Beast-man: A historical account of John Tornow, hermit, outlaw & murderer on the Olympic Peninsula

by Michael Fredson

Mason County Historical Society, 2002. Soft cover, 130 pp. With 22 black and white photographs, 4 illustrations and 1 laid-in folded map. [From back cover] Since 1909, when John Tornow first took to the woods, his tale has been told and retold, embellished upon, and straight lied about for almost a century. Tornow both terrorized and transfixed local residents and regional newspaper readers. During the manhunt, reporters scrawled stories of the "Beast-Man." In the Wynooche, they would say, in that vast, unexplored timber at the top of the world there lived a hermit who murdered his own nephews, then ambushed the deputies who hunted him and finally was killed in a bloody shootout in a swamp guarded by an army of tethered frogs. No story could better whet the appetite of even the most jaded newspaper editor in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, or points farther removed. Newspaper publicity transformed a reclusive, angry young man into a "demented. . . madman outlaw," crazed to kill whomever he met. They demonized Tornow as "Wildman of the Wynooche" and fed the public's hysteria from Port Angeles to Chehalis. Some even credit the Tornow story with inspiring Edgar Rice Burroughs to pen his Tarzan stories, the first which appeared in 1912. Over the years, Tornow has manifested the spirit of the shadowy, frightening, yet somehow free. This account uses newspaper dispatches, land records, sheriffs correspondence, eyewitness accounts, court documents, maps, photographs, even gossip and rumor to seek the truth of Tornow and why he remains in our imagination still. Michael Fredson, a fifth-generation Mason County resident, first heard the John Tornow story from his great-aunt Dora Fredson. Later, as a young man, he served in Vietnam. Currently he is president of the Mason County Historical Society in Shelton

Genres: History, True Crime

130 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[S. Lorton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense and Exciting!

[Jennifer D. Munro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in one night. An important piece of Pacific Northwest history I'd known nothing about.