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Archives: One of FBI’s 10 Most Wanted captured

This day in Vancouver history: Oct. 29, 1960

Joseph Corbett, Jr., a former Fulbright scholar listed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for kidnapping and murdering the heir to the Coors Brewing empire, is captured in a West End apartment after a Vancouver resident recognizes him from a Reader’s Digest story about the crime.

A convicted murderer with a genuis-level IQ, he had escaped from a minimum-security prison in California four years earlier and was living in the former Maxine’s Apartment Hotel on Bidwell Street under the assumed name Thomas C. Wainwright.

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The former Maxine's Apartments at 1215 Bidwell St. Photo: Vancouver Public Library, VPL Accession Number: 16252

Corbett, who pleaded innocence, was sentenced to life imprisonment and released in 1978. In 2009, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head inside his Denver apartment.

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