February 6, 1873 - Billy Gohl
His position as a union official gave him regular access to transient sailors passing through Aberdeen — men whose disappearances might go unnoticed for weeks or months. Convicted of two murders in 1910, Gohl became suspected in dozens of bodies recovered from Grays Harbor over a five-year period, with robbery proposed as the motive throughout. The historical record carries an unresolved tension: subsequent scholarship has raised serious questions about whether Gohl was a prolific killer at all, or a labor organizer made convenient by powerful local interests seeking to discredit the movement he represented.
From Wikipedia
William Gohl (February 6, 1873 – March 3, 1927) was a German-American murderer and suspected serial killer who, while working as a labor union official, murdered several sailors passing through Aberdeen, Washington.
Gohl was convicted of two murders in 1910 and is a suspect in dozens more that occurred between about 1905 and 1910, all supposedly for financial gain by stealing valuables from the victims. Spared from the death penalty by a request for leniency by the jury, he was sentenced to life in prison at Walla Walla State Penitentiary where he died in 1927 from lobar pneumonia and erysipelas complicated by dementia paralytic caused by syphilis.
Historian Aaron Goings argues there is cause for doubt that Gohl was a killer, proposing instead that the numerous bodies discovered in Grays Harbor were the result of accidental deaths caused by unsafe conditions on the docks and in the timber industry. Goings also proposes Gohl was unjustly blamed for these deaths by influential local businessmen hoping to do away with a powerful figure in the local labor movement.
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