100 years ago in Spokane: A theater cashier helped foil a second criminal plot in one month

For the second time in a month, Eva Jury, a cashier at the Lyric Theater in Spokane, helped foil a criminal plot.

In the most recent case, Jury tipped off police that a holdup was about to take place at the theater box office. One of the alleged robbers knew Jury and unwisely told her about his plans to rob her.

Police were stationed nearby when Tobey Wagner went up to the box office at about 10 p.m., reached through a window in Jury’s cashier cage, grabbed a bag of cash and stuck it underneath his shirt.

When he started to flee, the officers emerged and nabbed Wagner and another youth, who was thought to be an accomplice. Both entered pleas of guilty.

A few months earlier, Jury was at the center of the Spokane “theater stink-bomb” case, in which some men enlisted her in a plot to detonate stink bombs in Spokane’s nonunion theaters. Jury helped set off one stink bomb, but later turned state’s evidence and helped police solve the other stink-bomb cases.

From the oil beat: The Spokane Daily Chronicle editorial page staked out a middle ground in the ongoing debate over whether Spokane’s oil mania was based on sound science or fraud.

The editors said that those who are “actually drilling to prove the field” should be encouraged. Yet they should be raising money only for sinking exploratory wells and for no other purpose.

They also said sufficient drills were already operating to test out the Rockwood and Hangman Creek districts, “and it would be folly to put more money into the ground in those two localities at the present time.”