The Coby Murders

When there is a clear motive for someone’s murder, the police are usually at least half-way to solving the crime.  However, when a cold-blooded killing happens for seemingly no reason whatsoever…you have a real problem, one that usually ends with the murderer getting clean away and the victims winding up on the pages of this blog.  The following haunting mystery is a prime example.

31-year-old Dennis Coby lived with his wife of eleven years, 30-year-old Evelyn, and their eight-year-old son Tom in a quiet, pleasant neighborhood in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Dennis was an orderly at the psychiatric ward of the Cincinnati Veterans’ Administration Hospital, while Evelyn was a busy, seemingly perfectly happy housewife.  The Cobys were devoted to each other and their young son, and appeared to be the ideal middle-class family.

November 25, 1964, began as a perfectly normal day.  Tom came home from school to have lunch, then returned to his class at around 1 p.m.  Dennis was getting ready for a 3 p.m. shift at the hospital.  At 2:15, a neighbor saw Dennis and Evelyn walking to their garage, but did not notice their car leaving.  An hour later, Tom returned home to a puzzling scene.  The front door was open and the TV was on, but his mother was nowhere to be found.  He was also surprised to see that their lunch dishes were still on the table.  Although he did not know it at the time, his father had unaccountably failed to report for work.  The bemused child, not knowing what else to do, went to his grandmother’s house. 

At 4:45 p.m., another neighbor saw two people whom he assumed were the Cobys sitting in their car, which was parked in front of the garage.  When he walked past the Coby house fifteen minutes later, the car was inside the garage, but there was no sign of Dennis or Evelyn.

Meanwhile, Tom’s grandmother, understandably alarmed about the boy’s strange story, phoned Evelyn’s brother-in-law, Ray Temke.  When Ray went to the Coby house, he saw the car parked in the garage.  (The garage was an open, windowless recess, so anyone standing on the sidewalk could see inside.)  He also saw Evelyn and Dennis lying motionless in the back seat of the vehicle.  Assuming that they were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, Temke called paramedics.  When one of the firemen began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Evelyn, he found that her sweater was soaked in blood.  A closer examination found that both the Cobys had bullet holes in their chests.

"Cincinnati Enquirer," February 4, 1965, via Newspapers.com

The autopsies were able to give investigators some information about how the couple had been murdered, even if the “why” remained elusive.  Dennis and Evelyn had been shot multiple times.  The assassin had shot from point blank range.  The Cobys had both eaten a full meal just before they died, suggesting that the murders had taken place soon after lunch.  No fingerprints were found in the car.  The car doors were unlocked, the key was left in the ignition, and the engine was still warm.  There were no signs of a struggle, either in the car or their house.  It seemed clear that Evelyn had walked her husband to the garage, expecting to immediately go back to watching TV.

The Coby garage as it appears today on Google Maps

This was one of those cases brimming with unanswered questions:  Very little blood was found in the car, leaving it uncertain if the couple had been shot in the car, or someplace else.  Were they killed soon after the neighbor saw them walking to the garage, or just before Ray Temke discovered their bodies?  Although the undigested food in their stomachs would suggest that the couple must have died soon after eating their lunch, the coroner believed that they must have been shot sometime after 4 p.m.  If that was the case, where were the Cobys and what were they doing during the 2-plus hours after their last meal?  In this well-populated suburban neighborhood, how could someone commit these relatively public murders without anyone seeing or hearing anything?  Most importantly, who could possibly have had a motive for wanting the couple dead?  It is small wonder that, faced with so much murky and contradictory evidence, some police officers resorted to the simple, straightforward theory that it was a murder/suicide, with someone--probably Ray Temke--removing the gun afterwards.  Harry Sandman, the Chief of Detectives, could only grumble to reporters that “everything we have checked so far seems to lead nowhere.”  Such statements were small comfort to the late couple’s neighbors, who were understandably petrified that a homicidal lunatic might be in their midst.

Although police doggedly continued investigating the case for some months, their inability to find a motive for the murders or any plausible suspects led to an inevitable conclusion:  someone had committed an impossible-to-solve crime.  The deaths of Dennis and Evelyn Coby drifted into the “cold case” file, where they will probably remain forever.  However, many years later, true-crime writer J.T. Townsend interviewed the couple’s now-adult son Tom, who was able to provide one previously-unreported detail:  a few days after his parents were killed, his grandmother received a phone call from an unknown woman who said that her son had committed the murders.  She added that he did not intend to kill “the Mrs.” but she “got in the way.”  Then the woman hung up.  This caller was never identified, leaving it impossible to say if her statement was truthful, or--as seems more likely--just the ramblings of some crank.

In the words of Detective Sandman, “The intangible elements have fallen in favor of the killer.”  That is what makes this unusually baffling case so terrifying.