Episode 5 – Lena

*This post was originally an episode of the short-lived podcast, 1000 Words, and has been adapted for reading rather than listening. Quotes and other details are from The Spokesman-Review and The Spokane Chronicle accessed via newspapers.com.*

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I’ve been calling this “Episode: Lena” and it would fall into the category of ordinary citizens of the Inland Northwest.

In 2014-ish, I was interning at the Joel E. Ferris Archives at the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, entering metadata for the Libby Collection. We talked about that collection in the previous episode. My task was entering metadata for thousands of photos.

One of them has stayed on my mind and in my heart since then. It’s a photo of a middle-aged man holding a sign. The distinguished looking gentleman has an impressive moustache, a sharp nose and a slight dimple in his left cheek. His expression is serious.

He’s dressed in what appears to be dark clothes, a heavy wool coat and a fedora type hat. Quick side note on hats, I had no idea how many hat styles there are and how some have such subtle differences that it’s hard to know which is which, so I maybe probably got that hat part wrong, but you likely know what a fedora looks like, so that’s what we’re going with here.
The man’s name is Stuart Nott, and what his sign says is where we’ll begin.
“ON-CHRISTMAS-EVE-OF-1928-MRS-LENA-NOTT-WAS-KILLED-ON-NORTH-WASH-ST-DID-YOU-SEE-THIS? – IF-SO-FOUR-ORPHANED-CHILDREN-APPEAL-TO-YOU-TO-COME-FORTH-AND-TELL-THE-FACTS-CALL-MAIN-5844”

On Christmas Eve, 1928, 38- year-old Lena Nott was crossing Washington Street between Augusta Street and Maxwell Street just a few blocks from her home. She started on the West side and had made it as far as the midpoint between the curb and the center of the street when she was struck by a northbound car. Roy Critzer, the driver of the sedan, stopped and with the help of nearby resident Anna Domey, loaded Lena into his car to drive to the hospital, rather than wait for assistance.

One of Lena’s daughters rushed to the police station when she heard the news, but Lena had died before she was removed from the stretcher at the hospital. Critzer said he was driving slowly and swerved to Miss Lena, but she wasn’t in a crosswalk and was in fact crossing in the center of the block, so it wasn’t his fault. Detectives Mason and Pratt, who investigated the scene, agreed. The coroner, Dr. T.C. Barnhart, who examined Lena’s body, also agreed. Critzer was questioned and released.

Lena’s death left four children without their mother. Her daughters, Hazel and Ellen, were about 18 and 16. Her son Raymond was about 9, and baby boy, Robert, was probably only around three months old. Lena’s husband Stewart was distraught and did not accept that Critzer was innocent. He set out to reveal the truth and seek some justice for his wife.

Automobile accidents were commonplace in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, as Dr. Larry Cebula put it so eloquently in a recent Facebook group post quote, “Imagine an entire nation learning to drive at the same time and making up the rules as they went.”

In the 1st 11 months of 1928, there were 4,006 automobile accidents in Spokane. That was a total of all types of accidents, so vehicle versus vehicle, vehicle versus pedestrian, vehicle versus horse, et cetera. There were 19 deaths. Lena was probably the 20th. According to a 1921 edition of the Official Gazette, the speed limit on all highways in the city of Spokane was 20 mph and 12 mph on or over street intersections or in what we would now call a school zone. Drivers were expected to drive in a safe and prudent manner and not at a speed that would endanger life or property.

July 9th, 1929, the Nott children petitioned the City Council for permission to erect a small marble monument at the location of their mother’s fatal accident. Their heart wrenching letter to the council reads as follows,

“We want to erect this tablet in the memory of our dear mother, cut down in the prime of her life, our home is broken. We are forced to separate. Ordinarily, the cemetery would be the proper place, but we agree that if it is a placed where she met her death, possibly it may be a warning to other drivers and thereby be a means of sparing some other child or children the grief that has been ours. We sincerely hope that you will give this careful consideration. We scarcely think that you believe that a person that is struck by a car going 15 miles an hour would be hurled 45 feet. One side of her body literally crushed, and the fixtures torn from the side of the car.”

The Council denied the request.

Stuart was nothing if not persistent, however. He took matters into his own hands and erected a rough sign that, read, “On Xmas Eve, our mother was killed near this point. Wanted — Evidence. Communicate with W 424 Max. Ave., or call Bry 4957M after 6:00 PM. Watch this board.

“That board is going to be like a serial story. I am going to add to it twice a week until I uncover all the facts of my wife’s death, or until the law stops me.” Mr. Nott said in an interview with The Spokesman-Review.

In an effort to get some monetary justice, Stewart filed a civil suit in April of 1929 against Critzer for $20,000. The Nott family set forth the evidence as they knew it. The court papers filed say that Critzer was driving north and for an unknown reason, he swerved to the wrong side of the street, passing over both streetcar tracks when he hit Lena. They say he was driving at a speed of 35 to 40 miles per hour. They maintained that Lena was hit with such force that her head was badly crushed and her body thrown 45 feet, landing at the east curb Washington St.

They also said in an earlier interview that it took 90 feet for Critzer to stop his car completely. Critzer eventually countered by confirming that he was driving north on Washington Street and that Lena died within 15 to 20 minutes from the injuries she received after “coming in contact with the defendant’s automobile.” He denied every other allegation in the complaint and ended his response to it by claiming that Lena’s death was brought on solely through the faults, negligence and carelessness of Lena Nott.

It was when I read in one newspaper account that Critzer stated that Lena walked into the side of his car that I was determined to find something nearer to the truth. To find the truth or something close to it, I needed to know how far a body gets thrown, at what speed and at what speed in 1920s sedan would have had to have been going to take 90 feet to stop. Math is not my thing
So, I turned to Google and a friend who also knows how to use Google. It was slightly disappointing when I wasn’t able to prove that Critzer was driving entirely recklessly at the time. According to the two calculators we found, a 1920 sedan going about 26 miles an hour took 90 feet to stop and also would throw a body about 45 feet.

Despite Critzer not driving as fast as Stewart accused him of, he was exceeding the speed limit and going nowhere near the 15 miles per hour he at one point claimed. Would Lena have survived if he were going the speed limit? Obviously, there’s no real way to know and speculation is just maddening.

The civil case was all set to go before a jury. The jury, in fact, had already been chosen. The case was taken from the jury, however, when the judge determined that there was a lack of evidence proving the negligence of Critzer. Stewart appealed to the court for a new trial on March 31st, 1930, the judge denied the motion for a new trial, and it was all over. The Nott family disappeared from the newspaper after that. There doesn’t seem to be any record of what happened to the sign on Washington Street, and there’s no record of why Charles Libby would have taken that photo of Stuart with the sign.

Every episode I do, I print out the photo and hang it above my desk until the episode is posted and every time I glance up at Stewart, my heart aches for him and his children. I hope that they found some level of peace eventually. My ancestry searches show that the children ended up moving away as far as California and Florida as they married and had children of their own. Stewart died April 7th, 1959, in Spokane. He had five grandchildren.

I’d like to follow up on Roy Critzer now. My original theory was that Critzer got away with it because of corrupt cops and judges, or that he knew people in high places. Now, I’m not convinced of that. It is entirely more likely that crime scene investigations were just not a thing, or at least not as exact or as effective as they are now. It also didn’t help that Critzer left the scene with Lena’s body.

A more interesting morsel regarding Critzer is that in June of 1929, his Chrysler sedan was seized by the government when a man named Jim Corvallis was arrested after being seen entering the car with a gallon jug of whiskey. Critzer attempted to get his car back, but it was denied.

That’s not the best part though. Just in case you think Critzer was probably a great guy, just having a rough time of it, on February 11th, 1930, the Spokane Daily Chronicle’s huge headline read: U.S BARES HUGE LOCAL BOOZE RING. There were three indictments that were made public. The article says that all three were charged with conspiracy to violate the national prohibition act through the sale, possession, importation and transportation, and who’s named in that second indictment? Oh! It’s Roy Critzer.

There were many people involved in this case, and if prohibition, bootlegging and moonshine stories are your jam, I encourage you to look this up further. The defendants in this case allegedly set up shop in the hotel Alexandria. The group stored whiskey in rooms 50 and 216 and even installed a separate phone line to take orders. It’s quite an interesting rabbit hole to fall down if you’re ever bored.

Critzer pled guilty and was sentenced to a year and a day at McNeil Island Corrections Center and a $500 fine. He did indeed serve his time, and his name is in the record books. Not going to lie, it made me feel a little better knowing that he ended up paying for a crime in the end.

I didn’t take the time to find out any more about his life after that because the story wasn’t about him. Perhaps he turned over a new leaf and turned his back on a life of crime. I’ll never know.
So that’s it. Thank you for joining me once again.