A 91-year-old man walked into a Kentucky town in 2009 and told authorities he had killed 22 deputy sheriffs six decades earlier, after those same deputies burned his wife alive. He said he had spent the intervening 60 years living alone in a remote hollow in Harlan County, carrying his wife’s ashes with him the entire time. Josiah Combs was born in 1918 and lived on family land that had been held since 1801. He served in the Pacific theater during World War II, surviving campaigns including Guadalcanal, Peleliu, and Okinawa.
In 1949, he was 31 years old and married to Sadie May, whom he had wed when she was 17 and he was 20. The trouble began when a coal company, Harlan Consolidated, sought to extract seams beneath the Combs property. Josiah refused to sell. According to the account Combs later gave, the company used its influence with the county sheriff, Vernon Crawford, to break the family’s resistance.
On the night of October 15, 1949, Josiah was in Lexington buying equipment. Crawford and 22 deputies came to the cabin. Sadie met them with a rifle and told them to leave. She fired and wounded a deputy before the men returned fire.
Crawford then ordered his men to burn the cabin with her inside. Sadie died in the fire. Neighbors later told Josiah what they had witnessed from the surrounding ridges. When he returned two days later, he found the cabin in ruins and collected her remains in a mason jar that had survived in the root cellar.
He also found her wedding ring in the ashes and placed it on a chain around his neck. According to Combs, he vowed that every man involved would die by fire, the same death they had inflicted on his wife. The killing campaign began one month later, on November 15, 1949. The first deputy died in his home after the doors and windows had been blocked.
The deaths continued across multiple states, including Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. Combs said he tracked each man, regardless of whether they fled or changed identities. Crawford, the sheriff, was killed after Josiah ambushed him on a mountain road. By April 15, 1950, exactly six months after the fire that killed his wife, all 22 deputies were dead, each killed by fire.
After the final killing, Combs vanished into a deep hollow in Harlan County that his grandfather had shown him years earlier. The terrain was remote enough that no trails approached it. Springs provided water, game was plentiful, and soil had been improved by earlier generations of the family. He built a small cabin against a rock face and placed the jar of Sadie’s ashes on a shelf beside his bed.
He lived there for six decades. He spoke to the ashes daily, kept journals documenting his life and his conversations with Sadie, and maintained gardens and hunting practices that sustained him. He described the early years as consumed by grief and said he came close to ending his own life, but always set the pistol aside. He was found on October 15, 2009, exactly 60 years after the raid.
That day, he walked into the town of Harlan and identified himself to deputies, carrying the jar of ashes. He said he had come out not for himself but for his wife, so she could have a proper burial and her story could be told. He confessed in detail and led investigators to his hollow and to evidence supporting his account, including journals that documented what he had done. Authorities determined that prosecution was not possible: the statute of limitations had expired, witnesses were dead, and Combs was 91 years old.
Investigators also found historical records indicating that Crawford had been paid by Harlan Consolidated to pressure families that resisted the company’s expansion, which supported Combs’s account that the burning of his wife was ordered rather than spontaneous. Josiah Combs died on December 15, 2009, two months after emerging from the hollow. His final words, spoken to a nurse, described hearing Sadie singing rather than screaming for the first time in 60 years. He was buried beside a marker bearing her name, and her ashes were placed in the grave before he was lowered next to her.
The inscriptions on the stones tell part of the story: “They burned his wife alive, he answered. He survived 60 years alone. He never stopped carrying her with him. ” Beside his grave, Sadie’s marker reads, “Beloved wife.
She called for him until the fire took her voice. He heard her call for 60 years. ”