September 29th: the papers already have dirt on Coombs and Luke

Morning Post, September 29^th, 1893.   

The Bath Mystery. 

An Arrest.

A Bath Correspondent telegraphs that a young man named Arthur Stephenson Coombs was arrested last 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, and to have been in service in the house of Mr Kerry, at Bath, some two years ago. The arrest was effected at five o’clock 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 23 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 to the lock up.

Coombs is stated to have been keeping company with another servant in Bath after his acquaintance with Luke, and this so enraged the dead woman 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 the Coombs’ family dwelling, the accused residing with his parents, and it has transpired that on the Sunday evening before the August Bank Holiday on which she disappeared Luke was seen outside Coombs’s abode, apparently waiting for him.

The local police have been diligently inquiring into the antecedents of the young woman Elsie Luke, alias Wilkie. On her arrival in Bath she represented that she had come from London, and that her father was employed at an emigration office in the City. Her statements as to her relatives appear, however, to have been contradictory.