The Death of an Heir

by Philip Jett

  The following morning, Fox traveled to the dump site to rejoin fellow agents searching for bones and clues. Before long, Fox and other agents spotted a three-pawed bear rummaging about and called for a deputy to shoulder a rifle just in case the bear approached. The bear wandered away, agitated by all the activity.

  Special Agent Werner had amassed twenty-six agents to scan the woods surrounding the garbage dump. Rope stretched across areas canvassed the day before as part of a search grid. Each discovery brought Special Agent Robert Nelson with a large camera to snap photos and local pathologist Henry W. Toll Jr., M.D., to examine the find and document it, after which Agent Nelson would place it in a bag and stake a crude flag at the site. Numbered flags soon dotted the hillside indicating where discoveries had been made, such as a rib or a vertebra or a wristwatch with a dangling brown leather band.

  The scattered bones discovered at the site were ushered in secret to Dr. George Ogura, chief pathologist for the Denver City and County Coroner’s Office at Denver General Hospital. He also operated under a cloak of silence. This allowed the FBI to circumvent the Douglas County coroner and the sheriff’s office with the goal of keeping the lid on their search.

  Fox again visited Mary to show her additional items discovered that day. He met her at the home of David and Mary Jean Pate. It would be her last experience identifying Ad’s belongings until the trial.

  When reporters learned of the search two days later, on Wednesday evening, their newspapers’ carried photos of Ad Coors with large bold headlines. The front page of Rocky Mountain News flashed:

  Skeleton Unidentified

  COORS CLOTHES FOUND BY FBI

  A skeleton believed to be that of Adolph Coors III, missing

  Golden business executive, has been discovered in Douglas County

  Mr. and Mrs. Coors were staying at their vacation home at the Point in Nantucket, and no family member had telephoned to tell them the news. They heard it from a Denver Post reporter, who called to hear their reaction. “That’s news to me,” Mr. Coors said coldly.

  Bill Coors was asked if the finding at the dump meant the Coors family at last had given up hope. Bill told the interviewer, “You never give it up. Until you have definite proof, there’s hope. And you hope.”

  “Do you consider this definite proof?” asked the reporter.

  Bill hesitated and then answered. “I would say … yes.”

  * * *

  Two weeks earlier, Corbett, still using the alias Walter Osborne, stepped out of his Bathurst Street apartment heading to work at McPherson Warehousing Company. He picked up the newspaper lying outside his door on his way to catch a bus. Corbett boarded with his lunchbox and the newspaper stuffed under an arm. Though always circumspect, Corbett had grown comfortable in Toronto. It had been fairly easy hiding in Canada.

  Corbett unfolded his newspaper and eventually reached the local news. When he read the headline, he recoiled. He placed his hat on and pulled down the brim as he surveyed those sitting nearby. Wasting no time, he reached up and yanked the cord above his window. He stepped off the bus and walked away without turning, disappearing around the corner. He opened the newspaper again.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? the headline asked in large bold letters. Corbett saw his photograph. He hadn’t changed his appearance at all. Same haircut. Same glasses. No facial hair.

  “Sometimes uses the name Walter Osborne, William Chiffins, and James Barron.” Corbett was still using the name Walter Osborne in Toronto. He’d signed the application for his apartment under that name, and he used that name at his warehouse job. (He’d lost his lab technician job when his references didn’t check out.) He wouldn’t be going to work today. He had to leave Toronto immediately.

  Within minutes, Corbett headed for Winnipeg, carrying only the money in his wallet, where he kept most of his cash. He couldn’t chance retrieving his things. Perhaps his landlord had called the police.

  Later, he told the FBI he’d taken a plane from Toronto to Winnipeg, but that seems unlikely. It was expensive, and he could easily be identified on a plane or at an airport where it would be difficult to escape. Most likely, he stole a car. Whatever means he used, it is clear the intelligent suspect in the Coors disappearance had run out of a plan. Now he was simply on the run.

  CHAPTER 16

  On Wednesday, September 14, the FBI delivered all bones recovered from the dump (nine ribs, the sternum, two clavicles, the left humerus and radius, a fibula, six thoracic and three cervical vertebrae, and two scapulae or shoulder blades) to the Douglas County Coroner’s Office around 3:30 p.m. The first thing the surprised coroner Doug Andrews did was telephone Douglas County sheriff John Hammond to inform him what had been going on in his backyard for the last three days.

  Sheriff Hammond rushed to the coroner’s office and watched as the coroner assembled the bones into a human skeleton. Deputy Ardell Arfsten photographed the skeleton atop a white cloth stretched over a table. Some bones were darkened. Others were bleached by the sun. Many were missing, and those the coroner did have were badly damaged by gnawing of wild animals feeding on the dead and putrefying body. “No doubt animals have torn the body apart,” the coroner told reporters that Wednesday. More than 140 bones picked up by law enforcement were determined by the coroner to be from animals and discarded.

  The partial stature and maturity of the bones suggested they were of a human male, around six feet tall, in his forties. This coincided with Dr. Ogura’s secret determination in Denver a day earlier. From the bones’ condition, the coroner believed the person had been dead six to twelve months, depending on the temperature and insect infestation.

  None of Sheriff Hammond’s men had been involved in the sweep concealed by the FBI for three days, and that bothered him greatly. Like Sheriff Wermuth, Sheriff Hammond wore Western shirts and string ties with a Western hat and boots. Both were stocky, weighing in at more than two hundred pounds, with Hammond being about three inches taller at five foot nine. Unlike his Jefferson County counterpart, the Douglas Country sheriff dodged reporters. He was a low-key, thoughtful sheriff who rarely wore a gun. He was sincerely altruistic, not trying simply to be authoritarian or grab an occasional headline. Though he didn’t have Wermuth’s war record, the ordinarily easygoing Sheriff Hammond could become pugnacious—someone not to be tangled with in his own backyard, which the FBI would soon understand.

  “John was a mild-mannered, caring person, with strong character. A straight shooter. If John told you something, you could take it to the bank as accurate as he knew,” recalled Deputy Arfsten.

  Full of information, but out of patience, Sheriff Hammond grabbed Deputy Arfsten and headed to the Shamballah Ashrama dump. They arrived as darkness was falling. They were met by FBI agents Scott Werner and Doug Williams in what best could be described as a lively jurisdictional conference. After a heated discussion, Sheriff Hammond made clear his belief that since Ad Coors had not been carried across state lines, only into his county, the FBI didn’t have jurisdiction any longer. It was his county. He demanded that once the FBI Lab finished analyzing all the evidence they found from the dump, the evidence must be delivered to his office.

  And so, after the FBI Laboratory completed its analysis, all clothing and effects discovered at the dump were turned over to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. The FBI and local law enforcement agreed that discolored holes in the navy jacket were caused by two muzzle blasts either in contact with a gun barrel or within an inch of the barrel. The two holes matched those in the shirt and undershirt. The bullets entered the back and were two and a quarter inches apart. There were no exit holes.

  When the time came, the coroner would explain his findings to a Jefferson County jury:

  As for the right scapula, there were two defects or holes in this scapula which in my opinion were made by objects passing through it at high velocity. The location of these defects was such that the resultant wounds of the chest would be of themselves sufficient to cause death. In all me
dical probability, Mr. Coors died of severe bleeding and shock from receiving two gunshot wounds to his right shoulder that penetrated his chest and right lung.

  One strap of the undershirt had been cut, as had the necktie, seemingly indicating the killer had loosened his victim’s clothing for a better look at the wound, probably while Ad was bleeding to death on the bridge or in the back seat of Corbett’s car, assuming they were the bones of Ad Coors. Because despite the clothing and all the bones, and the coroner’s determinations of size, gender, race, and age, and his conclusion that two gunshots through the right shoulder blade at close range brought about death, the bones could not be positively identified as belonging to Ad Coors. For that, the coroner needed the skull.

  At five o’clock Thursday morning, Tom Berry and Ardell Arfsten joined other Douglas County deputies and FBI agents as they continued the search. Even the county coroner showed up with his son-in-law John W. Abbott to lend their assistance in locating the skull. The sheriff called in the Douglas County front-end loader at 9:30 a.m. to begin shoving, digging, and lifting garbage from the perimeter of the woods. The loader’s efforts revealed nothing. Though the lawmen uncovered a few more scattered bones along the steep hillside, none had discovered the skull. Their spirits began to fall. That changed at 12:30.

  “Get the sheriff!” yelled the coroner’s son-in-law, walking up the hillside. “And the camera!”

  Coroner Doug Andrews, standing in his suit and bow tie at the edge of the shallow Garber Creek, 1,300 feet down a ravine and more than 200 feet from the other bones, had located the skull. It lay on its side in a clearing with the lower jawbone a few inches away. They were photographed in the midday sun before being placed in a cardboard box. A staked flag bearing the handwritten number thirteen was shoved into the ground at the spot of the discovery.

  Word quickly spread of the coroner’s find. Several searchers abandoned their positions and made their way down the steep terrain. They were met by Andrews puffing a cigar and Sheriff Hammond carrying the box containing the skull and jaw up the rugged hill.

  When the skull was presented to the other searchers, there were no backslaps, handshakes, or whoops of success. There was only reverence and solemnity. In Hammond’s hands was the skull of what once had been a good husband, a good father, and a good son and brother, who’d done nothing to deserve such an unconsecrated and cruel committal at a dump visited by wild animals.

  “I was there when the skull was discovered,” Deputy Arfsten later recollected. “There was a sinking feeling throughout the group that was searching the area. There was a mixture of sadness and a little anger that someone would do such a thing to another person. The kind that takes the wind out of your sails.”

  The cardboard box containing the skull was properly marked and immediately taken to the Douglas County Coroner’s Office. Coroner Andrews determined the skull and jawbone showed no signs of violence—in other words, the victim had not been hit or shot in the head.

  Dr. Arthur G. Kelly, a dentist since 1904 who’d cared for Ad’s teeth for two decades, was called to meet Sheriff Hammond and the agents at the coroner’s office. All stood quietly as Dr. Kelly made his examination. He switched on an overhead light and positioned it above the skull. He commenced the one-hour examination by probing the jawbone and upper teeth before placing them behind an x-ray machine. He clicked a button a few times. The elder dentist removed the film from the machine and placed the developed slides on a lighted panel beside film from Ad’s mouth taken a year earlier. “It’s an out-and-out match,” he declared.

  “Are you sure?” asked Sheriff Hammond.

  “A hundred percent sure. This is the skull of Adolph Coors III.”

  The death certificate was typed up and signed by Coroner Andrews. It stated that Ad Coors died on February 9, 1960, “shot two times or more from the back by an unknown” and that he died from “excessive bleeding from two or more gunshot wounds in the right shoulder.”

  Rocky Mountain News printed what everyone had suspected, including Mary:

  COORS’ BODY IDENTIFIED!

  Adolph Coors III, long-missing business executive, is dead.

  * * *

  Three days later, Ad’s son Spike “celebrated” his fifteenth birthday.

  * * *

  After the positive identification of Ad’s remains was made public, Steve Hart’s young associate Bruce Buell entered the Jefferson County Court clerk’s office and filed a petition to probate Ad’s last will and testament. The court clerk set the hearing for October 31—Halloween.

  * * *

  Every last bit of hope, no matter how illogical, that Mary had clutched to so tenuously was now completely spent like her husband’s last breath on that fateful blustery morning seven months earlier. The discovery of Ad’s bones strewn about a garbage dump high in the mountains, some bearing teeth marks from hungry animals, his head carried hundreds of yards away in the jaws of a wild beast, hardly eased her pain or her nightmares. The find had been an exclamation point to an already horrible experience.

  Following the find, Mary waited for her children to arrive home from school. When the kids did arrive, she gave them a few minutes to change clothes, snack, and mill about before—

  “I need to talk to you,” said Mary. “Let’s go into the living room.”

  Those words made the kids tired, full of dread. They’d been called into family meetings far too many times that year, and it was almost always bad news. It had to be about their father.

  The children sat near Mary, some on the couch, some on the floor. Brooke wasn’t there. She’d left a few weeks earlier to join her college freshman class. She wanted to be a teacher.

  “Okay, you know how we thought your father may have died because it’s been so long since we’ve heard from him,” Mary likely began. “And how we’ve held out hope that your father was somehow alive despite the odds against it. Well, I learned the FBI found his body yesterday afternoon.”

  Mary hesitated as tears began filling her children’s eyes. It was really no surprise to them, but it still hurt. Seven months had passed with no word from their father. Seven months of sadness. Seven months of unanswered prayers. Their mother had told them months earlier he was likely dead. But it wasn’t until now that all hope was gone, like their father, forever.

  As the children huddled around their mother, crying, one of them surely asked, “How did Daddy die, Mama? Was he in pain?”

  “No, he died almost instantly.” Mary was being kind.

  “But how?”

  “He was shot in the back.” Mary had seen the holes in Ad’s jacket and shirt. Agent Fox had confirmed they were from two gunshots.

  The room was quiet.

  “Did they catch the man who did it?”

  “Not yet, but they will.”

  There was brief silence.

  “I hate him,” said one of the kids.

  “Me, too,” said Mary.

  Again, there was silence.

  “Know that your father will always be with us,” Mary may have lamented. “He’s in our memories, and he’s in your blood. He was very proud of all of you, and the one thing he desired most was for you to grow up into honest, responsible adults and be happy. He’s in heaven now looking down, so let’s continue to make him proud of us, okay?”

  Heads nodded back and forth. Mary stared out the living room window as her children continued sobbing and rubbing their eyes. She began to pray for Ad’s killer to be captured and sent to the gas chamber for what he’d done to her family. If there was a hell, she wanted him to burn in it for all eternity.

  “Seven months [after his disappearance] my dad’s remains were found in a garbage dump near Denver,” Spike recalled years later. “In the meantime, my family had fallen into a deep hole of hate. Mother, especially, allowed hatred for Joseph Corbett to consume her life. In that hatred she turned to the only crutch she knew, alcohol.”

  * * *

  Sheriff Wermuth pushed his chair away from
his desk, dissatisfied. Life at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office had returned to the mundane.

  There was the occasional excitement of a local sighting of Joe Corbett, but all of the reports had proved bogus. The FBI handled interstate reports of Corbett sightings, so there was little else to do in Jefferson County regarding the Coors case. Wermuth couldn’t fall back on his old reliable tactic of conducting a search for Coors to gain the media’s spotlight. Ad’s body had been discovered and worse, in Douglas County, where Sheriff Hammond and the county coroner were in possession of Ad’s remains. There was nothing Sheriff Wermuth could do but stand by and watch as the media pendulum had swung Sheriff Hammond’s way.

  Wermuth considered his situation. Ad’s body may have been dumped in Douglas County, but the fatal crime occurred in Jefferson County, so he continued to clutch the jurisdictional trump card. He believed his only hope to return to the public eye was to be in on Corbett’s arrest or, more likely, participate in his extradition to Denver should the FBI ever catch up with him.

  But there was something brewing, an insignificant matter that was beginning to snowball into something big, as many things do, and it would thrust Sheriff Wermuth back into headlines. An investigation would soon be opened that would have nothing to do with Ad Coors’s murder, but would focus on certain irregularities within the sheriff’s office.

  “I do say there is absolutely nothing illegal now or in the past,” Sheriff Wermuth soon would be saying to reporters.

  * * *

  Corbett pulled open the door to Hertz Rent a Car on the west side of the city of Winnipeg.

  “Can I help you?”

  Corbett walked to the counter, behind which stretched a banner on the wall that read, “Let HERTZ put you in the driver’s seat.”

  “I’d like to rent a car.”

  A young woman opened a portfolio of colorful photos of automobiles available for lease and laid the binder on the counter.

  “This Impala is a popular car. It has air-conditioning and an automatic transmission.”