Billy Gohl

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.