Anthony Azoff (1863-1895): Executed for Role in Murder of Railroad Detective

San Quentin photos of Anthony Azoff

Plot 4, Grave 94

Anthony Azoff entered California’s criminal record through a murder that was at once sordid, confused, and fiercely contested, and he left it on the gallows at San Quentin in the summer of 1895, insisting to the end that he was not the man who fired the fatal shot.

Azoff was convicted of the murder of Len Harris, a detective employed by the Southern Pacific Company, who was killed near Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County* in May 1894. Harris had been involved in investigating a planned robbery of the Boulder Creek railroad station. The prosecution’s theory was that Azoff, working with George Sprague and others, helped plan the crime and was present when Harris was shot. Sprague fired the revolver, according to Azoff’s own later account, but the state argued that Azoff was an active participant in a conspiracy that led directly to Harris’s death. Under California law at the time, that was enough to condemn him to hang.

From the moment of his conviction, Azoff maintained that while he had associated with Sprague, he neither fired the shot nor intended that anyone be killed. In a lengthy confession published shortly before his execution, he described himself as drawn into the affair by promises of money and by Sprague’s assurances that no violence would occur. When Harris appeared unexpectedly, Azoff claimed, events spiraled beyond his control. He admitted moral weakness and poor judgment, but not murder. “I did not fire that shot,” he repeated in interview after interview, swearing “before God and man” that he was innocent of the killing itself.

Azoff’s case quickly became a magnet for public fascination. Newspapers portrayed him as calm, articulate, and strangely cheerful for a condemned man. Reporters noted that he was a “star boarder” on Murderers’ Row at San Quentin, courteous to guards and fellow prisoners, willing to discuss almost anything except his own inner life and the precise moment of the crime. This demeanor fed both sympathy and suspicion: some readers saw stoic resignation; others saw a chilling lack of remorse.

One persistent misconception about Azoff was his supposed identity as a “raw and ignorant Russian nihilist,” a label that circulated widely in the press. Several papers went out of their way to correct the record. Anthony Azoff, they emphasized, was an American by birth, descended from old Virginia stock, and of more than ordinary intelligence. The foreign-sounding surname, combined with the era’s anxieties about anarchists and nihilists, had turned him into a convenient caricature. In reality, nothing in his background supported the image of a foreign radical bent on violence.

Inside his cell, Azoff passed the time with small acts of order and invention. The walls were decorated with paper birds, baskets, flowers, pendants, and grotesque pencil sketches, all fashioned by his own hands. He devised a crude pendulum from rolled tin foil suspended on a string, using its swings to guess the time of day. Above his bunk, he printed a motto in large letters that reporters faithfully transcribed:

What need have I to fear so soon to die?
’Tis but a lifetime, and the end is nigh.

The verse captured the fatalism that marked his final months. “If I must hang, what use is there to cry about it?” he remarked at one point, smiling. “A sudden drop, a moment’s struggle, and all is over.”

Despite his apparent composure, serious efforts were made to save his life. Appeals for clemency were directed to Governor James H. Budd, including personal pleas from Belle Dorner, a woman who became convinced of Azoff’s innocence and visited him repeatedly at San Quentin. Dorner argued that Azoff had been swept up by Sprague and that executing him would be a grave injustice. Azoff himself claimed to have influential friends both in California and in the East and believed, at least early on, that his sentence might be commuted to life imprisonment.

One dramatic twist came when Azoff asserted that a letter existed proving his innocence, allegedly written by the man who actually fired the fatal shot. The letter was said to have been mailed in Oakland and delivered to Sheriff McElroy of San Mateo County. Azoff insisted that he had been shown the letter but could not identify the handwriting with certainty. His attorney pursued the matter, hinting at altered signatures and missing evidence, but nothing sufficient to halt the execution ever materialized. Governor Budd ultimately declined to intervene.

Azoff’s connection to Oakland appears fleeting but significant. Contemporary accounts state that his wife and young child were living in Oakland during his imprisonment, and that he was deeply concerned about sparing his daughter the shame of knowing her father had been confined in San Quentin. He spoke of Oakland as a place of domestic life now irretrievably lost to him, a quiet counterpoint to the notoriety of his case. After his execution, reports indicated that his body was to be interred in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, fulfilling what was described as one of his last wishes.

On June 7, 1895, Anthony Azoff was hanged at San Quentin alongside Emilio Garcia and Patrick J. Collins, the three men condemned for separate murders. Witnesses remarked on Azoff’s steadiness as he walked to the scaffold. He sang briefly in his cell earlier that day, wrote farewell letters, and gave away his few possessions. When the trap was sprung, he died quickly.

Whether Anthony Azoff was a willing conspirator who escaped full moral responsibility in his own mind, or a lesser figure caught in a crime that ended in death, remains unresolved. The courts decided his fate, but doubt lingered in the public imagination long after his body was cut down from the gallows. His case sits uneasily in California’s nineteenth-century history of capital punishment—a story of circumstantial guilt, contested truth, and a man who went to his death clinging to the belief that history might yet judge him differently.

Current view of shooting site

*The current location of the shooting site is identified as the vacant lot behind the Boulder Creek Pizza & Pub. 

Sources: Sacramento-Record-Union-June,8-1895; San Francisco Morning Call, issues from March–June 1895; contemporary news accounts; San Quentin prison reports; Mountain View Cemetery records; Find a Grave