At about 2:30 in the morning of October 30, 1947, a man took an ax from a shed, removed his shoes and crept into the Tacoma, Washington, home of Bertha Kludt, fifty-two, and her daughter, Beverly June, seventeen. Bertha woke and reached for a weapon, and he hacked her to death; her head was nearly severed. Beverly came downstairs to confront him and was killed the same way. Two police officers sent to check on reports of screaming saw a man run out the back door, chased him and caught him. At the city jail he confessed, gave his name as Jake Bird, and said it was a burglary gone wrong.
Bird was born on December 14, 1901, in Louisiana, at a place he said he could not remember. He was a transient who worked as a manual laborer and a gandy dancer, laying and maintaining railroad track, and the work kept him on the move. By forty-five he had a long record of burglaries and attempted murders and had spent a total of thirty-one years in prison in Michigan, Iowa and Utah.
On November 26, 1947, a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder and fixed the penalty at death, and on December 6 he was sentenced to hang. After a motion for a new trial was denied, one of his own lawyers, J.W. Selden, said he would make no further appeals and that a man like Bird was a detriment to society and should be obliterated. Bird was allowed a final statement and spoke for twenty minutes: his request to represent himself had been refused, he said, and his own lawyers had asked the jury to hang him. He ended by telling them that all who had anything to do with the case were going to die before he did.
Within a year five of them were dead of heart attacks. Judge Edward D. Hodge died on January 1, 1948, at sixty-nine. Joseph E. Karpach and Sherman W. Lyons, both forty-six, who had taken Bird's confessions, died on April 5 and October 28, 1948. The court reporter, George L. Harrigan, died on June 11, 1948, and Selden on November 26, 1948. Arthur A. Steward, a penitentiary guard on death row, died of pneumonia two months before the execution. The deaths became known as the Jake Bird hex.
His execution was set for January 16, 1948, but he claimed to have committed forty-four other murders and offered to help the police clear them, and Governor Monrad C. Wallgren granted a sixty-day reprieve. Officers from several states interviewed him. Eleven killings were substantiated, and he knew enough about the rest to be considered the prime suspect in all of them, allowing departments in Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin to close cases. Most of his victims were white women, killed with an ax or hatchet. The criminologist Eric Hickey later wrote that the case challenged the stereotype of the serial killer as a white man.
The Washington Supreme Court refused a new trial, and the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court three times, rejected his petitions. For his last meal he asked for fried chicken, strawberries and ice cream, and orange soda. He was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla at 12:20 a.m. on July 15, 1949, before 125 witnesses. No family claimed his body; several officers took pieces of the noose as souvenirs, and he was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.