BILLY GOHL: THE GHOUL OF GRAYS HARBOR

William “Billy” F. Gohl was born on February 6, 1873 in Germany, but his serial murders were committed in the United States between 1902 and 1910. Before relocating to Washington, where his killings would occur, he lived in the Yukon where he had made his living as a bartender. He moved to Aberdeen, Washington where he got work at the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific as a union official. By the time he arrived in Washington, he was already a polished lawbreaker. Police suspected Gohl of being liable for the majority of the multitude of corpses of vagrant laborers that they discovered floating towards shore during his term of employment as a bartender. They were also suspicious of Gohl’s involvement in a copious amount of other crimes.
           
Gohl greatly abused his power of authority as a union official. He benefited from his reputation and his intimidating stature to repress strikes within the union as well as to “recruit” new members to the union. It was during his time of employment at the union that he realized the Union building’s potential for great victim clientele. The Union building turned out to be not only a convenient location to produce victims and commit crimes, but also to cloak the evidence that a crime had been committed.
           
Not long after sailors arrived at the Aberdeen port, they would venture to the Sailor’s Union building where they could gather their mail and, if they felt so inclined, they could put money into their savings. It was these services that Gohl found advantageous considering he was frequently unaccompanied on the job. When interacting with the sailors, Gohl would inquire about the presence of any relatives or acquaintances nearby. He would steer the conversation to the matter of wages and items of value. Gohl considered three things when selecting his next victims. If he established that the sailor was only temporarily stopping through Aberdeen, if he had no relatives or acquaintances close by, and if the sailor was in possession of more than petty cash or treasures on his person at that time, Gohl had found his next victim.
           
Gohl did not travel very far to commit his murders. In fact, nearly all of his victims were shot dead in the Union building. After Gohl had alleviated the valuable properties from the corpse, he would discard the bodies into the Wishkah River, which conveniently flowed in the rear of the Union building and ebbed into Grays Harbor. Located in the Union building was a slope that began inside and ended in the Wishkah River. Despite the fact that police suspected that Gohl was accountable for the slew of dead bodies of sailors who had temporarily docked in Aberdeen and subsequently vanished, police did nothing to prevent possible future killings.
           
Billy Gohl was not stopped until a co-conspirator named John Klingenberg was transported back to Aberdeen after having attempted to flee to Mexico to avoid prosecution. Though, some believed, he vanished to get away from Billy Gohl. Klingenberg was able to attest to the police that he had observed Gohl alone with a sailor named Charles Hatberg, whose corpse had been ascertained by the police in the Indian Creek harbor on February 2, 1910, not long after he had disappeared. Hatberg had been on the receiving end of a fatal gunshot from a .38 automatic pistol. The gun was located in proximity to his corpse and police trailed the ownership to Billy Gohl. In February 1910, Gohl was arrested for Charles Hatberg’s murder and was found guilty of two counts of murder, though he was the suspect in at least forty-one more. The second count of murder for which he was convicted was that of John Hoffman. Hoffman was a witness to the murder of Charles Hatberg. Gohl shot and wounded Hoffman on the day that Hatberg was murdered. Klingenberg murdered Hoffman the next day, a crime for which he received a twenty-year sentence. John Hoffman was murdered on December 23, 1909 and, true to Gohl’s modus operandi, he was dumped in the water. His body was found in the same body of water where Hatberg’s body had been located. He was found in the Indian Creek harbor. In July 1910, human bones were discovered in the Indian Creek harbor, but it was never concluded that it was the skeleton of John Hoffman.
           
The last time anyone saw Gohl’s final victim, he was entering the Union building. Gohl unknowingly implicated himself when the police found the body of the man and Gohl had incorrectly identified him. The victim, a man named Fred Nielssen, was wearing a watch that had August Schleuter inscribed on the back. Before Gohl disposed of the body, he had seen this inscription and surmised that it was the victim’s name. Gohl returned the watch to the victim before unloading the body and, when asked about the victim after the body had been found, he declared that the man’s name was Schleuter. Police were aware that the inscription on the back of the watch was not the victim’s name but the name of the watchmaker. They deduced that only the killer would have seen the inscription and Gohl was immediately arrested for murder.  
           
In March 1912 police discovered a skull buried adjacent to a cabin that was owned by Billy Gohl. Previously, another skull had been discovered nearby the same place. Authorities suspected that it was the skull of Red Miller who had vanished and was thought to be one of Gohl’s victims. The police found other bodies in Grays Harbor that they imagined were victims of Gohl. The corpse of Carl O. Carlson was unearthed on April 27, 1910 and a skeleton that remained anonymous was found in Indian Creek on July 21, 1910.
           
Exempt from the death penalty by a request of compassion of the jury, he was given the sentence of life in prison on May 12, 1910 after he had been found guilty of the two murders. On June 13, 1910, he was escorted to the State Prison. Afterward, he was moved to an asylum for the criminally deranged. He stayed at the asylum, Eastern State Hospital in Spokane County, until he died.
           
Billy Gohl died at the age of fifty-four from pneumonia, that had affected several lobes of his lungs, and a feverish infectious disease called erysipelas. These illnesses were made worse by the mental deterioration brought on by syphilis. He died on March 3, 1927.
       
Between 1909 and 1912, police had recovered over forty-one bodies out of Indian Creek and Grays Harbor. Only a handful of victims were identified by name. The majority of the victims remained nameless and police suspected them to be seamen.  Billy Gohl never disclosed his true number of victims.