100 years ago in Spokane: Private detectives caught the bank robbers who had ‘terrorized’ Eastern Washington for months, including ‘the cleverest guy in the profesh’

Police arrested the leaders of two notorious bank-robbing gangs that had “fairly terrorized” the small-town banks around Spokane for months.

Burns Detective Agency operatives were credited with “dazzling revelations” that solved the cases.

Johnny Reed, known as “the cleverest guy in the profesh,” was arrested in Seattle after Burns detective F.S. Alkus found a cetylene tank left at the scene of the Thornton, Wash., bank robbery. He traced it to the Seattle Oxygen Co. and then traced the sale of the tank to Reed.

Reed, along with his wife and two other members of his gang, were being held in Seattle on suspicion of multiple bank robberies, including the Thornton bank, a Fairfield bank and the Farmers Bank of Johnson, Wash.

The leader of another gang, Arthur J. Davis – alias Chicago Freddie – was arrested in Stockton, Calif. Burns detectives believe he was responsible for nearly a dozen bank robberies in Montana and at least one in Washington.

From the rum-running beat: A Bonner County district court judge formally ousted Sheriff William Kirkpatrick from office.

Kirkpatrick had been convicted a month earlier on federal charges of conspiring with bootleggers, but he refused to leave office while he was out on bail pending appeal.

The judge ruled that the office of sheriff had been legally vacant the moment Kirkpatrick was convicted. The judge confirmed that Fred A. Hanson, whom the county commissioners had appointed to replace Kirkpatrick, was entitled to the office retroactive to his appointment.

This was not the first county sheriff in the region to be fired because of rum-running. The Ferry County sheriff had been convicted and ousted earlier in the year.