I love a good mug shot, so that’s what we’re going back to in this episode. Our photo today comes from the Washington State Digital Archives. Although some of the mug shots in this collection have an information sheet like the ones my first episode did, most of them seem to not have that. They are usually comprised of two photos. One is what I assume is the intake photo, when the inmate is booked facing forward with their number. The other is a side view of the person, sometimes with their head shaved, and that’s what we have today.
The side view of our inmate is first, he looks like an average white man with a shaved head wearing a suit. The intake photo on the right-hand side shows the man’s face with wide eyes, thin lips and the sparse combover wearing the same pinstripe suit as the other photo. My theory is that his head was shaved after booking, but I do not actually know that.
His number is displayed on the sign just below his chin: WSP 13212. His name is Wilbert Laird and the year was 1930.
Two men walk into a bar…
That. That’s it. There’s no joke. Two men, Wilbert Laird of Minneapolis and George Movius of North Dakota, met in jail after a night on the town. One account says that they were roommates, but neither was from Spokane, so I’m not sure if they were sharing a hotel room while they were visiting Spokane or what. Both were drunk enough to spend the night in jail, so I guess they were sort of roommates.
They got to talking. Drunk people love to talk. I say that with the authority of a former server and sometimes drunk person myself. There are very few accounts of this case, but at some point, the topic of money got brought up.
Movius let Laird in on his source of money. His aunt Mary, back in Lidgerwood, North Dakota. His family was actually quite prominent in their little corner of that state. He probably thought it was just an impressive boast that neither of them would remember the next day, but Laird remembered. In his drunken state, he formed the perfect plan to get in on that easy money from Aunt Mary.
With the help of a friend, Ray E. Stone, Laird pretended to be George Movius. He wired Aunt Mary, and told her he needed money. She had no reason to believe it wasn’t her nephew requesting the money. It was revealed later that it was Movius’s money she was holding on to anyway, so there was no reason not to send it.
Laird managed to receive $300.00 before Movius caught wind of what had been happening and put a warrant out for his arrest. Laird was arrested at a Spokane hotel, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. Deputy Sheriff Harbor had to call for help before he was able to overpower Laird and make the arrest.
On July 14th, 1930, Superior Judge Charles Levy sentenced Laird to 2 to 15 years in the state penitentiary on the charge of grand larceny. Laird’s partner in crime, Ray Stone, had been arrested the day after Laird, but I couldn’t find a mug shot or further articles about him, so maybe they let him off.
Usually, I can manage to tell you what happened next, but it turns out that Wilburt Laird was a common name and it turned up in many ancestry search results, so it wasn’t confident enough to determine which one was ours. I probably could have followed up on George, but he wasn’t the most interesting member of the Movius family in my opinion.
In fact, his aunt Mary was way more interesting, so I may write a short blog entry about her later. So that’s it. Short and sweet, this story of inmate 13212, Wilbert Laird.
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