William "Billy" Gohl was a union official on the Washington coast who became one of the region's best known names for a crime story rather than for his union work. From 1903 to 1910 he was the agent of the Aberdeen branch of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific, at a time when Grays Harbor was the world's most productive lumber port and the most heavily unionized area of the state. In early 1910 he was arrested and charged with murder. In May 1910 a jury in Chehalis County convicted him of first-degree murder in the death of a sailor, Charles Hadberg, and he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1927.
That single conviction is the legal record. Around it grew a much larger story. Newspapers, and later true crime writers, blamed Gohl for many of the bodies found around Grays Harbor in the years he worked there, the so-called "Floater Fleet," and named him the "Ghoul of Grays Harbor." Estimates of his supposed victims have run from about 40 to 200. The historian Aaron Goings, who grew up in Aberdeen and spent about 20 years researching the case, argues that the legend was built by employers, labor spies and newspaper editors who saw Gohl as a dangerous enemy, and that the deaths blamed on him reflected the brutal conditions of the waterfront. Others in Grays Harbor dispute his reading.
In the early 1900s the towns of Grays Harbor, chief among them Aberdeen and Hoquiam, lived on timber. Goings describes logging camps, sawmills, shingle mills and ships where men worked long hours in dangerous conditions. Falling trees, swinging lumber loads, saws and badly kept ships and docks killed and injured workers in large numbers, and, by his account, Aberdeen led the Pacific Northwest in violent deaths. Logging, sawmilling and shingle work killed and maimed hundreds of people in Gohl's time.
The harbor was also a center of labor organizing. Shingle weavers in Hoquiam formed Local 21 of their union in September 1902, and between 1901 and 1907 the weavers organized nearly every shingle mill in Chehalis County, Goings writes in a HistoryLink essay. Grays Harbor weavers struck at least ten times between 1902 and 1911. Employers and their allies answered with force. In Goings's account, vigilantes beat, shot and kidnapped activists, and police jailed them and raided their halls.
Gohl was born in 1873. He took up the post of agent for the Sailors' Union of the Pacific in Aberdeen in 1903 and held it until 1910. He was elected by the union's seamen, and fellow unionists twice elected him president of the local labor council. He was also the founding president of the Grays Harbor Waterfront Federation. A HistoryLink essay by Goings records that Hoquiam's shingle weavers, together with Gohl of the Aberdeen sailors' union, formed the Grays Harbor City Front Federation, which its organizers saw as a first step toward one union for all waterfront workers.
The agent's job was practical. Gohl watched conditions on ships, collected dues and called strikes. He kept members off "death ships," arranged death benefits and funerals, represented sailors in court, translated for immigrant members and helped find them housing. He pressed ship captains to keep to union contracts and safety laws. He wrote letters to newspaper editors and helped build shelters for migrant workers. Goings writes that he won real gains for his members, and that this made him an enemy of the harbor's business owners. A reviewer summarizing the book quotes Goings's view that Gohl was "the only one capable of shutting down the highly profitable Grays Harbor lumber trade."
Gohl's union work was not peaceful. In 1906, Goings says, Gohl led unionists in armed clashes with employers and strikebreakers, and he was charged and convicted of a serious crime as a result.
By 1909, according to Goings, a group of employers, politicians and newspaper editors had formed a citizens' committee to deal with Gohl. A 2021 report on Goings's research says the committee was formed by Aberdeen's mayor, E. B. Benn, together with wealthy local business owners. The committee raised thousands of dollars to pay the Thiel Detective Agency, a private detective firm. Through 1909 and 1910 Thiel agents and local employers worked to have Gohl arrested and convicted of murder. Goings argues that much of the evidence was manufactured by labor spies, and that local newspapers printed rumors and began referring to the union as "Gohl and his Gang."
Goings's research began, he has said, with a single headline in the Aberdeen Daily World of August 10, 1911: "Business Men Helped Convict Gohl." The article reported a debate in the Aberdeen City Council over whether public money should pay the Thiel agents hired in 1909 and 1910 to investigate Gohl and help convict him.
Gohl was arrested and charged with murder in early 1910. On the day of his arrest, the Aberdeen Daily World blamed him for "many of the members of the 'floater fleet,' comprising more than 40 bodies." In Hoquiam, the newspaper editor Albert Johnson published a column on February 4, 1910, under the title "Listen, William Gohl!" Goings writes that Johnson, after Gohl's arrest on murder charges, called on respectable residents to take action against him outside the law, and asked Gohl in print whether he could hear "the roar of the mob."
Gohl was tried in Chehalis County in the spring of 1910. The prosecution's case rested heavily on two men. John Klingenberg, a sailor, admitted shooting Charles Hadberg but said that Gohl had threatened him into it. Paddy McHugh, described in a 2021 report on Goings's work as a private detective and labor spy paid by Gohl's enemies, also testified against him.
The jury had difficulty reaching a verdict, Goings writes. In May 1910, about three months after his arrest, it convicted Gohl of first-degree murder in the death of Charles Hadberg. He was sentenced to life in prison. Goings stresses that Gohl was tried and convicted of only one murder. Gohl himself said the case against him seemed like "the dream of some dime store novel writer."
Goings argues that in 1910 there was little hard evidence that Gohl had killed Hadberg, and that even the identity of the body was in doubt. A 2021 report on his book asks whether Klingenberg, who admitted the shooting, may himself have been pressed by the citizens' committee. The same report adds a caution: the committee's scheming does not by itself prove that Gohl was innocent, and he "could have been both, political enemy and murderer."
Gohl went to prison in 1910 to serve his life sentence. He died in 1927.
After the trial, the conviction was used to explain much of the violence on the harbor. Goings writes that newspapers pinned the region's violent crimes on Gohl and "his gang" while leaving out the employers' own, often brutal, campaign against labor activists. The popular version made him a serial killer who preyed on itinerant workers, and he became known as the "Ghoul of Grays Harbor." Grays Harbor itself came to be called the "Port of Missing Men."
The numbers grew with each telling. On the day of his arrest the Aberdeen Daily World linked him to a "floater fleet" of more than 40 bodies. The writer Murray Morgan, in his account of the Floater Fleet, put the toll at 124 deaths over ten years. In the version described in Larson's 2020 review, he killed upward of 100 people between 1906 and 1909. Goings notes that many studies have estimated that Gohl murdered between 40 and 200 men, and that some true crime writers have suggested he was one of the most prolific murderers in American history. None of these deaths was ever tried against him. They are part of the legend, not the legal record.
John Larson, director of the Polson Museum in Hoquiam, wrote in a 2020 review that he had long accepted the standard account, as told in Hollis B. Fultz's chapter in Northwest Manhunts and Murder Mysteries, in Robert Weinstein's Grays Harbor: 1885-1913, which carries a purported photograph of Gohl, and in Pamela Dean Aho's "Ghoul of Grays Harbor" in On the Harbor.
Goings set out his argument at length in The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest, published by the University of Washington Press in 2020. He had started the research in 2001, reading the Aberdeen Daily World on microfilm for his doctoral work. An associate professor of history at Saint Martin's University in Lacey, Washington, he grew up in a mill town and, by his own account, he and much of his family worked in mills.
According to Larson's review, the book draws on the City of Aberdeen's record of deaths, the Chehalis County coroner's record, university and state penitentiary records, census records, city directories, union records, several local newspapers, the Coast Seamen's Journal, the Pacific Lumber Trade Journal and the Chehalis County Superior Court trial records. From the death and coroner records Goings found that drownings were common in the port, often linked to accidents on ships, falls from docks or log rafts, and drinking. He concludes that the toll the press laid at Gohl's door "quite possibly" reflected the hazards of the waterfront rather than murder. In Larson's summary, Goings sees "this collective misery, as much as anything," as "the real ghoul of Grays Harbor."
In Goings's view the Gohl legend works like the legend of Billy the Kid: it puts the blame for a violent place on one man. He calls the idea of dozens of killings "somewhat silly." Gohl, he argues, was a militant labor leader whom the local bosses saw as an enemy to be silenced, and one of thousands of American labor and left-wing activists who ended up in prison through the efforts of employers, labor spies and newspaper writers. "I want to revive Gohl's reputation," he told a local reporter in 2021.
Goings had presented the same argument in an academic lecture, "Making A Serial Killer: Class, Conflict, and the Case of Billy Gohl," at Tampere University in Finland on January 22, 2019. The lecture summary states that there is surprisingly little evidence that Gohl was a serial killer.
The history Goings drew on has itself suffered losses. In June 2018 the Aberdeen Museum of History burned, destroying labor archives, including collections of the International Woodworkers of America, cooks' and waiters' union locals and maritime unions.
Not everyone in Grays Harbor accepts Goings's reading. Bill Lindstrom, a former city editor of the Aberdeen Daily World, said in 2021 that he admired Goings's scholarship but took exception to his interpretation, and that the book left out "vital information." Lindstrom said he had gathered about 1,600 references and was preparing a book of his own. His claims, as reported in 2021, include these: that 41 of the bodies found in the period shared three traits, being sailors, being single and having no money on them; that about $10,000 that union sailors had deposited in Gohl's safe disappeared around the time of the trial; and that in 1908 Gohl identified a body for George Dean, then a constable in Cosmopolis, under a name that turned out to be the name of a watchmaker on a watch found with the body. These are Lindstrom's claims, not court findings, and none led to any further charge against Gohl.
Interest in the case has continued. In 2021 a Grays Harbor composer, Alex Eddy, was writing a musical about Gohl, titled Billy, which takes Goings's side.
The legal record is narrow. Gohl was convicted of one murder, that of Charles Hadberg, on evidence that the historian who has studied it most closely considers weak and shaped by his employers' campaign against him. Every other death attached to his name comes from newspaper reports, later popular writing and local tradition, and none was tested in court. Whether Gohl killed Hadberg, and whether he had any part in other deaths on the harbor, remains disputed between Goings and his critics.
1873: William Gohl is born.
September 1902: Hoquiam shingle weavers found Local 21.
1903: Gohl becomes agent of the Aberdeen branch of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific.
1906: Gohl is convicted of a serious crime after armed clashes between unionists and employers or strikebreakers, according to Goings.
1909 to 1910: A citizens' committee of employers and officials pays the Thiel Detective Agency to investigate Gohl.
Early 1910: Gohl is arrested and charged with murder; the Aberdeen Daily World links him to more than 40 bodies.
February 4, 1910: Albert Johnson's column "Listen, William Gohl!" appears in Hoquiam.
May 1910: A Chehalis County jury convicts Gohl of first-degree murder in the death of Charles Hadberg; he is sentenced to life in prison.
August 10, 1911: The Aberdeen Daily World reports the city council debate under the headline "Business Men Helped Convict Gohl."
1927: Gohl dies.
2001: Aaron Goings begins his research.
June 2018: The Aberdeen Museum of History burns, destroying labor archives.
January 22, 2019: Goings lectures on the case at Tampere University.
2020: The University of Washington Press publishes The Port of Missing Men.
2021: Bill Lindstrom announces a rebuttal in preparation.