It was a murder most foul. Twenty-one-year-old wife and mother Millie Lyons was found brutally slain inside her farmhouse in Wooden Valley on Thursday, February 17, 1887, lying in a pool of blood. Ghastly cuts disfigured the lower part of her face, both jugular veins were severed, a portion of the little finger on her left hand had been bitten off, and cruel teeth marks were noticeable on her arms.
The savage murder had occurred less than two hours before she was found. The first to arrive at the scene was Millie’s brother Johnston Grigsby. Seeing at a glance what had happened, he picked up her sobbing eleven-month-old daughter from the floor, and took the baby to a neighbor. Next to arrive was Millie’s stunned and horrified husband, Herman Lyons.
The prime suspect: Pete Olsen, an itinerant farm laborer in Herman’s employ for the past five months. The police—nine miles away in Napa—were sent for, and the story unfolded.
That morning the Lyons family had gone into Napa for some shopping. Pete, who hadn’t yet been paid for chopping wood because Herman wasn’t entirely satisfied with his work, was asked to go along but stayed behind. The family returned home about four o’clock. Stopping at the farmhouse just long enough for Millie and their daughter to alight from the wagon, and for Herman to carry their purchases to the door, Herman started his team at a trot to return the wagon he had borrowed from his wife’s father, A. F. Grigsby. Upon arriving at the nearby Grigsby place, he unhitched the horses and started home, but he hadn’t gone all the way before he spotted Pete Olsen standing on a hillside below the road—holding a repeating rifle.
As they came opposite each other Pete leveled the gun a Lyons’ head, threatening to shoot. Replying calmly, Herman told him to come back to the farmhouse and he would pay him, but Pete fired the rifle anyway. Herman Lyons abandoned his team and ran—calling for help—to the field where A. F. and Johnston Grigsby, and other male relatives, were working. The men ran for their rifles; at Herman’s urging, Johnston went immediately to the Lyons’ home, where he discovered his sister’s body, along with bloody indications of Millie’s desperate struggle to escape.
Police, armed neighbors and family members rushed to Olson’s last known location, but he had vanished. Millie’s distraught and grieving husband pursued the killer himself, but lost Olsen’s tracks west of Red Bluff. A $1,050 reward—a considerable sum in 1887—and a description of Pete, was printed on 2,500 postcards that were sent all over the state: a Swede aged about 38, 5’10” tall; blond, blue-eyed, and “raw-boned.” The description fit many, to the consternation of several men who were unjustly arrested in various California towns in the following weeks.
Ten years went by, no one claimed the reward, and the details of Millie Lyons’ murder were largely forgotten. Then in February 1897, a deer hunter brought a human skull that his dog had uncovered to the Napa sheriff. The skull, which held just one large, upper eye tooth, was—perhaps too hastily—identified as being that of Pete Olsen. Almost immediately, the San Francisco Examiner published a sensational article that not only raked up the lurid details of the crime, but added another electrifying element, by accusing Frank Grigsby—another brother of the victim, who had joined the manhunt within hours of her death—of killing Olsen, and keeping silent about it for all that time.
Emphatic statements decrying the Examiner’s story as a complete fabrication poured forth from family and friends of the deceased, who denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, Olsen’s demise. Herman Lyons himself remarked that there could be nothing important about the recent discovery, because Pete Olsen had had a full set of strong upper and lower teeth, yet the unearthed skull only had one tooth left. Plenty of newspapers, whose reporters had interviewed the newly accused, lambasted the Examiner’s piece as a “cruel, outrageous fake.”
The San Francisco Call’s bold-type, February 1897 headline said it all: PETE OLSEN YET LIVES AND THE KILLING OF MILLIE LYONS HAS NOT BEEN AVENGED.
Almost 140 years later, that truth still stands.
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