100 years ago in Spokane: Fugitive Fay McDonald was so homesick for America that she was willing to get caught there

Fay McDonald, one of Spokane’s notorious McDonald siblings, explained why she snuck back into the United States after living as a fugitive in Mexico for two years.

“I would rather be in jail in the United States than free in Mexico,” she told reporters.

She said she was so homesick she “decided to take a chance on getting caught.” After arriving in Beaumont, Texas, by steamship, she tried to lay low, but an anonymous tipster alerted authorities to her presence.

She and her sister, Marie, and brother Ted had all been acquitted of murdering W.H. McNutt, a business partner. But Fay and Marie were rearrested and convicted of forgery, because they tried to cash a check taken from McNutt’s corpse. Both sisters fled before serving their sentences.

Marie was never located and Fay claimed she did not know her whereabouts.

Now, authorities were asking Fay be extradited back to Washington to serve her one- to five-year term in Walla Walla.

From the radio beat: Three North Central High School radio enthusiasts knew the perfect place to get ideal reception was looming high overhead – the summit of Mount Spokane.

So the boys, Leslie Graham, Frank Curtin and Edmund Craney, drove up the mountain and set up camp, complete with an aerial wire stretched between the tops of two trees. They attached this to a homemade radio receiver, perched on the running board of the car.

The results were spectacular. They picked up broadcasts from Minneapolis; Fort Worth, Texas; Syracuse, New York; and nearly 100 other locations. Most of those came in loud and clear.

“With no noise and no disturbance in the atmosphere, the radio set worked fine on top of the mountain,” Craney said. “Lots of calls we could hear plainly, 40 feet from the receiving instrument.”