Jake Bird was born in Louisiana around 1901 and spent his adult life riding freight trains and working on railway gangs across the United States, with convictions in several states.
On October 30, 1947, he broke into a house in Tacoma, Washington, and killed Bertha Kludt and her seventeen-year-old daughter Beverly with an axe. He was caught nearby with blood on his clothing after a struggle with police. The Tacoma press called him the Tacoma Ax-Killer.
In custody he confessed to a great many killings committed over years in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Florida, mostly of women, mostly with an axe, mostly in houses near railway lines. Investigators in several states corroborated eleven of them and cleared cases on that basis. His own figures ran as high as forty-four, and were not established.
He was convicted in Tacoma in November 1947 and sentenced to hang. At sentencing he told the court that he was putting the Jake Bird hex on all who had condemned him, and that they would die before he did. Over the following two years the trial judge, the prosecutor, his own defence counsel, a police officer and the court clerk all died, which is why the case is remembered in Washington at all. He was hanged at the state penitentiary at Walla Walla on July 15, 1949, having survived them.