Dark History: Murder on the Monarchs

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

The rock beaches along the eastern shores of Lake Pend Oreille are an idyllic place today. With the Green Monarch Mountains rising more than 3,000 feet above the water’s edge and a clear view of the Selkirk and Cabinet mountains, this area has become a popular destination for boaters and kayakers to spend an afternoon basking in the sun.

But, more than 100 years ago, this same stretch of shoreline was the scene of a gruesome series of murders and strange deaths that alarmed the community.

‘Two old time miners’

Howard Shipley came west from his home in Iowa in 1889, bringing along friend Patrick Welch, who immigrated from Ireland while he was quite young. Shipley and Welch had been “partners and friends” for a decade before striking out from the Midwest, eventually settling in the Idaho panhandle to prospect for gold and silver.

A photograph of the murder scene at the Shipley and Welch cabin near the Green Monarch Mine on Lake Pend Oreille. Photo courtesy of Bonner County Historical Society, donated by Paul Croy.

Shipley first found work as a fireman on the Kootenai River between Bonners Ferry and Nelson, B.C., before settling about three miles south of where the Clark Fork River empties into the lake. Shipley and Welch built a small cabin, where they lived for more than 20 years.

The two lived quiet lives, but were well known in the growing nearby community of Hope. Newspapers at the time occasionally ran small tidbits about the prospectors’ lives: “Howard Shipley was a visitor to Spokane Thursday on important business,” (1900); “Howard Shipley and J.F. Brown have been ill for a week or so, but are around again. Mr. Shipley attributes his illness to swimming too much in the lake the past summer,” (1906); and the Northern Idaho News mentioned in 1912 that Welch had been paid $2.25 for his work as a juror.

‘Cold-blooded assassination’

On June 18, 1914, J.J. Myers received a report at his home on Memaloose Island from a group of Hope residents led by a young man named Jimmy Simpson. Simpson told Myers he had visited the old prospectors’ cabin on the Green Monarchs beach and felt that “all was not right,” according to the Pend Oreille Review, dated June 26, 1914.

Myers took his boat and millworker Al Leeman to investigate the situation. When they beached on the shoreline, the two men immediately saw blood in front of the miners’ cabin. They immediately traveled to the nearby Green Monarch mine and enlisted the help of Edward Higgins and his son William, returning to the grisly scene a short time later. They encountered a gruesome scene upon opening the door. 

“The two murdered men stretched on the floor of the little cabin met their gaze,” stated the Review.

The party returned to Hope and summoned the coroner and sheriff, who brought along the county attorney and undertaker, a Review reporter and photographer Dick Himes, who traveled to the scene via steamboat.

Observing the position of the bodies, the initial investigators theorized that Shipley had been sitting in a chair by the stove while Welch was lying on his bed to Shipley’s left. Blood on the floor suggested that Shipley had fallen face down from his chair, and Welch had had no time in which to make a struggle, “indicated by the fact that his spectacles were still on and a magazine nearby indicated that he was in the act of reading when shot,” the article stated. 

The bodies were then dragged a foot or two from where they fell, their heads placed alongside each other with their feet pointing in opposite directions. Finally, a quilt from a nearby bed was used to cover the bodies. 

The coroner found that Shipley had been shot twice — once in the head behind the right ear and once in the right shoulder. Welch was shot three times — once in the right forearm, once in the right shoulder and another in the left shoulder, which traveled upward into his neck.

After speaking with local fishermen who had interacted with Shipley and Welch while out in their boat, the party deduced that the miners had been killed two nights before, and that the assailant — or assailants — had used an “automatic gun,” firing five bullets into the two men. Shipley’s boat was later found a mile west of Hope, indicating that the murderer had taken the boat and towed it behind a launch or rowboat and left it there to float ashore. Also missing was Shipley’s dog, which was never found, but investigators concluded had also been killed after they discovered a trail of blood from the dog’s bed into the water.

The double murder shocked the community, even in a time when murders, hangings and other nefarious activities plagued the rough-edged logging and mining communities surrounding Sandpoint. County commissioners telegraphed Idaho Gov. John Haines asking that the state offer a reward for the apprehension of the killer or killers, stating that, “No more cold-blooded assassination has ever been committed in a civilized community.”

‘Escaped lunatic’

The entrance to tunnel No. 1 at the Green Monarch Mine, with two men examining ore samples from a mine car. The mine entrance is not far from where Shipley and Welch’s bodies were discovered. Photo courtesy Bonner County Historical Society, donated by Hazel Gabel.

It was nearly three weeks later when a 50-year-old rancher — identified as a “socialist” named John Rhodes — awoke at 3 a.m. at his Moravia ranch outside of Bonners Ferry. Rhodes heard someone trying to open his door, then flinched when he saw a stranger peering through his window. Rhodes coughed loudly, causing the man to flee.

In the daylight, Rhodes spotted the intruder’s tracks and followed them through a potato patch, where he was startled by the stranger jumping from behind a clump of bushes with a revolver in hand. The man demanded Rhodes put his hands in the air.

Rhodes didn’t obey, instead reasoning with the man and leading him back toward his cabin. The man grabbed a length of rope and told Rhodes to face the wall, but the rancher quickly jumped through his cabin door and slammed it shut. A shot came through the door and hit Rhodes in the right lung as he grabbed his 30-30 Winchester rifle. The assailant attempted to barge through the door; but, when he saw Rhodes was armed, ran around the house. Wounded in the chest, Rhodes followed him, going the other way and, “saw the fellow with his gun leveled and a smile on his face,” according to a Northern Idaho News article dated July 7, 1914. 

With quick reflexes, Rhodes raised his rifle and got off a shot, striking the stranger in the heart.

“Death came so quickly that the smile still remained on the man’s face and the cocked gun did not go off,” the article stated.

Rhodes then walked three miles into Moravia, where he arrived “more dead than alive,” eventually taken to a hospital where he remained in critical condition but ultimately survived. Months later, Rhodes received the $500 reward that had been offered by the state, worth more than $15,000 in today’s dollars.

Letters found on the dead man identified him as Charles Lappel, an “escaped lunatic from the Warm Springs asylum of Montana,” according to the News. A Waltham watch was found on the dead man, which was positively identified as the same watch owned by Shipley. Also, the rope that the dead man had in his possession belonged to Shipley’s boat, and shells from Lappel’s gun were found in the prospectors’ cabin. Finally, the sheriff stated the bullets fired from Lappel’s gun produced a “peculiar scratch,” that was also noticed on the bullets removed from the bodies of Shipley and Welch.

The community breathed a little easier, knowing they had caught the killer who dispatched the two prospectors, who were buried in the same grave after a funeral service that drew a capacity crowd.

‘Another tragedy’

In a strange twist, four years after being the first to discover the double-murder of Shipley and Welch, young Jimmy Simpson discovered another corpse just steps away from the location of the cabin where the two prospectors were brutally murdered.

Simpson was dispatched to search for J.A. “Al” Moore, an old-time Hope resident who was three days overdue from his expected return from work at the Green Monarch mine. Moore’s sister sent her son, Simpson, by boat and he found Moore’s body along the shoreline.

“He had not gone into the mine and had evidently gone to fix the water works pipe nearby when a rock came down from the hillside and struck him on the head, fracturing his skull,” the Pend Oreille Review reported on Aug. 2, 1918. 

The coroner empaneled a jury, which viewed the remains and determined that Moore indeed died from a falling rock striking his head, but the coroner was “not entirely convinced that the man was struck by a rock and thought Moore may have been pitched from a ledge about ten feet above where his body was found.”

The death was eventually ruled an accident, but many in the community expressed concern about the strange deaths occurring on that particular stretch of strange, beautiful beach along the Green Monarchs.

Special thanks to the Bonner County Historical Society and East Bonner County Library for making the archives of local newspapers available online at eastbonner.historyarchives.online.