On the evening of June 3, 1898, guests at the Empire Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, heard a man’s voice declare he was ending his relationship with the woman in his room. A woman’s voice pleaded with him not to leave her. Then silence. Moments later, Charles Kinkade stumbled down the hotel stairs onto the sidewalk, clutching his throat as blood soaked his shirt and jacket.
He managed to rise briefly, fell again, and gasped, “My God, she’s killed me. ”
A former police constable shouted for a doctor and rushed to assist him. A fair-haired young woman followed Kinkade out of the hotel, carrying a white-handled razor covered in blood. A man drinking in the hotel bar took the razor from her trembling hand.
“Take the razor, I did it,” she said. Then she knelt beside the dying man, kissed his lips, and told the onlookers, “I did it. I didn’t mean to do it. I did it for love.
He drove me to it. ” When a doctor arrived moments later, he pronounced Charles Kinkade dead. The woman was Belle Adams. She was born in 1875 on her father’s farm near Seattle, in King County, Washington.
Pretty and elegant, she had grown into a young woman with many admirers, yet she rejected the idea of marrying into one of the county’s distinguished families. She wanted to marry for love. In 1895, at nineteen—young for a bride in an era when most women married at twenty-two—she married Anson Adams, a far less affluent gentleman. They had a child, but the marriage soon soured, and Belle found life as a wife and mother difficult.
Divorce was rare, less than one percent of marriages ended that way, and the social stigma and economic hardship that followed such women, particularly those with children, made the option seem impossible. The answer to her marital problems arrived in an unexpected form. In August 1896, gold was discovered in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada. The news swept through Seattle and San Francisco, setting off a rush of prospectors.
Anson Adams was among those who left his family to seek his fortune. The competition was fierce, and the influx of fortune seekers transformed the region. The town of Dawson, which had only five hundred residents in 1895, swelled to thirty thousand by 1898. With her husband gone, Belle found that being married and a mother had not lessened her appeal to the young men of King County.
She began going out more and soon met a musician from Kansas City named Charles King, known to everyone as Charlie. He was five years older than Belle, a charming, mixed-race man who played piano, guitar, and banjo. He had been married before, had two children, and had left the United States for Canada, settling first in Nelson, British Columbia, before moving on to Victoria, where work was abundant for talented musicians. The Canadian economy was improving, and many men passed through Victoria before embarking on the three-thousand-mile journey to the Klondike.
Belle fell for Charlie and left her child with her mother to accompany him to Victoria. Their relationship was passionate but volatile. They were often seen arguing in the streets. On one occasion, Belle packed a trunk and threatened to leave, but Charlie refused to let her go, demanding that she first return rings he had given her.
Despite the quarrels, they always reconciled. Charlie played most nights at a venue on Yates Street, while Belle worked as a prostitute. Prostitution was prevalent in Canadian cities at the time, and in Victoria it was generally accepted, although authorities had the legal power to fine and imprison sex workers and clients alike. Those measures were rarely enforced.
By May 1898, Belle and Charlie were living in a front room on the second floor of the Empire Hotel on Johnson Street, an area known for its brothels, saloons, and dimly lit streets. The relationship had become increasingly strained. Belle believed Charlie was seeing someone else. The hotel manager told him he could keep his room only if he ended his relationship with Miss Adams.
Charlie obliged and told Belle she could no longer stay at the hotel, though he helped her find alternative lodgings. Hotel staff were instructed not to give her access to his room. Belle, however, was resilient and clever. On Thursday, June 2, she persuaded the porter to let her into the room she had once shared with Charlie, hoping to retrieve some of her belongings.
When she opened the door, she found that Charlie had already taken up with another young woman. An altercation broke out, and Belle was removed from the premises. The manager again reminded his staff that she was not to be allowed back in. The following evening, Charlie returned to the hotel at nine o’clock.
He seemed in good spirits, carrying a cane and gloves, smiling at the staff and whistling as he walked upstairs. When he entered his room, Belle was sitting by the window waiting for him. Soon the hotel guests heard the heated argument. After the brief silence that followed, Charlie emerged, mortally wounded.
Belle was taken to the police station, where she gave her name as Miss Belle Adams and admitted what she had done, saying she wished to die with her lover. A coroner’s court convened the next morning. The jury viewed the body and then proceeded to the Empire Hotel, where the deceased man’s banjo and guitar lay on the bed and traces of blood stained the floor and walls. Belle wept as witnesses recounted the events.
The jury held her accountable for murder, and a judge informed her she would stand trial. The trial began on October 5, 1898, after several postponements. To the public and the prosecution, the case seemed straightforward: a jealous woman had killed her ex-lover after discovering he had taken up with another woman named Rita Carman. Witnesses testified to seeing Belle enter the hotel and follow Charles down the stairs with the razor in her hand.
Several confirmed that they had heard Miss Adams threaten to kill Mr. Kinkade if he ever left her. The defense, however, presented a strikingly different picture. A witness named William Burns, owner of the Burns guest house, testified that while Belle and Charlie stayed there, they argued frequently, and he was often called upon to separate them.
On one occasion, he said, Mr. Kinkade threw Miss Adams onto a bed and choked her, stopping only when Mr. Burns threatened to call the police. He added that Miss Adams took some time to recover.
When asked if Kinkade had been violent on other occasions, Burns said he had, recounting that during an argument over money, Kinkade said that if he had a razor, he would do for her. When Belle took the stand, anticipation filled the courtroom. Speaking in a hushed tone, she explained that she had ended the relationship and had gone to the hotel room on June 3 at Charlie’s request. He went out for a few hours, and when he returned, he was angry.
An argument followed. He grabbed a razor and tried to attack her. She said she wrestled the blade from his hands, and he dropped it on the table. Fearing that if he picked it up he would kill her, she grabbed it and cut him.
It was self-defense, she said. She answered the prosecution’s questions with composure and precision. They pressed her about a conversation with police officers on the night of the killing, alleging she had told them she warned Charlie not to make her vicious, and he had replied that he now had a girl he liked better. Belle confirmed she may have said that.
She described how they argued because he had told her he would be out only half an hour but had been gone for two. She asked if he had been drinking; he had replied, “Not much. ” They continued to quarrel before he attacked her. Another witness, a hack driver, testified that in May 1898 he had moved a trunk for the deceased, who told him that if Miss Adams did not look out for herself, he would kill her.
After the evidence was heard, the jury retired to deliberate. The courtroom was tense with expectation. When the jury returned, they found Belle Adams guilty of manslaughter, rejecting the idea that her actions had been premeditated. Justice Irvine sentenced her to five years in prison at the Kingston Penitentiary.
An eerie silence filled the courtroom, as many had anticipated a far more severe sentence. In December of that year, Belle’s husband, Anson Adams, obtained a legal separation, stating that his wife was a convict. Belle offered no defense. He was given custody of their child.
He had returned from the goldfields when he learned of his wife’s arrest, and it is believed he contributed generously to the expenses of her trial. As public interest faded, some began to question whether Belle was truly guilty. She was a petite young woman, and many found it hard to believe she could have inflicted such a wound on a powerful man like Charles Kinkade. Some suspected another person may have been responsible.
By then, however, Belle Adams was already serving her sentence, and the case of the woman who said she acted for love had come to its end.