High profile murders tend to be high profile cases; the sort of thing that stays a top priority for the law enforcement officers. And the intensity gets turned up a notch when the victim turns out to be a member of the force. But what happens when the murderer is also an officer and from another jurisdiction….
When a friend asked me to find for him the book, Breaking Blue, I was instantly interested. Not so much in the story, but rather in the setting.
If you visit Spokane, Washington, today, you’ll find an idyllic setting of fields and forests, streams and valleys all backdropped by distant mountains. And the city itself seems to have the perfect setting: all the conveniences of modern civilization and yet one can easily get-away-from-it-all. It would seem that Spokane itself were a modern refuge from modernity.
The story told in Breaking Blue, a retelling of true accounts, paints a picture of Spokane as the Wild West. But we’re not talking 1870. A U.S. Marshall was gunned down in a small town north of Spokane in 1935. The murderer, a law-man from another department, put four bullets into the federal officer for stumbling onto a smuggling ring.
Until 1989 the killing remained the longest unsolved murder in the United States. And what was so valuable that a cop would kill another cop for it? This wasn’t bootleg liquor, or gold, or anything so obvious. But back in 1935 it was just as precious…
The smuggled object was just one of the startling turns in this page-burner book, Breaking Blue. Its a true story that reads like a “who-dun-it.”
You can find Breaking Blue at MyLocalBookstore.
Timothy Egan is a Seattle-based reporter for The New York Times. He has also authored The Good Rain, Lasso the Wind, and The Winemaker’s Daughter.
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