 Wanted poster
for convicted murderer Edward Krause. Krause's real name
was Edward Slompke. Slompke had served in the U.S. Army at Wrangell,
but deserted when his regiment was sent to China in 1902 to help
suppress the Boxer Rebellion; he changed his name when he returned
to Alaska in 1905. Krause ran for the Territorial Legislature
in 1912 on the Socialist Party ticket and was believed to part
of the radical labor movement trying to organize mine workers.
In 1917, he was convicted of the murder of James O. Plunkett,
a Juneau charter boat captain who dissappeared in 1915 with his
boat under suspicious circumstances (the boat was later found).
Krause was also suspected of the murders of at least eight other
men who dissappeared in Southeast Alaska in 1912-1915, including
Treadwell Mine worker James Christie. Because of Krause's association
with socialist and labor causes, Pinkerton Detective Agency,
hired by Treadwell Mine to investigate Christie's dissappearance,
assumed that Krause had been hired by radical labor activists
to kill individuals opposed to their activities. Though these
speculations have never been tested, some believe Krause to have
been Alaska's first serial killer.Following his conviction, Krause was sentenced to death by hanging. On April 12, 1917, two days before his scheduled execution, Krause sawed through the bars of his cell to escape from the federal jail in the basement of the Juneau courthouse, initiating a widespread manhunt by posses of mineworkers let off from work and the mobilization of the Southeast Alaska fishing fleet. He was killed by a homesteader on Admiralty Island several days after his escape when he arrived there in a stolen skiff. Further details of Krause's story can be found in Alaska State Troopers: 50 Years of History (Anchorage: Alaska State Troopers Golden Anniversary Committee, 1991), pp. 19-24. |
