100 years ago in Spokane: Man jailed for murder disavows friend accused of diamond robbery in Denver

Vivian Tozier, aka “Alaska Viv,”already notorious for her connection with the robbery and murder of a Spokane hotel landlady, was arrested in Denver for her part in a diamond caper.

She apparently pulled off this new robbery with the help of a new accomplice, Robert A. Hood, “known as the San Francisco Raffles” (a fictional thief).

This bit of news was of particular interest to Frank Eastman, languishing in a Spokane jail for the Margaret Braun murder, because he, too, had used the alias of Robert A. Hood.

He couldn’t remember exactly how he picked up the name Robert A. Hood, but he guessed that Alaska Vivian suggested it. Perhaps it was the name she chose for all of her accomplices, a play on Robin Hood.

In any case, Eastman was not happy at all about this new chapter in the Alaska Viv story.

“I thought a lot about Viv, but I’m through with her now,” he told a reporter in a jailhouse interview. “The last thing she said to me before she left was that she knew I was innocent of any connection with this murder, and she would try and find out who the real murderer was. She told me, like she told the prosecutor and the judge, that she was going back to Seattle and open up a a barber shop and support her aged mother there. Everyone from the governor on down treated her square, pardoning her, and then getting her barber’s license back for her. Now she has turned us all down. She has broken her promises to me and those who helped her.”

He said that Alaska Viv got her nickname because she had been the wife of a “high government official in Alaska” and then had “gone wrong” and operated a notorious “dance hall” in Nome.