Addie GIlmour (1865-1893); Cut to Pieces and Cast into the Bay: The Terrible Death of Addie Gilmour

Strangers Plot, Grave 676

 

Addie Regent Gilmour was twenty-eight years old when she left Colusa for San Francisco in the late summer of 1893. She was a milliner by trade, a careful young businesswoman, engaged to be married, and accustomed to carrying cash for her work. To her family she said she was going to purchase stock for her shop. What she did not say—what she likely could not say—was that she was pregnant and desperate.

San Francisco was a city where such secrets could be kept, at least for a time.

When Addie failed to return home and her letters stopped abruptly, her family began to worry. Days passed, then weeks. Her sister Emma and her father searched first in Colusa, then farther south. By early September, the search had spread to San Francisco, where rumors began to circulate of a missing young woman last seen entering a doctor’s office on Turk Street.

Then the Bay began to speak.

Near Sausalito, a human head surfaced—stripped of flesh, unrecognizable except by teeth and general shape. A few days later, boys playing along the Oakland waterfront discovered a five-gallon coal-oil can half buried in the sand. When the coroner forced it open, he began pulling out what remained of a woman: thighs, calves, portions of the torso, internal organs, all compressed tightly into the can and weighted down. The remains were badly decomposed and bore unmistakable signs of dismemberment.

Inside the can were personal effects that told a quieter, more devastating story—hair, fragments of clothing, buttons, ornaments, a purse. These small domestic objects, far more than the mutilated flesh, convinced investigators and family alike that the dead woman was Addie Gilmour.

Emma Gilmour was summoned to view the items. She collapsed in grief and had to be led from the room. “Those poor Addie’s,” she cried, according to one account, before being taken away.

At first, uncertainty lingered. Witnesses came forward claiming they had seen Addie alive days after the head was found—walking through San Francisco shops, attending the State Fair in Sacramento, pale and thin, as if recovering from illness. Newspapers fed on these sightings, printing them eagerly. But physical evidence outweighed rumor. The body parts, the clothing, and the timing told a different story.

Suspicion soon focused on Dr. Eugene F. West, a physician with offices at 132 Turk Street. Addie had been in his care shortly before her disappearance. West admitted she had visited him and acknowledged performing a medical operation. What he did not do—according to prosecutors—was report her death.

Instead, the state argued, he cut her body apart, removed identifying features, packed the remains into a can, and consigned them to the Bay.

West was charged not merely with performing an illegal abortion, but with murder.

The trial transfixed San Francisco. Jurors heard how Addie had sought relief from her condition, how the operation ended in death, and how the doctor responded not with confession or aid, but with concealment. The prosecution argued that intent could be read not only in the operation itself, but in the calculated destruction of her body afterward. No innocent man, they said, dismembers a woman and throws her into the sea.

The defense countered that West had not intended to kill Addie Gilmour, that the operation was undertaken to help her, and that panic—not malice—guided his actions once she died. Witnesses were disputed. Testimony was excluded. Legal arguments tangled with medical ones.

Judge Wallace ultimately ruled that West had not acted with intent to murder. But the law was unforgiving. Because Addie Gilmour died during the commission of a criminal act—an illegal abortion—West was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in San Quentin.

It was not the end of the case.

The California Supreme Court decision is People v. West, 106 Cal. 89, 39 P. 207, filed Feb. 12, 1894, Supreme Court docket No. 21162. The high court ruled (in substance) that the trial court wrongly excluded testimony on “physician–patient privilege” grounds in a criminal prosecution—an evidentiary error serious enough to require reversal/remand for a new trial. This case is still cited historically in California privilege discussions.

The conviction was set aside.

Whether the state retried West, reached a plea, or failed to secure another conviction is not conclusively established in surviving published court opinions.

What is certain is that Addie Gilmour never received a second chance.

Her body had been torn apart and scattered in the Bay, her private life laid bare in court, her death debated as a legal abstraction. She became one of San Francisco’s early symbols of what could happen to young women who vanished into the city seeking secrecy and mercy. Decades later, when the Bay yielded other bodies—most famously that of Laci Peterson and her unborn child—Californians would again be reminded that the water keeps its own grim archives.

Addie Gilmour’s story is not only about violence, or law, or scandal. It is about a world in which silence was safer than survival, and about how the dead can be argued over long after their voices are gone.

Sources: Sacramento Daily Record-Union, September 1893–February 1894; San Francisco Morning Call, 1894–1895; Woodland Daily Democrat, September 1893; California Supreme Court, People v. West (1894); Find a Grave memorial 216177643.

---

Legal context: abortion penalties in California, 1893

Under California Penal Code §§ 274–275 (in force at the time), performing an abortion was a felony, punishable by two to five years in state prison, unless necessary to save the woman’s life. If the woman died as a result of the procedure, the act could elevate to manslaughter or murder, depending on intent and circumstances. In Addie Gilmour’s case, the death occurring during an illegal operation formed the basis for the second-degree murder conviction that was later reversed on evidentiary grounds.