About a decade ago, Pat Jollota started getting offers from retiring and retired law enforcement officials, or their descendants, who were unloading artifacts otherwise headed for the landfill.
The former Clark County Historical Museum director and retired Vancouver City Council member had made a name for herself as this city’s chief popular historian and the author of several books. So did she want these old detective notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs and other materials connected with a notorious abduction and murder that took place in downtown Vancouver in 1950?
Of course she did. Jollota used to work as a police dispatcher in Los Angeles, where her late husband was a detective. “I spent 22 years with those guys. It marks you,” she said.
Jollota already knew about the famous case, which made national headlines and resulted in the executions of two Camas brothers. But the matter still seemed full of holes and riddles to her, more than half a century later.
She used to spend quiet moments at the museum simply reading newspapers from earlier eras, so she’d already experienced a day-by-day replay of the shocking crime, the convoluted investigation and the controversial result, just as any citizen would have when the information was fresh.
“The beauty of newspapers is, you see history unwinding before you, day by day,” she said.
When Jollota’s publisher, The History Press, invited her to pen a true-crime book about Vancouver, she was ready. She wanted to go beyond the already-infamous facts to explore the back stories, puzzles and political intrigues that heated up the case. She spent years digging into archives, talking to detectives and judges, and even interviewing some descendants of the people involved.
Now the book is out, and it’s Jollota’s biggest, most complex and most focused work. At 154 pages of careful storytelling and historical photographs, “The Murder of JoAnn Dewey in Vancouver, Washington,” makes for a grave and gripping read.
“Why were all three of them there? What were they doing, 10 years before that night, that brought them to the corner of 12th and D?” Jollota said. “I am convinced some stories want to be told.”
Missed connection
On the evening of March 19, 1950, a young woman named JoAnn Dewey got off a bus in downtown Vancouver, made some phone calls from the station and started walking east. She’d seen a movie with a friend in Portland but missed a connecting bus to her family home in Meadow Glade; after calling a friend and her mother, she came up with a plan to spend the night with a family friend who worked as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital on East 12th Street, then go home in the morning.
Jollota sets a tensely quiet scene in the downtown that Dewey walked through. The Kaiser shipyards were already history, and so were many restaurants and bars formerly patronized by shipyard workers. Main Street was still somewhat lively, but side streets were empty and dim. If Dewey felt safe, Jollota writes, it’s only because she’d missed recent news about the attempted abduction of a woman by two men who sprang out of a car at 13th and Broadway. The victim had fought the men off, and the item got little attention.
JoAnn Dewey never reached the hospital. At 11:30 p.m. on an otherwise quiet Sunday night, numerous people witnessed trouble on the street. A nurse in the hospital heard screams. Men who looked out their windows, including an elected Clark County commissioner, saw two men struggling with a woman; one of the men called out that she was his wife and that she’d had too much to drink. The woman didn’t stop screaming and struggling until one of the men punched her in the face. Then they got her into the car and drove off.
Police were on the scene within moments, but the car was gone. A search of the sidewalk yielded hairpins and other items that might have been torn loose from a young woman during a struggle. “Throughout the night, agencies across Clark County were searching for a dark car, maybe a Buick, with two men and a woman. That was all that they had,” Jollota writes.
Actually, they had more: an open, unfinished bottle of beer found on the street, and a Camas family with a long criminal record and the ongoing suspicion of multiple local law enforcement agencies. But law enforcement also had big problems of its own.
Barely controllable
When youngsters in school, the Wilson brothers of Camas were “barely controllable” even by imposing male teachers, Jollota writes. Their father landed in the Clark County Jail for being drunk and disorderly. Several of his children made impressive juvenile starts on careers as thieves and burglars, spending some of their formative years in reformatory schools; three of the Wilson brothers were convicted rapists and wannabe murderers who served time in prison. Two of them escaped and were re-captured.
Brothers Turman and Utah Wilson were eventually released from prison. On that March night in 1950, Turman and Utah were out and about in a dark Buick sedan.
And that’s where the strange story starts getting stranger. Jollota follows the complicated and politically charged investigation and the compelling alibis of the Wilsons, who claimed they went on the lam because of their previous criminal records and a recent petty theft — but not because they were guilty of kidnapping and murder.
Jollota also traces the biographies of the feuding lawmen involved: Vancouver Police Chief Harry Diamond, a “damned good policeman” whose sober methods moved step by step, she said, and Clark County Sheriff Earl Anderson, a recently appointed bureaucrat with virtually no law enforcement experience but a thirst for good press.
There were odd coincidences and leads that went nowhere. There were serious investigative and evidence-handling errors. There was even a brawl, of sorts, between sheriff’s deputies, a state trooper and a potential witness that resulted in the dead girl’s bereaved mother knocked to the ground. Anderson and two of his deputies were tried for intoxication on the job, which he said was a politically motivated lie, but a jury took just two hours to find all three men guilty.
A tip from another Wilson brother lead to the arrests of Turman and Utah Wilson in California. They always insisted that the evidence against them was circumstantial, and their good looks won them supporters. And even after a jury took just five hours to find the Wilson brothers guilty and sentence them to death, the matter wasn’t settled. There were repeated appeals and startling new evidence. There was an investigation by celebrity crime writer (and Perry Mason creator) Erle Stanley Gardner and his “Court of Last Resort.” Four execution dates were set and postponed as the chaotic case continued.
The fifth execution date happened as planned. Turman and Utah Wilson were hanged just after midnight on Jan. 3, 1953, in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. They maintained their innocence to the end.
#UsToo
“We lost our innocence that night,” Jollota said. It was the end of women feeling safe while walking alone in Vancouver at night, she said. As the story unfolded, day after month after year, “the town was held captive” by news reports, she said.
Sixty years later, she said, too little has changed; the whole nation is now captive to endless revelations about sexual misconduct and sex crimes.
“Sex crimes are not about sex,” Jollota said. “Rape has nothing to do with sex. Rape is a crime of violence, and power, and hatred.” That’s why Jollota, at age 81, stays busy volunteering with local child-abuse and elder-abuse prevention agencies, she said.
Of all the terrible things about JoAnn Dewey’s fate, Jollota said, the worst is that she’s been all but forgotten.
“The overlooked person is the victim,” she said. “That’s what always bothers me. Everybody’s interested in the killers. Nobody remembers the victim.”
