Landmarks: Taunting drove immigrant to kill editor

Journalists have been killed for the work they do or sometimes because they are caught in the line of fire in a war zone, but rarely are they killed for something that never happened.

One such famous case took place in Spokane – the murder of Edward H. Rothrock, city editor of the Spokane Daily Chronicle, on April 24, 1912, right in his own news room. It happened just days after the Titanic sank on April 15 in the North Atlantic, an event which figured into the murder in Spokane.

The story, as told in newspaper accounts, began with a Russian immigrant known as Charles Aleck, who worked as a lumberman and lived at a lumber camp at Hellmer, Idaho. Newspapers were filled at the time with huge headlines and stories about the sinking of the great ocean liner, and his fellow laborers began taunting Aleck about a story they told him appeared around April 18 in the Chronicle, a story accusing him of lewd and perverted behaviors. He could not read English, and he recounted later that they told him the story was printed on the front page as big as the ones about the Titanic.

An upset Aleck came into Spokane and went to the Chronicle offices on April 23 to complain and later said that no one believed him. He left and checked into the Rochester Hotel on Main Avenue downtown. One newspaper account stated it was believed he purchased a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with a 5-inch barrel that day.

Upon returning to the Chronicle the next day, he asked for the city editor and was directed to the 36-year-old Rothrock. He said Rothrock told him there had been no such story, so Aleck reached into his pocket for the gun and shot Rothrock in the chest. Witnesses said he stood over the mortally wounded editor and shot him a second time. He threw the gun at Rothrock and, when he tried to flee, was subdued by three painters who were working close by, as well as by Chronicle staff.

From the jail where he was held immediately afterward, he said, with the assistance of a local Russian-speaking clothing salesman who acted as an interpreter, that “I killed him because he would not take back an article that was printed in the paper about me … He told me this morning that there never was any such thing said about me, and I shot him.”

Aleck, whose real name was said to have been Basil Aleckinev, told investigators he had left a wife and child behind in Russia “because she was no good to me,” but little else was known about him. Aleck consistently clung to the story that the shooting was prompted by the stinging ridicule of those at the lumber camp over the “story” that appeared about him in the Chronicle.

Authorities wanted to charge Aleck, who gave his age as 34, with first degree murder, but there was concern that he had become unhinged because of the Titanic sinking and might not be in his right mind. And indeed, in what was described at the time as a perfunctory trial, on June 5, 1912, there was a finding of not guilty of murder and that Aleck was “mentally irresponsible, which means he will go to the insane ward at the state penitentiary for life.”

But Aleck did not live out the rest of his life at the penitentiary at Walla Walla, as a 1940 census record shows him to be an inmate at the Eastern State Hospital at Medical Lake, where he apparently had been transferred. He died in August 1954 and was buried at the New England Cemetery in Cheney.

The man he murdered, Edward Hiram Rothrock, was the son of Spokane pioneer Hiram Rothrock, a Civil War veteran who moved in the late 1870s from Kansas to homestead at Marshall Junction southwest of Spokane. Edward Rothrock was a graduate of Spokane High School and Stanford University. He began his career at the Chronicle as a cub reporter in 1899 and because of his abilities quickly rose in the ranks. He was president of the Spokane High School Alumni and a member of the Stanford Club and Spokane Amateur Athletic Club.

He and his wife, Mary Hadley Rothrock, had no children. She died at age 34, nine months after her husband’s murder. They are buried at Greenwood Memorial Terrace.