The Tefton Intelligencer

The Tefton Intelligencer was the local newspaper serving Trapingus County, the rural jurisdiction where the Detterick twins were raped and murdered in June 1932. Its only full-time reporter, Burt Hammersmith, wrote the principal news stories on the crime and the subsequent trial of John Coffey, and it was from him that Paul Edgecombe later learned the details the Intelligencer considered too gruesome to print.

Coverage of the Coffey Case

Hammersmith's reporting for the Intelligencer covered the brief manhunt that netted Coffey on the riverbank, the arraignment, and the trial itself. The newspaper printed the basic facts: how the girls were taken from the porch of the Detterick farmhouse, how the family dog was found with its neck broken, and how Coffey was discovered sitting on the bank of the Trapingus River with the bodies of Cora and Kathe Detterick in his arms, wailing. But the Intelligencer omitted the most horrific details—the condition of the girls' hair, which had turned auburn from blood, and the fact that their skulls had been dashed together. These were the details Hammersmith shared with Edgecombe in private, and they were the ones the paper's editors killed as too gruesome for a family audience.

The Reporter's Personal Tragedy

Hammersmith's own life was marked by a parallel tragedy that colored his view of the Coffey case. His family's mongrel dog, Sir Galahad, had without warning attacked his young son Caleb, leaving the boy with a huge circular scar across his face, a dead eye, and a disfigured mouth. Hammersmith shot the dog himself. When Edgecombe visited him at his home to ask about Coffey, Hammersmith drew a direct analogy between the dog's inexplicable violence and what he believed Coffey had done: "Your negro will bite if he gets the chance, just like a mongrel dog will bite if he gets the chance and it crosses his mind to do so." He told Edgecombe that Coffey had undoubtedly committed the murders, and warned him not to turn his back on the condemned man.

The Newspaper's Role in the Narrative

The Intelligencer functions in the story as the public record of the crime—the version of events that the community accepted and that sealed Coffey's fate. Edgecombe read the paper's accounts in the prison library on a hot October afternoon, and they gave him the framework of the case: the abduction, the dog's death, the posse, the capture. But the newspaper's sanitized version left out the very details that would later make Edgecombe question Coffey's guilt. The Intelligencer never printed the fact that Coffey's lunch, found in his pocket, contained no sausages—the sausages that had been used to quiet the Dettericks' dog. It never printed the fact that the package was tied with butcher's twine, a knot Coffey could not have tied. The newspaper's omissions, as much as its inclusions, shaped the public understanding of the crime.