May 31, 1897 was an eventful day in the District of Columbia. First came the pomp and circumstance of Decoration Day parades and ceremonies. Then, just before two o’clock in the afternoon, the strongest recorded earthquake in area history shook the city. But the thing that remained in the public memory for the next several decades happened later, in an alley bordered by Q, R, Third, and Fourth Streets in Northwest: a Black man named Dorsey Foultz shot and killed Charles Robinson, another Black man, then simply walked away.
Unlike most sensational crimes, the murder itself wasn’t all that interesting. This wasn’t a whodunit; at least five people identified Foultz as the culprit.1 The motive—some confluence of jealousy and anger—lacked intrigue. Yet hundreds of articles referencing Foultz appeared in Washington newspapers between 1897 and 1953. What made Dorsey Foultz a notorious local celebrity well into the twentieth century? He was never caught.
While D.C.’s Metropolitan Police painted Foultz as especially skilled at evasion—a detective described him as “as slippery as an eel”—Washingtonians weren’t convinced it was skill so much as abundant opportunity that allowed him to maintain his freedom.2 According to the Evening Star and Washington Post, the police bungled their response early and often. Immediately after the incident, they reported, Foultz “might easily have been captured had a posse of officers from the different precincts gone in pursuit, but this was not done[.]”3 Then the Second Precinct failed to report the crime to headquarters for several hours, resulting in a two-day delay before detectives were assigned.4
Almost a week after Robinson’s death, the police surrounded a sewer where Foultz was reportedly hiding only to be tricked into leaving their posts when they heard a nearby distress whistle. While investigating, they left the sewer’s exits unguarded long enough that Foultz “could then have reached almost any part of the city.”5 Over the next several years, false leads, mistaken identities, and purported sightings in at least six states and five countries ran the police ragged.