Arrow-right Camera

Color Scheme

Subscribe now

This column reflects the opinion of the writer. Learn about the differences between a news story and an opinion column.

100 years ago in Spokane: The Maurice Codd murder-turned-perjury trial took a new turn when the KKK came up in questioning

 (Spokane Daily Chronicle archives)

As if the Maurice Codd subornation of perjury trial weren’t sensational enough, now the Ku Klux Klan was injected into it.

A defense attorney was trying to get star witness Beatrice Sant to explain why she hid out in Montana. He asked her if she was “trying to escape the clutches of the Klan?”

Sant emphatically denied that she had ever expressed any fear of the Klan. She stuck to her story that Codd’s attorneys had spirited her out of town in order to avoid a grand jury subpoena on the perjury charges.

From the sledding beat: Four Washington State College students were in the hospital after their bobsled slammed into a taxi on the Campus Avenue hill in Pullman.

A number of students were injured in various sledding accidents on Thanksgiving.

From the police beat: A bullet crashed through a streetcar window in Hillyard, spraying glass over four Great Northern shop workers.

Police had no suspects in the shooting, but it may have been related to the railroad shopmen’s strike.

The strike had essentially been broken weeks ago, but there were still out-of-work strikers picketing the shop. The union strike committee said it did not condone such dangerous tactics.

Also on this date

(From onthisday.com)

1953: Hugh Hefner publishes the first edition of Playboy magazine, featuring Marilyn Monroe as the magazine’s centerfold.

1955: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus and give her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.

More from this author