A violent robbery at the Coury Mercantile Company in Duran, New Mexico, began a criminal case that became closely connected with the final use of hanging as a legal method of execution in the state. Anton J. Coury, a merchant in the small Torrance County railroad community, was shot and killed during the robbery. His wife, Raffa Coury, was also shot and seriously wounded but survived. The attack became one of the most consequential criminal cases in early twentieth-century New Mexico because four men convicted in connection with Coury’s murder were eventually executed at Estancia, including the last person legally hanged in the state.
Anton and Raffa Coury operated the Coury Mercantile Company in Duran. Records preserved by the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives document the family’s commercial activity from the early twentieth century and include store inventories, contracts, tax records, customer accounts, receipts, leases, insurance policies, promissory notes, and other business materials. These surviving records show that the Courys were established merchants rather than temporary operators. Their store served a community whose economy was closely connected to railroad transportation, ranching, and regional trade.
Duran had developed as a railroad settlement along the El Paso and Southwestern system. Like many small New Mexico communities created or expanded by railroad development, the town depended heavily on commerce connected with rail employees, travelers, nearby ranches, and local residents. General stores performed an especially important function in such settlements because they supplied food, hardware, livestock feed, household goods, and other necessities that could otherwise require substantial travel.
The robbery occurred on Saturday evening, September 3, 1921, as Coury was closing his business. Contemporary accounts later used by New Mexico historian Robert J. Tórrez identify five participants. Coury was fatally shot during the crime, while Raffa Coury received a gunshot wound but survived. Torrance County Sheriff John Block quickly began pursuing the suspects. Francisco Vaisa, Isidoro Miranda, and Carlos Rentería were captured within days. Luis Medrano was arrested several months later. A fifth suspect, Eziquel Machucha, was never brought to trial.
The prosecution moved forward in Torrance County. In June 1922, Miranda, Rentería, Medrano, and Vaisa were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Their punishment reflected New Mexico law during a transitional period in the history of capital punishment. At that time, executions still occurred in the county where the crime had been committed, and the county sheriff carried out the sentence.
Miranda, Rentería, and Medrano were executed by hanging at Estancia, the Torrance County seat, on July 28, 1922. Sheriff Block supervised the executions. Although spectators gathered near the execution site, officials placed a canvas barrier around the gallows. Raffa Coury attended the executions. Newspaper reports circulated accounts of the event throughout New Mexico and beyond, transforming a murder committed in a small railroad settlement into a widely reported criminal case.
Vaisa did not die with the other three defendants because his conviction entered an appellate process. The New Mexico Supreme Court ultimately upheld the judgment against him. On April 6, 1923, Vaisa was brought to the gallows in the jail yard of the Torrance County Courthouse in Estancia. Sheriff Block released the trap. Physicians pronounced Vaisa dead approximately ten minutes later. He was twenty-five years old.
Vaisa’s execution gave the Coury case lasting significance beyond Duran and Torrance County. It became the final legal execution by hanging in New Mexico. The state subsequently moved away from the gallows as its method of capital punishment, later employing electrocution and other execution methods. Thus, the murder of Anton Coury stands at an important point in New Mexico’s legal history, connecting an act of local violence with a major change in the administration of criminal punishment.
The preservation of Coury family papers by the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives gives the episode additional historical value. Those documents place Anton and Raffa Coury within the commercial history of Duran and preserve evidence of the business that existed before the robbery made their names part of New Mexico criminal history. Former New Mexico State Historian Robert J. Tórrez also examined the case while researching the history of executions in New Mexico, using historical newspapers and judicial records to separate documented events from later stories that accumulated around the crime.
The September 3, 1921, robbery therefore holds significance on several levels. It records the violent death of a small-town New Mexico merchant, documents the operation of law enforcement and capital punishment during the early statehood period, and culminated in New Mexico’s final legal hanging. What began inside a mercantile store in Duran ultimately became a defining episode in the history of criminal justice in New Mexico.
References / More Knowledge:
New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. “Carole Ann Darr Papers Relating to the Darr and Coury Families of Duran, NM.” State Records Commission Minutes, June 17, 2014. https://www.srca.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/attachments/06172014minutes.pdf
New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. “Carole Ann Darr Papers Relating to the Darr and Coury Families of Duran, New Mexico.” State Records Commission Minutes, December 3, 2013. https://www.srca.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/attachments/12032013minutes.pdf
Town of Estancia. Julie Carter. “Estancia—New Mexico’s Last Hanging.” https://www.townofestancia.com/2022/02/EstanciaNew-Mexicos-last-hanging
Tórrez, Robert J. Myth of the Hanging Tree: Stories of Crime and Punishment in Territorial New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. https://www.unmpress.com/9780826343796/myth-of-the-hanging-tree/
Gonzales-Day, Ken. Review of Robert J. Tórrez, Myth of the Hanging Tree: Stories of Crime and Punishment in Territorial New Mexico. Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 1159–1160. https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-pdf/95/4/1159/2103749/95-4-1159.pdf