I think the story is inseparable from the setting. Why is the story of this feral human so compelling? Why did hundreds of people push and shove to be near the body of a man dressed in ragged clothes and burlap who had been dead as long as Lazarus and probably smelled no better? Why has the story been retold so often and still told today? I’ve thought about John Tornow often enough to wonder why. They would have stripped the corpse of clothing, cut its hair and splintered the plank beneath it for mementos if 30 sheriff’s deputies hadn’t prevented stood guard. In 30 minutes 650 people filed past the body hundreds more were unable to get inside. His family wanted privacy but the crowd would have nothing of it. When they brought his body to the small town of Montesano three days after the gun battle that killed him, a restive crown formed. The post I wrote about him several years ago has generated more comments than any other. His story has been retold in several books and articles. The prolonged man hunt for Tornow, the circumstances of his life living rough in the woods, and his uncanny success avoiding capture became the subject of newspaper headlines nationwide. There was no evidence that John Tornow was the murderer, no motive, but the men sent to arrest him suffered the same fate and Tornow sealed his own. The man hunts began when his two nephews were murdered in the woods, each killed with a single shot. He preferred living deep in the forests of the Olympic Mountains. John Tornow grew up near Grays Harbor, Washington, at the end of the 19 th century. It is certain that his life, and death, captured the imagination of the nation. The firefight in the woods that ended his life precluded a trial. There is little that can be said about the short, brutal life of John Tornow with certainty, whether he suffered brain damage from measles as a child, whether he escaped from an insane asylum, or even his actual body count.

Beast-man by Michael Fredson