by Philip Jett
“He was president of the Bryant Boys Club in 1942,” recalled Scott Cassill Jr., a salesman for Graystone, to a reporter. “I was vice president. He was a darn nice guy. As close as we were, I really can’t remember anything about him after the middle of our high school days. He matured much faster than the rest of us. He was a head taller than I when we graduated from Bryant and must have been six feet tall when we got out of elementary school.”
“Did you stay in touch afterward?” asked the reporter.
“No, I lost track of him in high school.”
“Everyone says he kept to himself, didn’t talk to anyone, that he was a recluse,” said the reporter.
“If that happened, it was much later,” continued Cassill. “I remember him as a reasonably extroverted type.”
“Was he a good student?”
“If he turned into a bookworm, as some news accounts say, it was much later than when I knew him.”
After high school, Corbett entered college, the University of Washington in his hometown, an uncommon path for young men in the 1940s who weren’t entering under the GI Bill. He’d scored 91 out of 99 on his admittance exam when 50 was an average score. He joined a fraternity of twelve physics majors called the Quantum Club. He ran a typing business on campus for students and also maintained a part-time job at American-Marietta Company, testing adhesives.
He seemed to have a bright future, working his way through college with a genius IQ. He had his eyes on medical school. Perhaps his brilliance, part-time jobs, and resultant lack of free time accounted for his dearth of socializing that others thought odd; perhaps not.
“When Joe left the plant at night, it was as if the doors had shut behind him,” said Henry Preusser, technical-service manager for American-Marietta Company. “He had no friends from the company … he never attended our parties, didn’t bowl with our team … he took no part in our extracurricular activities. It was almost as if he was trapped in the building and just accepted it and felt forced to take part in the discourse that went on inside the plant.… On his last day, it was the darnedest thing. He left early, about three o’clock, to avoid a going-away party we were throwing for him. We bought him a bright sports shirt to go with those drab khakis he always wore. One of our employees delivered it to him the next day after he didn’t show.”
Clearly, Corbett already had developed a penchant for solitude. Then on the morning of June 7, 1949, Corbett was enjoying his summer vacation from the University of Washington when his mother, Marion, a Democratic precinct committeewoman and founder of the women’s auxiliary of the American Newspaper Guild, plunged from a kitchen balcony onto an iron well grate. No one saw her fall. Corbett found his mother on the well cover in the yard, he said. She died after lying unconscious in a Seattle hospital for five days.
Corbett was devastated. He failed to return to college in the fall, merely one year shy of graduation. Instead, he moved to San Francisco and worked at odd jobs while he withdrew even more, refusing to make friends, eventually quitting work entirely.
And then he did the unthinkable. Four days before Christmas 1950, he murdered a man. Alan Lee Reed, a twenty-year-old sergeant from Ligonier, Indiana, stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base north of San Francisco, was found dead from two bullet wounds, one behind each ear. His lifeless body had been dumped at Larkspur in Marin County, California, like a piece of garbage, leaving behind a three-mile trail of blood that led to the site of the shooting.
Corbett was arrested in Beverly Hills driving a stolen car and carrying a .32-caliber revolver and a .38-caliber automatic pistol. Ironically, Corbett was captured because his father, who was worried about his son because he had not heard from him in days, called and asked the police to check his son’s Kensington Park boardinghouse to make sure he was all right. When police arrived at Corbett’s boardinghouse, they found his bags packed sitting in the middle of his apartment. His landlady, Grayce Fahey, described a car she’d seen him driving for several days and even provided the license plate number. The plate matched that on a stolen vehicle that had been the murder car, filled with blood from the crime, ditched a few miles from the shooting.
Corbett’s attorney, Albert E. Bagshaw, argued it was self-defense. He said Corbett admitted stealing the car, but that on the way back from target shooting, he picked up Reed as a hitchhiker, and an argument ensued because Reed insisted on going out for a night of drinking and gambling. During the quarrel, according to the lawyer, Reed went for Corbett’s gun, and Corbett had no choice but to shoot him.
“Joe Corbett kept very much to himself and was regarded as reticent,” Fahey recalled in 1951, soon after her tenant shot and killed the air force sergeant. “Generally, he stayed home nights and had no friends that I know of. He paid his rent regularly and didn’t smoke or drink.… He read a lot and owned quite a few guns; always cleaning them.”
“He showed considerable interest in short firearms,” said a former boardinghouse roommate. “He spent quite a bit of time cleaning them.”
Corbett’s father stood by his son. “I’m completely satisfied that Joe is innocent,” said Mr. Corbett shortly after his son’s arrest. “And I’m convinced he is a victim of circumstances that point a finger of suspicion at him for something in which he had no part at all.”
There was one problem with the father’s account and that of the lawyer’s. They were wrong. After Corbett was arrested in Beverly Hills in another stolen car, he told police he wasn’t involved. When police recovered Corbett’s blood-sprayed hat in his boardinghouse room, size 7⅜, he changed his story to one of self-defense. The police didn’t believe that either. The evidence pointed to a robbery gone bad, since the sergeant’s watch and wallet were missing. Deputy district attorney William Weissich believed the cause had more to do with primordial temper or simply plain meanness. Any way it went, he knew it was impossible for Corbett to explain how he defended himself by putting two .38-caliber bullet holes into the back of the sergeant’s head.
When Corbett was arrested, local police didn’t find the murder weapon, but did uncover seventy-five books in his room, which included books on physics, mathematics, psychology, and criminology. When the deputy district attorney asked Corbett if the shooting had been accidental, the well-read twenty-two-year-old correctly replied, “Well, even in an accidental shooting in the course of robbery, it’s first-degree murder, isn’t it?”
The young Corbett was offered and accepted a deal from prosecutors whereby he’d plead guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for a five-to-life sentence that was later fixed at ten years. Because Corbett’s answers to interrogators were inconsistent and because there was no trial, the true facts of the case were never known.
After he was sentenced and sent to San Quentin, an optimistic Corbett told reporters he’d complete his education and obtain his master’s in physics while in prison. He didn’t.
A stunned Joe Corbett Sr. told the Seattle papers that his son hadn’t shot the sergeant but, “If he did it … somewhere along the line something had snapped inside him.”
Indeed, something seemed to have snapped. “Something was bothering the boy,” said officials at the University of Washington.
“Friends and associates in Seattle recalled him as a brilliant student at the University of Washington whose personality changed after his mother died,” The Seattle Times reported.
Corbett’s father hired psychiatrist Dr. Joseph D. Catton to “leave no stone unturned” in trying to uncover some explanation for his son’s strikingly altered behavior after his mother’s death and his murder of the air force sergeant. Unfortunately, the doctor was unsuccessful.
“The crime I committed in California,” Corbett later told an FBI agent (who hadn’t asked), “I shot the guy. There was a fight, and I shot him. It was a terrible thing, but I pleaded guilty. It was due to my guilt complex that became a punishment complex. My mother was a very strange person.… I feel partly responsible for her death because I procrastinated in repai
ring the railing around the second-story porch where she fell and was killed.… I would have been greatly relieved if my father and stepbrother had said something, that they didn’t believe I was to blame, but they made no effort to console me. For that reason, I retained the guilt complex and eventually decided to go to California. Both of them are responsible for my decision to leave home.”
Corbett left the agent with a macabre thought: “It’s only natural for children to have a desire to kill their parents,” Corbett continued, “and from time to time I’ve had that desire.… But I did not kill my mother.”
There was no evidence to prove otherwise. His mother languished unconscious for five days before breathing her last, never able to tell exactly what happened.
* * *
Dr. Robert N. Smith warned in his psychiatric notes from the California Medical Facility at Terminal Island:
Joseph R. Corbett Jr. is markedly schizoid. He continually fails the social-fitness test, says he admires Nietzsche, saying, “Might makes right. Look at Nagasaki. The only thing that was important was the result of the bomb.” He’s a four-flusher or blowhard, always trying to impress others with his superiority, always thinking he’s correct and those who disagree with him are wrong, always “going back to college.” The thing that makes him most dangerous is he habitually represses emotion, maintaining a placid appearance to those who see him, but if something breaks through that reserve, he can burst into violent, uncontrolled emotion.
Another psychiatrist, Dr. W. A. Drummond Jr., who examined Corbett at San Quentin in 1951, wrote this:
Corbett is a 22 year old man convicted of murder 2nd and referred for psychiatric examination because of the nature of his offense. He is a blond young man, tall and thin. His behavior is entirely proper, includes the usual social graces, and reflects his background of adequate good breeding. The most noteworthy thing is his reserve. Though quite cooperative in giving facts about his family and himself, he is obviously in uncomfortable territory when asked to describe personality characteristics. His descriptions along this line all closely approach usual concepts of “normality.” One would suspect he has tremendous need to maintain his internal equilibrium by avoiding the contemplation of even ordinary deviations, and that the bringing of emotional factors offers great threat to him. The inadequacy of his personality in this respect is significant in relation to his crime. Excessive restraints against emotionality when broken down, probably changed to violent uncontrolled emotionality, the personality having no facilities for dealing with it.
He describes his family history in terms of such stereotyped normality that very little is learned. Both parents had been married previously, the mother bringing to the second marriage a son who was three years older than Subject and who grew up with him. When Subject was about nine, an Alaskan boy was brought into the home as a foster son, for reasons not made clear. One is struck by the undercurrent of violent incidents in the family, though no details are brought out; mother’s first husband was killed in an auto accident. One of father’s two previous wives was killed in an auto accident. Child of one of father’s previous marriages was killed in an auto accident. Father of foster brother was in prison.
He describes himself minimally. He “gets along well;” he is interested in engineering physics; he enjoys athletics. He utters such information with evidence of considerable disturbance. He does not, of course, admit to emotional disturbances since doing so would be contrary to his defenses.
Descriptions from others and observation of him make it seem clear that he is introverted, not very sociable, and consumed in interest with activities of internal importance. He must find great danger in introverted life, however, and resorts to a sterile though proper sort of extroverted behavior which denies his autistic preoccupations. Extroverted behavior falling short, and emotional factors finding no outlet, explosions become possible. The murder for which committed is probably the great example in his life of full expression of aggressive emotion which neither he nor others find compatible with the stirrings he allows himself to be aware of. He is not at all psychotic, but his defenses conceivably could allow the development of psychosis. The powerful motivations which his bland thinking is apparently guarding against could quite possibly be fantasies of omnipotence.
IMPRESSION: Character disorder with schizoid and asocial tendencies.
Not only prison doctors noticed Corbett was different. “I remember him as a quiet boy … a little withdrawn … maybe even an introvert,” a shop owner near Corbett’s boyhood home recalled.
Dr. Philip Huffman was a childhood friend of Corbett’s, but didn’t have fond recollections:
Joe was proficient at shoplifting when he was eight or nine years old. He always stole scientific goods, such as electrical switches from dime stores and laboratory equipment from the chemical laboratory at the University of Washington. He had a small chemical set in his basement and replenished his supply from the University.… He took pride in his ability to evade apprehension. He was daring in his escapades, climbing the vines on the outside of the buildings at the University and on the elevator cables between floors.
When we were twelve or thirteen years old, Joe said he wondered what it would be like to kill someone. That was typical of Joe’s interest in new and different things. He was a lone-wolf type who always went ahead with whatever he planned even when the rest of us backed out.
Though he’d held promise as a youth, perhaps folks back in Seattle would not be surprised, after all, if they knew Corbett was sitting on a log, eating a sandwich in the cold, hiding from the law for yet another crime.
Regardless, Corbett didn’t have time to reflect. He jumped back into his Mercury and spun loose gravel by the roadside. He had to keep moving.
CHAPTER 10
Stephen H. Hart, Ad’s personal attorney, couldn’t believe the news. A year earlier, February 19, 1959, he’d overseen Ad sign his last will and testament. No one in the room could ever have envisioned that the healthy man of forty-three years seated before them could be dead in less than a year. The attorney hoped the will wouldn’t be needed for years to come, but just in case, he removed the will from the firm’s fireproof vault—and read it.
* * *
Ad Coors has never been involved in any of the labor negotiations at the plant,” Rocky Mountain News reported. “Bill Coors has headed the sometimes bitter labor management talks at the brewery and Joe Coors has handled the same at the porcelain plant.”
Reporters located Bill and Joe at the brewery that Wednesday. Word of Ad’s apparent kidnapping the day before had spread throughout the plant early that morning. Employees were surprised to see the brothers working and walking about instructing employees like it was any other day. Some had expected a company meeting that morning to inform the employees of Ad’s disappearance. After all, the Coors brothers often called meetings to discuss labor concerns or their views on various issues. Ad’s disappearance seemed worthy of at least a few words from his brothers.
The brothers temporarily divided Ad’s duties between them while handing off other matters to those who’d worked with Ad for years. Of course, they wished for Ad’s safe return, but until that day arrived, someone had to perform his duties. The Adolph Coors Company must continue brewing and making porcelain products.
Bill and Joe did think about their brother during work. If they forgot for one second, there was Ad’s empty chair at his desk near theirs, just as it had been for years. They made sure they could easily be summoned if a telephone call came in from Mary, the sheriff’s office, or the FBI. They’d already received word of the ransom note and rushed out to meet FBI agents, returning to the plant that afternoon. They’d be traveling to Mary’s house again in the evening to be with her should the kidnappers call.
During the workday, they’d accept an “I’m very sorry” from employees with a nod, though they took calls from only their closest friends. To Bill and Joe, all that was Coors family business, and therefore it was
none of the employees’ business. There’d be no announcement, conversation, or prepared statement. Just work as usual.
* * *
While everyone searched for Ad Coors and his kidnapper in Colorado, Corbett was continuing to travel east in an automobile. Along the way, he in all likelihood kept up with news from Denver on the radio and in the newspapers where he would have read an article like this:
Sheriff Wermuth called off the organized search yesterday after saying every bit of broken country between the Coors home and the brewery and porcelain plant at Golden, about ten miles to the north, had been thoroughly covered.… The elder Coors said, “It is a matter now of waiting for an offer.” … Money was no object said Coors Sr.…
He also would have read news of a snowstorm approaching from the west, passing over Denver and across the plains, that would hamper lawmen’s search for Ad Coors and clues as to his disappearance.
Corbett would later tell a reporter about leaving Denver in a rush, “I had some trouble in my past and had been in that area. I figured the police would come knocking.”
Whatever the truth, Corbett had left Denver in a hurry. Where he was going, only he knew at that time. One thing was for sure: he wasn’t carrying a bagful of money.
* * *
Landing lights on the Continental Air Lines Viscount flooded the runway as the commercial airliner touched down at Stapleton Airfield in Denver that Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Reporters stood ready to storm Mr. and Mrs. Coors when they disembarked the plane. As the reporters checked their cameras’ bulbs and tested their recorders, four propellers pulled the passengers swiftly past as the plane taxied beyond its scheduled gate to the Continental hangars, where Mr. and Mrs. Coors stepped down the plane’s ladder and Bill whisked them away in their private car, a courtesy extended only to the ultimate first-class passengers at the fifth-busiest airport in the country.
Bill informed his parents that there had been no further communication from the kidnappers yet, though the FBI was pretty confident about the case. They had helicopters, undercover agents, dogs, all kinds of electronic gadgets. “The meeting about the ransom note is tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock at Ad’s house,” said Bill. “Mary has to stay near the telephone, just in case.”