From our archives, 100 years ago

Miss Lizzy Degn, a “nonprofessional spiritualist” in Walla Walla, may have solved the mystery of an old skeleton dug up by workmen in that city.

Or maybe not.

She “donned eyeglasses found with the skeleton and said she saw the spirit” of a man named Oscar de Frazier and the two men who slew him. 

Then she wrote out, in shaky handwriting, the following message (with misspellings intact): “My name is Oscar de Frazier and I came here in July … 1894 and I am a native of Canada. …   I was looking for work. I fell in with two men hoo new of a farmer that wanted some men and would go out with me. They were strangers to me … I noticed one always walked in front and the other always behind, although their was plenty of room for us all. We came to a flat when the one behind struck me a blow on the jaw or on the side of the face rather and I I fell. I don’t remember any more until I found myself on this side of life. I don’t remember hearing either of their names. I guess that is all.”

From the fugitive beat: Wallace authorities believed that one or both of the fugitives who escaped from the Wallace jail might be dead.  Searchers claimed they heard two shots from high on a mountainside followed by a short scream. They were unable to investigate because of darkness and snow. But they theorized that one or both of them, desperately wounded, and surrounded, had ended their lives.