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Jul 03, 2023

True Crime: College grad’s quest to find her long

Sylvia Gaines, 21, having completed her education, set off to find herself. In

Sylvia Gaines, 21, having completed her education, set off to find herself.

In September 1925, the recent Smith College graduate left her mother's Lynnfield, Mass., home and traveled 3,000 miles to Seattle. She was seeking her father, Wallace C. Gaines, 46, a man she had not seen since her parents’ divorce 16 years earlier.

Her journey of discovery would end with both father and daughter dead.

Sylvia Gaines. (P&A photos/New York Daily News Archive)

Her parents had made a clean break, remarried, and maintained no contact. Tracking her father down took two months.

When she arrived, the World War I veteran greeted her warmly, and she moved into the small home he shared with his new wife. Gaines was on disability due to shell shock — today known as PTSD — but he had support from well-to-do family in the community. His brother, William, was chair of the King's County Board of Commissioners.

By all accounts, Gaines was overjoyed to meet the beautiful young woman who had been a small child when the marriage dissolved. He vowed never to lose touch with her again.

But then Sylvia vanished on the night of June 16, 1926, 10 months after arriving in Seattle and less than a week after her 22nd birthday.

The following morning, two men walking to work on a narrow footpath along a lake shore spotted a slipper and hat and then the bloody form of a nearly naked young woman in a grove of alder trees.

Police found a large rock, covered in caked blood and strands of the girl's hair, by the water's edge. Her shredded clothing was strewn about 100 feet from her body along the path.

Detectives search area where they found the body of Sylvia Gaines. (P&A Photos/New York Daily News Archive)

Her father, who said he had been searching for her all night, collapsed in the morgue before he could identify his dead child.

Locals told of seeing a heavy-set man — with a thin face and long nose — loitering around the area. They heard dogs barking in the night but no one remembered hearing the victim scream.

Hundreds of searchers were soon hunting for the "beast man," as the press had dubbed the murderer. Police questioned and released a seedy collection of vagrants, students, laborers, drunks, and random men with big noses. They dragged the lake in a fruitless search for additional clues. A $1,500 reward (about $26,000 in 2023) produced no leads.

The city hired private investigator Luke May, known as "America's Sherlock Holmes," to examine the evidence. May's investigations led prosecutors to a new person of interest — Sylvia's father.

Wallace Gaines (New York Daily News Archive)

Everyone knew that Wallace Gaines was a drunk and mean one. Since Sylvia had entered their lives, neighbors told of terrific fights between Wallace and his wife, Elizabeth. A few month's after her stepdaughter's arrival, Elizabeth made an unsuccessful suicide attempt and then left for an extended stay in San Francisco.

Detectives interviewed friends, family, and people living near the crime scene. A friend told police that on the night of the murder, Wallace, drunk, came to his home.

"You remember, I always told you I’d be master in my own house — and if anyone in my house tried to tell me when I should come and go and when I should drink and how much, I’d kill ‘em," the friend quoted Wallace as saying. "That's just what happened."

It sounded like a confession and police arrested Wallace for the murder of his daughter. From her home in Massachusetts, Sylvia's heartbroken mother told the Associated Press: "Wallace Gaines — impossible to live with. I was afraid of him. He threatened me many times. That's why I divorced him 16 years ago."

At his trial, which started in August 1926, prosecutor Ewing Colvin proposed a motive described as so "gruesome and revolting" in court papers that the judge had to clear spectators from the room for parts of the testimony.

Colvin spoke of a "strange and unnatural affection" between father and daughter. When Sylvia tried to end the incestuous affair, Colvin said Wallace killed her.

Mrs. Wallace Gaines. (P&A Photos/ New York Daily News)

Their forbidden love started soon after Sylvia reached Seattle, the prosecutor said, and it was the provocation for the fierce quarrels between Wallace, Sylvia, and his wife.

In her testimony, however, Elizabeth Gaines said his drinking, not his trysts with his child, was the motivation for her suicide attempt. She stood by her husband throughout the trial.

Witnesses told of seeing a man resembling Wallace near the murder scene. Hotel clerks said they saw Wallace and Sylvia sharing a hotel room. Police told of finding them parked in lovers’ lanes.

His lawyers tried to block any mention of incest, which would have destroyed the prosecution's case.

"STATE FIGHTS TO TELL JURY LOVE LIFE OF GIRL’S FATHER," screamed the Seattle Union Record front page headline on Aug. 10, 1926. Colvin read a series of lurid cases in court in an attempt to establish a precedent.

The incest evidence was ruled admissible.

"GAINES GUILTY" was the front page headline of the Seattle Union Record on Aug. 19, 1926. The first-degree murder conviction meant the noose. His last words to the hangman on the day of his execution, Aug. 31, 1928, were, "Get this over as soon as you can."

Sylvia Gaines’ murder was only one of a series of eerie occurrences at Smith College in the waning years of the Jazz Age.

On Nov. 12, 1925, Jeanne Robeson accidentally turned on the gas in her dorm's kitchenette and died. On Friday, Nov. 13, 1925, Alice M. Corbett, 19, vanished from her dormitory. Three years later, on Friday, Jan. 13, 1928, Frances St. John Smith, 18, also disappeared, fueling speculation of a curse or a Friday the 13th killer. Fourteen months later, two men were out fishing and pulled up the skeletal remains of a woman, later identified as Smith. Corbett's body was never found and her disappearance remains a mystery.

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