Remembering those lost in 1958 tavern shooting
“No trespassing.”
“That’s what the bold, black letters say on the sign hastily nailed to the wooden frame of a punctured screen door. Shattered window glass lies everywhere. Splintered posts support the small front porch; the walls of the two-story residence are riddled with bullet holes.”
That’s how the article from the Sandpoint News-Bulletin’s Thursday, July 17, 1958, begins as it tells of the harrowing shooting that happened just days before, on July 11.
What was supposed to be a happy occasion — a couple’s 20th wedding anniversary celebration — quickly turned into a nightmare when a 74-year-old Sandpoint man opened fire inside Sandpoint’s City Club Tavern, resulting in the death of two and leaving three others wounded. According to the article, Emil Olkonen was in the tavern arguing with his wife, Mary, when the pair were asked to leave because they were disturbing the party.
The tavern owner’s wife, Olga Hunter, reported that after asking the couple to leave, Olkonen struck her in the face. After this encounter, her husband Robert and another woman, Rubye Tanner, demanded that the Olkonens leave the business. Emil Olkonen left, but returned roughly 45 minutes later, the article recounts witnesses as saying, with a .357 magnum pistol.
“It sounded like someone was shooting off firecrackers on the front porch,” Robert Hunter told the News-Bulletin. “Then I looked up and saw Emil standing in the doorway with a gun in his hand.”
Unphased, Olkonen’s wife told the other guests that her husband was merely shooting blanks.
“There were two bullet holes in the booth back rest, inches to the left of her head,” the article read.
Apparently, everyone in the tavern assumed someone was lighting off firecrackers, so when Olkonen continued firing, there was no commotion. When he entered the tavern, Olkonen aimed his pistol at Rubye Tanner, the woman who had told him to leave earlier. Bob Hunter, the tavern owner, saw Olkonen and walked up to him, telling him he needed to cut it out and leave. He continued to tell him to get out of the tavern even as Olkonen fired a shot at him. However, undeterred, Hunter went down as Olkonen’s second shot hit him in the neck. The man fired one more shot at a patron who attempted to run out the back door, Bud McMurtey, hitting him in the back.
Olkonen then fired a shot at his wife, which barely missed her, before walking out the bar, driving to his house and barricading himself inside.
At the tavern, Tanner lay slumped against the bar, dead with a bullet wound through her chest; Hunter struggled on the floor, a bullet through his neck; and McMurtey — a graze wound on his back.
When police arrived at the Olkonen residence commanding the shooter to surrender without further incident, Olkonen once again opened fire, hitting the chief of police, George Elliot.
“The bullet ricocheted off the ground about a yard in front of Elliot, smashed a hole through the portable megaphone the police chief was carrying, and ripped into the stock of the .30 caliber rifle he held in his hand,” the News-Bulletin article read. “Elliot collapsed to the ground when pieces of the bullet hit him twice, in the left chest just over the heart and in the fleshy part of the right thigh.”
After this assault, officers opened fire on the house in an attempt to cover the men trying to lift Elliot out of harm’s way and get him to the hospital. During this ordeal, Olkonen, still barricaded inside the house, died by suicide. However, officers outside were unaware that the threat was eliminated, and continued shooting over 200 rounds at the house as they called for reinforcements.
Roughly two hours later, over 20 officers from Coeur d’Alene, Bonners Ferry and Priest River were on the scene as well as five state patrolmen. One of the precincts brought tear gas to flush Olkonen out and while an officer crept onto the porch to throw the gas through the window, he saw Olkonen lying on the floor, deceased.
“We hear what a kind old gentleman he was and that we do not doubt for a minute, but he was NOT a kind old man of 74 last Friday night…” read an editorial piece in the News-Bulletin.
Ultimately, Olkonen’s rampage killed two people, including himself, and injured three others. If it hadn’t been for his poor aim, the editorial piece read, many more would have been injured and possibly killed, including Olkonen’s wife.