Publisher's journal: He played in the NFL, and he sold cars, too

Seventy-five years ago this week, Clovis’ most famous athlete was settling in for a relaxing summer with family. He could not have imagined the challenges he would soon encounter.

Jerry Nuzum had been away at college where he was the star halfback at New Mexico A&M in Las Cruces. Late in 1947, he’d decided on a career field.

But first, the 1941 Clovis High School graduate was spending time in his hometown.

“Mrs. Jerry (Mary) Nuzum and small daughters, Jerry Jan and Sandra, have arrived from State College, N.M., to spend the summer visiting in the home of Mr. Nuzum’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. W.N. Nuzum, 1101 Connelly,” the Clovis News-Journal society page reported on June 15, 1948.

“Jerry Nuzum will arrive here sometime today from State College and will stay until August 1 when he is scheduled to report to the Pittsburgh Steelers, with whom he has signed a professional football contract.”

“Bruiser” Nuzum would go on to play four seasons with the Steelers, rushing for 930 yards and scoring seven touchdowns before retiring.

But it wasn’t his football career that put Nuzum in the newspaper headlines most of those four seasons. He was a murder suspect.

Nuzum was visiting Las Cruces in March 1949 when an 18-year-old waitress, Ovida “Cricket” Coogler, went missing. When rabbit hunters found her body more than two weeks later, witnesses told authorities they’d seen her in a bar with Nuzum the night she disappeared.

Dona Ana County Sheriff A.L. “Happy” Apodaca soon arrested Nuzum and kept him in jail nearly two weeks as a suspect in the teen’s death.

He was released and went back to Pittsburgh, but authorities arrested him again in the spring of 1951.

Milan Simonich, a veteran journalist who’s worked in El Paso and Santa Fe, has reported multiple stories about what happened next.

He wrote that Nuzum went on trial in connection with Coogler’s death in the summer of 1951. But Judge Charles Fowler ended the trial before it went to a jury, ruling prosecutors failed to make their case.

After football, Nuzum opened Jerry Nuzum Chevrolet in Uniontown, Pa. He said the murder allegation, which he repeatedly denied, haunted him for the rest of his life.

“It was so embarrassing to be accused of a crime like that,” Nuzum told the El Paso Herald-Post in 1983. “You can’t ever live it down. It’s a shame that people sometimes hear my name and they don’t say anything about my being a car dealer or playing four years for the Steelers. They say, ‘He was the one in that case.’ “

Nuzum was 73 when he died in 1997.

No one has ever been convicted of killing Cricket Coogler.

David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at:

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