Topic: Crime
During Prohibition, which began in Washington state on January 1, 1916, and ended in 1933, Spokane was a major center for receiving and distributing contraband liquor. Prohibition in the area spawned ...
Five years before the 18th Amendment kicked off national Prohibition, Washington voters approved a state initiative banning the sale and manufacture of alcohol. Within days of this new state law, a th...
In Washington -- as in the rest of the country -- the question of who, if anyone, should control, manufacture, import, possess, and consume alcoholic intoxicants has been contentious and complicated b...
As a treaty-rights activist and tribal entrepreneur, Robert Satiacum's influence and notoriety spread far beyond his Puyallup Tribe. He was first known as a local athlete and then, along with family m...
Early in the morning of May 7, 1906, Oregon mill worker George Mitchell spotted the man he had been looking for in Seattle since he had arrived from Portland on May 2. Franz Edmund Creffield was walki...
More than a century ago, a debate about the ethics and authority of law enforcement began in Seattle as citizens, mainly women, voiced concerns about the abuses of power committed against women and gi...
David Wilma was a University Police Officer during the protests that broke out in early May 1970 in response to the United States entry into Cambodia, a neutral country, and in response to the killing...
Throughout its history, Seattle has often been a hotbed for narcotic and stimulant drugs. In recent times, heroin was a popular drug in the city’s music scene and caused several notable deaths. ...
This reminiscence by the then-bank teller Dorothea Pfister (later Nordstrand) (1916-2011) recounts the events of a rather alarming day at the Green Lake State Bank, located in the Green Lake neighborh...
Jeffrey Lee Smith, nationally known as The Frugal Gourmet, was an immensely popular cooking-show host and cookbook author who attracted a near cult-like following. Born in Seattle in 1939, he was rais...
From 1978 to 1981, a rapist who committed as many as 37 brutal assaults kept the city of Spokane terrified. Police scoured the city for the "South Hill rapist" so-named because many of the rapes took ...
Matt Starwich was a colorful King County sheriff who left a wealth of stories to delight historians. He first rose to prominence as a deputy sheriff in the coal-mining town of Ravensdale in southeast ...