by Beau Yotty
Dutch May (Annie Marie / May Peters) Prescott and her husband Fred J. (or Mr.) Prescott were found dead on or about August 30, 1916, in a small wooden shack in Flagstaff, Arizona’s restricted (red-light) district. Contemporary reporting treated the scene as a possible staged murder-suicide that most observers rejected as a double murder. The case was never solved and quickly went cold.
Dutch May Peters Prescott (also called May or Annie Marie Prescott) was a middle-aged woman active in Flagstaff’s Southside restricted district south of the railroad tracks. By most accounts she owned or operated “female boarding houses” (the era’s euphemism for brothels) and had accumulated “considerable property” there, making her one of the more prosperous self-made women associated with that area. The Coconino Sun later described her as having “the reputation of being peacefully inclined with no enemies.” She had lived in Flagstaff for a good many years. Prescott was the surname of her recently married husband; she was not from the town of Prescott. Exact details of her earlier life and whether she worked as a prostitute, madam, or both remain sparse in the surviving record.
Her husband, referred to as Fred J. Prescott or simply Mr. Prescott, was newly married to her. Contemporary and later accounts note uncertainty about the marriage, some suggestions that he may have had another wife in California, and questions about how formal or recent the union was. Little else is documented about him in the available sources.
The bodies were discovered on Wednesday afternoon, August 30, 1916. Everett Hanna, who was building a new residence for the woman on lots just north of the shack, stopped by to discuss plans, received no answer, noticed a peculiar odor, and notified Coroner/Judge J. O. Harrington. Harrington forced entry into the small two-room board shack in the rear of a house in the red-light district. The structure was largely enclosed by a high board fence, with the front door facing north.
The Coconino Sun (Friday, September 1, 1916) headlined the story “MURDER AND SUICIDE OR WAS IT DOUBLE MURDER? BLOODY TRAGEDY.” The bodies of “Dutch May” and her recently married husband were found on the bed, partially covered by bedding that had been set on fire. The fire charred and seared the upper bodies and burned much of the bedding down toward the floor before either smothering in the locked room or being extinguished. The room was “spattered and drenched in blood.”
Injuries reported by the newspaper:
- Dutch May: shot through the head twice and her throat cut. Either wound would have been instantly fatal. She lay huddled against her husband, badly charred.
- Prescott: throat cut from ear to ear with a razor; several deep cuts in his back; a bullet wound in his head. Either the throat wound or the head wound would have been fatal.
Prescott was found holding a six-shooter that was fully loaded except for the cartridge under the hammer, which had been discharged. A bloody razor was inside the house; an old razor was found in the yard. A pet dog belonging to the woman had been shot, and a canary in the room was dead. Numerous bullet holes were in the ceiling of the little room, and cartridge shells were found in the enclosed yard. There was a smear of blood on the outside doorknob, a slight stain on the screen door, and signs that someone had tried to wash blood stains inside. The last time the woman was seen was the preceding Monday.
The paper noted letters addressed to his wife found in her trunk and a note left by Prescott, but stated that “from the nature of the wounds and the condition in which the two were found, it does not seem possible that the note left by Prescott covered the tragedy.” A September 8, 1916, report in the Hassayampa Miner (Wickenburg) summarized the case as an investigation into the killing of “Dutch May” Prescott and her husband, whose “slashed and mutilated bodies” were found in a small shack, badly burned after the crime, with both bodies “riddled with bullets” and “no clue to the perpetrator.”
Later retellings vary slightly in emphasis (some stress both throats being slashed plus gunshot wounds, or advanced decomposition and a foul smell reported by neighbors), but the September 1 Coconino Sun account is the most detailed contemporaneous source. The staging, gun in the husband’s hand, bodies arranged together under burned bedding, was intended to suggest murder-suicide, yet the multiplicity of wounds, the fire, the dead animals, the ballistics evidence, and the overall scene led most people at the time to reject that explanation.
County authorities investigated, but the case produced no identified perpetrator and went cold. Later accounts and local historical commentary note that Flagstaff had limited appetite for pursuing deaths in the restricted district, and rumors circulated (without public confirmation or trial) that a highly placed town figure may have been involved. No charges were ever filed, and the matter faded from the public record.
Both families declined to claim the bodies. The couple was buried in Potter’s Field at Citizens Cemetery in Flagstaff. The site of the shack was in the old Southside restricted district, in the vicinity of what is now the Grand Canyon Hostel area on South San Francisco Street.
In 1916 Arizona was a new state moving away from its territorial “Wild West” reputation. Flagstaff’s red-light district operated under the polite cover of “female boarding houses.” Dutch May’s relative prosperity and peaceful reputation made the violence notable, yet the social marginality of the location likely contributed to the investigation’s rapid stall. Discrepancies between the primary newspaper report and later summaries are common for early 20th-century local cases that lacked formal trial records or modern forensic work; the core facts of the discovery, the blood-soaked and burned scene, the multiple fatal wounds on both victims, the attempted staging, and the lack of resolution are consistent across the available sources.
The case remains one of northern Arizona’s older unsolved homicides, more than a century later, still without a named suspect or official closure.
September 1, 1916, The Coconino Sun
