This day in history: Missing 13-year-old found dead 5 miles outside city. 72-year-old determined to deliver mail via stage coach in ‘one last trip’ as air mail takes off

From 1976: A Spokane police detective found the body of Nanette Marie Martin, 13, in a rocky, marshy area, about 5 miles west of Spokane.

The coroner said Martin died from lack of oxygen, “either by suffocation or strangulation.”

She was last seen delivering newspapers in her North Side neighborhood.

A detective went to the area “acting on a hunch” from a similar slaying seven years earlier in which a girl selling Camp Fire mints was abducted and slain. He found Martin’s body in the same area.

Now the hunt was on for her killer. Police were combing the site for evidence.

From 1926: Spokane’s new air mail route through Pasco and Elko, Nevada, was likened to a modern miracle – but one man was determined to remind people of the old way of making that delivery.

Col. Felix Warren, pioneer stage coach driver, took the occasion to “make one last trip” on his old stage coach route between Spokane and Pasco.

It took him five and a half days, but in the end he triumphantly handed a mail bag to the Pasco postmaster. He was 72 years old and hadn’t made the trip for decades, but he was determined to hold the reins every mile of the way.

He “cracked his whip at jackrabbits and sage brush and joked with persons along the road,” the Chronicle wrote. He also posed for an estimated 1,000 pictures – he would “stop his team and pose upon the appearance of a cameraman.”

And how did the Spokane Chronicle get the story of his arrival in Pasco? The story was “sent by airplane from Pasco to the Chronicle.”