By Stephen D. Bowling

The victim’s family said it was murder. One juror called it the worst case of suicide he had seen. A Breathitt County Jury determined it was justified self-defense.

Peter and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Combs were well-known and respected business owners in Jackson.  Their used furniture store was a huge success.

Peter “Pete” Combs was born on April 6, 1899, on Lost Creek.  His parents, Shade and Sally Ann Combs, raised their family of eleven children near Ned.  Pete was educated in the Breathitt County Schools, and when the United States joined the war in Europe to defeat the Kaiser, he joined.

Combs enlisted in the United States Army at Jackson and was inducted on September 4, 1917, in Lexington.  He was assigned to Company A of the 167^th Infantry.  After completing basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, Combs boarded the Anchises on June 12, 1918, and sailed for France.

In November 1918, he was wounded in the lower right chest with a bullet and pieces of shrapnel.  He was treated in France and shipped from Brest, France, on January 5, 1919, back to the United States on the Nieuw Amsterdam.  He was taken to a military hospital at Camp Sherman in Ohio, where he recuperated.  Combs was discharged on January 31, 1919, and returned to his wife, Lizzie.

They settled into a home at 118 West Front Street in Newport, Kentucky.

Peter Combs was described as being thirty years of age, five feet eight inches tall, with blue eyes, dark brown hair, and able to read and write.

The Combs family moved to Middletown, Ohio, for some time but returned to Jackson in 1933.  While in Ohio, Lizzie gave birth to Doris Jean Combs, the couple’s first child.

Combs opened Combs Furniture Company in a small store on College Avenue, selling refurbished and used furniture.  Sales were brisk, and Combs soon outgrew his small building.  He rented two buildings on Old Quicksand Road to store and rework furniture for his store.  The business continued to grow.

After some negotiations in March 1944, Peter and Lizzie Combs purchased the Cardwell Building, the former Jackson Bottling Works, on Broadway opposite City Hall.  The family remodeled the upstairs and moved into the newly renovated space.  Business continued to grow steadily. 

The strain of managing the business’s finances proved to be a significant source of stress for Lizzie Combs.  She was frequently ill and unable to help in the store. 

During her illnesses, Peter Combs began visiting several local meeting spots and was a frequent guest at the notorious Bloody Bucket on Quicksand Road.  By the late 1930s and 1940s, the Bucket had gained a less-than-stellar reputation for drinking, women, and “fun of every kind.”  Most businessmen in Jackson shunned the place, but Combs reveled in the excitement of the place, according to a relative.   

Lizzie suspected that Peter Combs was indulging in more than just liquid-filled fun.  He was often seen in the company of female companions, and the gossip circles of Jackson took great pleasure in repeating the stories.

After one night out in 1947, Lizzie reportedly brandished a pistol and told Peter, in the presence of two witnesses, that “if you ever go back down to River Street again, I will kill you.”

Family members said that he “flew right” for a while, but went back to his “old haunts.”

The entire set of details of what happened one night in August 1948 has been lost, but two stories have survived.

According to a family member, Peter Combs took that fateful trip to River Street and, at some point in the night, returned to the family’s apartment shortly after 2:00 a.m. on August 25, 1948.  With him was a well-known Jackson woman and her brother.

The party had been drinking, and Peter Combs led them up the long set of stairs to the apartment over the shop.  Seeing the woman coming into the apartment, Lizzie Combs raised a pistol she had in her lap and rushed toward the woman.  After screaming at her husband, Lizzie started firing, hitting him once and “rolling him down the steps and into the street.”  Another version of the story is that she fired a shotgun, hitting him.

Peter Combs was hit once in the side with a bullet, which passed through his abdomen.  He lay on the sidewalk for a few moments and managed to stand up.  Leaning on the handrail, he climbed the stairs up to the apartment where his daughter stood at the top of the stairs.  Little Doris Combs rushed to her father and cradled him as he died at approximately 2:30 a.m., fifteen minutes after he was shot.    

 The version of events that Lizzie Combs told in court was very different. 

Lizzie Combs testified that she and Doris were at home when she heard the door at the foot of the steps open.  Peter Combs, a woman, and a man came into the apartment and started yelling and using “abusive language.”  She told officials that her husband and the woman hit her, and Peter Combs threatened to kill her.  Information she gave to police and testified to in court indicated that she feared for her life, got a gun from a drawer, and emptied the pistol at her attackers to save her life.

Police officials at City Hall, across the street, heard the shots and ran over to the Combs residence to find Peter Combs in a pool of blood just inside the apartment door.  Mrs. Combs sat at the kitchen table with an empty pistol on the table in front of her.  The two unnamed visitors were nowhere to be found.

Peter Combs’ body was taken to the Ray & Blake Funeral Home, and services were scheduled for Friday, August 27.

Lizzie Combs, owing to her poor health, was placed under house arrest and remained in the bedroom of the apartment while investigators documented the scene for evidence.

Mrs. Combs did not speak with the reporter from The Jackson Times who attempted to contact her.  Instead, she gave a statement through her attorney, Grover Cleveland Allen, who retold her story of abuse and threats.

While the Combs family conducted the funeral for Peter Combs and took him to the Hudson Cemetery near Rowdy for burial, Lizzie Combs appeared before County Judge Edward T. Deaton. After hearing testimony from officials, Judge Deaton ordered Combs to post a $5,000 bond and scheduled the trial for the November 1948 term.

Sheriff Goebel L. Allen presented evidence and testified before the Breathitt County Grand Jury as “to the facts as he believed they existed.”  The Grand Jury indicted Lizzie Combs on November 12 on one count of murder styled “Indictment #1576.”

The next day, she posted bond and was released, with Joe Miller, R. A. Collier, and John Robinson as her sureties, on the condition that she would appear in court on November 29 for trial.

When the trial date came, Lizzie Combs’ doctors told the court that she was “unable to be present in court” due to an illness.  The state and Combs’ attorneys agreed to a continuance, and the trial was set for the March term.  Seven witnesses, Clarence Hensley, D. B. Pelfrey, Arthur Lee, Josephine Deaton, John J. Deaton, Roy Fugate, and Lewis Hayes, were paid $1 each for attending even though the case had not been heard.

During the winter, Lizzie Combs’ health improved, and she was dressed in her finest and sitting in a chair when Circuit Judge Ervine Turner gaveled the court into session at 8:30 a.m. on March 23, 1949.

 The prosecution and the defense team “announced ready,” and the case proceeded.  Robert Turner, Preston Spencer, Jerry Raleigh, J. W. Hensley, Ed Carpenter, Buck Howard, Bob Deaton, John Wes Turner, Sam Raleigh, Sammie Turner, Johnnie Dunn, and Miles Hollon were sworn in and seated as jurors to hear the case.

  They heard the “reading of the indictment, the testimony of the witnesses, the instruction of the court, and the arguments of counsel,” before retiring to the jury room to deliberate the case.

After a short time, the jury notified Judge Turner that a decision had been reached.

 In open court, jury foreman J. W. Hensley read the verdict: “We the jury agree and find the defendant, Not Guilty.”

The witnesses were paid for their time in court, and Lizzie Combs was released from custody, a free woman.

 One juror told a family member of Peter Combs that he was aware she was a “woman of her word” and that the jury believed that he had committed “suicide because she had warned him in front of witnesses not to go back down there (River Street) and he did.”

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Combs operated Combs Furniture Company for several years before she left Jackson.  Lizzie married Sidney P. Grider in 1950.  She died in Louisville, Kentucky, on December 2, 1975, at the age of 72.  She was buried in the Eastern Cemetery in Jefferson County.  Doris Jean (Combs) Roberts Lawhorn, the Combs’s daughter and the last witness to the shooting that killed her father, died in 2000.

Peter Combs’ mystery lady was never publicly identified, and with time, the case was forgotten. 

Little is left to remind us of the Combs Furniture Company and the shooting that occurred there in 1948. An alert observer may catch a glimpse of the faint remnant of the painted store name above the door or see the door that hides the long set of steps in the Cardwell Building that lead upstairs to the Combs’ apartment. 

Sadly, we may never know the complete and true facts surrounding the tragic events that led to the murder or “assisted suicide” of Peter Combs.

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© 2025 Stephen D. Bowling

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Many thanks to an anonymous nephew and Combs family member who shared personal details about this story with me more than 15 years ago.