Peter Voiss (1862-1946): Bearded Wanderer Involved in Killing for a Quarter

"Official" Peter Voiss photo with Golden Gate Bridge

Stranger's Plot

Peter Voiss was one of the Bay Area’s most eccentric and tragic wanderers—a bearded old prospector whose life on California’s highways became a strange blend of folklore and infamy. Born near Cologne, Germany, around 1862, Voiss immigrated to the United States as a young man, chasing the same dreams of fortune that lured thousands of Europeans westward. Like many before him, he took to the Sierra Nevadas as a miner and prospector, living for decades on hope and hardpan dust. By his own later reckoning, he spent three-quarters of his life in that solitary pursuit but never struck it rich.

By the 1930s, age and disappointment had turned him into a roadside fixture. His long gray beard, sun-creased face, and pair of small burros—Trixie, Jimmie, and Dock—made him instantly recognizable along the byways between Los Angeles and Seattle. He lived in a two-wheeled covered cart that carried all his possessions, including the camera equipment and props he used to earn what little money he could. Amateur photographers and tourists were fascinated by the sight of the “hermit of the highways,” and Voiss made them pay for the privilege of taking his picture—usually a quarter or fifty cents. It was, he said, his only livelihood.

Bio of Voiss and Newspaper Clipping of Trial

That business arrangement turned deadly in 1936 on a stretch of Monterey Highway outside San Jose. Dr. Jasper Gattucci, a young dentist, stopped to photograph Voiss and his burros but refused to pay. When Gattucci snapped the picture anyway, Voiss raised his shotgun. The doctor fell dead. Newspapers quickly dubbed the killing the “snapshot slaying,” and the gray-bearded drifter became front-page news across California.

At trial, Voiss, then 73, testified tearfully that he “didn’t mean to kill him”—that he only meant to protect himself and his frightened animals. His attorney, J.D. Foley, argued that Gattucci and a friend had conspired to taunt the old man, deliberately driving toward him to scare his burros. “Angered when Gattucci drove in such a manner as to frighten his burros—in effect denying him the free use of the highways—Voiss shot,” Foley told the court. The defense portrayed the act as one of self-defense, not malice.

Reporters described the scene in the San Jose courtroom as both pitiful and riveting: Voiss sobbing uncontrollably, turning his back to the room as he insisted that he “didn’t intend to hurt anyone.” After days of testimony and a dramatic viewing of his battered cart and the bullet-riddled car window, the Santa Clara County jury acquitted him. He was simply too old, too feeble, and too pitiable to be judged a murderer.

Freed from jail, Voiss returned to his wandering life, once again steering his burro cart up and down the state highways. He remained adamant that no one could take his picture without paying him—a rule he continued to enforce through shouting matches and, occasionally, courtroom appearances. He was arrested several times for assaulting people who photographed him without permission, and his cart was once struck by a truck, leaving him injured but unbroken.

As he aged, his travels became more confined, limited mostly to Alameda County. Locals grew used to the sight of the white-bearded hermit trudging beside his burros, a relic from another century. He wrote eccentric “wills” on scraps of paper, bequeathing his three animals to anyone who happened to show him kindness. These informal documents later caused a minor legal tangle: when two different “beneficiaries” came forward with Voiss’s handwritten notes, officials discovered that he had scattered such papers up and down the coast like a wandering Johnny Appleseed. In one version, the will doubled as an advance bill of sale.

"Official" Peter Voiss photos with his beloved mules

By August 1946, Voiss was living out his final days in Oakland. His health failed as he sat in his little wagon, his faithful burros tethered nearby. Authorities found him critically ill in the cart and brought him to Fairmont Hospital, where he died on September 13, 1946, at the age of 84.

When news of his death spread, it sparked a small wave of fascination and melancholy. Newspapers described him as “bewhiskered Peter Voiss, amateur photographers’ model,” the man who once “expressed deeper fear for his burros than for himself.” His only known relative, a nephew named William E. Voiss in Portland, Oregon, was notified to make funeral arrangements. Whether any were ever carried out is unclear—accounts suggest that his body went unclaimed for a time, while his three burros were temporarily sheltered by Oakland’s pound master.

Peter Voiss’s story stands as a strange, sorrowful vignette of California’s frontier afterglow: a man born in Germany who crossed oceans and deserts in pursuit of gold, only to become famous for guarding his right to a fifty-cent photograph. He died as he lived—poor, proud, and fiercely protective of the humble animals that were his only family.

Sources: Oakland Tribune, July 1 1936; The Bakersfield Californian, August 10 1946; San Mateo Times, September 13 1946; Oakland Tribune, September 13 1946; Associated Press wire stories; and Find a Grave