In the spring of 1920 a man held in a Los Angeles hospital ward, shackled to the bed after trying to take his own life, became the center of a case The Spokesman-Review called "the most sensational of its kind in the history of the country." The Spokane papers called him "Bluebeard" Huirt. The name on his marriage certificates changed from one bride to the next: Charles Newton Harvey, Harry M. Lewis, Lawrence Gordon, Milton Lewis, Walter Andrew Watson. Police could not settle his real name. He was sentenced as James P. Watson, and that is the name the record keeps.
Over the following weeks he admitted marrying at least 20 women and confessed to killing several of them. Investigators in Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, Alberta and California tried to trace the others. In May 1920 he pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to the first-degree murder of one wife, Nina Lee Deloney of Eureka, Montana, under an arrangement that spared him the gallows, and a Los Angeles judge sentenced him to life in San Quentin. UCLA Library's catalog records that he died there in 1939. That one guilty plea is his only conviction. The other deaths rest on his confessions and on what investigators found in 1920, and none of them was tried.
Little about his early life is known. Library catalog headings for the case give his dates as 1871 to 1939. While he waited for sentencing in the Los Angeles jail ward, he wrote an account of his own life and state of mind, which the Spokane Daily Chronicle printed. In it he described a grim but honest childhood as a homeless "boy tramp" who never had a dollar, and claimed that even hunger had never made him steal food. "My earlier life is void of one act that I know would be regarded as dishonest," he wrote. Jim Kershner, retelling the piece a century later in The Spokesman-Review, called the account largely self-serving.
In the same account he compared himself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He said he had "argued with myself for several years trying to master an ungovernable desire," that he had thought about asking to be committed to an asylum for a cure, and that he was "anything but bad" by nature. "My every act shows that I am to be pitied more than to be blamed," he wrote. He called himself tender-hearted, pointing out that there were many other women he could have swindled and had not.
From his hospital bed he gave other explanations. He told Los Angeles authorities that he was the victim, or the tool, of "a gang of men near Kansas City" who robbed women through bigamous marriages. He claimed to have been a patient in an Ohio insane asylum, and his lawyers first prepared an insanity plea. After he was sentenced he said his true surname was Holden. None of these claims was confirmed.
The pattern that emerged from the letters, the wives' statements and his own confessions was consistent. He met women through correspondence, courted them quickly and married them under one of his false names. Then he asked for their money. He was away for weeks at a time, and he kept wives in different cities at once; Canadian investigators in 1920 said he had maintained wives in Edmonton, Seattle and California. Among his belongings, police found papers he had used in trying to gain control of his wives' property.
Letters he wrote under the name Lawrence Gordon to a Spokane woman, released by the Spokane branch of the Burns Detective Agency, showed how he kept a courtship going from a distance. Writing from California in February 1920, he told her: "Sweetheart, I have $3,000 transferred to me from Canada." He wrote that he had bought her "a beautiful present, worth several hundred dollars." He asked her not to tell her friends she was coming to join him, so that they could be surprised by an announcement from California, and he kept putting off the "wonderful trip" he had promised. His last letter to her said: "Sweetheart, I have to make one more inland trip." He was arrested in Los Angeles the next day.
Two of his Spokane wives, comparing notes in Los Angeles in April 1920, noticed that he had never called either of them by her first name. One of them suggested that he had avoided first names on purpose, since with so many wives he "might have got them mixed and made no end of trouble for himself."
When a wife vanished, her family and friends heard from her by typewritten letter. Elizabeth Prior's landlady in Spokane received a typed letter, signed by typewriter, describing travel and a planned move to California, where the husband was said to own a large prune ranch. Bertha Goodnich's relatives received a typed letter saying she planned to emigrate to Australia; they found it strange that even her signature was typed. Agnes Wilson's sister received a typewritten letter in the spring of 1919 that seemed to come from Agnes. Watson had written it himself.
Elizabeth Prior, known to her friends as Betty, was 28 and lived in Spokane. She had worked at the Banquet Cafe in Wallace, Idaho, before moving to Spokane, where she worked in the dining room of the Davenport Hotel. A friend described her as an orphan with no relatives. She had saved about $2,000, her life's savings.
She told her landlady she planned to marry a man she knew as Milton Lewis. They were married in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He soon asked her to hand over her money, and she did, against her landlady's advice. Then "Lewis" disappeared for two months. When he came back, she left with him for Portland. After that, her friends heard from her only through the typed letter.
In April 1920, after the arrest in Los Angeles, Spokane police began to fear she was dead. A body had been found months earlier in a shallow grave near Olympia, in Thurston County, Washington. Investigators first thought it might be Bertha Goodnich, another of the Spokane wives, but dental records ruled her out. The body was then identified as Elizabeth Prior through a laundry mark on her clothing, traced to the Shoshone Laundry in Wallace. Her closest friend in Spokane said the uncertainty was over, but that it was terrible she "should have gone this way." The friend said Prior's husband had killed her to take her savings.
The Thurston County coroner ruled that she had been murdered and asked the county to seek Watson's extradition. Some of her Spokane friends wrote to the Thurston County prosecuting attorney asking for the same thing. "Betty Prior was an orphan and, since she had no relatives, I believe it is my duty as her friend" to press the case, one of them wrote. Watson later confessed that he had killed her with a hammer near Olympia. He was never tried for her death.
Bertha Goodnich, also of Spokane, may have married him in Yakima in June 1919, under one of his aliases. Her relatives heard nothing more from her except the typed letter about Australia. In April 1920 a Spokane dentist helped examine a body found at Martinez, California, and found it was not hers; the body near Olympia was also ruled out. On April 23, 1920, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported that Watson had told Los Angeles authorities he "knew" her, without saying where she was.
He later confessed that he had tipped her out of a boat on Lake Washington, near Seattle. He first described her death, and that of Alice Ludvigson, as an accident, and then as murder. No report says her body was found.
Alice Ludvigson of Seattle had disappeared nearly a year before Watson's confession. He said he had tipped her out of a boat "in a river in Idaho," and gave few details. Idaho authorities connected her case to an incident the previous August at the Chatcolet campground on Lake Coeur d'Alene. A man and a woman had rented a boat there, and the man had asked about spots "100 feet deep or deeper." Nobody saw a crime, but the man later left the campground alone, in a hurry. No body was reported recovered.
Watson also told investigators that he had taken one wife out in a rowboat on Lake Washington, choked her and pushed her overboard. He said he did not remember her name, only that he had married her in Tacoma. Authorities suspected she was Beatrice Andrewartha of Rossland, British Columbia, who had disappeared after marrying him in Tacoma. The reports do not confirm that she was the woman he described.
Agnes Wilson of Edmonton, Alberta, married Watson in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1918. She moved with him to Seattle, where he was often away for long periods, and she disappeared soon after the wedding. In the spring of 1919 her sister received the typewritten letter in Agnes's name. In May 1920 Canadian authorities opened an inquiry into her disappearance. Watson, according to the Spokane report retold by Kershner, apparently confessed to killing her but gave few details. No charge followed.
Nina Lee Deloney came from Eureka, Montana. She married him under the Watson name, and the Los Angeles district attorney prepared the murder charge under the name Walter Andrew Watson. While the two were camping in California, she found letters showing that he had another wife, a Spokane widow. According to the transcript of his confession, she told him she would have him arrested as soon as she could find an officer, and he struck her on the head with a hammer. He buried her in a small valley off a canyon in a remote part of California. He later said he had gone back to the site more than once afterward to remove traces of what he had done.
The Spokane widow whose letters Deloney had found was in Los Angeles helping the police when the confession was released. She was shaken. Watson had taken her camping at the same place, she said, and had remarked that it would be "a splendid place for a murder." She believed he had brought her there to kill her, and that she was saved because another camper came up and started a conversation, an intrusion Watson seemed to resent.
Many of the women he married survived, and several spoke to the press in 1920.
The widow from Spokane had met him about a year after her first husband died, when she was lonely. He was kind and affectionate, and they married soon after. "I was so happy," she said. "In fact, I once told him it was too good to be true." She joined him in Sacramento, until he deserted her and moved in with another wife in Southern California. She said he took her jewelry and $3,300 in cash. She visited him in the hospital after his arrest, where he told her not to worry and said he could "explain everything." She was not persuaded. In a letter home she described his record as "the worst criminal record they can find anywhere" and wrote that without divine protection she "would have been next."
Another Spokane woman, who owned an apartment house, said she had married him in Coeur d'Alene in 1917. She refused to sign her property over to him or make a new will, but he still took several thousand dollars before he disappeared. "I don't regret the loss of my money, for I am glad that I am alive," she said. She had had five husbands, she said, and he was "the kindest" of them in his conduct. A woman in Wallace, Idaho, told police she had been married to him when he called himself Charles Newton. A Chicago woman said she had married him the previous October and that he deserted her on their honeymoon after taking her jewelry. A Spokane mother said her daughter had married him in Colfax, Washington, and had been swindled.
Not every woman named in the early reports had married him. Press accounts in April 1920 put the number of wives at 25, then 27, and several Spokane women publicly denied any connection. "I do not know the man, never saw him and never had any correspondence with him," one of them said. Another, shown his photograph by a reporter, could not be sure he was the man she had known as L. Gordon, to whom she had been engaged.
His most recent wife was a Spokane dressmaker. She had married him about a year before his arrest, under yet another alias, and was living with him in Hollywood when the scheme fell apart. His long absences made her suspicious, and he refused to give her money. When the Los Angeles police gave her "little satisfaction," she hired private detectives to follow him. They found evidence of other marriages and of a possible attempted bank robbery. When he telegraphed that he would be home on a certain day, she told the police, and officers arrested him at the house. He "put up a fight," she said. In her statement to the police she said he had been "always a gentleman to me, and intellectually bright."
He was first held on suspicion of attempted bank robbery. At the time of his arrest he tried to kill himself, and he was taken to a Los Angeles hospital, where he was kept shackled to a bed. He made two suicide attempts in custody, according to the Spokane Daily Chronicle on April 23, 1920. By mid-April, as reported in Spokane, police believed he had as many as 25 wives, at least three of them from Spokane, and were looking for at least eight who were missing. On April 15, 1920, the Chronicle described two Spokane wives as following his case. Both went to Los Angeles to help the investigation.
On April 27, 1920, he spoke to Los Angeles reporters from his bed. He said he would soon "disprove the charges against me," that he found the reaction "amusing," and that once he was on his feet he would explain the "disappearances" being blamed on him. He complained that he was being made "the goat" for any woman "who has lost a husband within the last few years."
After the Los Angeles district attorney met the two Spokane wives, a warrant was issued charging Harry M. Lewis, also known as James "Bluebeard" Huirt, with bigamy, and a formal bigamy complaint was filed in Los Angeles centering on the two women. Through his attorney, he arranged financial restitution to both of them; no amount was reported. The bigamy case was overtaken by the murder case, and its outcome was not reported.
By the end of April 1920 he had admitted marrying at least 20 women and had begun to confess to killings. The first confessions covered Elizabeth Prior, killed with a hammer near Olympia; Bertha Goodnich, tipped out of a boat on Lake Washington; Alice Ludvigson, tipped out of a boat in Idaho; and Nina Lee Deloney, killed with a hammer in California. He drew a map showing where he had buried Deloney. A murder charge was to be filed once her body was found.
Soon afterward he was reported to have confessed to murdering four of his wives, two of them from Spokane. The Los Angeles district attorney believed he had killed as many as five more; Watson had neither confessed to those nor denied them. The prosecutor predicted that the full story would "astound the whole world" and planned to question him again, though Watson was still frail from cutting his wrists in custody. The Tacoma wife was added to his confessions in this period. A Los Angeles report quoted him as saying he had felt "intense mental satisfaction from killing the women."
Authorities said his cooperation was driven by a promised plea arrangement: he would plead guilty, and the state would seek life imprisonment rather than death. Some relatives and friends of the dead women were reported to be "greatly incensed" by the decision not to seek execution.
The map proved unreliable. Searchers who followed it found nothing and accused him of deceiving them. He answered that once he recovered he could lead them to the spot blindfolded.
On May 4, 1920, by the Spokane account, he did. Still weak from his suicide attempt, he rode in an ambulance at the head of a procession of police cars and onlookers, and directed the searchers to a rocky patch of ground near a gulch and a ledge. Deputies began to dig, and her body was found within moments in a shallow grave. Watson, who had seemed composed until then, collapsed and had to be helped back to the ambulance.
Sources differ on where the grave lay. The Spokane report places the search in Imperial County, California. Photographs from the Los Angeles Times archive, now held by UCLA Library, are catalogued as showing sheriffs and searchers at Sugarloaf Canyon, San Diego County, on May 8, 1920, and the grave on May 9, 1920; the catalog dates may be publication dates rather than the day of the search. A 1931 Philadelphia Inquirer feature placed the grave in the Imperial Valley.
The latest wife, the dressmaker whose detectives had exposed him, opposed the plea arrangement. On May 5, 1920, she issued a statement from Los Angeles saying she would keep fighting until he was hanged. She called the officials' willingness to bargain with a murderer "outrageous." "Mercy!" she wrote, and added that he had shown no mercy to the women he had robbed of their savings and killed when they threatened to expose him. She believed that without her own action she would have been one of his victims.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in a Los Angeles courtroom after admitting that he had killed Nina Lee Deloney. He sat with his head bowed and whispered "guilty" to the judge. His attorney said the only thing he wanted was to escape the gallows. The plea came during the grand jury indictment proceedings, and the Spokane report said it was not yet clear that the arrangement was final, because the Los Angeles prosecutor had never endorsed it in public. The deal was reported to depend on his cooperation in the cases of about six other missing wives.
The arrangement held. A Los Angeles judge sentenced him to life in San Quentin State Prison, as reported in Spokane in May 1920. The judge was Frank R. Willis, who, according to his college alumni newsletter of July 1, 1920, presided over the case of James P. Watson, "Blue Beard," and sentenced him to life. When he was sentenced, the death toll among his former wives was thought to be nine.
His attorney, J. Morgan Marmaduke, had at first planned an insanity defense, then decided that a prison was better for his client than an asylum. In San Quentin, Watson would stay under California's jurisdiction and avoid murder charges in Washington. Marmaduke said Watson "does not want to go to Washington for trial," where the attorney believed capital punishment was then in force. The Spokane report described a plan to keep him in San Quentin until no other state could prosecute him, then have him found insane, sent to an asylum and eventually paroled.
The dressmaker objected to that too. She asked why he should be shown mercy when he had "showed no mercy" to the women he killed, and said he "was never insane and isn't now." No charge against him by Washington, Idaho or Canada was reported.
He served the life sentence. In 1931, a Philadelphia Inquirer magazine feature described him as still serving life in San Quentin for the killing of Nina Lee Deloney. The feature told a story that had grown up around the case: that he had buried about $50,000 in Liberty Bonds in glass jars near her grave. Wycliffe A. Hill, a Hollywood writer, had gone after the supposed treasure after a newspaper he edited printed Watson's story and invited readers to hunt for it. Hill then sued Watson for $25,000 in damages for his wasted time, claimed that a verbal contract entitled him to $20,000 of the bonds, and asked the court to make Watson reveal where they were. "I feel I have been terribly victimized," Hill said. The reports do not say how the suit ended or whether any bonds existed. The same feature gave the year of the killing as 1926, which is wrong; the plea and sentence were in 1920.
He died of pneumonia in San Quentin in 1939, according to UCLA Library's catalog of the Los Angeles Times photographic archive. The exact date of his death was not reported.
The case left a trail in Northwest memory. The Spokesman-Review's history columnist Jim Kershner retold it day by day in April and May 2020, a century after the Spokane Daily Chronicle first reported it. UCLA Library holds Los Angeles Times glass negatives from 1920 showing the search for Nina Lee Deloney's grave, catalogued under "Watson, James P., d. 1939." The San Diego History Center's research library holds a 2020 study of the case by Alene Lorraine Burnett-Reaugh, American Bluebeard: Lies and Dead Wives.
His real name is unknown. He was sentenced as James P. Watson; the murder charge was prepared under Walter Andrew Watson; Spokane reports called him James Huirt, with the middle initial given as R. in one report and B. in another; investigators thought he might be Walter Andrew Watson; and after sentencing he claimed the surname Holden.
The number of wives was never fixed. Reports in April 1920 gave 25 and then 27; he admitted "at least 20"; one wife spoke of "several dozen" brides; UCLA Library's catalog says 16 to 22. Several women named as wives in early reports denied it.
The number of killings is also uncertain. He confessed to four killings at first, with others added later. The district attorney believed in as many as five more. At his sentencing nine deaths were attributed to him, and UCLA Library's catalog says he confessed to seven. Only the killing of Nina Lee Deloney was proved in court, by his own plea. Elizabeth Prior's death was ruled a murder by the Thurston County coroner, and he confessed to it, but he was never tried for it.
The suspected identification of the Tacoma wife as Beatrice Andrewartha was not confirmed, and the bodies of Bertha Goodnich, Alice Ludvigson, Agnes Wilson and the Tacoma wife were not reported found.
His claims about a Kansas City gang, an Ohio asylum and an "ungovernable desire" were his own, made while he was seeking to avoid a death sentence, and none was tested in court.
The attempted bank robbery that first brought him into custody was reported as a suspicion; no charge or outcome for it was reported.
The location of Deloney's grave is given as Imperial County in one account and San Diego County in another.
1871: Year of birth given in library catalog headings for the case.
1917: A Spokane apartment-house owner later said she married him in Coeur d'Alene this year.
1918: He married Agnes Wilson of Edmonton in Vancouver, British Columbia; she disappeared soon afterward.
Spring 1919: Agnes Wilson's sister received a typewritten letter in Agnes's name, written by him.
June 1919: Bertha Goodnich of Spokane may have married him in Yakima.
Date not given: Elizabeth Prior of Spokane married him, as Milton Lewis, in Coeur d'Alene.
"The previous August" (as reported in April 1920): Incident at the Chatcolet campground on Lake Coeur d'Alene later linked to Alice Ludvigson.
About a year before his arrest: His last wife, a Spokane dressmaker, married him; they lived in Hollywood.
February 1920: He wrote to a Spokane woman as Lawrence Gordon, promising money and a trip.
Before his arrest (date not given): Nina Lee Deloney killed in California.
1920: Arrested at his Hollywood home after his wife told police when he would return; attempted suicide.
April 15, 1920: Spokane Daily Chronicle reports him in custody on suspicion of attempted bank robbery, with as many as 25 wives.
April 1920: Body found near Olympia identified as Elizabeth Prior; bigamy warrant and complaint filed in Los Angeles; Thurston County coroner rules Prior's death a murder.
April 23, 1920: He tells Los Angeles authorities he "knew" Bertha Goodnich.
April 27, 1920: He tells reporters from his hospital bed that he will disprove the charges.
Late April 1920: He confesses to killing Prior, Goodnich, Ludvigson and Deloney; a plea arrangement for life imprisonment is reported.
May 4, 1920: He leads searchers to Nina Lee Deloney's grave (Spokane account).
May 5, 1920: His last wife demands that he be hanged.
May 1920: Canadian authorities investigate Agnes Wilson's disappearance. He pleads guilty to first-degree murder of Nina Lee Deloney in Los Angeles; Judge Frank R. Willis sentences him to life in San Quentin.
1931: Still serving life; Wycliffe A. Hill sues him over a supposed buried treasure.
1939: Dies of pneumonia in San Quentin (UCLA Library catalog).