100 years ago in Spokane: The aftermath of a raucous party in Newman Lake turned deadly for two guests

Joe Dillo, Mike Dillo and Dick Flack were driving to Liberty Lake in the dark of night when they saw two men waving at them from the side of the road near Newman Lake.

The two men said, “We’ve had a little accident.”

What an understatement.

Flack and the Dillo brothers saw a young woman, Luella Carlton, 22, stretched out in the middle of the road, covered with blood and dirt. A demolished auto was tilted up against a telephone pole. The driver of the car, Fred Hanke, was lying motionless next to the car.

“There’s another girl around her someplace, but we haven’t been able to find her,” said one of the two uninjured men.

The rescuers retrieved flashlights from their car and found Margaret Jackson, 21, underneath the wreckage.

While searching, they had another scare. A taxi came tearing around the curve at 40 mph, barely missing Carlton and hitting two more cars whose drivers had stopped to help. The taxi driver abandoned his damaged taxi and disappeared.

Meanwhile, Flack and the Dillo brothers believed Jackson and Hanke were beyond help, but they carried Carlton to the car and rushed her to the emergency hospital. The others were later taken by ambulance.

As it turned out, Jackson was still alive but had a fractured skull and was in grave condition at Sacred Heart Hospital. Carlton and Hanke died of their injuries.

Police arrived and pieced together the story. The people in the accident had been partying and drinking at a Newman Lake cottage and were so rowdy the owner of the cottage ordered them out. They all piled into the car. Hanke was driving so fast the car skidded off the road in the rain and hit the pole so hard it “literally climbed the pole” several yards. A piece of the car was embedded 12 feet up the pole.

The uninjured men were in jail on possible manslaughter charges. One had been in trouble with police before in connection with a fatal bootleggers’ quarrel near Keller, Washington.