The Axeman of Tacoma: Revisiting a Forgotten Black Serial Killer

 The mainstream media and the neoliberal bioleninist state that they empower operates from an outdated script. This is part stupidity and part laziness, but at its core, it is about maintaining the narrative. See, for instance, publicized hate crimes in the United States. Whenever the supposed victim is non-White, the media and politicos jump to the conclusion of pasty-faced perpetrators as if we still live under Reconstruction. The most famous recent example of Jussie Smollett, who fabricated a hate crime in 2019 in order to further his flagging career, was bought hook-line-and-sinker by Democrats like Kamala Harris, who used her Twitter account to call the faux crime a “modern day lynching.” When it came to light that the noose and bleach attack on Smollett was carried out by his paid (and Black) accomplices rather than rednecks in MAGA hats, the moment became fodder for jokes rather than a serious condemnation of the elite class’s implicit anti-White bias. Instead of demanding hate crime charges against Smollett and his ilk (after all, their false accusations amount to blood libel), people made memes and mocked Smollett as a weird aberration.

Fake hate crimes became something of an industry after the 2016 presidential election, with Daily Caller reporting over twenty well-publicized fake hate events, most of which involved Blacks blaming Whites for their own devious behavior [1]. Black academic Wilfred Reilly wrote an entire book on the hate hoax phenomena, blaming its visibility post-2016 on a multiplicity of factors, from increased reporting from federal and state agencies to the serial corruption of “fake news” [2]. Reilly writes in his book Hate Crime Hoax that the combination of fake allegations and “the real, but anti-White, wave of backlash crimes” carried out by non-Whites get used by the left-wing media to print article after article about the worsening racial situation in the United States [3]. Again, the media wants racial conflict front and center because the neoliberal state (the combination of Wall Street, academia, and the permanent bureaucracy) uses the false idea of rampant and violent White racism to justify further oppression via high taxes, historical erasure, and anarcho-tyranny against the Historic American Nation. It is also true that the current regime is full of people who sincerely believe that White people are always bad and need to be punished.

Arguably, no outdated script used by the media is more blindly accepted than the notion that serial killers are always White men. The idea of White male murderers is embedded in popular comedy, movies, and mass culture generally. True crime aficionados gobble up documentaries, podcasts, and books about such “golden age” monstrosities as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. These are the men who helped inspire the FBI to coin the term “serial killer” in the first place, and since the 1970s they have provided the archetype of serial killers in the popular imagination.

The truth is that most serial killers in the United States are Black. White people, who are 76.6-percent of the U.S. population, represent about 58-percent of all serial murderers [4]. As with violent crime in general, White males are underrepresented when it comes to serial killers. Blacks, on the other hand, are overrepresented. This trend began in the 1980s, which “was the first decade in which White serial killers only just had more than half of the share” of crimes. In the 1990s, the U.S. saw more Black serial killers than Whites, and in the 2000s, “just 32% of US serial killers were White, while 54% were Black and 11% were Hispanic” [5]. In plain language, Blacks “have been the outright majority of serial killers since the 1990s” [6]. Despite this fact, and despite some well-known Black serial killers like Lonnie David Franklin, Jr., alias the Grim Sleeper, and Samuel Little, the Black serial killer who may have killed 93 victims, the general public still persists in the delusion that White men should be feared more than Black men.

The Black serial killer is not a new phenomenon, nor is it confined to just Black Americans. South Africa has one of the “highest numbers of serial killers in the world” [7], and as a Black majority state, one cannot blame such actions on racism or institutional injustice against Blacks. As for motivations, Black serial killers tend to have the same motivations as their White counterparts—deviant sexual desires, an overactive fantasy life, mental disturbances, etc. However, Black serial killers are unique in that they are more likely to target non-Black victims than White serial killers. John Douglas, one of the most famous members of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, noted in his book Mindhunter the higher rates of interracial violence carried out by Black offenders as compared to White offenders [8]. Douglas himself worked on two such cases: George Russell Jr., who strangled three White women to death in Seattle between 1990 and 1991, and William Henry Hance, aka the Stocking Strangler who murdered and sexually assaulted six elderly White women in Georgia in 1978. Prior to Douglas’s career and even the term “serial killer” itself, there were Black serial killers who targeted White women. Jarvis Theodore Roosevelt Catoe, whom the Washington, D.C. newspaper called the Dupont Circle Killer, raped and strangled several White and Black women between 1929 and 1941 [9]. The infamous Servant Girl Annihilator of Austin, Texas, who butchered at least eight White and Black women between December 1884 and December 1885, was most likely a Black drunkard and local ruffian named Nathan Elgin [10].

But of all the Black serial killers to prey on White women, the worst of the bunch was the Axeman of Tacoma, Jake Bird. These days, Tacoma is an outpost of the Black Lives Matter hegemony. The city’s police chief, Don Ramsdell, has voiced total support for the movement. Such placating has done nothing to deter several BLM and Antifa riots in the city since last summer [11]. Back during the Great Depression, the city lacked both masked anarchists and Afro-Marxists, but it was still a violent place populated by rough loggers and weather-beaten railroad workers. Jake Bird was one of these men.

Bird did not come from Tacoma originally. Born in Louisiana in 1901, Bird grew up in a violent and unstable home (which is all too common in Black families even to this day). At age nineteen, he left home and began riding the rails. Bird “fit the bill as a stereotypical hobo, sneaking into train cars only to hop off once the train reached town” [12]. Eventually, Bird found his way to Tacoma, the city then known as the City of Destiny.

Little is known about Bird’s activities between 1930 and 1947. He lived an indigent lifestyle of seasonal work. However, it is highly likely that Bird murdered White women in the states of Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin over a span of several years [13].  Little is known about these individual crimes, although suppositions can be made based upon the double murder that we know Bird committed for sure—the October 30, 1947 slaying of Bertha Kludt and her daughter Beverly June. Bird entered the Kludt household at 1007 South 21^st Street in Tacoma and attacked both women with an axe. Although he surprised both women, they managed to scream and scream loud enough to alert their neighbors. Tacoma police officers arrived quick enough to find Bird still at the scene and covered in blood. Bird attempted to escape by slashing one officer’s hand with a knife and stabbing another in the shoulder. The wounded officers took these blows before ultimately tackling Bird and arresting him [14]. While imprisoned in Tacoma’s Old City Jail, the loquacious Bird confessed to forty murders across the United States. A Washington jury later convicted him of eleven murders, although most suspected him of at least forty-four murders in total [15].

Prior to his execution in 1949, the story of Jake Bird, the Axeman of Tacoma, took a bizarre turn. At his trial, Bird yelled out, “I’m putting the hex of Jake Bird on all of you who had anything to do with my being punished. Mark my words. You will die before I do.” It turned out that this “hex” had legs, as six men involved in the case died of natural causes between the trial and Bird’s execution. Judge Hodge, the presiding judge in the case, died of a heart attack one month after Bird’s sentencing. Next came Joe Karpach, a police officer involved in the case, who also died of a heart attack. Chief court clerk Ray Scott, Lieutenant Sherman Lyons of the Tacoma Police Department, Bird’s defense attorney J.W. Selden, and corrections officer Arthur A. Seward all died of heart failure, thus becoming the final four victims of the Axeman of Tacoma’s curse.

Bird may or may not have had Black magic powers, but he was certainly demonic. Little is known about the particulars of Bird’s crimes, which is in keeping with most Black serial killers. It seems the general public, true crime addicts, and the FBI are just not that into Black serial killers, although their reasons likely differ. That said, given Bird’s choice of weapon (the axe) and given his choice of victims (White women), it can be theorized that Bird was motivated by lust. Like the so-called Man from the Train, whom authors Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James believe murdered somewhere around one hundred people between 1898 and 1912, Bird used the railroads to move from town to town and leave just as quickly. And like the Man from the Train, whom James and James theorize murdered out of a deep-seated attraction to prepubescent females, it appears that Bird murdered White women because that was who he fancied the most. It is not impossible that Bird might have been motivated by racial animosity. Such murders are not unheard of. The Zebra Killers of 1973-1974 shot, stabbed, and mutilated White San Franciscans as an act of racial revenge spurred on by the anti-White vitriol of the Nation of Islam. In June 2019, 23-year-old Black criminal Temar Bishop beat and raped a White woman on the roof of his Bronx apartment. One eyewitness later testified that Bishop justified his actions by saying, “‘She was a White girl. She deserved it because us minorities have been through slavery.’” Vanderbilt football player Cory Batey said much the same thing after he raped a White woman in 2013. Specifically, Batey was heard to yell, “That’s for 400 years of slavery.” In Europe, Black Africans and Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East routinely sexually assault native women and blame their crimes on “racism,” “colonialism,” and “Islamophobia” [16]. Bird may have had these same thoughts, but we will never know as he was sent straight to hell almost seventy-two years ago.

While the Axeman of Tacoma’s motivations can only be guessed, what is not unknown is the fact that Black males in the United States not only commit violent crime at higher rates than other races, but they have been the majority of serial murderers since at least the 1990s. Jake Bird was merely one of the earliest and most prolific of these Black serial killers, and his signature of attacking White woman is sadly not uncommon among Black offenders. These days, in the age of “White privilege” and the proliferation and support of Critical Race Theory, unhinged Black criminals have an overabundance of justification for their anti-social behavior. There may be multiple Jake Birds waiting in the wings, just sharpening their axes and preparing public defenses full of CRT loanwords as we speak.

[1]: Peter Hasson, “Here’s A List of Hoax ‘Hate Crimes’ In The Trump Era,” Daily Caller, Feb. 18, 2019, https://dailycaller.com/2019/02/18/hoax-hate-crimes-list/.

[2]: Larry Elder, “The Fake News ‘Surge’ in Hate Crimes,” Real Clear Politics, Apr. 11, 2019, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/11/the_fake_news_surge_in_hate_crimes__140019.html#!.

[3]: Wilfred Reilly, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2019): Kindle edition.

[4]: Mackenzie Samet and Jackie Salo, “New profile of serial killers debunks long-held myths,” New York Post, Aug. 14, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/08/14/serial-killers-a-terrifying-look-at-their-ordinary-lives/.

[5]: “Black Serial Killers vs White Serial Killers: Stats, Figures (Shocking Truth),” Ways to Die, https://ways-to-die.com/Black-serial-killers/.

[6]: Robert Hampton, “Most Serial Killers Are Black,” American Renaissance, May 30, 2019, https://www.amren.com/commentary/2019/05/most-serial-killers-are-Black/.

[7]: “Black Serial Killers vs White Serial Killers”

[8]: John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (New York: Gallery Books, 2017): 214.

[9]: Peter Vronsky, American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years, 1950-2000 (New York: Berkley, 2020): 49-51.

[10]: Skip Hollandsworth, Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer (New York: Picador, 2015): 216.

[11]: Jason Rants, “Jason Rantz: I was inside Antifa riots in Tacoma—this is what I saw,” Fox News.com, Jan. 26, 2021, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/antifa-riots-tacoma-jason-rantz.

[12]: Steve Dunkelberger, “Jake Bird: The Strange Story of a Tacoma Serial Killer and the Hex that Made Him Famous,” SouthSound Talk, http://www.southsoundtalk.com/2016/03/31/jake-bird-tacoma/.

[13]: Vronsky, American Serial Killers, 36.

[14]: Dunkelberger, “Jake Bird.”

[15]: Martin Gilman Wolcott, The Evil 100: Fascinating True-Life Tales of Terror, Mayhem, and Savagery (New York: Citadel Press, 2002): 129.

[16]: Raymond Ibrahim, “Europe: Rape Victims Accused of Racism,” Gatestone Institute, July 11, 2020, https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16179/rape-victims-racism.