F. K. “Charlie” von Dahmer, a 33-year-old male bartender of Russian descent, was living in Juneau, Alaska, when his life ended on the evening of January 18, 1909. Known around town as “Chas. F. Dalmer,” he tended bar at the Montana Saloon and kept a cottage on the lower side of Fourth Street between Franklin and Gold, where the shooting took place at about 6:30 p.m. The streets outside were part of a booming gold-town capital, but inside that small house an argument turned fatal.
Earlier that day, according to contemporary accounts later retold by historians, a dispute had flared over money and violence involving a dance-hall entertainer named Kitty O'Brien. O'Brien told her companion, 18-year-old Robert F. Stroud, that von Dahmer had refused to pay her and had beaten her. Stroud went to confront the bartender at his cottage; a struggle followed, and von Dahmer was shot dead. Some reports say Stroud claimed the bartender was armed and that he acted in self-defense; others recount that von Dahmer was knocked unconscious and then shot.
Police quickly focused on Stroud as the suspect. He was arrested and booked into the federal jail in Juneau that night and by the next day—January 19, 1909—was formally held for the killing of F. K. F. von Dahmer. Because Alaska was then a U.S. territory, the case proceeded in federal court. Newspapers and later summaries noted the tangle of names—“von Dahmer,” “Van Dahmer,” even “Dalmer”—but they agreed on the core fact: Stroud had shot the bartender after the quarrel over O'Brien.
The aftermath moved swiftly. Stroud was charged and ultimately convicted of manslaughter in the death of the 33-year-old male victim. He received a 12-year sentence in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, setting him on the path that would later make him infamous as the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Von Dahmer's death was later memorialized in community histories and victim registries, a stark entry for a man remembered primarily by the violent way his life ended on that winter evening in Juneau.
