An Excerpt from “Murder in a Cigar Store”

     Without a weapon or witness, there was little likelihood the murderer would ever be found. After the beating death of a prostitute in Douglas the previous year, efforts to arrest the woman’s estranged husband, who was the favorite suspect, fell apart without a witness or direct connection between the scene and the suspect. The decade of 1900 was the first that fingerprint evidence was being used in the United States and the first forensic lab in the world had been established in France less than a decade before. Such forensic tools were not even a consideration in remote communities.

An Excerpt from “The End of an Accomplished Woman”

      In 1914, Lucy Shellhouse was a young woman of education, employed as a house cleaner, and living in Douglas, Alaska. She was a new divorcee, and had chosen, on that Sunday evening in September, to attend a series of films at the Lyric Theater, Douglas’s largest entertainment venue. She was also going to become, that same evening, the victim of domestic violence.

An Excerpt from “Death in the Underworld:”

      The ferry pulled up the dock in Treadwell, where he could see the magnificent mansion that was the residence for the mine’s superintendent just a couple of blocks away.  The ferry skipper eased the boat to the dock, idled the engine and stepped onto the dock with the mooring rope in one easy movement. Three people stepped off, all of them appearing to be workers at Treadwell, and a couple stepped on. The man held the hand of his partner, helping her make the small but potentially watery step between the dock and boat. They went into the cabin to get out of the rain, but not before Leishke heard the man say to the woman, “you’ll feel safer in Juneau.”

      It shouldn’t surprise him that the word was out about the murder, if that was what the man referenced. He had worked in Alaska for the past 18 months, and knew how fast gossip traveled, and how very wrong it could be. Now, he prepared to face a coroner’s jury, assuming that Douglas Commissioner Hensen, the man whose job included acting as coroner, had gotten those six men to the scene of the crime as quickly as he was heading there.

      The coroner’s jury was a tool in common use elsewhere, but with Alaska being a territory and not a state yet, they were more frequently used here. Frank Leishke’s feelings about the juries were mixed – in his role as a Pinkerton detective and now as a deputy marshal, Leishke had seen capable and educated juries, but had also seen men swayed too easily by the authority figures around them. He hoped this jury would be considered and methodical, as he preferred it to be when he investigated a crime.