John Devine, alias "Chicken Devine", was considered a desperate criminal. He always hung out around the Barbary Coast and the ...

Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement

BANC PIC 1996.003:Volume 21:130c--fALB

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The Bancroft Library

Full titleJohn Devine, alias "Chicken Devine", was considered a desperate criminal. He always hung out around the Barbary Coast and the waterfront, and was continually in trouble. In a fight in a sailors' boarding house his arm was caught in the jam of a door and a man named Billy Maitland seized a knife and severed Devine's hand from the wrist. Devine picked up his hand and walked into a drug store at Pacific and Davis and asked the druggist to put it together. Devine's last escapade was when he inveigled a man to accompany him to the southern part of the city and upon arriving at the hill where the big rocks lay, as you would be descending from Wilde Street, he murdered this man whose name was August Kemp, by beating him to death with a rock. For this murder he was convicted and was hung in the county jail on Broadway, May 14, 1873.

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