More than a century ago, in the first decade of the 20th century, Aberdeen, Washington was growing into a busy seaport. Situated at the spot where the Chehalis and Wishkah Rivers empty into Grays Harbor, Aberdeen was the perfect spot for the logging industry to harvest timber by the boatload, from virgin forests of monstrous evergreens that blotted out the sun and dwarfed any man who dared have his photo taken next to one. Aberdeen had been home to a sawmill for six years by 1900, and took its name from a local cannery named after the Scottish fishing port of the same name.
The shipping industry was booming along the Pacific Coast fueled by a very busy timber industry and ships loaded with sailors from all walks of life came and went multiple times every day.
The life of a merchant seaman was something of a transient lifestyle and mariners were commonly roughnecks who carried their pay in cash and spent it liberally in the saloons and brothels which dotted the streets of Aberdeen and the surrounding communities.
Conventional wisdom in the industry at the time dictated that once a ship docked, sailors, nearly all of them union workers, should immediately visit the union office, the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. There, a sailor could retrieve any mail that had been sent from loved-ones at home and send replies, set aside savings from their wages, and if they had just finished a job, they could find new employment opportunities at the office.
They were men with names like Henry, and Hector, and Shamus, and Charles, and if everything had gone as expected, we wouldn’t be talking about them right now, but everything did not go as expected.
No, Aberdeen, Washington, today sometimes known as the Gateway to the Olympic Peninsula, had different nicknames in the early 1900s–the Hellhole of the Pacific, and the Port of Missing Men.
Tales of True Crime, episode 12
Getting Away with Murder: The Ghoul of Grays Harbor
Men had been disappearing in Aberdeen in ever increasing numbers by 1910, and the local authorities were discovering a large number of “floaters” in the Wishkah. A man named William Gohl, an official with the local sailors’ union, was a vocal critic of law enforcement and demanded a thorough investigation each time a sailor’s remains were found.
When yet another victim was pulled from the river, Gohl, whom everyone called Billy, was called to the muddy banks to identify the body.
“Yes! That’s another of my men!”
“His name is August Schleuter! By God, if we don’t get some action out of you fools soon, there won’t be any sailors left in these parts!”
Billy Gohl was the kind of man most feared… he was a German-American immigrant, described by author Murray Morgan in his 1955 book “The Last Wilderness” as a “short, round-headed, heavy-shouldered man,” but what Billy Gohl lacked in stature he overcame with bluster. He was widely known as a blowhard with a penchant for outlandish stories and most gave him a wide berth.
Billy arrived in Aberdeen around 1900, broke, fresh off a spell spent as a bartender at saloons on the San Francisco wharves and in the wild and untamed Yukon. When he arrived in Aberdeen, some already regarded him with suspicion. It seems his time serving the rough-and-tumble clientele at watering holes along the coast happened to coincide with a flotilla of dead migrant workers whose bodies washed up not far from any place Billy called home. He got a job in a waterfront saloon where he told one of the outrageous tales he would become known for… a story about cannibalizing another man while stranded in a whiteout in Whitehorse, Alaska.
In 1903, Billy took a job as a representative for the Sailors Union of the Pacific, and his position meant he was frequently the first point of contact for seamen arriving in port with their pockets flush with cash. Hundreds of men came and went without incident but too many simply disappeared after paying a visit to Billy Gohl, only to be discovered later floating in the Wishkah or downriver in the harbor. If they came in groups, more often than not, everything went off without a hitch. But if a sailor came in alone and asked to send money or store valuables in the safe, they often vanished. So many men disappeared in Aberdeen that locals began calling the men the “floater fleet,” and each time a sailor turned up bloated and dead, Billy Gohl was regarded with suspicion despite his calls for investigation. Unfortunately, nobody could prove Billy was responsible for the death of any of the sailors who had been disappearing at an increasing rate.
Gohl spent his days enjoying his status as a local businessman and dove into his position as a union representative with relish. In 1905 Billy got wind of a plot by a local captain to cast off with a non-union crew. The ship, The Fearless, was tied-up in port, the unionized crew on-strike. When the Fearless steamed across Grays Harbor for the Pacific, someone alerted Billy Gohl, who commandeered a launch and set off in pursuit with a crew of union enforcers. When the Fearless spotted the pursuing boat, someone fired a shot and a gunfight ensued. The sailors on the ship traded shots with Gohl’s small boat in a fusillade that lasted half an hour. Gohl’s launch was too small for the conditions and the larger Fearless was able to escape. Not long after, Billy was arrested and charged with aggravated assault for which he paid a $1200 fine, not an insignificant sum for the day. As for regrets, he would have none. Billy would later say the fine was “worth every penny” if only for the publicity and his reputation as a guy you didn’t wanna mess with.
In another instance Billy’s sway with local law enforcement would prove useful. A local cigar store operator whose competition had driven one of Billy’s businesses into temporary bankruptcy reported an encounter with Billy on the street.
“You ain’t gonna be in business much longer.”
The cigar store operator reported the conversation was amicable, but the threat was not empty. Later that night, the hotel that housed the cigar store burned to the ground, killing two people in the process.
Sometime later, Billy was overheard in a local saloon claiming to have burned the hotel to the ground with a bomb triggered by the cutting-edge technology of the day–electricity. A passage from Morgan’s book detailed the plot.
Billy said “I used electricity to set it off. I had the damnedest time. I fastened the cord to his light circuit, but the son-of-a-bitch hadn’t paid his light bill, and it was turned off. I had to run a wire-in from clear across the street to make it go.”
Despite the loud, public confession to a sizable group, an officer who went to question Billy apparently decided he had nothing to do with the fire and returned without an arrest. We don’t know exactly why. Billy’s crimes happened in an era before the information age, when details sometimes escaped public knowledge, drowned out by the rhythmic din of expanding mechanical industry and the internal combustion engine. Billy was a man out of time, an outlaw just thirty years too late, and it’s possible, like an old west cattle town Sheriff, Aberdeen’s law enforcement may have wanted to just stay clear of Billy whenever possible. Billy was also politically connected which quite likely saved him trouble over the years.
In researching Billy’s case, I caught myself wondering is he a serial killer? Or is he just getting away with murder? Because Billy Gohl wasn’t fooling anybody… he was an extremely violent man, and people knew it.
Honestly, he wasn’t keeping it a secret. Rumors ran rampant about Billy. 41 men had disappeared in two years–vanished, into the majestic wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, discovered later, dead and bloated in the water. Residents accused Billy of having a trapdoor in the floor of the union hall with a chute to the Wishkah River, where he could quickly dispose of sailors after he had relieved them of their valuables.
He once confessed to sending a Swede onto the pier on a wild goose chase only to shoot him in the head and watch his body wash itself away, downriver, into the harbor. He confessed it to an acquaintance.
Despite the confessions, the suspicions, somehow Billy Gohl managed to remain a free man for years in Aberdeen.
The Watch
In 1910, it would all come crashing down on Billy Gohl and the collapse would begin back where we started, with Billy on the banks of the Wishkah demanding an investigation upon the discovery of another of his sailors.
“Yes! That’s another of my men!”
“His name is August Schleuter! By God, if we don’t get some action out of you fools soon, there won’t be any sailors left in these parts!”
Billy likely thought himself clever–that he was making himself look innocent by demanding an investigation–but it backfired, big time.
August Schleuter was not the name of the dead man on the riverbank. Police discovered the corpse was a man named Fred Nielssen and the watch he carried in his pocket was easily traced to a master watchmaker in Hamburg who had the pride to engrave his name on all the major pieces of his watches. August Schleuter.
From the facts we know, we can presume what happened. When Fred Nielssen arrived in port, Billy was there to greet him. Fred arrived at the Union hall alone, unfortunately, and Billy saw his chance to strike. He drew his pistol and shot the man in the head. He rifled the man’s pockets for valuables and found a finely made watch. His first instinct was to keep it, but upon noticing the name August Schleuter engraved on the watch, Billy had a thought.
If they find this man’s body and I am found in possession of a watch with his name engraved on it, they’ll know I killed him.
Instead, Billy put the watch back in the man’s pocket and disposed of his body. It never occurred to him that the engraving was the watchmaker’s name, not the victim.
“Yes! That’s another of my men! His name is August Schleuter!”
When the police pulled the body of Fred Nielssen from the water and Billy incorrectly identified him by the name on his watch, the police knew Billy has seen the watch.
It was presumption in the eyes of the law, not the kind of hard evidence that would bring charges, but it was impetus enough to spur a new probe, a careful examination of Billy Gohl.
The Murders of John Hoffman and Charles Hatberg
The charges that would finally stick to Billy Gohl stemmed from an investigation about a petty theft. Billy was accused of stealing an auto-robe.
If I can digress for a moment, I had to educate myself on the auto-robe, also sometimes called a lap robe, which was a garment worn by drivers of horse drawn wagons and early cars of open air design, to protect themselves from the cold and snow and mud. They were made from rubberized canvas and resembled an oversized hybrid of overalls and fishermen’s hip-waders.
Billy had been accused of stealing one. He was arrested and charged, but turned loose when his friend Charles Hatberg, a cattle rustler along the Chehalis River, provided him an alibi. They were dishonest men, partners in more than one illegal scheme, and if they had both been run-of-the-mill crooks, perhaps that’s where it would have ended, but Billy was a next-level psychopath who could not tolerate another man having leverage, power over him.
When word got back to Billy that Charles Hatberg had been seen talking to a Deputy Sheriff, he was sure the shoe was about to drop. Billy was concerned Hatberg might blab about an occasion when Billy had shot another man’s cow, then tried to claim it was a wild cow. Technically, cattle rustling, still a serious charge in the early 1900s. When police later asked around, they were told Billy had been overheard at the local pub vowing to silence Hatberg. Several weeks later the proprietor said “Billy, I haven’t seen Charley around,” and Billy’s reply was direct.
“You won’t. He’s sleeping off Indian Creek with an anchor for a pillow.”
Charles Hatberg’s body was later found right where Billy had said it would be, fastened to an anchor.
Detectives attempted to follow the trail to Billy’s rumored co-conspirators, John Hoffman and John Klingenberg, but discovered Hoffman had recently disappeared, and Klingenberg had boarded a schooner for Mexico.
The Sheriff sent word to the AJ West that Klingenberg was wanted by the law. Klingenberg tried to jump ship but was detained and returned to Aberdeen. When questioned by authorities, Klingenberg spilled the whole tale.
Billy had recruited Hoffmann and Klingenberg to kill Hatfield. Klingenberg testified Billy had killed Hoffman in the course of the operation, first by shooting him in the back and then executing him with a shot to the forehead as he begged for his life. They dumped his body overboard before they arrived at Hatfield’s cabin. The next day, Billy demanded Klingenberg kill Hatfield, and he did.
Klingenberg would testify “Billy looked at me and said, ‘You take him,‘ and I knew I had to. There wasn’t anything else to do. He had a great deal of animal magnetism.”
“I knew if I had not done it, Billy would have shot the pair of us.”
Billy and Klingenberg disposed of Hatberg’s body in the salt flats and returned to Aberdeen. As news of the disappearance of John Hoffman and Charles Hatfield spread, Billy asked Klingenberg to go for a walk on the beach. The Aberdeen Herald reported on April 7, 1910 that Klingenberg testified “He was overanxious to get me alone and I had some good idea in my head that Billy Gohl wanted to try to get me into a place that he could put some lead in me.” Wisely, Klingenberg declined, escaped aboard the AJ West, and lived to tell the tale at trial.
In his defense, Billy tried to argue Hoffman and Hatfield were off in Alaska working as keepers of a lighthouse. The prosecution refuted his claim by bringing Hatfield’s severed arm, preserved in formaldehyde, into court so the horrified jury could see distinguishing tattoos and verify for themselves that Hatfield was not in Alaska, he was dead.
The .38 used to kill Hatfield had been found near his body and traced to Billy, who was convicted and sent to prison for two murders–Hatfield and John Hoffman.
Billy spent several years in State Prison and was later transferred to Eastern State Hospital near Spokane. He suffered dementia due to syphilis left untreated, and died in 1928.
Whoever loves money never has enough
Nobody knows for certain how many people Billy Gohl killed. As is so often the case, the story is incomplete. There are many unknowns. Most believe Billy is responsible for every one of the 41 men who went missing in Grays Harbor between 1908 and 1910. Others have said it might have been 141, and some have speculated his body count might be as high as 200 if you count the men he likely murdered in Alaska and San Francisco.
We also wonder, if Billy could be diagnosed in today’s terminology, exactly what was his deal? Could’ve been a pathological narcissist with borderline personality disorder or an antisocial psychopath. We can’t examine him and know for sure and records are incomplete.
One oddity about the crimes of Billy Gohl when viewed in the context of better-known serial killers is motive. So often there is a sick sexual component behind the motivation to kill again and again, a compulsion to play out a fantasy time after time, or a complex need to exert power and dominance over another person.
But as far as one can tell, the only motive Billy Gohl ever had was that motive old as time. Greed.
Ecclesiastes 5:10 says Whoever loves money never has enough and Billy Gohl never had enough… couldn’t get enough. With unapologetic malice Billy Gohl pursued the almighty dollar… if you met him alone on the dock at the Union Hall, you deserve our sympathy, because in that final instant, with his gun pointed at your head and his eyes black, you understood why he was known as the Ghoul of Grays Harbor.
If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
###########################
[music]
Night on the Docks – Sax by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4129-night-on-the-docks—sax
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Mystery Sax by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/4108-mystery-sax
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Hitman by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3880-hitman
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[feature photo] Pok Rie via Pexels.com
[sources]
Aberdeen Herald, April 7, 1910
Murray Morgan “The Last Wilderness”
Michael Newton “Encyclopedia of Serial Killers”
SerialKillerCalendar.com
