A Tinker's Alibi: How Tumwater Witnesses Overturned a Tacoma Murder Conviction

Between 10 and 11 o’clock on the evening of the 5th of October, 1889, Enoch Crosby, an inoffensive and respected citizen of Tacoma, was shot down in cold blood in the public streets of that city. The victim lived long enough to give a brief account of the murder. He had been down to the depot to see some friends and, on returning home, was walking quietly along the street when two men started out from the side of a barn which fronted the street. When within five or six feet of him, without making any demands or giving any warning, they shot him through the body with a revolver. One of them went in one direction and the other in the opposite direction. The motive for the crime was never disclosed, as Crosby was too exhausted to answer whether they had robbed him.

On the following Wednesday, October 9, George Stowe was arrested on suspicion of having committed the crime, and a day or two later a man named Hoyt was also arrested. A joint information was filed against them, charging them with Crosby’s murder. Stowe was convicted of murder in the second degree and sentenced to twenty years in the penitentiary. He appealed, assigning as error that the information laws were not applicable to the state, that the evidence did not warrant the verdict, and that a new trial should have been granted on the ground of newly discovered evidence.

At trial Stowe claimed that he was in Tumwater, a village thirty or forty miles from Tacoma, on the day Crosby was murdered, pursuing the vocation of an itinerant tinker, or mender of tinware. Several citizens of Tumwater swore that they saw him there during the day. Tice, who kept the hotel at Tumwater, swore that Stowe stayed in his house on the Saturday night of October 5 and that he woke him for breakfast the next morning and that he ate breakfast there. No register was kept at Tice’s hotel.

After the trial Stowe moved for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence. Martha E. Eddy swore that the defendant came to her house in Tumwater between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on a certain Saturday in October 1889, after the district school had begun, and requested work at mending tinware, indicating that he was deaf and dumb. George Gelbach, clerk of the Tumwater school district, swore that the school term for that year began September 30. Because Stowe was arrested on October 9 and confined in jail at Tacoma during the rest of October, if Mrs. Eddy saw him on a Saturday in October it must have been the first Saturday, October 5. Clark Biles, a resident of the Tumwater school district, also swore that on the first Saturday of the school term in 1889 he saw the defendant, a deaf and dumb tinker, in Tumwater between 2 and 3 p.m. The affidavits noted that Stowe was in the habit of imposing himself upon communities where he plied his trade as a deaf and dumb man, claiming that he could get more work by reason of such supposed afflictions.

The respondent argued that the showing was insufficient and cited the rule that applications for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence are regarded with distrust and disfavor. But the court held that the code simplified the requirement: a new trial is admissible for newly discovered evidence material to the applicant which he could not with reasonable diligence have discovered and produced at trial. No fixed standard can be established for the measurement of every case, no iron-bound rule prescribed; each case must be governed by the circumstances surrounding it. Finding that substantial justice had been denied the applicant, the court reversed the ruling and granted a new trial.