Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

A family tragedy unfolded in Moscow, Idaho, after a 17-year-old girl attended a church revival meeting against the wishes of her father.

It later became clear what her father had feared – that she would tell the truth.

During a women-only event at the revival meeting, the girl said that her father had forced “improper” and “unsavory” relations upon her. The girl had been serving as housekeeper to her father ever since her parents had separated two years earlier.

The women at the meeting told the pastor’s wife. They arranged to have the girl sent to her mother in Lewiston. Then the church informed the local prosecutor, who swore out an arrest warrant.

When the father heard about the warrant, he contacted his own attorneys, denied the charges, and told them that he would “rather have died than be accused of such a crime.”

A few days later, when the sheriff went to the man’s farm to serve the warrant, the sheriff discovered the father dead, on the floor, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1967: Astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo spacecraft.