Jake Bird
Jake Bird was an itinerant laborer who favored working for the railroads as a section-gang laborer when he wasn’t serving time in prison. By the time he was 45 years old Bird, by his own estimates, had served at least fifteen of those years in prison for petty theft, burglary, assaults, and attempted murders. Working for the railroad kept him on the road, away from the watchful eyes of local police, and allowed him to pursue his penchant for murder.
When Bird burglarized a home in Tacoma, Washington in 1947 he used an ax to kill two women in the home, and then resisted arrest by assaulting a police officer while armed with a knife. Bird was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. While awaiting execution of sentence in early 1948, Bird started confessing to other murders, in multiple states, which he had committed when he had been in the area for railroad work. Eventually, Bird confessed to 44 murders, hinting that there were more, and waited while the various affected states filed for stays of execution in order to clear homicides on their books by bringing Bird to trial within their jurisdictions.
How many of the 44 murders Bird actually committed is unknown; he had sufficient knowledge of the crimes to allow investigators to close the books on previously unsolved crimes. Eleven of the murder claims were fully substantiated and would have led to charges if the prosecutors had not chosen to defer so as to not delay execution. While working for and traveling on the railroad Bird had claimed victims in eleven states, from Washington to Florida, mostly women.
Bird was hanged on July 15, 1949, for the double murder in Washington, but not before a “curse” he had placed on participants in his trial, in which he told those involved with his prosecution that they would die before he did, gained partial credence. Five members of the court involved in his trial preceded Bird in death, just as he predicted.