California Newspaper Transcriptions
Crimes and Criminals (pre 1924)
JOHN SPERBECK

Transcribed by Kathy Sedler

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JOHN SPERBECK

            In the period between September 6, 1915, and February 6, 1922, 
Marysville lost three policemen at the hands of assassins.  Police Officer John 
Sperbeck was the first to receive a fatal bullet wound.  About four o’clock on 
the afternoon of September 6, 1915, while Sperbeck was on duty at the police 
station, word came that a Chinese store on C Street, between First and Second, 
had just been held up by a youthful-looking bandit, and the contents of the till 
taken.  Sperbeck at once responded, and with Chief of Police C. A. Smith traced 
the robber to a lumber-yard near the corner of Fourth and C Streets and found 
him hiding behind a pile of lumber, where he was changing his outer clothing for 
some he had previously placed there. He flashed a gun on Smith, at the same time 
taking refuge behind another stack of lumber.  Smith shouted to Sperbeck to 
beware of the man, and the next moment a shot rang out.  The robber had espied 
Sperbeck taking aim at him from another portion of the yard, while crouched 
behind some timbers.  The robber’s aim was true, the shot striking Sperbeck in 
the back of the head and inflicting a fatal wound from which he died about seven 
o’clock that evening, in a hospital to which citizens had hurried him.  He never 
regained consciousness.

            The murderer proved to be Kosta Kromphold, alias John W. McLarney, a 
New York lad, only eighteen years of age.  He was caught in the Yuba River 
bottom east of the city while trying to escape a horde of citizens who took up 
the trail from the lumber-yard.  The jury that tried him returned a verdict of 
murder in the first degree, and he was hanged at Folsom prison.

History of Yuba and Sutter Counties, Historic Record Company, Los Angeles