100 years ago in Spokane: The strange story of the city’s ‘woman of mystery’ came to light after her identity was finally confirmed

For more than a year, the Spokane social services bureau had nicknamed Mrs. Ida Brown “The Woman of Mystery.”

Finally, the mystery was solved. She was actually Mrs. May Rhodes of South Dakota.

Rhodes had been reported missing from her home a year earlier. When Brown showed up in Spokane with her four children, police and case workers noticed that she matched the description of Rhodes. Yet when they asked her if she was Mrs. Rhodes, she “emphatically denied it” and said she had never heard of the Rhodes family.

She said her name was Mrs. Ida Brown, and her husband had deserted her in Montana.

Welfare workers tried to “fathom the secret of Ida Brown’s past life, but in vain.” She “kept her affairs well to herself,” and eventually landed a job. She continued to apply for aid occasionally when illness prevented her from working.

Then came a few baffling developments.

Neighbors reported seeing an “unknown man” from time to time around the Brown home. Once, the man was found inside the house. When confronted, he said he “simply took an interest in the family from a humanitarian standpoint.”

Finally, a sister-in-law of Rhodes came to Spokane from Canada to take a look at “the mysterious woman that bore such a resemblance to the lost May Rhodes.”

The sister-in-law immediately confronted her. “Ida” broke down and admitted that she was May, and told her sister-in-law “that she came to Spokane to lose herself forever to the relatives in South Dakota.”

Yet she was not seeking to lose her husband. In fact, George Rhodes was in on the scheme.

The couple had married against the wishes of her family. Her family was apparently making their lives miserable, so she and her husband came up with a plan to go west and start anew. She was to pretend to desert her husband and go west by train, while he went to Butte by auto. There they would meet up again, change their names, and disappear.

The couple had actually been together in Spokane almost the whole time.

Now, after that plan had unraveled, they were all returning to South Dakota, having apparently made some kind of peace with her relatives.