Of The Crimes -- Memories Of Murder And Mayhem: Investigator Windsor Olson's `Private Eye On Seattle' Tour Is A Journey Back Into Some Of This City's Grimmer Moments

In the lemon light of a clear spring morning, the streets of Seattle don't seem quite so mean, unless you consider the traffic. And the private eye - the gumshoe, the snoop, the dick - who stalks them is no red-eyed, bull-necked wreck in a wrinkled trench coat and battered felt fedora.

On the contrary, he's a slight, white-haired gentleman of 70 in a snappy pastel blazer; soft-spoken, he seems almost shy on first glance. The feathery red cockade in the band of his dapper Tyrolean hat is the only hint of daring about him.

Even his name is mild-mannered: Windsor.

So when he pulls the blood-stained club, the hatchet, the filleting knife, the semi-automatic pistol from between the seats of his salmon-red minivan, the effect is all the more macabre.

He says he found the club in 1969 at the scene of the bludgeoning death of one of his clients.

Windsor Olson lets the implications of the statement coagulate among the guests taking his new private-eye tour along the streets and alleyways of the city.

"Sure I offered it to the police back then, but they weren't interested," he says, leaning from the window of the minivan, pointing to a row of rhododendron bushes on First Avenue near the west entrance of Seattle Center.

"That's where I found it, near where they'd found a pool of blood. Who knows if it was the murder weapon. At least I've never ruled out the possibility."

The other weapons help illustrate his descriptions of other crimes on the tour route. The handgun was the type used to kill 13 people in the infamous 1983 Wah Mee Club massacre in the International District.

"Now don't you worry," Olson says with grandfatherly reassurance. "This gun can't be fired, and the blades of the hatchet and knife are all taped up. Perfectly safe, you see.

"Still, when we're here at the scenes of these crimes, these weapons can send chills up your spine, can't they?

"This isn't a tour for the squeamish."

In semi-retirement after 40 years as a Seattle private investigator, Olson inaugurated his "Private Eye on Seattle" tour earlier this year.

He hopes to attract not only tourists and conventioneers - concierges at a dozen downtown hotels already have tested the 1.5-hour jaunt through Queen Anne, downtown, Pioneer Square and the International District - but locals as well.

"You'll never see the city the same way again after the tour," he says. "At least that's what I'm hoping.

"This is a city with a colorful past, a city with dimension, a city full of stories. I've been part of a lot of them, and know many of the others."

And Olson is nothing if not a practiced storyteller and raconteur. It's part of the private eye's art.

"So, I was born here. I remember the bordellos and bottle clubs, the speakeasies and the after-hours clubs. I remember Sally Rand doing her bubble dance at the Music Box. And Chief Seattle's daughter sitting on her street corner selling the baskets she made.

"And I remember when the little winery under the Fremont Bridge, the ancestor winery of Ste. Michelle, sold the most popular drink in town - basically fruit juice with a little alcohol added - for 25 cents a pint."

Olson's tour depicts the life of private investigators in the days before no-fault divorce and computer searches. "There was the hotel at Fourth and Spring - the last one in town with transoms over the doors, where people like me could just walk down the hall with a mirror on a stick and see what we were hired to see.

"And the Edgewater down there at the waterfront: I'll tell you, I'll bet I drilled a hole in the wall of every room in that place at one time or another, for cameras and listening devices."

Incidents from a wild past

The tour recalls nearly forgotten incidents in the city's wilder past, such as the alley corner where a severed head was found one morning in 1959. And visits scenes of more spectacular crimes that also have tended to fade from memory.

"This mini-storage place on the corner of First and Cherry here was once a private bank of sorts," Olso narrates. "The Pioneer Safety Vaults: 1,640 safety deposit boxes filled with cash, gold from Alaska, jewels, negotiable bonds and - the word on the street was - various ill-gotten gains and money hidden away from the tax collector . . . that sort of thing.

"Well, it was over the three-day holiday for George Washington's Birthday in 1954. A crew of robbers blocked off both ends of the alley with barricades and went in and emptied 400 boxes out - took them six or eight hours. Strangely enough, it was never solved - no one was ever arrested.

"The official estimates put the take at between $100,000 and $400,000. Other estimates consider up to $1 million. From what I heard, it might have been as high as $2 million. That was when the famous Boston Brinks robbery (a $1.2 million heist in January 1950) was listed as the crime of the century.

"Supposedly, some years later, after the statute of limitations had run out and he couldn't be prosecuted, some safecracker down in Portland admitted to pulling the job. But that could have been just brag. We'll never know."

`A really rough town'

Olson waxes nostalgic. "I was here when this was a really rough town,' he says. "A military town, a logging town, a town whose tone and tempo were set by sailors and longshoremen. When this was known as one of the most corrupt cities and counties in the nation.

"But it's always been a city with a soul - and, at least until recently when it started to take itself a little too seriously sometimes, a city with a sense of humor.

"And all of that's still here, in the shadows of the bright new buildings, behind the new facades of the old buildings."

That's quite a landscape to evoke from the front seat of a salmon-colored minivan, but Olson's monologue - weaving between history, reminiscence, fact, fancy and fun - does a pretty good job of it.

Like the gangster tours of Chicago, the Dashiell Hammett tour of San Francisco and the venerable Underground Tour his program complements in Seattle, Olson's excursion celebrates a history worth holding on to, and tales worth retelling.

Mayhem and merriment

Certainly, the tour's stops at murder scenes can be chilling. Consider that 1969 Seattle Center mystery - a case that might be called Cold-Blooded Cuisine:

Yi Yun Chen Lee, 58, operated the Mongolian Steak House at the center's Food Court. She was a woman of accomplishment in her native China. As a teenager, she'd joined the revolution against the Manchu Dynasty, joined Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and, during the Sino-Japanese War, served as the only woman general on the front lines.

Later she immigrated to the U.S. She earned a master's degree in municipal administration from the University of Michigan and worked for a number of years in the Washington, D.C., area, where she met her husband, chemist Chin Joe Lee.

The couple visited Seattle for the World's Fair and, recognizing an opportunity, decided to stay and open a restaurant. Even with her life's dramatic accomplishments, Lee felt special pride about a sauce she developed for the Mongolian Steak House.

"She was a good client of mine," Olson says, "and I know how closely she protected that sauce she used with her beef tenderloin dishes. She kept it on her person at all times - didn't even share it with her husband.

"Now, something was bothering her. She asked me to follow her husband, to find out how he was spending his time.

"So I did follow him, and all I could come up with was how he spent every morning at the Logan Building on Sixth and Union, at the stock market board.."

Lee was last seen about 2 a.m. the morning of June 29, 1969, leaving the restaurant with about $1,000 in receipts in her purse.

"Now, the record shows that Mr. Lee called the police about 3 a.m., to say she'd never arrived home, just a few blocks away," Olson says. "A search turned up the pool of blood and the shoe in the rhododendron bushes. That was it.

"The police talked to me for all of two minutes about what I might know. I went to the Center myself and poked around, and that's when I came up with the club, near what was apparently the murder scene."

A few hours later, at 8 a.m., Lee's body was found in the bushes off East Interlaken, her skull fractured in two places. Two days later, her shoe was found in the same vicinity.

"The purse with the receipts - and maybe more significantly, the recipe - were never found," Olson says.

A $1,000 reward for information, posted by Lee's husband and the Food Court concessionaire, was eventually raised to $2,000 - then, the following August, to $10,000. No arrest was ever made.

"But I never could shake the feeling that the recipe for that sauce figured into it all somehow . . ."

Queen Anne's Flying Chickens

Olson relieves the chill of murder tales with stops at more fanciful, if no less notorious, sites.

"Here we have the roost of the Flying Chickens of Queen Anne," he says.

For more than four months from late 1984 through May 1985, a rakish fowl variously called "Rocky the Cock" and "Wild Rooster Cogborne" swept a dozen or so domestic hens off their nests and into the trees that line a Queen Anne neighborhood off Bigelow Avenue North.

The neighbors grew restless, literally. Not only had their chickens been led into debauchery, but Rocky seemed to enjoy rubbing it in. He'd crow about 3 o'clock every morning from his roost in one of the tallest trees.

Police and firefighters had little success dealing with the situation. Neither did the Boy Scouts when they entered the fray.

"I lived up here at the time, and I remember it all pretty clearly," Olson says. "People tried tranquilizer darts. People tried nets. The favorite bait was chicken feed soaked in vodka because they figured the rooster would be easier to deal with if it was drunk. Others tried poison, but they caught a lot of criticism for trying to kill the birds.

"But those were some cagey chickens, all right."

After one neighbor ran out in the middle of the night shooting at Rocky and his harem with a .22-caliber rifle, Animal Control authorities hoping to prevent accidental bloodshed went after the rooster with air rifles.

Rocky died in a holly tree on the night of April 25. An obituary appeared soon after in the "In Memoriam" column of The Times' classifieds:

"In memory of the great Queen Anne rooster, Wild Rooster Cogborne: After surviving slingshots, guns, poison darts, tranquilizers, leg-hold traps, Boy Scouts, freezing weather, snow, garbage trucks, nets and taxis, he limped on, mortally wounded, for three weeks before he died of lead poisoning . . ."

When Olson began his career as a private investigator in 1958, he was one of seven gumshoes in Seattle. "Now there are nearly 500 in the state," he says. "Mostly people working for California investigation companies, sitting behind computers. It's a whole new world.

"I'd gone straight from Broadway High School in 1944 to the war in the South Pacific," he says. "When I came home, I tried working as a salesman for the Greater Mountain Chemical Co., but I wasn't happy. A friend of mine was in insurance and he told me that there might be a lot of work for someone like me, who was good with a camera, doing insurance investigations.

"That was the start of Windsor and Associates Legal Investigations. And no, I seldom carried a gun. I never have liked guns. I did have one, though. It was a Walther PPK, just like James Bond carried. The guy I bought it from swore it once belonged to Ian Fleming. I don't know about that. And anyway, it was stolen out of my car a lot of years ago now."

Three partners

During his career, he worked with three partners. His wife, Dorie, and two of their three children worked with him at the firm from time to time. He sold the business to an associate, Scott Hatten, about four years ago, as Windsor and Hatten Legal Investigations.

"But I've always had to keep busy. There were a couple of side ventures. And new one coming up all the time. I knew the streets, right? And I could see how hard it was for people to send paperwork and messages around town, so . . .

"You know Bucky's Courier Service, the bicycle messengers? Well, I'm Bucky. That was my nickname as a kid. My father used to bounce me on his knee and say, "Horsey Bucky, Horsey Bucky." I started it, then sold it. I also started and sold the first armored-car service in town.

"But those are other stories."

Stories that Windsor Olson is only too happy to tell. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Taking the tour

For information and reservations on Windsor Olson's 1 1/2-hour "Private Eye on Seattle" tours, contact Windsor and Hatten Legal Investigations, 206-622-0590; fax 206-622-0263. Cost is $20. Group discounts are available.