A Hotel Register, a Pistol, and a Death Pact in Seattle
A Tacoma couple checked into a Seattle hotel under false names. Hours later, Anna Burke was dead and H. O. Eames was telling police they had come to die together.
Seattle — A man and woman who registered at a local hotel Saturday morning as H. O. Eames and wife, of Tacoma, are believed to have come to this city for the express purpose of committing suicide together. The woman is dead at the city hospital, from a bullet wound in the left breast.
Eames told the police that the woman was Mrs. Anna Burke; that he had come from Denver with her two years ago and that they had lived in Tacoma as man and wife; that they had been drinking for several days and, becoming despondent over financial troubles, they had decided to come to Seattle and kill themselves.
While he was absent from the room, Eames says, Mrs. Burke took his pistol from a bureau drawer and shot herself.
“They had decided to come to Seattle and kill themselves.”
Washington now has crisis lines and mental-health interventions meant to reach people before despair ends in a hotel room with a gun. The story also shows how financial trouble and heavy drinking were recorded as context, even when the truth of the death pact remained uncertain.
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