100 years ago in Spokane: Asylum escapee apprehended, not for the first time

Police chased down Gotlieb Kreh, an escapee from the the local insane asylum, after a foot race on Riverside Avenue.

Kreh had somehow slipped away from the hospital at Medical Lake and went to a downtown bank, where he demanded money being held in trust for him under a court order. The bank notified police.

Kreh took off running when he saw the officers, but didn’t get far before he was thrown to the sidewalk and handcuffed.

As it turned out, this was not Kreh’s first escape from an insane asylum.

This “pioneer landscape gardener” from Spokane had recently gained notoriety by writing letters to President Woodrow Wilson in which Kreh outlined his “plan for world peace.” He also insisted on getting a passport to go to Germany and “teach the Germans,” although what exactly he was going to teach them was unclear.

He did not stop at writing letters. He made a trip to Washington, D.C., but was immediately picked up by authorities and confined to a mental hospital near the nation’s capital.

He somehow escaped from the D.C. hospital, but was recaptured and sent back to Spokane.

At his hearing in Spokane, he told the court that he was “a perfect man” and that he “had it in his power to make it rain if he drank milk, and to make the sun shine if he drank water.”

He was taken back to Medical Lake, where, presumably, the guards were planning to watch him a little more closely.