100 years ago in Spokane: Murder mystery takes another twist

The wife of missing Spokane stockbroker W.H. McNutt said she was more certain than ever that her husband had been abducted and murdered, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported.

She said he had left his office on June 24 with the intention of collecting a large sum of money owed to him by some persons who were in partnership with him on a rooming house.

He had encountered trouble with these people before, and they had once threatened to shoot him if he approached them again. Those people had now disappeared, apparently to Los Angeles. She believed they shot him and then drove off with his body in his own car.

A deputy sheriff working on the case did not buy Mrs. McNutt’s theory. He suspected that McNutt was “alive and in hiding.”

However, a report that he had been seen at a farm he owned near Newport had proven to be false. Police were working with a police in “another city” – apparently Los Angeles – in an attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery.

From the police beat: Three women and two men were under arrest for a wild, drunken joyride that ended in the wreck of a taxi.

Dorothy Duke, Billie Howard and taxi driver Gail Lattin embarked on a ride with two men. They got the two men drunk and robbed them, said police, but were caught when the taxi crashed. Duke was found in possession of a roll of bills totaling $300 that apparently belonged to one of the men.