That winter, the cop killer in the woolen jacket gunned down his first two patrolmen near Broadway and Republican on Capitol Hill. Police scoured the city for “the man in the mackinaw.” A couple of cops spotted him downtown at Second and Cherry. They shouted at him to stop. He pulled out a pistol and shot one of them through the heart. The city was outraged.

“What justification can be offered,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked, “for the dereliction of courts and juries, the laxity of the parole wardens, the lubrication of all prison exits by the milk of human kindness?”

The year was 1920.