accused remain live questions, even as true-crime coverage still turns suspects into spectacles.
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