100 years ago today: Huge drug stash found in empty boxcar

A Great Northern Railroad special agent found $20,000 worth of morphine and cocaine in a handbag stashed in an empty boxcar near Sandpoint.

The handbag contained 40 bottles of the drugs and was “the largest catch of cocaine and morphine ever seized in or near Spokane,” said a Spokane police detective.

The drugs bore English trademarks, indicating they were smuggled into Canada from England or “the Orient” and then smuggled across the border into the U. S.

From the court beat: The defense scored a few points on the first day of the trial of two federal Prohibition agents, accused of manslaughter in the shooting of Ernest Emley, near Keller.

Defense attorneys were able to bring up discrepancies in testimony from prosecution witnesses. Some of them seemed to have changed stories between the inquest and the trial.

The defense claimed that the agents were going after a car full of bootleggers when the shooting occurred, and the prosecution claimed that the shooting was unwarranted. The trial was set to continue the next day.

Also on this date

(From the Associated Press)

1896: The first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens, Greece.

1954: Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., responding to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s broadside against him on “See It Now,” said in remarks filmed for the program that Murrow had, in the past, “engaged in propaganda for Communist causes.”

1974: Swedish pop group ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest held in Brighton, England, with a performance of the song “Waterloo.”