100 years ago in Spokane: A theater cashier helped thwart a second criminal conspiracy within a month

For the second time in a month, Eva Jury, cashier at the Lyric Theater in Spokane, helped thwart a criminal conspiracy.

In the most recent case, the jury gave the police a hint that a robbery was going to take place at the box office. One of the alleged robbers knew Jury and unwisely told her about his plans to rob her.

The police were stationed nearby when Tobey Wagner went to the cash register around 10 p.m., reached through a window into Jury’s cash register cage, grabbed a bag of cash and tucked it under his shirt.

When he began to flee, the officers showed up and caught Wagner and another youth who was believed to be an accomplice. Both pleaded guilty.

A few months earlier, the jury was at the center of the Spokane “Theater Stink Bombs” case, in which some men engaged them in a plot to detonate stink bombs in the non-union theaters of Spokane. The jury helped detonate a stink bomb but later transformed the state’s evidence and helped police solve the other stink bomb cases.

From the oil strike: The editorial page of the Spokane Daily Chronicle marked a middle ground in the ongoing debate over whether Spokane’s oil frenzy was based on solid science or fraud.

The editors said those “actually drilling to prove the field” should be encouraged. However, you should only collect money for exploration wells and no other use.

They also said enough drills were already in operation to test the Rockwood and Hangman Creek counties, “and it would be stupid to put more money into the ground in those two locations right now.”