William Gohl was born in Germany on February 6, 1873, worked in the Yukon, and arrived in Aberdeen, Washington, around 1902, where he became the agent of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific. Aberdeen was a lumber port full of transient men, with a large and violent waterfront, a great deal of drink and a river running through it.
Between 1902 and 1910 a large number of bodies were recovered from the Wishkah River and Grays Harbor, mostly of sailors and itinerant labourers. The local press called them the Floater Fleet. The traditional account of the case, which is the one that made Gohl famous, is that he used the union hall as a killing room: that he asked arriving sailors whether they had family nearby and money on them, shot those who had neither, took what they had, and dropped them through a chute into the river behind the building. Figures given range from a few dozen to well over a hundred. He was called the Timber Town Killer, after the industry the port lived on.
He was arrested in 1910 after a former associate, John Klingenberg, gave evidence placing him alone with a sailor named Charles Hadberg, whose body had been recovered from the water in February that year. He was convicted of two murders, Hadberg's and John Hoffman's, and given life. He was declared insane in 1927 and died at the Eastern State Hospital at Medical Lake shortly afterwards.
There is a serious modern challenge to the rest of it. Aberdeen at the time was the centre of a bitter fight between the shipping employers and the waterfront unions, and Gohl was the most prominent union official on the harbour. The historian Aaron Goings, working through the court record and the local press in The Port of Missing Men, has argued that the drownings were largely what drownings usually are in a port town of that kind, that the evidence at trial was thin and the witnesses compromised, and that the Ghoul of Grays Harbor was substantially an invention of the employers' newspapers. Two convictions stand. The hundred do not, and this entry does not treat them as established.