On the morning of December 21, 1927, Nettie Benoy finally told Sheriff Hervin Rothwell that she had shot her husband to death. The killing had taken place the evening before in Stites, Idaho, a hamlet located about fourteen miles northeast of Grangeville. She claimed self-defense, but the evidence belied her story.
The victim was Thomas C. Benoy, a well-off blacksmith. Born in March 1863 in a small town about sixty-five miles west of Madison, Wisconsin, he married for the first time in early 1885. He and his wife moved to Spokane, Washington, about four years later. He started as an employee there, but soon had his own shop, along with a small ranch property. By 1894 he had prospered enough to own at least one racing horse, a pacer. However, Benoy proved to be a quarrelsome fellow, especially during his all-too-frequent drinking bouts. Several times, he had been fined for disorderly conduct, and warned about other lapses.
Some time before the spring of 1899, Benoy and his wife separated. She was soon granted a divorce, and on November 22, 1899, Benoy married nurse Rosa Stuck, a native of Spokane. Their son, Charles Felix Benoy, was born in August 1900. In the fall of 1907, Rosa obtained a divorce from Tom because of his drunkenness and abuse. The court accepted her claim that she feared for her life, and awarded her custody of the son. However, a year after the separation, Rosa (Stuck) Benoy died and the boy was returned to his father.
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| Spokane, ca 1902. Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. |
Accounts from the time indicate that they had a contentious home life. Then, in October 1911, Elsie was adjudged insane and committed to a state mental hospital. Available records do not say when Thomas secured a divorce, but he married again in early 1913. The new wife, a divorcee, had a son of her own. That boy was mentioned as part of the family in later newspaper items, but not “Felix.”
It seems likely that Charles Felix Benoy had been made a ward of the court some time during the earlier turmoil. When he entered the U.S. Army in 1918, he listed a deputy U.S. Marshal as his point of contact. Charles served in France and arrived back in the states in July 1919. He settled in central California and, after a few years, began a long career in banking.
In early 1923, Benoy split with his fourth wife in a rather curious manner. She discovered that her previous husband had probably lied to her when he claimed they were divorced. Unable to confirm that action, she was granted an annulment of her marriage to Benoy. When her divorced status was certain, she asserted, they would remarry. That did not happen. Perhaps she changed her mind as she considered Benoy’s behavior when he was drunk.
In any case, Benoy married yet again in September. His new bride was divorcee Jeanetta “Nettie” (Scott) Alden. That marriage came with its own bit of oddity. Nettie Scott was born in April 1863 in Sandusky, Ohio. On January 22, 1882, she married Franklyn K. Alden there. They soon had two sons, but one of them died as a child. Then, in 1887, she obtained a divorce on the grounds of adultery and nonsupport.
Nettie lived in Sandusky for the next quarter century. She was postmistress for a time after 1891, but mostly worked as a nurse. Her mother lived with her for a time, but when she died in 1913, Nettie moved to Chicago. Her surviving son, Harry Scott Alden, seems to have worked from a home base in that city after military service in the Philippines. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1916, then re-enlisted after the war. Around 1922, Harry settled in the Los Angeles area and pursued various engineering ventures.
Nettie remained in Chicago until 1923. An Idaho news account stated that she “came here from Chicago, where she was a nurse, to marry Benoy.” The item provided no explanation of how the two met and agreed to get married. Perhaps there was a family link: The City Directory for Spokane listed well over a column of people named “Scott,” and Benoy was often in that city on business. Or they may have been connected through a “matrimonial advertisement,” a surprisingly common practice at the time. In any case, Nettie married Tom on September 18, 1923 in Stites.
Except when he drank, Benoy was apparently a decent husband. However, accounts suggest that he began to drink even more as the years passed. He was also fined and/or jailed several times for selling liquor on the Nez Percé Indian Reservation. By the fall of 1927, Tom’s abuse of Nettie was common knowledge among their neighbors.
Matters came to a head on the evening of December 20, 1927. Earlier in the day, Tom had been released from jail, pending a trial on a drunk and disorderly complaint filed by Nettie. He then apparently “drowned his sorrows” in booze for some time. Nettie told the sheriff that he arrived home about 8:30 in the evening. She implied that he was reasonably sober until somewhat later, when he went out to the garage where he kept more liquor.
Nettie claimed she was preparing for bed when Tom came back inside, mad with booze and wildly brandishing a shotgun barrel as a club. She had just enough time to retrieve a .32-caliber Colt automatic pistol from her sewing drawer. He charged at her but ducked when he saw the weapon. One of her shots hit him in the top of the head, the other about three inches further back.
Matters became a bit muddled after that. Nettie said she didn’t remember anything too clearly about the incident. Nor did she have a good explanation for why she waited all night to inform the sheriff. Tom’s body was found beside his bed, but not sprawled like he had been trying to dodge. Some of the bedroom furniture was in “disarray” as though there had been a struggle. However, the sheriff also found other objects arranged normally, including a stack of neatly-folded quilts in a corner near the bed. Luckily, searchers inspected further, and found a considerable blood stain on one, right where Tom’s head would have been if he was sleeping.
Authorities rejected Nettie’s self-defense claim, and a coroner’s jury that very afternoon brought in a verdict of first degree murder. The sheriff and his deputies then went about collecting all the evidence they could find. However, some gaps must have worried the prosecutor. About a month after the killing, the sheriff contacted criminologist Luke S. May, asking him to analyze some ashes from a stove in the Benoy home. He specifically wanted to know “just what the article was that was burned.”
The county chose not to pay Luke to travel to Idaho. The sheriff did describe the death room layout and where the bullets hit (perhaps using a copy of the coroner’s diagram). The bullet trajectories and wounds, plus the blood-stained quilt, clearly supported the prosecution’s contention that Nettie had shot Tom while he was asleep on the bed. The ashes, however, contained nothing of interest: normal firewood residues, a few chicken bones, and some thin book-binding wire.
May then asked the sheriff what they expected to find … perhaps he could offer at least a “yes” or “no.” The sheriff then informed him that the ashes had contained “some” of Benoy’s upper teeth, knocked out by the slug that had gone all the way through. That at least helped verify the bullet trajectory. They really wanted to know if Nettie had used the stove to dispose of her nightgown and slippers. She claimed she had burned them because they had been stained with blood when she examined the body. Luke found no evidence of either.
Neither the sheriff’s letters, nor later news reports offered a detailed account of the overall sequence of events. Still, a hypothetical reconstruction is possible. To begin with, Tom had probably come home too drunk to do more that perhaps curse at his wife and then go to bed. (He was found wearing only his night shirt.) Nettie surely feared what he might do when he sobered up. Thus, she shot him with the pistol she had acquired after another violent argument in the past. For officials, that all added up to a case of premeditated, cold-blooded murder.
We may speculate that Nettie first decided to conceal the killing altogether. She could blame his disappearance on his erratic behavior when he was drunk. Thus, she rolled the body off the bed and tidied up everything so it looked normal. Tom’s broken teeth, which would have been scattered in the bedding, went into the stove. She tossed the spent shells from her automatic into the firewood crib. Any blood on the bed frame or floor would have been scrubbed away. Then she carefully folded the bloody quilt to conceal the stain and added it to a neat pile. She said she burned her nightgown and slippers, and perhaps she did … just not in the stove. Or she could have buried them where a patch of disturbed soil wouldn’t be noticed.
Having gone that far, Nettie must have then realized that it would be impossible for her to move the body and make it vanish. Desperate, she then cooked up the self-defense story and tried to disturb enough furniture to make that look plausible. Exhausted by all this, she went to her own bed and fell asleep.
In the end, what saved Nettie was her husband’s long history of abusive behavior. The jury took just four hours to return a verdict: Guilty of manslaughter. She received a sentence of two-and-a-half to ten years in the state penitentiary.
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| Jeanette (Scott) Benoy. Idaho Penitentiary Records. |
There’s no indication that Tom’s son Charles, or Nettie’s son Harry Alden, came to Idaho during this period. Charles Benoy married in 1928 in Alameda, California, and they had a daughter in 1934. He died in 1963 and was buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.
Harry Alden married at least three times, in 1910, 1926, and 1936. With these wives, he fathered a daughter, Patricia, and two sons, John Jarvis and George Mitchell. Like their father, the children are all direct descendants of famous Mayflower Pilgrim John Alden. Harry died in Pasadena, California, in late 1943, and is buried in the Los Angeles National Cemetery.
Effective September 30, 1930, Jeanette “Nettie” Benoy was granted “a full, free and unconditional pardon” by the Idaho governor. She settled in Spokane using her first married name, Jeanette Alden. Nettie outlived Harry Alden by just under three years, passing away in November 1946. The Find a Grave memorial states that her ashes were unclaimed and are in storage at Fairmont Memorial Park in Spokane.
| References: Census records, city directory listings, and other genealogical sources were consulted extensively. Online sources included Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and others |
| “[Benoy-Scott News],” News-Journal, Mansfield, Mansfield Weekly News, Ohio; Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Spokane Chronicle, Washington; Idaho Statesman, Boise, Idaho County Free Press, Grangeville, Grangeville Globe, Idaho; Chicago Tribune, Illinois; Oakland Tribune, California (June 1887 – August 1930). |
| Luke S. May, Luke S. May Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1969). |
