On October 30, 1947, Bird was prowling through Tacoma, Washington, when he stopped at the home occupied by Bertha Kludt, 52, and her teenage daughter Beverly. Finding an ax in the woodshed, Bird reportedly stripped off his clothes before breaking into the house and hacking both victims to death. Their dying screams alerted neighbors, and police were just arriving on the scene as Bird emerged from the backyard, shoes in hand. Violently resisting arrest, he slashed two officers with a knife before he was finally beaten into submission and dragged off to the county hospital for treatment of various injuries.

In custody, Bird first pled innocence, then dropped his pose when blood and brain tissue were found on his trousers. Sentenced to die for the slayings, he stalled execution for nearly two years, regaling police with his intimate knowledge of 44 deaths nationwide. At least eleven crimes were solved through Bird's confessions , starting with the ax murders of two women at Evanston, Illinois, in 1942. Other victims were confirmed in Louisville, Kentucky; Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Kansas; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Cleveland, Ohio; Orlando, Florida; and Portage, Wisconsin. Police in Houston suspected Bird of murdering Mrs. Harry Richardson there, and Chicago authorities were curious about a weighted body retrieved from Lake Michigan, five miles south of Kenosha. Los Angeles detectives had their eyes on Jake for murdering a black youth and a Jewish grocer, while in New York City he was tentatively linked to the robbery and murder of a delicatessen owner.

Psychiatrists examined Bird in jail and labeled him a psychopath , deriving satisfaction from the sight of women cowering in terror. In the verified cases, most of his victims were female, most were white, and the majority had been killed with hatchets or axes in their homes. (Bird also put a "hex" on several enemies from prison, journalists reporting that some half a dozen of them subsequently died.) Inevitably, Jake ran out of stories, and he climbed the gallows on July 15, 1949, in the Washington state prison at Walla Walla.