Birmingham Daily Post, September 29th, 1893.
The Bath Mystery: An Arrest.
A Bath correspondent telegraphs that a young man named
Arthur Coombs was arrested yesterday evening on suspicion of causing the death
of the young woman, whose remains were found in a cave, and who is now known to
have borne the name of Elsie Luke (her stepfather being named Wilkie), and to
have been in the service in the house of Mr. Kerry, at Bath, some two years
ago. The arrest was effected by Superintendent Rutherford, of the Somerset
police, who was accompanied by a county police-sergeant and a Bath detective-sergeant
in plain clothes.
Coombs, who is twenty-three years of age, but looks older,
was at work at Messrs. Fuller’s Coach Building Factory in Kingsmead Street,
Bath, when he was apprehended, and in answer to the charge of murdering Elsie
Luke, alias Wilkie, in August 1891, he said he was not the man, and asked how
the police could be certain that his former sweetheart was the woman whose
remains had been found. The officers told him of the identification of parts of
the clothing by Mrs. Kerry, her last mistress. He was then removed in custody.
Coombs, adds the correspondent, is stated to have been
keeping company with another servant in Bath, named Shepherd, after his
acquaintance with Luke, and this so enraged the deceased that she waited upon her
rival and assaulted her. She is also said to have annoyed Coombs, and to have
told her friends that he had got her into trouble. The house in which she
stayed after leaving Mrs Kerry’s service is in the same terrace as that of
Coombs’s family, the accused residing with his parents, and it has transpired
that on the Sunday evening before August Bank Holiday, on which she
disappeared, the deceased was seen outside Coombs’s abode, apparently waiting
for him.
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