John M. Wannenwetsch, a 58-year-old male, German-born, spent the evening of October 7, 1917, doing the rounds as Colville’s chief lawman when a sharp, metallic clatter carried out from a downtown store. He moved toward the noise and found two intruders forcing a safe. Before he could close the distance, the burglars opened fire. Bullets struck him several times. He returned fire in the sudden, echoing exchange inside the darkened business, but his shots did not find their mark.
The assailants fled into the night, racing south toward Spokane, while Colville’s chief collapsed at the scene, mortally wounded.
By dawn the town knew the shape of the loss: the city’s night marshal—also recorded as chief of police—had been killed in the line of duty after three years of service. Memorial listings and later summaries describe the crime as a safe-burglary interrupted, a split-second encounter that left no names for the men who ran. Contemporary and retrospective accounts note only that the suspects escaped toward Spokane; none report a subsequent arrest or identification. He was remembered as a steady presence in a rough season for small-town law enforcement, survived by his wife, and eulogized in roll-calls of fallen officers.
Away from the headlines, fragments of his life remain: a birth in Germany on February 28, 1859, an immigrant’s stake laid down in northeastern Washington, and more than a decade as a Colville resident before his final watch. Those pieces, gathered from graveside records and local remembrance, sketch a man rooted in the community he served—an industrious citizen who met his end answering a noise after hours, stepping into a robbery in progress, and paying with his life.
