In Step with Tom Hitzroth and Dean Jowers: ‘Murder at Avondale: Joseph Cicero, August 1895’
- RHSociety
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Richard Hao, Youth Director At Large
Edited by Laura Lee Bennett, Executive Vice President
On April 11, 2026, the Redmond Historical Society welcomed local historians and researchers Tom Hitzroth and Dean Jowers. Nearly 90 members and local history enthusiasts attended, marking the final Saturday Speaker Series program held at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, our venue since 2013. In keeping with the occasion, the program explored a chapter of Redmond’s “Old West” history.
On August 21, 1895, Joseph Cicero was killed on Avondale Road just south of NE 116th Street—an incident later uncovered by Dean while researching archival materials, including newspapers, court records, and property tax rolls. Working with Tom, the story of two once-friendly neighboring families turned bitter rivals comes to life, from the day of the killing through the complex trials and lasting impact.
We caught up with Tom and Dean for a bit of Q&A.
RHS: What draws you to studying local history? What about it intrigues you?
Dean Jowers: That very reason. It’s local. It’s things that are happening here that are part of the fabric of the Redmond community, or the Kirkland community, or whoever.
Tom Hitzroth: And what you might call history, we call, “Well, that was on a Tuesday. We saw that happen.” We go back 70 years-plus in the local area.
“What you might call history, we call, ‘Well, that was on a Tuesday. We saw that happen.’”
– Tom Hitzroth
RHS: So the proximity is what really draws you in. You can actually see the places where things happened.
Dean Jowers: Exactly. You can go to the place.
Tom Hitzroth: And in our presentation, we’ve got photographs showing Redmond and Avondale at that time, so you can see what it looked like. It’s difficult for people to understand that what they see out the window today isn’t what was there when this happened. We’re going to try to show that.
Dean Jowers: You also have to look at the fact that the narrative has to do with people living in their time, not our time. The rules of civility were quite different back then. So things you might say, “Geez, that doesn’t look so bad,” were a big deal to them.
You also have to look at the fact that the narrative has to do with people living in their time, not our time. The rules of civility were quite different back then.
– Dean Jowers
RHS: How did you first come across the murder on Avondale story?
Tom Hitzroth: I was researching crime in Redmond for a piece that Halee Turner and I put on the blog. It’s called Redmond True Crime Timeline, 1883 to 1923, and it’s posted there. I found a lot of different crimes, but this one stood out because of the volume of information. The others were usually just a paragraph or two in a Seattle newspaper. This one had dozens of news articles, some of them up to a quarter page, and it went on for two years. So that was the discovery. I brought it to Dean because we had worked previously on another murder in Redmond, and we felt there was enough information that we could continue the research and build a presentation.
Dean Jowers: Over the last 35 years, I’ve worked on four homicides in the Seattle and Kirkland area, so this became a collaboration between the two of us on something we were both very interested in. And it was local.
RHS: What part of the story was the most striking to you? What made it especially interesting, beyond the fact that it was close to home?
Dean Jowers: It was unnecessary. But the other thing that made it intriguing for me is that there was so much information. We were able to put together a fairly complete timeline. You don’t get that with a lot of homicides from back then. You rarely find information on them outside of what the newspapers say. So yeah, there was just so much information, and you could build a timeline on everything.
RHS: Do you think the results of the murder on Avondale would have been different if it had happened farther east, in a larger and more established city?
Dean Jowers: In 1895, I think it would be the same whether you were here or anywhere else west of the Mississippi River. The East Coast was a whole different world. The South was different too. Places like Washington, DC, Baltimore, and New York had laws and customs going back to colonial times. We didn’t have that here. We just had what was hewn out from 1860 on.
RHS: So if it had happened on the East Coast, the way it played out would have been very different?
Tom Hitzroth: Yes. If it happened in Washington, DC, or New York, there would have been a policeman on site very quickly. In this case, it took four and a half hours just to notify the policeman, who was in Seattle, and then it took him 12 hours to get to the murder site.
RHS: That’s a long time.
Dean Jowers: And that’s because there was no local law enforcement out here. Redmond was not an incorporated town. It was in the county, so the only person with jurisdiction was the county sheriff, and he was in Seattle.
RHS: So he had to take care of the whole county?
Dean Jowers: I’m sure he had deputies in different places, but not out in the sticks here.
Tom Hitzroth: Redmond and Avondale didn’t have their own.
Dean Jowers: The boondocks were actually on the map compared to where Avondale was.
Tom Hitzroth: We clocked it. It was 3.6 miles out of town. The murder occurred at 1:30, and it took until 6:00 to notify the sheriff.
Dean Jowers: Then the sheriff had to decide: can I go right now or later, and how am I going to get there? He’s getting there by ferry across the lake.
RHS: What did the community think about the murder?
Tom Hitzroth: The community was evenly split—supporting the men who did it, and supporting the man who got killed. There were two different factions in the area.
RHS: So everyone knew who the killer was, but there wasn’t some kind of citizen’s arrest?
Dean Jowers: Let me tell you a little bit about the old days when they did have citizen’s arrest. If you arrested someone, you were required to take him down to the jailhouse yourself. You couldn’t call the police and say, “I’ve just arrested this guy—could you take it over?” That would have been an all-day trip. And if there’s a dead guy out here in Avondale, that may be tomorrow before they get there. They can’t hold the body until the following day. So everybody’s taking care of the corpse while the sheriff is deciding when he’s going to come out. You’re dealing with the Old West here, and it’s very primitive.
Dean Jowers: Avondale was a separate community from Redmond. In fact, the only reason Redmond had a name at that time was because of the guy who lived there.
Tom Hitzroth: It was the railroad stop and the post office.
Dean Jowers: That was it.
Tom Hitzroth: Most of downtown, that’s all that was there. You’ll see it in a photograph we’re going to show.
RHS: So there weren’t many people out there.
Dean Jowers: Maybe 100, if you’re lucky, depending on where you are and what you call the greater Redmond area.
RHS: So east of Lake Washington was basically just sparsely populated land claims.
Dean Jowers: Basically, yes.
RHS: What specific artifacts or photos came up as especially interesting during your investigation?
Tom Hitzroth: My favorite is the train tracks.
Dean Jowers: The Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway
Tom Hitzroth: About the same time, we were working on this, I found in the Historical Society collection a photograph taken around 1888, because it’s still Washington Territory then—we haven’t become a state yet. It shows the train tracks going into Redmond, and it’s basically all woods. You can barely see the outline of a rooftop in the distance.
Dean Jowers: And you have the Sammamish River. But the photograph also shows that about where 154th Avenue Northeast is now, it was wetland. It was all underwater.
RHS: What about an artifact that was especially important to your investigation?
Tom Hitzroth: An artifact I really enjoyed was Joseph Cicero’s probate record. He’s the dead guy.
Dean Jowers: Yes, that was amazing.
RHS: For what reason?
Tom Hitzroth: It took eight years to settle his estate. There are 68 pages in the document. The information in there is enlightening.
Dean Jowers: But you also have to understand that the probate laws in 1895 are not the same as they are today. It was a far more complicated process. Almost everybody’s estate took four, five, or six years to probate.
Tom Hitzroth: Mrs. Cicero handled the probate, and she had three children—eight, five, and two, I think. The court appointed a guardian for them. She kept the kids, but she couldn’t spend any money from the estate on the kids without approval from the court. So she had to raise them under that sort of restraint.
Dean Jowers: That’s part of what’s interesting for me, because I have to go back and read all the laws of 1895 and earlier to see how we got here, realizing that none of that exists today. The topic may exist, but the process won’t. In one case, I didn’t understand what a particular thing was, so I had to find the 1895 law to tell me what it was about.
RHS: So you’ve become a kind of an expert on late nineteenth century law and policymaking.
Dean Jowers: When I was working on school district business for this area, I started in 1854 and worked my way up to about 1910, learning how the process worked. It was interesting.
RHS: Have you given this presentation before, or is this the first time?
Dean Jowers: First time.
RHS: What questions do you expect from the audience?
Dean Jowers: We don’t know, because basically no one besides us knows the details or knows about it. The audience is primarily going to come in cold, and all they’ll know is what we tell them. So I really don’t know what to expect. I’m going to handle some questions after Toms presentation, and I have to be prepared for everything.
Tom Hitzroth: Everything.
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