A Rejected Suitor, a Pistol, and a Tacoma Courtroom
A German servant girl accuses a suitor of drawing a gun on her when she chose another man—and he takes the stand to explain his broken heart.
TACOMA, March 27.—Maggie Kerner, a German girl who is employed here as a domestic in a family in this city, was the complaining witness in a peculiar case before Judge J. M. McMurray today. She charges Mike Pfifle with attempting to kill her. Pfifle took the stand and told a tale of unrequited love. He said his affection for the fair complainant had been pure and devoted, and that at one time his love seemed returned, but another young man had won the girl's affections. This had been too much for him, and he had purchased a gun intending, he said, to force her by threatening to kill her to give up the other man and love only him. Maggie objected to his methods and had him arrested. The justice continued the hearing until April 18.
“He said his affection for the fair complainant had been pure and devoted, and that at one time his love seemed returned, but another young man had won the girl's affections.”
A man who admits buying a gun to frighten a woman into loving him—and says so openly in court—is a window into how casually intimate violence against women was treated in 1895. That the case was merely continued, not condemned out of hand, shows how far the language around coercion and domestic threat has had to travel.
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