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.