The Death of an Heir

by Philip Jett

  Expenses included a stay at the Hotel Vancouver and the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, not only for him but his third wife. When asked why he’d taken his new wife along on official business and sought reimbursement from taxpayer dollars, Wermuth first explained, “She took the original call on the dispatcher’s board about the missing Adolph Coors and continued the chain of evidence.” When commissioners said that didn’t make sense, the sheriff changed his story. “She is a stenographer who would be needed to take a statement from Corbett should he make one.”

  When reporters relayed Wermuth’s story, Commissioner Osborne replied, “Unless she’s taken some schooling in the last year or so, I doubt very seriously if she would qualify as a stenographer.”

  In addition to the Seattle hotel, meals, and other expenses, the sheriff had chartered a plane and had deemed much of his trip as overtime pay. Commissioners also learned that Wermuth gave deputies overtime pay to paint his wife’s house with county paint, and he’d tapped into the courthouse water pipes and furnace to divert water and heat to the sheriff’s residence next door.

  As the story heated up, the sheriff told the press, “I don’t say there couldn’t be a mechanical error in these vouchers, but I do say there is absolutely nothing illegal now or in the past in the manner in which this office submits expense accounts for payment. I hope this whole thing is cleared up as quickly as possible.”

  The first newspaper article about the expense probe appeared on Thanksgiving Day. Other newspaper articles followed, keeping the investigation in the news all the way up to the Coors murder trial. Like the Coors disappearance, this was a story that wouldn’t go away. Only this time, Wermuth wasn’t posing for photographers.

  * * *

  District Attorney Ron Hardesty and his assistants Dick Hite and Ed Juhan continued their discussion in Hardesty’s office about the most likely scenario of Ad Coors’s murder in preparation for the upcoming trial. Hardesty had just described the struggle on Turkey Creek Bridge and the shots fired as Ad tried to escape to his Travelall. Now Hardesty turned to the more gruesome part of the case.

  “I’m sure Mr. Coors let out a groan when the bullets tore into his back, penetrating his right shoulder blade and piercing his right lung, which likely collapsed. Blood sprayed everywhere: on the railing, on his car, even on the rocks along the creek bank with help from the gusting wind. He reached for the railing as he fell and twisted on the way down, landing on his back, groaning and gurgling as blood drained from his body seeping into the gravel. A stunned Corbett looked around and didn’t see anyone. He knelt beside the ashen-faced Coors, breathing fast and coughing, blood exiting his mouth as one lung filled with blood. Corbett felt for a pulse and removed his pocketknife and cut the defenseless Coors’s tie, opened his shirt, and cut the shoulder strap of his undershirt to look at the wound. There were no exit wounds on his chest. By this time Coors was falling unconscious from blood loss.”

  “That plays well for juries, but I don’t think we can get in the moans and all the bleeding, too speculative and prejudicial,” said Hite. “I like the theater of it, however.”

  “We’ll try to get some of it in,” replied Hardesty. “Okay, I’m almost finished. Corbett didn’t freeze. He had to have acted quickly because the veterinarian drove by at 8:04 exactly, and he said he saw no sign of anyone. The way I see it, Corbett sprinted to his car, grabbed the green blanket out of the trunk, placed it on the ground, and rolled Coors on it. He carried or dragged Coors to the rear car door and slid him onto the back seat or floorboard. Corbett shut the door, slammed the hood, and with one last look around for eyewitnesses, climbed into the car and sped away, digging gravel as he left. That accounts for the tire marks at the north end of the bridge. By this time, Coors was either dead or had only minutes left before he bled to death.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Juhan.

  “I’ve got a bit more here about dumping the body,” Hardesty said, looking down at his notes.

  “Go on,” said Hite.

  “All right. As Corbett drove, he had to decide on a location to dump Coors’s body, because I’m sure he hadn’t planned to kill him, at least not at the bridge. So he chose some place he’d been before, target shooting. The Shamballah Ashrama dump. We have the FBI’s sighting of the three-pawed bear at the dump that Brynaert told us Corbett had described to him, and we have the statement from the lodge proprietor that put Corbett near the dump. He drove twenty miles south into Douglas County, taking Jackson Creek Road up the mountain to the dump. Mud from the melting snow mixed with pink feldspar stuck under the Mercury’s carriage and fenders. He reached the dump and dragged Coors’s body from the back seat, still wrapped in the blanket, a hundred feet or so into the thick woods, away from the area where folks dumped garbage. Wild animals did the rest.”

  “Too bad we can’t get the death penalty,” said Juhan.

  “Mrs. Coors’s testimony hopefully will make the jurors feel as you do, Ed,” said Hite. “What do you have, Ron, about what he did with the car and how he cleaned up afterward? I’m not clear on that.”

  “Neither am I,” said Hardesty. “But we don’t have to know for certain. I’ll tell you what I think happened, though. I think he drove to Denver. The smell of warm blood and urine filled his car’s interior, so he went to some location to clean up the Mercury and himself. Probably parked the Mercury in a garage. Then maybe he switched vehicles, taking an already mud-covered Dodge to mail the ransom note around 2:15 p.m. He parked the Dodge at a secret location and walked to his apartment, where he showered and listened for news about the crime.”

  “That whole Dodge/Mercury thing bothers me,” said Juhan. “The FBI couldn’t find the Dodge.”

  “He just had two cars is my guess,” said Hardesty. “The gas station attendant said he saw Corbett in a ’46 or ’47 Dodge. He probably dumped the Dodge somewhere. We’ll be ready for this. Okay, I’m almost done.”

  “Yep. Go ahead and finish,” said Juhan.

  “Around 5:30 that evening, Corbett heard a news report about the kidnapping and began losing his nerve. According to what he told Agent Hostetter on the plane from Seattle, he kept watch out his apartment window for anything suspicious. It’s then he spotted a man in a car he mistakenly believed was the FBI already staking out his apartment. He panicked, packed up that night, and the next morning loaded the Dodge, drove it to an undisclosed location, transferred his belongings to the Mercury stained with blood, and left Denver. He drove all the way to Atlantic City and burned the Mercury to get rid of the blood-soaked upholstery and carpet. He then crossed the Canadian border to live in Toronto. The rest we know.”

  The men contemplated Hardesty’s conclusions and Corbett’s greed and senseless murder of Ad Coors.

  “That’s a fine job, Ron,” said Hite. “Very close to my thoughts.”

  “Yeah, I think that’s the way it happened, too,” said Juhan. “Now we just need to lock up that son of a bitch for life.”

  * * *

  “Five hundred, five hundred, five hundred–dollar bid, now five-fifty, I got five-fifty, who’ll give me six?” sang out an auctioneer’s chant at the Denver Union Stockyards. Ad’s prize Angus steer, which had been the 1960 Grand Champion of the Denver Bellringer Sales, was being sold along with the rest of Ad’s prize Angus feeder cattle and his commercial stock. It was an auction Ad intended to have at some point, moving away from raising cattle to breeding quarter horses—with one big difference. He’d planned on selling them himself, not through his executors.

  Ad’s pride and joy as a rancher, his prize quarter horses, were also sold. He, Mary, and the kids had ridden them about the ranch and had given them names. Now Brooke was in college and had no interest in keeping any, nor did Cecily, who was leaving for college in the fall. The boys would have liked to keep a couple, but they were now living in the exclusive Polo Club subdivision, and despite its name, the Polo Club only permitted the boarding of expensive automobiles, not horses, in the mansions’ garage
s.

  The ranch equipment also was auctioned: an old Ford pickup, a homemade trailer, a grain truck, a Chevy, some horse tack and troughs, fencing, tools, and so on. Just the typical ranch or farm equipment that auction-goers hope to pick up at a bargain, and in this case, pick up a little piece of history—something owned by a murdered Coors.

  The house and the ranch sold in April and May 1961. Mary had moved to Denver the previous summer, but held on to the ranch until Ad’s remains were discovered. Sadly, Ad’s dream house and his plan to ultimately leave the beer business and work full-time on his Jefferson County ranch had lasted only eighteen months.

  * * *

  COORS FIGHT WITNESSED: DA SAYS WOMAN SAW CORBETT professed the headlines of The Denver Post on March 16 as jury selection for the murder trial was nearing an end. An eyewitness to the crime could send Corbett to the gas chamber.

  “We were about here when I saw two men fighting over there,” Beulah Neve Lewis told District Attorney Hardesty. Both of them were standing on Turkey Creek Bridge in overcoats on that cold March day. “I was driving my husband, Walter Linn, to Idaho Springs. I picked him up at the veterans’ hospital in Denver. He’s a World War I veteran. Anyways, I took the back roads to miss all the traffic and wandered around out here confused and worried because I couldn’t remember the exact road I had taken before. When I got to the top of the hill there, we come down around that curve and I saw that Corbett man wave down Mr. Coors with his hands. He stopped and got out.”

  “Then what’d you see?” asked Hardesty as DA investigators Buckley and Hawley (the former undersheriff) took notes.

  “Well, the men were fighting, struggling on the bridge. And I drove very slow. When I pulled up behind them, behind the two cars, why, I saw him hitting him on the back of the head like that and throw him in the back seat of his car. One of the men turned toward us, and his shirt was covered in blood. I recognized him as Adolph Coors III.”

  “How’d you know it was him?” asked Hardesty.

  “Me and Walter Linn went through the Coors brewery once. Mr. Coors took us on a tour and treated us to beer. I knew him very personally.”

  Hardesty and Hawley looked at each other. Ad Coors wasn’t in the habit of giving brewery tours or being around to be seen by tours, but still, he could’ve done what Lewis claimed. But “knew him very personally”?

  “What happened next?”

  “Like I said, the other man hit Mr. Coors over the head with somethin’, maybe a gun, then he pitched forward like that, and Corbett grabbed him like that, took him, dragged him back, and loaded ’im in the back seat of his car. Yes, sir, I was there. I was an eyewitness.”

  “How close were you?”

  “About fifteen to twenty feet. I was parked in back of their car.”

  “You parked?”

  “I had to drive up and stop. I couldn’t cross the bridge.”

  “Did you see him shoot Mr. Coors?”

  “No. I only saw him clobber ’im and put ’im in his car.”

  Hardesty turned to look at the others. Buckley shook his head.

  “Then what?” continued Hardesty, realizing that her story conflicted with the evidence.

  “The killer saw me and Walter Linn sittin’ in the car. He looked at me eye-to-eye. He had the coldest eyes. I remember I yelled to poor Walter, who couldn’t ’ave done nothing no ways. Thank goodness, the man climbed in his car and drove off.”

  “Just so I understand correctly, Mrs. Lewis, you say you saw them fighting and Corbett hit Ad Coors in the head and loaded him into Corbett’s car. You didn’t see or hear anything else?”

  “No, that’s about all there was.”

  “All right, Mrs. Lewis. That’ll be all,” said Hardesty, leading her to Hawley’s car. “Mr. Hawley will drive you home. I have to get back to the office. We’re still in jury selection.”

  Members of the district attorney’s office continued investigating Lewis’s statements throughout the afternoon and evening. A neighbor told one investigator he’d always driven Lewis’s husband to the veterans’ hospital, not her. She didn’t drive. Another investigator heard her speaking about someone as if he were alive, but the man had been dead for years. She also thought her phone was tapped.

  Back at his office that evening, Hardesty spoke to Assistant District Attorney Ed Juhan, who also had talked briefly with Beulah Lewis. Juhan, a short, wiry fellow who said what was on his mind in a colorful fashion, had received his law degree from the University of Denver. He served as assistant state attorney general and practiced law until joining Hardesty in January 1960.

  “What did you think, Ed?”

  “I think she’s got a screw loose is what I think,” said Juhan. “What she saw isn’t the way it happened. And even if she looked away for a few seconds, how could she not hear two gunshots? Witnesses a quarter mile away or more heard the shots. And there’s the blood spray over twenty feet.”

  Earlier that afternoon, Hardesty had asked prospective jurors during voir dire how they felt about the death penalty, thinking he had an eyewitness. (Voir dire is basically the questioning of prospective jurors by prosecution and defense attorneys prior to trial to determine potential bias or other cause why a juror should not serve.) The change in questioning to include inquiries about potential jurors’ feelings about the death penalty had alarmed Corbett’s attorneys. The judge called a break to the questioning and asked the lawyers to join him in chambers, and that’s when Hardesty explained he believed he had an eyewitness.

  “Judge Stoner wants us in his chambers with Mrs. Lewis at ten o’clock tomorrow morning to explain what she knows,” added Juhan.

  “I know,” Hardesty said, “but it’s almost worth getting a horsewhipping from Stoner to have seen Corbett shaking in his boots today when he thought we had an eyewitness. Looked like he’d seen a ghost.”

  Indeed, Corbett knew all about Colorado’s death penalty law. He had told Special Agent Hostetter about it on the plane during his extradition flight from Seattle to Denver. “I know the conditions under Colorado law that have to be satisfied to sentence someone to the death penalty,” he said. “Oh, yeah? What are they?” asked Special Agent Hostetter.

  Corbett said nothing for a moment. “Anyway, surveys reveal the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder.”

  Hostetter had grown tired of his fugitive’s grandiose chatter for the last hour. He wasn’t saying anything about the Coors case. “Maybe, maybe not. I know one thing for sure, though,” said Hostetter.

  “What’s that?”

  “It deters the guy who gets executed.”

  Corbett did know the conditions required to send him to the gas chamber. He wasn’t going to confess, but perhaps he’d made a mistake and this woman did see him. That’s why he was feeling so sick to his stomach after Lewis came forward. He no doubt spent a restless night in his cell running the bungled kidnapping through his mind, over and over, wondering if Beulah Lewis had stopped her car nearby. Prison for life was one thing; he had done time at San Quentin and Terminal Island. That he could handle, but death by cyanide gas? He was only thirty-two years old.

  The next morning, a pipe-smoking Buckley along with Hawley flanked Beulah Lewis as they entered the courthouse. A heavyset woman of seventy-three, she wore a purple dress and white coat with a white bonnet. She covered her face from cameras like she was under arrest.

  “Why did you wait until now to come forward?” asked a reporter as she walked by him. A full thirteen months had passed since Ad’s disappearance and the trial was about to begin.

  “Because I feared for my life. I still am,” she replied. “But when I read that man might have an alibi, I felt it my duty to come forward and see that justice is done.”

  The “alibi” Mrs. Lewis referred to appeared in a newspaper article that stated a man and his son were willing to testify that Corbett was at a gas station having his car repaired on the day Coors disappeared. But the two wouldn’t be called as defense witnesses because
Corbett bewilderingly told his lawyers, “That’s just not true. Someone may have been at that gas station, but it wasn’t me.”

  The meeting about Mrs. Lewis’s claims among the lawyers in Judge Stoner’s chambers went badly for the prosecution. The district attorney explained to the judge, who was upset about this late revelation, that he’d never heard of her until she’d called his office at lunch the day before; that he immediately took Lewis to Turkey Creek Bridge to hear her account of what she saw; and that after hearing her account, admitted she was “just short of an eyewitness.”

  Judge Stoner questioned her at length, and so did defense attorneys. Her answers to questions were inconsistent, and she couldn’t provide answers to questions about obvious events she should have known if they happened only a few feet away from her, as she claimed. The judge permitted the prosecution to endorse her as a potential witness, but investigators on both sides reported that statements by Mrs. Lewis were not only ridiculous but journeyed into the bizarre. She wouldn’t be taking the witness stand for the prosecution. The prosecution and defense attorneys had disagreed about almost every facet of the case, except one. As Hardesty later stated it, “Beulah Lewis was a nut.”

  Corbett would sleep easier that night.

  CHAPTER 21

  The first day of the trial had come at last: The People of the State of Colorado, Plaintiff, v. Joseph Corbett Jr., alias Walter Osborne, Defendant. Criminal Action No. 2815. The charge was murder in the first degree. Kidnapping wasn’t included, showing the prosecutors’ confidence in their case. It was only the second jury trial in Golden in thirteen years, and the verdict of the last jury was guilty—of a traffic violation, a twenty-five-dollar fine.

  The case would be heard before sixty-one-year-old Christian D. Stoner, a judge’s judge of twenty years on the bench, rumored to have carried a pistol strapped to his side concealed beneath his black judicial robe. The judge expected lawyers to be prepared and professional and tolerated absolutely no nonsense in his courtroom from the lawyers or the gallery.