100 years ago in Spokane: The nurse who accidentally married a bigamist revealed chilling details of his deception

Alma Schneider, Spokane nurse, broke her silence about her marriage to swindling bigamist Harry Roshon – and then dropped another bombshell.

She said Roshon was the second bigamist she had fallen prey to.

She had once come perilously close to marrying the notorious “Bluebeard” Watson, who was serving a life sentence for murdering at least six of his wives, including two from Spokane.

She believed her earlier encounter with Watson could have ended in tragedy. He had ingratiated himself with her while he was in Spokane, and they became engaged. She was preparing to join him in Los Angeles for the wedding, but a few days before she was scheduled to leave, Watson was arrested by Los Angeles police.

After that close call, she met Roshon, who was using the name of Will A. Allen at a Spokane rooming house.

“I believe that I was drugged when I married Mr. Allen and during the week following the marriage,” she said. “When I signed the check for $8,000 … I was in a stupor – in a dazed condition. I was like a small child, easily led to do anything. I first suspected something of the nature of the thing when my little son, Willard, said to me, ‘Mamma, everything seems so strange and distant. I wonder what’s the matter.’ I called a doctor who told me to throw out everything in the house which I suspected. I don’t know what the drug was in.”

Roshon lived with her only a week, until he obtained the $8,000 . Then he took off for the Midwest and she never saw him again. She subsequently divorced him.

“I escaped the fate that many of ‘Bluebeard’ Watson’s wives met,” she said. “I still have my life and my son to live for. I suppose the two will meet in the San Quentin prison and I hope Allen is given as long a residence as ‘Bluebeard’ received. If I am ever victimized again, I am going to take the law in my own hands, and it won’t be a story of a bigamous husband murdering one of his wives, either.”

She told her story while leaning from a second floor window, because when The Spokesman-Review reporter knocked on her door, she refused to open it. She said she “had trusted men too much already.”