Pescadero Memories

This may get complicated. I will try to explain.

Carl Coburn was the adopted nephew of Loren Coburn, a kind of replacement “son”–and a terrible disappointment. Some years earlier, Carl was involved in a messy financial scandal that took down several county supervisors.

I think it would be fair to say that Carl wanted to get rich quick, any way.

By 1919, Carl ran “The Emporium,” the candy store with wooden sidewalks in front. On San Gregorio Street [Stage Road], across the way from Loren and Sarah’s home.

On the day Sarah’s body was found, Carl was doing business in Redwood City. But the rumors of Mrs. Coburn’s death had somehow made their way to the county seat and Carl cut short his visit and suddenly appeared in Pescadero wanting to help the authorities.

Carl’s assistance consisted of telling the district attorney, sheriff, detectives, anyone that the murder might have been committed by poor Wally, who, Carl said, had been behaving strangely–violently.

He wasn’t alone, however. Other neighbors said they once found Wally trying to hit his stepmother–and when she asked him to stop pounding nails into a stick, he began cursing.

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Dr. Thompson, who performed the autopsy on the body of Sarah Coburn, estimated her time of death of  between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m on Tuesday, June 3, 1919.

He said while asleep, she had been struck repeatedly on the head. One of the blows above the left eye, crushed her skull causing death. In Dr. Thompson’s opinion, Mrs. Coburn never regained consciousness.

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At 3 p.m. Dr. Thompson performed the autopsy on Sarah Coburn. He even removed her stomach for analysis.

Originally from a small town in Northern California, Dr. Thompson got to know the Coburns well. Loren was Pescadero’s most famous skinflint and when he fell ill with the so-called “Spanish Influenza” in 1918 –he refused to be treated by Dr. Thompson because he feared being overcharged.

Instead he sent for Dr. Morrison, who had to travel from Redwood City but was less expensive. Loren died before he could pay the doctor, and Morrision had to sue the estate to recover his payment.

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Dr. Thompson, who performed the autopsy, estimated the time of death of Sarah Coburn as between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m on Tuesday, June 3, 1919.

He said while asleep, she had been struck repeatedly on the head. One of the blows above the left eye, crushed her skull causing death. In Dr. Thompson’s opinion, Mrs. Coburn never regained consciousness.

….more….

Meanwhile………..

When a pile of blood-stained clothing (that of a man) was discovered beneath a bridge in San Mateo, authorities wondered if there was a connection to the murder of Sarah Coburn.

There were bloodstains on the sleeves of the coat, back of the vest and knees of the trousers.

A theory emerged that the murderer headed for San Mateo in an automobile, ditched the bloody clothes, and escaped to San Francisco.

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Obviously, I am doing some editing of this very long piece. I want to tell you that the original manuscript was typed–and there are additional handwritten notes on the front and back of the white sheets of paper.

There was so much stuff to this story, so much detail that I found fascinating and significant historically. I’m talking about the backgrounds of all the players–for example, learning that Dr. Brooke had come to the Coastside as an Ocean Shore Railroad doctor.

Truly, there was something about Pescadero………….

Like most people, Dr. Brooke was curious to know who the benefactors of Sarah’s Will were. To his surprise no “blood” relatives were mentioned–but Sarah’s housekeeper, Margaret Harrison was. And so was John L. McNab, one of Sarah’s attorneys.

The Will provided that one-half of Mrs. Coburn’s estate, valued at $200,000, was to be divided between a C.H. Widemann and a judge from Monterey County. Wally Coburn  (not a blood relative, remember Sarah was Loren’s sister-in-law) was bequeathed the income from $50,000. There were no other provisions for him.

Had Mrs. Coburn died without a Will, the estate would have gone directly to Wally–and if he died, the bulk would go to Arzo Coburn, one of Loren’s nephews who lived on the East Coast.

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Dr. William A. Brooke, the 55-year-old county coroner, began organizing the inquest into the death of Sarah Coburn. The inquest would take place inside the Coburn home in Pescadero in the afternoon, hours after her body had been found.

Dr. Brooke was a familiar face. The native Californian had arrived on the Coastside about 1900, as a physician employed by the Ocean Shore Railroad.  The Ocean Shore’s plan was to compete with the Peninsula’s Southern Pacific, laying a “parallel” set of tracks on the isolated Coastside, from San Francisco to Pescadero and south to the resort of Santa Cruz.

By the time of Mrs. Coburn’s murder, the Ocean Shore was nearing bankruptcy, set back financially by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake & Fire as well as insurmountable engineering problems in the vicinity of the unstable Devil’s Slide area.

While poking around the Coburn house, Dr. Brooke happened upon Sarah’s  Will in Wally’s room. To Dr. Brooke, the legal document appeared as if it had been typed on an ancient machine. Dated February 19th or 27th, 1919, the typed Will had been signed by Sarah Coburn–and witnessed by local residents. He recognized all their names.
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Remember Gort? Here’s his image, courtesy of John Vonderlin.
Hi June,
Being a student of all things odd, it’s my opinion that there is hardly a more self-deluded group of distortionists and self-promoters then the “researchers” of Atlantis. Particularly, those who insist there is substantial evidence that it was in the Caribbean. Christopher Dunn, the publisher of “Atlantis Rising Online,” while a believer in previous highly advanced civilizations, now disappeared, was the researcher who helped me identify the source of the star-shaped or petal-shaped holes in rocks I had found near Pescadero and a few other places. Here’s a quote about an email he received from Richard Wingate, an Atlantean “researcher” of the former kind.

“In support of his premise that these are the stones of Atlantis, Wingate described petal-shaped holes drilled through 12 feet of granite,a feat that he says would require sonic drills”.

As I alluded to in a previous email, Mr. Dunn, investigated this himself and traced the blocks of stone with star-shaped holes back to a project that transported blocks of quarried limestone on barges, which occassionally sunk, from the Moselle Shoals to build the Miami jetty in the 1920s. The mysteriously shaped holes, some spiralling through the blocks, were the product of concussive rock drilling machines with star-shaped bits that had jammed.
I’m revisting this subject because I wanted to show you the amazing rock I found just feet from a cluster of the mysterious holes near Pescadero. (super bowl yard 008 photo) While I know what it is, I suspect it would have been used as powerful proof of alien visitation, Atlantean Super Science, or some such fantasy by Mr. Wingate and his ilk in their next pulp “fiction” paperbacks.
Even knowing that it is of concretionary origin, I am amazed by the shape it took. It reminded me of the head of Gort, the large robot, in the classic 1951 Science Fiction film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” (Gort bmp photo) I’ve collected several other cases where concretions are asserted as being products of former high civilizations, one of the reasons I love these oddities. (Endako1 photo) Strangely, Creationists are also highly interested in them, with several of the objects on their O.O.P.Arts (Out of Place Artifacts) list being of concretionary origin. They feel the discovery of these objects in ancient rock layers is proof that Geologists and the rest of the pointy-headed intellectuals trying to convince us of Evolution or an extremely old Earth are wrong. But, that’s another story.
For a while I had a large assemblage on my studio floor entitled “She Spawns,” that included this rock and a number of my other concretions. (she 006 and 026 photos) Enjoy. John Vonderlin

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The D.A., Franklin Swart, questioned all the potential witnesses he could find and he wanted to talk to Margaret Harrison, Sarah’s housekeeper. She had gone to San Francisco to buy things for a trip back East with Mrs. Coburn–but shouldn’t she have returned by now? Nobody knew where she was.