100 years ago in Spokane: A longtime bigamist made a local woman his latest target, and letting the bed bugs bite may have been the least of one household’s troubles

Alma E. Schneider of Spokane was swindled out of $8,000 by her new “husband,” Harry Roshon – a man who, it turned out, was already “married” to six other women.

Roshon had previously defrauded several other wives and was alleged to have a list of more than 60 other women, “whose wealth … he had reduced to tabulated form.”

His arrest came about after an extensive investigation by Los Angeles police into Roshon’s marriages under various aliases. During an interrogation, he told the “unusual story of his 27 years of operation as a bigamist.”

He married Schneider, a nurse, in a 1920 ceremony in Coeur d’Alene. But he stuck around for only a week before taking her stocks and bonds and departing for the Midwest – where he married another woman.

Reporters who attempted to talk to Schneider were unsuccessful.

From the fire beat: Hannah Anderson was attempting to rid her bedroom of bedbugs by placing several sulfur candles around the room.

She may have killed a few bedbugs, but not in the way she intended. One of the candles set fire to a dresser, which was filled with linens. The family put out the fire with a garden hose, but not before the dresser and linens were destroyed and the room was filled with smoke.

Also on this day

(From onthisday.com)

1857: The steamship SS Central America, aka the “Ship of Gold,” sinks in a hurricane off Cape Romain, South Carolina, killing 423 people aboard and taking tons of gold coins and bricks from the California Gold Rush down with it. The shipwreck was discovered in 1988.