In the early hours of Aug. 15, 1944, the body of Italian prisoner of war Guglielmo Olivotto was found hanging from a guywire on an obstacle course at Fort Lawton outside Seattle. By nightfall, the Army had begun destroying the crime scene. Within weeks, 43 Black soldiers faced charges. Three of them could be executed.
The Army's own classified investigation would point to a white military policeman as the most probable killer. Not one white soldier was ever charged. The wrongful convictions stood for 63 years.
Fort Lawton
Fort Lawton occupied 700 acres on Magnolia Bluff above Puget Sound, just outside Seattle. It served as the Army's second-largest Pacific staging area. Over the course of the war, more than a million soldiers passed through its gates. The base was enormous, busy and, in the summer of 1944, tensions were on the rise.
Two hundred Italian prisoners from the 28th Italian Service Unit had arrived in May for labor assignments. Military officials had chosen them carefully. Unlike POW populations made up of committed fascist volunteers, these men had mostly been drafted into Mussolini's army.
After Italy's capitulation in 1943, they signed agreements to support American war operations in any role short of direct combat. The Geneva Convention required the Army to treat them accordingly. They received pay for their work and regular passes to leave the base. The Italians ate at Seattle restaurants, toured Mount Rainier and had Sunday dinners with local families.
The 650th and 651st Port Companies occupied barracks directly adjacent to the Italian compound. Both were Black transportation units, trained to unload cargo ships in combat conditions. The same Seattle bars the Italian prisoners visited were off-limits to them. The Army put them to work shoveling snow off city streets and confined their recreation to a single on-post bar.
Racial tensions had been building across Seattle for months. In March 1944, a bus driver physically removed a Black woman from his vehicle. That July, Mayor William Devin told an audience at the University of Washington that the city's racial situation was loaded with "a great deal of dynamite."
Police Chief Herbert Kimsey warned reporters at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that his department was bracing for disorder from what he described as a "crowded, mixed and excited wartime population."
For the Black soldiers at Fort Lawton, watching prisoners of war, who only months before were shooting and killing American soldiers, receive freedoms denied to American servicemen was a daily humiliation. Samuel Snow, who would later be convicted of rioting, said, "It was racial, real racial."
Among the Italians in the compound was Pvt. Guglielmo Olivotto. Fellow prisoners described him as reserved and devoutly religious, a man who kept mostly to himself. They also noted he harbored a deep fear of Black people.
The Night of Aug. 14
Aug. 14 was payday for the 650th and 651st. Both units were also under orders to board ships for New Guinea the following morning. The soldiers went out into the city to enjoy their last night stateside.
By 11 p.m., Pfc. Willie Montgomery, a 39-year-old from New York City, had been drinking heavily when he crossed paths with a group of Italian prisoners returning from an evening in the city. Accounts of what followed differ, but the confrontation turned physical when an Italian prisoner named Giuseppe Belle knocked Montgomery unconscious.
Both sides ran back to their compounds. Word spread through the Black barracks that a group of Italians had attacked an American soldier without provocation. Men came out carrying fence boards, tent stakes, chunks of pipe and loose rock. Within minutes, a force estimated between 100 and 200 soldiers was moving toward the Italian compound.
Prisoners dove under their bunks, jumped out windows and sprinted for the tree line as the Americans went after anyone in the barracks. A massive brawl began. An emergency whistle sounded near the Italian barracks. The first military policeman on the scene was Pvt. Clyde Lomax.
Clyde Lomax
Lomax arrived in the middle of a full-scale riot. He loaded a single injured Black soldier into his vehicle and drove away without alerting the guardhouse at the compound entrance, which he passed on his way out. He also bypassed the nearest medical facility on the base and continued to a hospital on the far side of Fort Lawton. The riot went on without him.
Forty minutes passed before MP reinforcements arrived in force. By then, 32 men needed hospital treatment. Among the injuries were three fractured skulls, multiple stab wounds and several shattered bones. The MPs who responded declined to arrest anyone, telling investigators later that visibility had been too poor. Several specifically noted that they had been unable to tell one Black soldier from another.
Lomax did not return for more than two hours. Around 5 a.m. on Aug. 15, he showed up and reported that he and another MP had found a body.
Guglielmo Olivotto had been strung up by a noose attached to a guywire at the base of Magnolia Bluff, approximately 50 feet from the last window witnesses saw him jump through. His body had no defensive wounds. The only marks on him were shallow scrapes along his legs. A pair of shoes that investigators concluded were Olivotto's turned up in the brush far from the hanging site, their position suggesting a body had been dragged facedown through the underbrush. There were no footprints in the soft ground around his body.
The Army's initial statement suggested Olivotto might have taken his own life. When investigators arrived weeks later, the physical evidence did not support that conclusion.
The Investigation
Post commander Col. Harry Branson had the area around the crime scene swept clean by the evening of Aug. 15. Physical evidence went unsecured, unprocessed and unrecorded. Repair crews moved into the damaged barracks that same day and had them repainted within 24 hours. Branson also attempted to transfer the Black soldiers to San Francisco before any formal inquiry could begin. A subordinate who recognized what was happening reported it to the Pentagon, and the transfers were stopped.
The Army sent Brig. Gen. Elliot Cooke to conduct a formal inquiry. Between Sept. 10 and Oct. 5, 1944, Cooke's team conducted 165 interviews, producing more than 1,500 pages of testimony.
Witness after witness, including white soldiers, told investigators that Lomax spent roughly 40-minutes at the scene without backup, he had encouraged rioters and distributed weapons before any reinforcements arrived. Lomax then took the opportunity to disappear.
The Cooke Report, completed Oct. 28, found that the riot had been avoidable and that placing the Italian and Black units in adjacent quarters had been a serious failure of judgment. It concluded that Olivotto had been strangled, meaning the guywire noose may have been used to display the body rather than kill him.
The report characterized Lomax and a fellow MP as showing "if not cowardice, a decided lack of proper training, and also a flagrant disregard of the Articles of War," recommended Branson be demoted and directed that Lomax face court-martial.
The Army classified the report immediately.
The Prosecution
By fall 1944, the case had drawn attention well beyond Seattle. Italy's new government was an American ally, and a dead Italian POW on American soil carried diplomatic weight. The State Department monitored the proceedings closely, the White House received regular updates and FBI agents compiled intelligence files on the soldiers, their relatives and courtroom observers.
The man the Army sent to prosecute was Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, a trial attorney from Houston who would later serve as the Watergate special prosecutor. He charged 43 Black soldiers under Article 89 of the Articles of War, a provision carrying a potential life sentence. Pvt. Luther Larkin, Pvt. William Jones and Pvt. Arthur Hurks faced the additional weight of capital murder charges in connection with Olivotto's death. Not a single white soldier received any charge.
Jaworski offered immunity to soldiers willing to testify for the prosecution. Most declined, including Samuel Snow and Roy Montgomery, but five agreed. A later investigation revealed that every one of those five had preexisting personal grievances against the specific men they testified against, a fact that was never presented to the court.
The Italian prisoner witnesses presented their own complications. Most told investigators they had been unable to identify anyone during the chaotic night. Two gave sweeping identifications of dozens of accused soldiers despite the darkness and confusion.
Military intelligence files reviewed years later showed both men had been flagged before the trial as unreliable security risks. Jaworski never disclosed this to the defense. A third Italian witness, Agosto Todde, submitted a written statement naming nine men; by the time the trial began, his list had grown to 14.
The Trial
The panel consisted of nine white officers. Proceedings opened Nov. 16, 1944. The defense drew Maj. William Beeks, a Seattle maritime attorney who would later receive a federal judicial appointment. He was assigned to represent all 43 defendants, three of whom faced execution. He was given roughly 10 days to prepare and was assisted by a single colleague. Jaworski's team had been building its case for months.
On Dec. 8, midway through the trial, Beeks learned for the first time that Jaworski had obtained a copy of the Cooke Report before proceedings began. He demanded it be disclosed. Jaworski argued that releasing it posed a wartime security risk. The panel sided with the prosecution.
Beeks returned to the defense without ever knowing that the Army's own investigators had found the riot preventable, that his opposing witnesses had been assessed as unreliable by military intelligence, or that the report had recommended Lomax face court-martial for deserting his post during the window when Olivotto was killed.
Jaworski then put Lomax on the stand to testify against the Black defendants.
When Jaworski presented the rope into evidence, it was not the one that had been used to hang Olivotto. That rope had never been secured after Branson cleared the scene and was never recovered. Rather than acknowledge this, Jaworski asked Lomax only to confirm that the rope he was holding resembled the one from the scene. Lomax said it did. Every reporter covering the trial missed the facts entirely.
The Verdicts
Five weeks of proceedings made this the largest and longest Army court-martial of World War II. When the verdicts came in during late December 1944, 28 of the 43 defendants had been found guilty. Larkin and Jones were convicted of manslaughter. Hurks was cleared of the capital charge but convicted of rioting, as were 25 others. Hard labor sentences ran from six months to 25 years. Upon their release, nearly every man received a dishonorable discharge.
Snow returned to Leesburg, Fla., and spent the following decades working as a church janitor. He destroyed his military records and never told his children what had happened. Montgomery buried the experience and almost never spoke of it. The final defendant was released from custody in 1949 after President Harry Truman offered pardons in the war's aftermath.
On Jan. 1, 1945, the Army court-martialed Lomax for failing to report during the riot. He was dishonorably discharged and never charged in connection with Olivotto's death. He died in 1999.
Jaworski's career went on undisturbed. He served as president of the American Bar Association, contributed to the Warren Commission and became the Watergate special prosecutor whose pursuit of White House recordings helped bring down the Nixon administration. He died in 1982 without ever publicly addressing his conduct at Fort Lawton.
Olivotto's remains were interred in a section of Fort Lawton's cemetery kept apart from the American graves. His family in Nervesa della Battaglia spent six decades with no information about how or where he had died.
The Case Reopened
Jack Hamann was a television reporter for Seattle's KING-TV in 1986 when a routine assignment brought him to a public hearing at Discovery Park, built on the former Fort Lawton property after the Army transferred the land to the city.
A park employee mentioned a headstone in an out-of-the-way corner of the old military cemetery bearing a misspelled version of Olivotto's name and the inscription "14 Agosto 1944." Hamann spent nearly a year investigating from 1944 newspaper coverage and court-martial records and produced a documentary that aired in 1987 and won an Emmy Award.
As years passed, Hamann grew uneasy with what the documentary had concluded. Working only from court transcripts and wartime press accounts meant accepting the version of events Jaworski had constructed. In 2001, Hamann and his wife Leslie traveled to the National Archives facility in College Park, Md., to start over from primary sources. After weeks of searching, Leslie found the Cooke Report in the "Miscellaneous" section of the World War II collection, accompanied by the full supporting testimony.
The documents confirmed that Jaworski had possessed the report before the trial opened, that he had been aware his investigation had been improperly conducted from the start and that he had successfully argued to keep all of it from the defense. Hamann later described the Fort Lawton case as "conspicuously absent from history books and even from the collective memories of lawyers, soldiers, and journalists."
His book, "On American Soil," published in 2005, received the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award. Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington state introduced legislation directing the Army to reopen the case. On Oct. 26, 2007, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records voted unanimously that Jaworski had committed "egregious error" in withholding the Cooke Report and ordered all convictions overturned.
President George W. Bush signed legislation authorizing back pay for the men or their surviving families. Snow's initial check, calculated across 63 years of owed wages, came to $725. When Secretary of the Army Pete Geren testified before Congress in support of legislation to add interest to those payments, he called that figure "a travesty of justice."
The Final Acts
The Army held a formal ceremony at Discovery Park on July 26, 2008, exactly 60 years after Truman signed the order desegregating the armed forces. A gospel choir performed as Rep. McDermott, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims each spoke. Of the men whose convictions had been overturned, most were already gone.
Snow, 84 and living in Florida, had traveled to Seattle for the ceremony but was admitted to a hospital that morning. His son Ray stood in and accepted an honorable discharge on his behalf. Family members carried the paperwork to Snow's hospital room that afternoon.
Thirteen hours after the ceremony ended, Samuel Snow died. He was buried with full military honors. After learning his conviction had been overturned, he had told a reporter, "I'm rejoicing today. I'm not mad at nobody. I'm just as satisfied as can be."
Montgomery did not attend. Army officials drove to his home in Detroit to deliver his honorable discharge directly and offer a personal apology. Montgomery took the documents and said, "This is a great satisfaction. Now I can forget about the whole thing. That's all I ever wanted to do." He died Dec. 6, 2012, at 91.
Sources: Jack Hamann, "On American Soil," University of Washington Press, 2007; Dominic W. Moreo, "Riot at Fort Lawton, 1944," iUniverse, 2004; Heather MacIntosh, Priscilla Long and David Wilma, HistoryLink.org; National Registry of Exonerations, UC Irvine Newkirk Center; The Seattle Times; National Archives AOTUS Blog; BlackPast.org; Washington State Historical Society; Friends of Discovery Park.
