Poor Innocent Lad

“Mas. Gill Jamieson, poor innocent lad, has departed for the Unknown, a forlorn ‘Walking Shadow’ in the Great Beyond, where we all go to when the time comes.”

Those words, printed in a handwritten letter delivered to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on the morning of September 20, 1928, told the city of Honolulu that 10-year-old Gill Jamieson, the only son of Hawaiian Trust Company vice president Frederick Jamieson, was dead. What had begun as the search for a kidnap victim quickly turned into a search for Gill’s body and for his killer—a 19-year-old Japanese man named Myles Fukunaga. Poor Innocent Lad: The Tragic Death of Gill Jamieson and the Execution of Myles Fukunaga uses trial transcripts and court documents, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, official government records, and a detailed confession from the killer, himself, to tell this tragic story of the kidnapping and murder of young Gill, and the arrest, trial, conviction and execution of Myles.