On the morning of February 2, 1910, two brothers from Hoquiam, William and George Lightfoot, were towing a rowboat across the mud flats near Indian Creek, on Grays Harbor in Washington, when they found a man's body tied down in eighteen inches of water, held there by a fifty-pound anchor, with two bullet holes in the head. Six weeks earlier the Aberdeen police chief, George Dean, had been told that the bodies of a sailor named Charles Hadberg and of a local cigar dealer, John Hoffman, could be found at Indian Creek. The man who had supposedly put them there was William "Billy" Gohl, the Aberdeen agent of the Sailors' Union of the Pacific.
Gohl was born in Germany on February 6, 1873, worked in the Yukon, and came to Aberdeen around 1902 or 1903. Aberdeen was then the busiest lumber port in the world, a rough waterfront town of transient sailors and loggers, where mill owners made fortunes and the men who loaded the ships worked in brutal conditions. As a union official Gohl won real gains for his members, and he became the harbor employers' chief enemy.
The prosecution's story came largely from two men. John Klingenberg, a sailor, admitted shooting Hadberg on or about December 21, 1909, but said Gohl had threatened to shoot him if he refused. He said Gohl had shot and wounded Hoffman, a witness, on December 23, and that he himself had then finished Hoffman off on Gohl's orders, robbed him of $450 and put the body in the harbor. Klingenberg was sentenced to twenty years. Patrick J. McHugh, a labor spy working for the shipping interests, testified that Gohl had talked to him in a saloon about the plan to kill Hoffman and Hadberg. A citizens' committee backed by the Thiel Detective Agency, a firm known for anti-union work, had pushed the investigation. A .38 automatic pistol found near the body was traced to Gohl, according to later accounts, and one account has him boasting to his own lawyer that he kept a journal of his crimes. Gohl was arrested in February 1910.
In May 1910 a Chehalis County jury convicted him of first-degree murder for both killings. At the jury's request for leniency he was spared death and sentenced to life. In June deputies moved him in secret from the county jail to the penitentiary at Walla Walla, on the sheriff's orders, for fear that his wife, Bessie, or his allies would try to free him on the road.
His fame grew after the trial. In the years he worked on the harbor an unusually large number of bodies had come out of the Wishkah and Chehalis rivers, and the newspapers called them the Floater Fleet and Grays Harbor the Port of Missing Men. The legend that followed had Gohl asking arriving sailors whether they had family nearby and money on them, shooting those who had money and nobody to miss them, and dropping them through a chute from the union hall into the river. Figures of dozens and eventually more than a hundred killings attached to his name, and he was called the Ghoul of Grays Harbor. When the body of Carl O. Carlson was found floating in the harbor in April 1910, it too was laid to him. A skeleton found at Indian Creek that July was never shown to be Hoffman's.
The historian Aaron Goings, who grew up in Aberdeen and spent two decades on the case, has argued in The Port of Missing Men, published in 2020, that most of that story was invented. His research began with an August 10, 1911, headline, "Business Men Helped Convict Gohl." He argues that the drownings were what drownings usually were in a port like Aberdeen, that the evidence even in the Hadberg case was thin and the identity of the body in doubt, that the key witnesses had their own reasons to lie, and that the employers' newspapers built the Ghoul to destroy a union leader. "I want to revive Gohl's reputation," he has said.
Gohl was later moved to Eastern State Hospital at Medical Lake, the state's asylum for the criminally insane, where he declined mentally and physically from advanced syphilis. He died on March 3, 1927, of lobar pneumonia and erysipelas, complicated by syphilitic dementia, and was buried in an unmarked field on the hospital grounds above West Medical Lake. Some accounts place his death at Walla Walla. The two convictions stand; the hundred have never been more than legend.