In July 1949, Andrew Covic ended his troubled marriage to Mary Covic with a fatal gunshot.
Content warning: The following story contains references to domestic violence. If you are experiencing domestic abuse or violence and need help, please visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
Andrew Henry Covic (1884-1966) and Mary Elizabeth Getchey Covic (1888-1949) were a couple whose lives reflected both the promise and hardship of working-class America in the early 20th century. Andrew was born in April 1884 in Austria-Hungary, near what is now Croatia, and immigrated to the United States around 1903 or 1904. He settled in eastern Ohio, and found work as a coal miner and later as a teamster in the industrial towns of Tuscarawas County. Mary, born in December 1889 in Tuscarawas County to immigrant parents Andrew and Martha Getchey, lost her mother at a young age and spent her youth in a modest household with her father and brother. She married three times—first to Charles Burton Dodge in 1909, then to Truitt S. Hawley in 1916—and had several children before meeting Andrew.
By 1920, Andrew and Mary lived together in Uhrichsville, Ohio, with their young daughter, and later that year they formally married. Their life together was one of labor, family, and frequent struggle. Andrew worked wherever he could—mining coal, hauling freight, laboring in an iron pipe plant, and later serving on WPA road crews—while Mary kept the home and raised their large family of seven children from their own and previous marriages. They lived for many years in and around Newcomerstown, sometimes “back in the woods” of Oxford Township. Their marriage, possibly strained by poverty and conflict, eventually unraveled in the 1940s and Mary petitioned for a divorce in the summer of 1949.
On July 18, 1949, 65 year-old Andrew Covic, then a janitor at the J. B. Clow Company, walked more than a mile through Newcomerstown gathering evidence to fight Mary’s divorce suit. He stopped in cafés and taverns, collected signed slips from proprietors who swore he was not the habitual drunkard Mary Covic accused him of being. With every stop though, he took another drink. By the time he reached her home on West Canal Street, he carried a revolver and a head full of liquor.
Inside the home, Mary, 61, played the organ while daughter Katherine, and family friend Paul Harbold (1907-1973), sat nearby. Around 8:30 p.m., Andrew entered through the back door, his voice calm but cold. “Mary, you want your divorce—and I’m going to give it to you,” he is alleged to have said before pulling the revolver’s trigger. A .22-caliber bullet grazed Mary’s arm and pierced her heart, killing her instantly. He fired again and again, hitting Katherine in the hip as she tried to reach her mother. Harbold grabbed a milk bottle and smashed it over Andrew’s head, launching a violent struggle that turned the kitchen into a battleground.
Andrew slashed at his daughter with a putty knife, swung a butcher knife at Harbold, and grabbed a kettle to strike them both. Harbold tore the revolver from Andrew’s hands and ripped out the cylinder, ending the fight as Mary lay dead on the floor. Katherine, bleeding and stunned, leaned against the wall while Andrew staggered toward the door. He walked away from the scene and surrendered to police less than an hour later. When officers questioned him, he claimed he couldn’t remember shooting anyone, yet the slips of paper in his pocket told another story—each one a twisted reminder of the evidence he thought would clear his name.
Coroner John F. Lake (1911-1950) pronounced Mary dead at the scene and sent her body to the funeral home. Police charged Andrew with first-degree murder. Neighbors recalled his threats and the years of turmoil in the Covic home. Even Katherine admitted she had begged police to keep watch, fearing her father’s anger would erupt. As the town absorbed the shock, word spread quickly across Tuscarawas County. In the weeks ahead, the courthouse would fill with witnesses, neighbors, and family members, all waiting to hear how justice would weigh the life of a man who claimed to love his wife—and yet killed her.
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© Noel B. Poirier, 2025.
Tuscarawas County Stories 