Crimes and Capers of the Northwest collects the high-profile crimes and quirky capers that have made headlines in Washington, Oregon and Idaho over the past 150 years:
• Bill Miner was a gentlemanly train robber, also known as The Grey Fox, and was credited as being the first to say, “Hands up!”
• Linda Burfield Hazzard pretended to be a doctor, wrote books on fasting, and convinced her patients to starve themselves to death so she could profit from their passing
• Sarah Johnson had it all—she lived with her picture-perfect family in an affluent Idaho neighborhood—until the night she decided to kill her parents because they didn’t approve of her illegal alien boyfriend
• Keith Hunter Jesperson was a truck driver and serial killer, referred to as The Happy Face Killer for the way he signed his letters to the media
• Franz Edmund Creffield claimed to be a prophet looking for the mother of the next Christ and preached that clothes were evil; his Oregon nudist cult seduced women and enraged their husbands, boyfriends and brothers
• Clarence Dayton Hillman was a real estate manipulator who hired actors and staged fake scenery to lure in unsuspecting customers to buy inferior land
• Ted Bundy killed as many as 40 women between 1974 and 1978, throughout the Northwest states; his favorite hunting ground was college campuses and his favorite victims were young, pretty girls
• For 20 years Maxwell Levy ran an underhanded business as a “crimper”; he shanghaied sailors staying in his boarding house, and sold them to ship captains in busy Port Townsend in the late 1800s
• The Green River Killer raped, tortured and murdered close to 50 women in the ’80s and ’90s—most of them prostitutes or teenage runaways—but it took almost 20 years to convict Gary Ridgway of the crimes
• William Dainard kidnapped nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser, of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company family, off the street in the middle of the day. George’s father paid the $200,000 ransom, and the boy was released unharmed, but the ransom bills were marked, and William spent the next 40 years in prison
• Mary Kay Letourneau was caught up in a Romeo and Juliet story that made jaws drop: she was a married 34-year-old schoolteacher in love with her 13-year-old student, which led to her being convicted as a child rapist.