The Twin Slayings In Honeymoon Cottage

The full moon which hung over the tops of the towering firs dropped out of sight,  and only the feeble glow of a turned-down lantern shed any light in the corner where the sleeping lovers lay.  Beside the bed, on a chair, stood an alarm clock; it was set to go off at midnight to awaken twenty seven year old Archie Coble, clerk in a Rainer,  Washington,  store. Now the man and his young girl wife, Nettie, slept the deep slumber of those at peace with the world.

At last the moon was blotted out, and suddenly from out of the shadows of a nearby building,  a sinister figure emerged,  paused for a moment,  then crept to the window of  “Honeymoon Cottage”.  A keen edged blade gleamed in his hand.

Silently,  as the night itself,  he entered the house;  a few swift strides and he stood  beside the sleeping couple.  The Devil must have chuckled then as he looked  upon what transpired in that bedroom.

At midnight the alarm clock went off,  but not even a shrieking siren could have awakened the sleeping lovers at that hour;  Death had stalked with that sinister figure.

Near sunset of Tuesday,  July 11,  1911,  the following day,  a grocer informed Mrs. W.E. McNett,  aunt of Nettie Coble,  that he thought it strange,  neither of the young people had been seen all day.  Mrs. McNett went to investigate,  discovered the kitchen door of the Coble home wide open,  but no one seemed to be within.  She went out on the street and brought Constable Lew Eddy and Justice of the Peace C.G. Morris back with her.

Together the two men entered the cottage.  As they approached the bed they could see that it was occupied;  two humps marked the location of two still forms,  silent and unmoving,  the bed covers drawn over their heads.

Constable Eddy advanced to the foot-board with an uncomfortable feeling that he had no business in other people’s bedrooms, but that sensation soon changed to one of horror.

Upon the clean white counterpane,  lay a double bitted axe.  The once gleaming blade was now dyed a reddish hue. With trembling hands,  Constable Eddy turned back the covers. 
Archie Coble lay on the near side of the bed,  his head crushed by a terrific blow;  on the other side of the bed was his eighteen year old wife.  Her crumpled form lay further beneath the covers,  as though she had been awakened when the first blow was struck,  and she had slid down as the fiend stood over her with weapon poised;  her lovely black tresses hung over the bed-rail and reached the floor;  the right side of her head was cracked open.  It was apparent both victims had been dead for hours. 

On the following day a coroner’s jury returned a verdict of  “murder at the hands of persons unknown”.

The crime was particularly atrocious,  since an examination disclosed that Nettie Coble had been criminally attacked.  Robbery was evidently not the motive,  since $500 left in the house was left untouched.

The double murder held more than the usual interest because it happened within a month of the wiping out of the Hill family in Portland,  Oregon,  150 miles to the south of Rainer,  by another killer.

From the start,  Sheriff George Gaston,  of Thurston County,  had the assistance of Dr. J.S. Cathie and Dr. R.S. Cathie of Portland,  both doctors of medicine as well as scientific investigators who had worked on the Hill case.  Almost immediately the Cathies came to the conclusion that the Hill murderer and the Coble murderer were one and the same;  basing this belief upon the similarity of the manner in which the two crimes were committed.

Unquestionably the Cathies were of great assistance in reconstructing the crime.  First,  due to the discovery of the run-down alarm clock,  they were able to determine that the murders had been committed before midnight,  it being natural to expect that Archie Coble would have turned off the alarm had he been awakened by its ringing.  Then there was evidence of a neighbor who had seen Archie Coble on his way home at ten o’clock.  Thus,  the time of the killings was fixed as between ten and twelve o’clock.

On the top of the lantern,  by the light of which the fatal blows had no doubt been struck,  blood-smears were found.  Beneath the bedroom window were the prints of shoes.  The dirt was soft there and with their magnifying glasses the Cathies could trace across the kitchen linoleum,  the damp prints of the killer,  distinguished by a queer patch on the sole of one shoe. 

In the end the two investigators nurtured the opinion that the killer of the Hills and the Cobles was a sadist;  a blood-lusting degenerate who had left a trail of killings from Iowa to the Pacific Coast.

However,  Sheriff Gaston wasn’t so sure the Cathies were absolutely correct.  His own opinion was that the man who killed the Cobles was well acquainted with the premises and also with pretty Nettie Coble.  With this in mind,  and realizing he would need the services of a trained investigator,  he hired Detective J.D. Sandusky of a private detective agency,  in Seattle,  to make a complete investigation of the past lives of Archie and Nettie Coble.  He soon discovered that the love affair of these popular young people had ripened quickly,  and that there had been no other lover in the life of either of them.  He reported to Sheriff Gaston that in his opinion it was not a rejected lover who had committed the crime.

So the Sheriff had to come back to the idea that either some half-witted,  or sadistic fiend was the killer.  News of the ravishing of Nettie Coble was now printed for the first time,  this secret having been carefully guarded.  The people were aroused more than ever;  determined groups of men gathered in the little prairie town and discussed what they would do to the fiend if they caught him;  inflamed public opinion  began to suspect every person who was known to be a bit “queer”.

So it happened that the citizens of Rainer,  determined to have their revenge, settled upon a man who had once been confined in an insane asylum,  as the guilty party. Sheriff Gaston made the arrest,  placed him in jail,  and then checked his alibi.  It stood up one hundred percent.

In the meantime,  Detective Sandusky,  whom Rainier knew only as Frank Rino, had extended his quiet search to the territories surrounding the Coble cottage,  and finally he came across what seemed a significant lead.

He found a newspaper on which bloody hands had been wiped;  it was in a tent house directly in the rear of “Honeymoon Cottage”.

It was no trouble to ascertain to whom this tent house belonged;  it was the property of George Wilson, a section foreman at Rainer; a quiet,  well mannered man with a large family,  and a good reputation.  He was a friend of the dead Cobles,  and about thirty five years old. 

At the time of the murder,  George Wilson’s family was out of town,  and he was stopping at the Waddell House,  Rainer’s lone hotel.  If he had been to the tent since the murder,  Detective Sandusky wasn’t aware of it.

But,  after the finding  of the papers,  Sheriff Gaston and the detective decided it would be best to keep watch on the place and see how Wilson acted if he discovered the bloody clue in his tent house. 

In a short time Sandusky found that others besides Wilson sometimes occupied the tent house,  and this naturally widened the field of suspects.  But while Sandusky was busy watching the tent,  a tedious task,  Sheriff Gaston came into possession of what seemed to be a most important clue.

He found that a local character had had a quarrel with Nettie Coble on Sunday afternoon,  prior to the murder on Monday.  The man was not wholly competent, and Nettie had enjoyed teasing him about his love affairs; on this occasion he had grown very angry. 

Gaston found the suspect in Tenino,  eighteen miles from Rainer,  and arrested him.   He was surly and did not deny quarrelling  with Nettie Coble,  but he denied he was in Rainer on Monday night.  Finally he grew defiant,  and said,  “Well,  if I did it they can’t prove it.”

Now Sheriff Gaston found a new use for the laborer’s disguise adopted by Detective Sandusky.  He placed the detective under arrest on a vagrancy charge and put him in the same cell with the suspect.  After a night of conversation Sandusky reported that it was of his opinion that the man was merely stubborn,  and not guilty of the murders. 

However the Sheriff did not immediately release him;  the reporters especially seemed certain he was the guilty man.  They pointed to his irrationality and connected the neatness of his attire,  with the straightening of the room and the careful depositing of the axe on the bed covers,  in the cottage. 

Sheriff Gaston took Sandusky back to Rainer,  and there a surprise awaited him. 

George Wilson had come to Justice of the Peace Morris with the news that he had found bloody newspapers in his tent house!

“Does he suspect anyone?”  Gaston asked.

“Yes,”  answered Morris.  “A man who worked for him on the section;  a Swede named Swan Peterson.”

This information brought the Cathies back to Rainer;  they had suspected the Hill murders were the work of a big Scandinavian laborer who had been in the vicinity of the house on the day of the slaughter.  This man had been traced north of Portland;  now they believed he might be Swan Peterson. 

Foreman George Wilson reported that Swan Peterson had left work very suddenly on the day that the two bodies were discovered.  He had called to Peterson to wait and get his pay,  but according to Wilson,  the man was in such a hurry that he would not even pause for this important matter.

“If we find this man,  we can be pretty certain whether or not he is our man”,  said the Cathies.  “He will very likely be left handed,  as was the Hill murderer and also the Coble murderer,  we believe.  He has a patch on his left shoe sole which should compare with the prints on the linoleum.  They were too indistinct to be photographed but we could see them with our glasses.”

“Why,  Swan repaired his shoes in my tent,  on Sunday afternoon,”  said Wilson,  when informed of the Cathies’ statement. 

At least,  it seemed,  the case had broken;  find Swan Peterson and the guilty man would be under arrest.  The hunt over the Northwest became intensive and two days later the suspect was arrested as he trudged along the railway tracks near Sumner,  Washington,  some fifty miles from Rainer.

Peterson was returned to Rainer.  He denied that he had ever spent a night in Wilson’s tent.  If he had ever had a patch on his shoe like the imprint on the linoleum,  he was no longer wearing that footwear.  He claimed he had spent the night of July 10th in a room  in  the  Waddell  House,  and  this was substantiated by the register there. 

But,  in that room the Cathies found blood on the doorknob and blood on a book which Swan Peterson was supposedly to have left there.

When asked where he had been before he came to Rainer,  Swan answered:

“I yust came by Purtland”

“Pick up that axe and swing it,”  commanded Sheriff Gaston.

Swan Peterson,  with a hefty left handed stroke, stuck the axe into a chopping block; the net was seemingly closing around the old laborer.

Now the officers took Swan to “Honeymoon Cottage” and made him stand before the bed where Archie and Nettie Coble were murdered;  they recounted for him what they believed happened in that room;  the old man was stolid; he appeared without emotion until they had finished.

But suddenly he became seemingly just a harmless old man; his voice broke a little as he talked.

“Aye not do that,”  he said  “Aye do that…Aye kill myself right away;  some younger man as Swan do that,  don’t you think?”

There was one man in that room to whom Swan Peterson’s logic appealed; Detective Sandusky,  who had stood in the shadows of the cottage and listened intently to each word which had been said.  Swan was an old man,  probably past sixty years;  it did seem reasonable that a younger man must have been the killer. 

But just the same, the circumstances continued to point more and more toward Swan Peterson.  Sheriff Gaston found that while the old laborer had retired at the Waddell House early in the evening another workman had seen him come out of the hotel about midnight.  Then dried blood was found on one of Swan’s shirts and a handkerchief.  He claimed the blood came from his nose...but he was taken to Olympia and locked in jail.

As a young newspaper reporter,  fresh from the police “runs” in Eastern cities,  I had arrived on the Pacific Coast only a few weeks prior to the Coble murders; I was well acquainted with police mechanics and intensely interested in the developments of scientific investigation which was very much in its infancy. The methods the Cathies were employing were hardly conclusive to my mind.  I soon formed an acquaintanceship with Sheriff Gaston and Detective Sandusky,  which was to continue pleasantly for many years.  As we sat one night in the Sheriff’s office,  discussing the case,  Sandusky gave voice to what I thought was a practical deduction.

“I don’t believe that an old man,  like Peterson,  unfamiliar with the house,  could have failed to make a noise which would have awakened one of the sleepers,” said the detective.  “The house is so small,  and there are so many things which a man might stumble.  I tried it in the dark myself,  and though I had become somewhat familiar with the place,  I still ran into things.”

We all joined in the discussion,  the final result being that we were of one mind,  that Peterson was not guilty;  we were impressed by Sandusky’s contention that the murderer of the Cobles had been acquainted with their home, and someone who had coveted the young wife.  Now Sheriff Gaston started questioning Peterson with a view of assisting the old man in recalling his actions on the night of the murder.

“Swan,” said Sheriff Gaston, “why did you leave the hotel after you had gone to bed that night?”

“Aye felt ill,” answered Swan.  “Aye yust get up and take a walk over by railroad track.”

Then Sheriff Gaston questioned the laborer who had seen Peterson leave the Waddell House.

“Are you sure you saw Swan leave before midnight?” asked the Sheriff.

“No” replied the laborer “I am not.  It might have been a few minutes after midnight;  I don’t know exactly what time it was.”

Now if Swan Peterson had not left the Waddell House until after midnight,  it was almost a certainty he could not have been the murderer.  The authorities were able to verify every statement that Swan Peterson made to them and at last were convinced he was not the guilty man.

Why then had George Wilson so willingly pointed the finger at this man?

George Wilson,  friend of the Cobles; George Wilson,  who knew every cranny and nook of “Honeymoon Cottage.”  Detective Sandusky began to feel the tingle of a new clue.  Quiet,  easy going, mild mannered George Wilson became a suspect, with the detective intent upon following every move the man had made for several days before and after the murder.

But however quiet and easy going a man may appear in everyday life,  there is no plumbing the depths of his passion,  except by close scrutiny of his actions.  His attitude toward sex;  his philosophy of life;  his reaction to a pretty woman and the remarks he might pass about her, all become important things to know.  Still disguised as a laborer,  Sandusky moved among George Wilson’s associates,  and soon he found sufficient information to convince him that the man was a sensualist to an extreme degree;  he became agitated to a point of excitement by talk of women; to one man he had spoken of the attractiveness of Nettie Coble. 

These were slender clues,  but they were straws which showed which way the wind might blow; Sandusky was at least convinced that he had found an admirer of Nettie Coble;  one who longed to possess her;  a man who might be aroused to a pitch of passion where he would commit such a crime to satisfy his desires.  But,  many a man has admired,  and desired,  in silence, and nothing ever came of it; what Sandusky needed now,  if his suspicions were correct, was positive proof of Wilson’s infatuation for the girl wife.  Surely if Wilson were so terribly infatuated with her,  he would have in some manner shown it to others. It seemed to the detective, too, that Nettie Coble would have spoken about it to some of her friends;  he began checking her movements for the few days previous to the murder.

Sandusky found that on the Sunday afternoon,  previous to the murder,  Nettie Coble had gone with Mrs. Wilson to the train which she was taking to Tacoma.  George Wilson got off that same train, walked to the Coble cottage with Nettie and left her at the door. Nothing very suspicious about this, but Sandusky nevertheless decided to continue his investigations of George Wilson’s movements on that day. True, he was pulled off on a couple of false trails,  but each time he came back to the conclusion that a lustful degenerate had committed the deed, and that the person was someone known to Nettie Coble. 

And, as the days of fruitless search went by, people began to talk more and more about the bloody newspapers which had been found in George Wilson’s tent house.  Some were there who began to whisper that George Wilson might have committed the crime; finally these rumors reached the ears of Wilson himself and he went to Justice of the Peace Morris about it.  He said people were accusing him of the Coble murders and he was afraid they might lynch him.

Was that an honest fear of the result of a guilty conscience, Sheriff Gaston wondered, when informed of the event by Justice Morris.

In the meantime, Detective Sandusky was moving among the citizens of Rainer, asking questions about George Wilson,  and trying to ascertain who knew him best. At last he was directed to a woman named Olga West, who had done some nursing in the Wilson family and was at the Coble home for dinner on the Sunday afternoon that George Wilson had accompanied Nettie Coble to her home.

Mrs. West was reluctant to talk,  but finally Sandusky persuaded her to tell what she knew.

“On the Sunday night before the murder,” said Mrs. West, “I was standing just inside the house when George Wilson brought Nettie Coble home. She slammed the door in his face,  and I heard him say, ‘I’ll get you yet, you pretty little black devil.’ “

Here, at last was a real clue; here was someone who coveted Nettie Coble.  But how was it to be proved? Certainly not by the physical clues, and a consultation with Sheriff Gaston brought Sandusky to the conclusion that without a confession there was no hope of solving the mystery.

By watching Wilson from the brush along side the railway track,  Sandusky soon found out that the foreman was very nervous; he glanced apprehensively toward town many times each day, and whenever a friendly mail clerk threw a paper from a passing train,  Wilson was the first to reach it.

This eagerness gave Sandusky an idea. That same night,  in Olympia,  I helped prepare a story for release to the Tacoma Ledger of the following morning; the news- paper which Wilson was to get from the train.  The headline screamed that another arrest was about to be made in the Coble case,  that Sheriff Gaston was not convinced of Swan Peterson’s guilt. The article said that Sheriff Gaston was in Rainer gathering evidence, and within 24 hours he would make another arrest. The suspect was referred to as a well known resident of Rainer, not previously mentioned. The arrest would probably create great surprise, it said. There was not a single line in that story to point directly at George Wilson.

The following day Sandusky secreted himself in the brush beside the right-of-way. At last the train roared by and the paper was thrown off. Wilson picked it up.  His eyes raced across the head lines. He stuffed the sheet into his pocket.  Several times during the afternoon Sandusky thought Wilson was on the point of fleeing, for he would leave his men and walk some distance along the track. Each time, however he returned. At dusk, with his crew,  he went to town.

Sheriff Gaston had been detailed to watch the railway station,  while Detective Sandusky kept Wilson under surveillance. Arriving in town that evening the section foreman hurriedly ate his dinner,  then went up to his room in the Waddell House;  there he packed clothes and went to the railway station. When Sheriff Gaston saw that the man was actually leaving town he made the arrest,  and Wilson was hurried to Olympia.

Detective Sandusky, posing as another prisoner, was placed in a cell with the accused man and gradually he gained the confidence of George Wilson. Soon he was convinced that he was on the right track; the foreman knew who had killed the Cobles; he had a terrible secret on his mind. Then Sandusky assumed a religious attitude; he talked much of what happened to sinners who did not confess. Finally Wilson, much shaken said...”I killed Archie Coble and his wife.  I feel certain I did it, but I don’t know why I did it, or how I did it.

“I was walking down the track one day when a voice said to me, ‘Why don’t you kill somebody?’ It was so plain that I looked around to see who was speaking...but no one was there.

“From then on that thought worked on my mind until my head was fairly breaking; I feared I might kill my family. I was living at the section house to be away from them, when I learned with relief that they had gone out of town for a visit.

“Then I became afraid I might kill one of the section hands, so I went to the hotel to sleep. On Monday night I returned to the tent where we had lived in back of the Cobles. I went to bed as usual with the idea that I must kill someone, still on my mind; a voice seemed to be whispering it over and over to me.

“I don’t remember anything I did.  I woke up in the tent in the morning, restless and worried and found bloodstains there on my clothes...blood for which I could not account. At first I thought my nose had bled during my sleep.

“That night, when I heard that the bodies had been found, things got clearer in my mind...and I felt that I had killed them. I was afraid to tell the authorities for I had no reason for murdering them and I could hardly believe my own thoughts. Then I got to thinking that if I told I would be hanged.

“I worried so much that I thought I was going insane...my head seemed as if it was coming off. It seemed to me that everyone must know I had killed the Cobles, so I told the Peterson story to prove that he, and not I, had done it.

“I feel certain that I killed Archie and Nettie, but I can’t remember anything about it.”

Sandusky told Wilson he should repeat the story to Sheriff Gaston; this he consented to do, and the Sheriff was sent for. Wilson repeated the story to Court Reporter A.C. Baker,  but by the next morning,  after the story had been typed,  he consulted a lawyer and changed his mind.  He refused to sign the confession.

However on August 11, 1911, Prosecutor Wilson filed two charges against George Wilson and he went to trial on October 4th of that year.

As the trial progressed it was apparent that only the admission of the confession would bring a conviction. This was finally accomplished through the testimony of Sandusky, Court Reporter Baker and Sheriff Gaston.

George Wilson did not dare to completely repudiate his confession.  He tried to qualify it, saying: “I said that my conscience had been asking me if I committed the murders; I did not say I did them.”

Mrs. West appeared as a witness to establish the motive and to testify to Nettie Coble’s fear of George Wilson. The jury was out for twenty-four hours and brought in a verdict of guilty in the second degree. George Wilson was sentenced to from twenty years to life in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla for as heinous a crime as the west coast had ever seen.  The End.

   As printed in the May 1935 issue of “Master Detective” 


     Submitted by Jay Gentry

   Archie and Nettie Coble are buried at Penner Cemetery,  Douglas County MO.

  Archie is the son of Alfred Luther & Xeraviah (Wood) Coble.

Archie Coble in his youth..............submitted by Cousin Eileen Nail

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