By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Sitkans interested in true crime stories from Alaska’s territorial days will have an opportunity Friday to hear Juneau author Betsy Longenbaugh discuss her new book, “Forgotten Murders from Alaska’s Capital.”
Longenbaugh will host what she calls an “anatomy of a murder story,” at 6:30 p.m. Friday at the Sitka Public Library. The event is free to attend and will include a book signing.
Longenbaugh, who grew up in Sitka, plans to dive deep into the research behind one of the more disturbing stories in a book full of violence and bloodshed. It’s the tale of the deaths of two Juneau women at the hands of a young Canadian army veteran in 1923.
Betsy Longenbaugh holds a copy of her book this morning on the Pioneers Home grounds. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
“I’m going to be talking about all the different sources that I used when I researched that particular story,” Longenbaugh said in a phone interview. “I’m going to be talking a little bit about the story itself, because it’s such a sensational one involving these two young women who were killed brutally in their downtown Juneau brothel. And the person who was arrested for the crime had his own very sad story. He was a World War I veteran who enlisted at the age of 17, had grown up in a slum of London, and was barely making ends meet trying to teach boxing and living on a pittance from the Canadian Army at the time of the crime.”
Longenbaugh, who was a newspaper reporter in Sitka and Juneau, stitched together a narrative of the 1923 crime from old newspapers and official documents.
While her presentation at the library – appropriately scheduled for Friday the 13th – will focus on a single story, her book has stories of about ten Juneau-area homicides between the turn of the century and statehood.
“They’re all the stories of drama and trauma, and also the stories that tell us a lot, I think, about the setting in which they occurred, both historically and geographically,” Longenbaugh said.
Many of the narratives in her book include people from disparate places who had arrived in Alaska to build a new life and instead found the opposite.
“What I saw is a theme where people came up here to escape from things,” Longenbaugh said. “Oftentimes people change their name… They may have changed the fact that they were married or changed the fact that they had a long history of convictions or something else. And in many cases, they disappear, and that was certainly the theme with the serial killer who’s in the book... There’s just this theme of people leaving a life behind and possibly losing their life here and just disappearing.”
Longenbaugh said the idea for the book originated a few years ago when working at the Juneau-Douglas city museum.
“I was just one of the many, many people who find true crime really interesting… (On slow days at the museum) I started reading newspaper columns that had been put together by Bob DeArmond… and one of the columns I came across had to do with Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz… and his first murder was here in Juneau, and I thought, well, that’s really interesting,” Longenbaugh recalled. “I wondered about other stories like that. And so that definitely piqued my interest.”
Following a nudge from another museum staff member, Longenbaugh got to work. As a retired journalist, the racism and misogyny in turn-of-the-century reporting stood out to her.
“You could walk into a newspaper office here in Juneau or Douglas and so long as you were a white man, and said you could read and write, they’d hire you. There was no journalistic standard.”
After sifting through old records and archives, she gave her first presentation on old murders in 2019. That work morphed into the first three chapters of the book.
“I sent them off to a publisher. They wanted the whole manuscript so then I had to write seven more chapters,” she said. The result was the publication of her book by Epicenter Press of Seattle, which specializes in books about Alaska.
Following her presentation at the library, Longenbaugh will discuss a different story from her book at a Sitka Maritime Heritage Society fundraiser 7 p.m. Jan. 18 at Harrigan Centennial Hall. The $35 for admission also includes a dessert from the Wildflower Cafe. Longenbaugh has chosen a nautical murder story for this event, where her husband, Ed Schoenfeld, will be co-presenter.
“It’s a fantastic story about a vaudevillian performer who was killed and his boat sunk in 1920,” she said. “For a couple of years he’s been running this boat around little cannery towns, where he shows films, sells bootleg and performs, probably sings with guitar.” Matters take a dark turn when discord breaks out among the three men on the boat.
Longenbaugh said her fascination with true crime stories stems from her affinity for solving puzzles.
“I’m drawn to it for that reason,” she said. “What are the clues? How did they come about figuring this out? What’s the backstory? For me, I always want to know what’s happened to people and what was going on with them before this happened and I really wanted to bring to life the victims, because these were all forgotten murders.”
Longenbaugh is already thinking about another book.
“I’m writing a novel this time, but it’s based on a true story,” she said. “And I’m also beginning to do some research and work on a non-fiction book that would be similar to the first one that would broaden out to Southeast Alaska instead of just the Juneau area.”
