Bismarck Daily Tribune

YOUNG LAD MADE SECOND CONFESSION OF MURDERING CHILD

STATES THAT HE RUBBED SAW DUST IN VICTIM'S FACE—EXAMINATION OF BODY SHOWED DEATH FROM SUFFOCATION—HIS BROTHER SAYS HE KNOWS NOTHING OF THE CRIME COMMITTED ON HIS PREMISES.

Cleveland, Ohio, Nov. 3. Local police authorities have been thrown into a quandary by a new confession of Alva Coan, 17 years old, that he murdered little Alexander Hoenig, two years ago. The boy first confessed to the murder Monday. That night he retracted when the police accused him of fabrication.

Today, in his room at the boy's detention home, he wrote a lengthy description of the crime and addressed it to Juvenile Judge Adams. He enticed the child he said, into an alleyway in the rear of a Scoville avenue butcher shop owned by one Benjamin Cohn.

"I asked him if he had money," wrote Coan, "he said No." "I started to search him and he screamed. Then I stooped down and picked up a handful of shavings and rubbed them over his face. I let him drop to the floor and walked out. I walked around for three quarters of an hour and came back, thinking he had got up and gone home. I saw him lying there and I got scared. I felt his heart, it was not beating. Then I staggered, caught myself without falling, a cold sweat broke out all over my body. I shook like a leaf. I knew he was dead and, my next impulse was to conceal the body. I picked him up, threw him in a barrel head first, Then I climbed over fences till I was three doors from there."

The boy said he had not been able to sleep through an entire night since the crime.

The autopsy on the body of the Hoenig child showed that he had been choked to death with saw dust and shavings picked up in the rear yard of the Cohn butcher shop. The doctors asserted that they found traces of frost in the flesh, indicating that the body had been in a cold place such as an ice box.

Judge Adams sent for Cohn the butcher, after the new confession from the Coan boy, but Cohn, as he did at the time of the murder, declared that he knew absolutely nothing about the case except that the boy was found in his yard.