by Philip Jett
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For Austin and Brandon
PROLOGUE
At barely half a rod wide and three hands deep, Turkey Creek was not unlike hundreds of tributaries snaking their way through Colorado canyons. That would soon change. The creek flowed only a few miles, spanned here and there by rough-hewn lumber bridges like the one in Turkey Creek Canyon, with its crude railings and two wooden tracks burrowed in gravel, wide enough for a single car to cross. Fewer than half a dozen vehicles crossed Turkey Creek Bridge each morning. That included the local school bus and a milk delivery truck—and for the last month, the white-over-turquoise International Harvester Travelall driven by Adolph Herman Joseph Coors III.
The name fit for a crown prince belonged to the forty-four-year-old chairman of the board and CEO of the multimillion-dollar Adolph Coors Company in Golden, Colorado, and first-born grandson of the brewery’s founder. Known simply as “Ad” to most who knew him, he was well-liked by associates and employees for his friendliness and reserve. And despite being the eldest successor to the giant Colorado beer empire and an accomplished man, Ad preferred the simple life on his horse ranch southwest of Denver, where he lived contently with his wife, Mary, and their four young children.
On the crisp, windy morning of Tuesday, February 9, 1960, Ad rose before sunrise and began his daily exercise regime. After showering, he dressed for work and joined Mary at the kitchen table for coffee. They talked as they did every morning.
Before leaving for the brewery, Ad headed outside to check his horses, pitching hay and breaking ice in their troughs. He soon returned to kiss Mary and his children goodbye, but his children had boarded a school bus minutes earlier. Grabbing a tan baseball cap and slipping on his favorite navy-blue nylon jacket, he stepped out onto the carport, started his Travelall, and headed down the driveway. He waved to his ranch manager as he passed. It was 7:55 a.m.
Ad’s normal route to the brewery, twelve miles away, would have carried him less than a mile to paved US Highway 285, but a section of the highway had been closed for construction since January. The closure forced him to detour along a winding, lonely stretch of gravel road for four miles to Turkey Creek Canyon, where it connected to a state road that led back to Highway 285.
As Ad drove along the secluded road that morning, his Travelall rambled around the last bend before reaching Turkey Creek Bridge, just out of view. Waiting on the bridge was thirty-one-year-old Joseph Corbett Jr., who had stalked Ad for many months awaiting the chance to carry out his scheme. The road closure and detour across Turkey Creek Bridge gave him that chance.
Corbett backed his canary-yellow Mercury sedan onto the one-lane bridge just minutes before Ad’s arrival. Handcuffs and leg irons lay on the back seat. A ransom note in an envelope ready for mailing later that day lay in the glove box. Concealing a pistol in his coat pocket, he exited the four-door car, leaving the driver’s door open. He opened a rear door and raised the hood, signaling engine trouble, and stood by the car, waiting for his victim. All he had to do was lure Ad away from his Travelall. Then the Coors CEO and heir wouldn’t be so rich and powerful. Instead, he’d be a hostage worth many times his weight in gold and, if all went according to plan, would make Corbett a very rich man by week’s end.
As Ad drove around that last bend, he spotted the yellow Mercury stranded on the narrow bridge. It was 8:00 a.m. Just as Corbett had planned, Ad pulled onto the bridge behind the Mercury. He shouted through a rolled-down window, asking if he could help. Corbett shouted back his rehearsed reply. Eager to get going, Ad stepped out of the Travelall and shut the door, leaving the engine running and radio playing. He didn’t expect to be long. He figured he’d help push the stranded car out of the way and give its driver a ride to the nearest filling station.
But as Ad approached, Corbett stepped forward and drew his pistol, taking the beer magnate by surprise. Ad was an intelligent but stubborn man, not the kind to don shackles and meekly slide into an assailant’s car. As Corbett drew nearer, the six-foot-one, 185-pound Ad Coors seized his abductor’s hand that gripped the gun. The two, almost identical in height and weight, struggled. Ad shoved his younger assailant backward, and they slammed against the crude bridge railing. Ad’s baseball cap along with Corbett’s fedora flew into the creek. Ad’s eyeglasses fell, too, cracking the left lens on impact. Ad pushed his antagonist away and made a break for the Travelall. But Corbett, seeing his ransom trying to escape, extended the pistol and fired. The sound of shots echoed up the canyon.
“It was about eight o’clock,” Rosemary Stitt would later testify in the First District Court of Colorado. “Right after I sent my kids off to school, about twenty minutes after. First, it sounded like somebody hollered down at the bridge. I was sittin’ in front of my sewing machine by the window. It sounded like one or two words is all. It was two different people, I think. Then I heard a crackling noise like lightnin’ striking a tree. I looked out the kitchen window to see if a tree fell down out back but didn’t see nothing. So it was then I got to thinking it might be a gunshot. Just one shot. Or, it coulda been two really close together.”
Those two shots set off the largest US manhunt since the Lindbergh kidnapping. State and local authorities, along with the FBI, burst into action, attempting to locate Ad Coors and arrest his kidnapper. Ad’s influential father demanded that the perpetrator be caught and his son returned, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover gave assurances that he would make it his top priority domestically. Once the evidence pointed to Corbett, Hoover backed up his promises by placing Corbett on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, describing him as the most hunted suspect since John Dillinger. The manhunt would span the continent and involve hundreds of law enforcement officers. Yet as months passed with little success, Ad’s tormented wife and children clutched tenuously to their hopes. Like them, everyone wondered where Colorado’s favorite son and his abductor could be.
I
THE
PLAN
CHAPTER 1
Windshield wipers squeaked back and forth to reveal the white stripes flashing along the Colorado highway that cold February Sunday afternoon in 1960. Despite a heavy cloudburst, Joe Corbett Jr. spotted the sun reflecting on the mountain peaks in the direction he was traveling. On the back seat lay two polished high-powered rifles in cases along with a fully-loaded .22-caliber target pistol stuffed in the glove compartment. He’d left .45-caliber and .38-caliber revolvers and a 9 mm Llama automatic pistol with a stockpile of ammunition on the closet shelf in his Denver apartment. All of his weapons were capable of blowing a sizeable hole through anything or anyone. And he knew how to use them.
“They’re for target shooting,” he’d tell anyone who glanced in his car or ventured into his apartment. “I enjoy target shooting.”
Target shooting was one of Corbett’s hobbies, all right, as it was for many Coloradans. He frequently searched for a place to shoot that wasn’t posted
, much like searching for a good fishing hole, some out-of-the-way place where he could take aim and fire at bottles, cans, or rats—anything would do to keep his aim sharp.
Most days, Corbett satisfied himself with excursions to mines, caves, and ghost towns abandoned decades earlier. He reconnoitered farther out sometimes, like Central City, Sedalia, and Morrison and as far south as Colorado Springs near the US Air Force Academy. Sometimes to shoot, sometimes to scout for places to shoot, and sometimes to just sit and watch.
This Sunday, he sat and watched. An hour passed. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. It might take longer today to observe what he was looking for. He was used to waiting. While he waited, he opened a book. Corbett was an avid reader and a thinker. Once, he’d been a Fulbright Scholar enrolled at the University of California–Berkeley, but he had dropped out of college after his mother died. Soon afterward, in December 1950, he stole a car and shot a hitchhiker twice in the back of the head during a botched robbery, leaving behind a horrific scene of blood and brain tissue. The young Corbett was tracked down and spent a year in San Quentin and three years in Soledad and Terminal Island on a second-degree-murder plea deal. He gained his warden’s trust and received a transfer to a minimum-security prison, the California Institution for Men in Chino, where he escaped three months later and hid in Los Angeles before fleeing to Colorado in November 1955.
Though no longer behind bars, Corbett found himself in another sort of prison, where he was forced to work dead-end jobs surrounded by men whom he believed read nothing more challenging than the sports page or girlie magazines. Unlike them, he possessed a library card from the Denver Public Library and regularly checked out books on multifarious scholarly subjects, such as chemistry, physics, math, philosophy, psychology, vocabulary, and foreign languages, like Russian and German.
And so he waited with a book in his hand until the rain stopped.
* * *
Though his love for shooting explained his guns, his hobby couldn’t explain the mail orders he’d received during the past few months—four pairs of leg irons and four pairs of handcuffs. He’d also purchased a Smith & Wesson K-32 Masterpiece revolver, for which he signed a statement: “I am over 21 years of age, have never been convicted of a felony, and am not now under indictment or a fugitive.” It gave him a big laugh.
Nor could simple curiosity explain the most recent titles checked out on his library card—books about traveling to foreign countries, learning the Spanish and Portuguese languages, and understanding criminology and methods of detection. Even the book he was reading on this Sunday, The FBI Story, detailed several federal crimes, including insurance fraud, embezzlement, and kidnapping.
No, there was no simple explanation, at least not one that would make sense to any law-abiding citizen, because Corbett’s reading and thinking had mutated into scheming, and his target shooting into stalking. He’d been planning a crime that would yield him loads of money since the first day he’d stepped his fugitive foot on Denver soil. But who would notice? No one knew where he was. No one could find him.
Even though he’d robbed a supermarket of $700 in Los Angeles after his escape from Chino, his illicit gains had not been so forthcoming since fleeing to Colorado. He’d planned to rob a liquor store and then considered robbing a coworker’s family business in Denver, but didn’t go through with either plan. In the summer of 1957, he and coworker Dave Reigel tried to rob a Texaco Bulk Station, but were unable to crack the safe.
Corbett’s natural proclivities soon demanded more audacious plans to quench his greed. He plotted a bank heist, yet decided against it.
“That would only net me about $5,000 to $10,000,” Corbett told coworker, Arthur Brynaert. “Enough of that small-time stuff. I’m planning something big. A big score. I’m talking a few hundred thousand to a million. With that kind of cash, I can go to Mexico or Australia, or maybe a country without an extradition treaty with the United States and never be heard from again.”
Maybe Corbett was shooting his mouth off. Perhaps that’s why he generally kept to himself, so his mouth wouldn’t get him into trouble. But those who knew him, like Brynaert, a coworker with a shadowy past himself, believed something might be in the works.
“Said he’d been planning something for two and a half years, something very big,” Brynaert told lawmen later. “Said he attempted to go into this venture, whatever it was, the previous summer, that would be the summer of ’58, during his two-week vacation. That something backfired and he wasn’t able to accomplish it, and had to postpone his plans.… Didn’t say why or what exactly he planned to do. I took it at first as just general bragging—you know. I’ve been in trouble with the law myself, nothing big, you understand, just little stuff like vagrancy, laying hot paper, you know,” Brynaert said.
On this rainy Sunday, Corbett’s subterfuge had taken him from the streets of Denver to rural Jefferson County. That’s why Corbett picked an out-of-the-way spot, parking on a seldom-traveled gravel road, alone. After all, if anyone asked him, what was he doing wrong? Only reading—and watching.
* * *
“Be sure and tighten that front cinch,” Ad Coors said to his sixteen-year-old daughter, Cecily, on that rainy Sunday after Ad’s return from the US Brewers Foundation convention in Miami the day before. “Need some help?”
“No. I can do it.”
The rain had stopped, so the two mounted their horses and rode along the trail away from the corral.
“Come on, Daddy,” Cecily said, riding ahead.
They headed southwest in the direction of the Dakota Hogback, a ridge rising up from the prairie that formed a beautiful boundary around the south end of the ranch. The sun was peeking through leaden clouds, spraying its rays of sunshine down on the colorless winter countryside, save for a sprinkling of emerald pine trees. Snowfall from two days earlier had all but melted in the lowlands, leaving muck for the horses’ hooves when they strayed off the sand-and-feldspar paths.
Ad looked out over his ranch from the saddle. He’d missed the crisp air and the mountains while in Miami. This was the beginning of his second full year as a part-time rancher, and his enthusiasm hadn’t waned one bit. Since they’d married in 1940, he and Mary had always lived in Denver in a very nice section of the city. But over the last few years, Ad’s dreams of leaving Denver and living on a ranch had grown stronger. That’s all he talked about—a ranch with cattle and prize-winning bulls and quarter horses. Anything to counter the long days spent inside his office behind a desk. In 1956, his dream had come true at last. Mary acceded to relinquish her urban conveniences and build a new house on 480 acres above the Bergen Ditch in the Willow Springs area, south of the small town of Morrison, about fifteen miles south of Denver. After all, it wasn’t that far away, especially from the fashionable Cherry Creek area Mary enjoyed, maybe a twenty-minute drive. And Ad could make the twelve-mile drive to Golden without having to battle Denver traffic and lights.
The deal Ad struck with Mary seemed a natural one. He would design their home and its exterior and make the ranch whatever he wanted while the décor of the interior, the family’s living space, would rest solely within Mary’s province. Construction was completed in the summer of 1958, and the family moved into their ranch-style house. It was a beautiful residence with beautiful surroundings—hundreds of acres of Dakota red sandstone and prairie grass lying at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with a magnificent view of Pikes Peak to the southwest. Though it was hardly luxurious by the standards of the rich, Ad was happier than he’d been in years. At long last, he was going to be a rancher in his spare time, and he hoped it would be full-time very soon.
Ad had always loved the rugged outdoors, and he’d remained active despite sitting in an office. His physique was that of a younger, vigorous man. Every morning, Ad did push-ups and sit-ups, and he hiked the Colorado terrain and worked his ranch when he could. He also was a superb snow skier and an avid hunter. And his four children—Brooke (Brookie), eighteen; Cecily (Ces),
sixteen; Adolph IV (Spike), fourteen; and James (Jim), ten—kept him busy joining them in their activities as he was doing with Cecily on that Sunday afternoon.
“Look, Daddy, there’s that car again.” Cecily pointed at a car with a single occupant, a man wearing a brown hat and dark-rimmed glasses. “I saw it earlier out the living room window. It’s been there for like an hour. Brookie saw it, too.”
Mary had told Ad the same thing. Her maid, Thelma Coffman, said she’d seen the automobile several times while Ad and Mary were in Miami the week before. Sometimes with one person, other times with two men inside, she thought, if it was the same car.
A parked car along a quiet country road, not known as belonging to a neighbor, generally raised suspicion that the occupants might be up to no good, like hunting on posted land, looking for something to steal, or worse.
“Let’s go see what we can do for him. Might be a poacher,” Ad said as he kicked his horse a bit to trot over.
No sooner had Ad and Cecily prodded their horses than the car spun away down the wet gravel road.
“Guess he wasn’t in the mood for conversation,” Ad said, believing that by the man’s actions, he must have been a poacher.
When Ad and Cecily arrived at the barn, Cecily told Bill Hosler about the car while unbuckling the girth from her saddle. The ranch manager shook his head and turned to Ad, saying, “I seen that same yellow car parked on the road one day last week. Seen others, too. Hunting for game off the preserve, I bet.”
“Can’t they read? Our land’s posted everywhere you look. I may have to place a call to the sheriff if they keep coming out here.”
Ad was referring to the metal placards tacked up on fence posts, gates, and utility poles surrounding his property that read:
NO HUNTING
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted