Murder at the Brown Palace
Page 4
“You’ve got everything, Tony,” Rosenbaum comforted.
“All right.”
He put on his coat and walked outside to Broadway, where he saw the police ambulance backed up to the curb. The man who had survived numerous close calls as a balloonist refused to ride in it.
“Not me for the ambulance.”
“Tony, here’s a taxi if you wish,” said one of his friends.
“Me for the taxi.” Accompanied by police surgeon Dr. Willis Mudd and two friends, he rode to St. Luke’s Hospital like a warrior leaving the field of battle.
Henwood made no attempt to escape. “I did it,” he said, to no one in particular. “I was attacked.” Appalled that he had wounded Copeland and Atkinson, Henwood broke down in tears. “I didn’t mean to do it! Oh, just let me touch him. I didn’t mean to do it!” He sat quietly on a couch in the lobby until policeman Leonard Anderson, attracted by the sound of shots as he walked past the hotel, came upon him and placed him under arrest. Moments later, Chief Hamilton Armstrong and detectives Peter Carr and Timothy Connor took Henwood into custody.
The police carted him off to jail at City Hall, at Fourteenth and Larimer Streets. An architectural pile of stone and peculiar features, City Hall squatted like a gargoyle beside Cherry Creek, its basement cells a haven for rats. Once at the jail, Chief Armstrong asked his prisoner what prompted the shooting.
“Von Phul was looking for trouble and found it. He was after me for some time, but I was ready for him.” He repeated his repulsion for gunplay. “I never carried a gun in my life until tonight but I was told that von Phul always carried weapons and was a bad man, and I thought I would take steps to protect myself.”
He didn’t reveal what triggered the incident. “We had a few words while standing at the bar. His attitude angered me and I may have used strong language. He struck me and I protected myself with my revolver.” He showed no regret, except that he had winged two bystanders with his wild shots. “I am sorry that innocent persons were injured,” he told Chief Armstrong. “I did not intend to hurt anyone but von Phul and I have no regret for having injured him, nor will I ever have.”
It was nearly 2 a.m. when Henwood struck up what became a peculiar, almost friendly, relationship with reporters from the city’s newspapers. Standing in the jail’s hallway, he talked openly in an impromptu press conference. He was not completely honest, however, preferring to concoct fanciful tales rather than revealing the true cause of the fracas. “I am sorry that I cannot tell you fellows just what prompted the shooting; but, really, I have forgotten what it was. You may say that he liked the bathing girls with the ‘Follies’ company, that I disagreed with him and that we had words which led to blows and then to the shooting.”
Other stories were brought up: that wine salesman von Phul belittled Henwood for his choice of vintages in the barroom the night of the shooting and ordered the bartender to bring a different bottle, one from his employer’s line; or that he may have called von Phul a liar. He couldn’t recall.
Asked why he was carrying a gun, Henwood shrugged and joked, “Oh, I have a trunk full of revolvers in my room. I’ve been collecting them. I have some from Mexico, some from India and some from the South Pole. Each has a pedigree.”
A reporter asked, “Had you ever met von Phul previous to your first meeting in Denver?” Henwood paused, then said, “I don’t think I care to answer that question. I have said all I care to say and you can roll your little hoop.” With that he walked toward his cell.
As he entered the small room, he turned and said, “Tell them Tony von Phul stuck his finger in my wine, and it made me sore. That started the fight.”
“Is that your reason for killing a man?”
“That’s my answer.”
When he awoke the next morning after a night of sound sleep, Henwood asked jailers for the morning papers “to see how many bouquets the reporters threw at me.”
At St. Luke’s Hospital, only a few blocks east of the hotel, von Phul was getting bad news.
“How bad are my wounds, doctor?”
“They are fatal,” Dr. Van Dyck McKelvey responded.
“How long will I live?”
“Oh, I think until about noon.”
With only hours to live, the man The Denver Post characterized as “the connoisseur of life’s pleasures...a sporting man, free, easy, unmarried” tried to put his life in order. He told one of his nurses, “Well, I’ve been close to death about fifty times when ballooning, but the doctor says it is going to come this time at noon. Well, I always said I would never get killed ballooning, and this settles that.”
Doctors wanted to operate to remove the bullet in his abdomen, but before he would let them, von Phul asked that a priest be sent to his room. It was to Father McDonough that he unburdened himself of the real causes of the barroom tragedy. With everyone else, he declined to discuss the woman in the case, other than to tell a nurse, “I hold no grudge against Henwood. He was a good sport, but I didn’t think he’d let a woman come between us. He insulted me and I knocked him down just as I would any cur. I did not think for a moment that he would shoot. When he got up he started shooting. The coward fired five shots at me while I stood there helpless. The first bullet entered my right shoulder and left me completely at the mercy of the dog.”
Fred Cooke, the cousin with whom he had shared dinner at the Brown Palace the night before, said, “My God, Tony, what was the trouble? Was it that woman?”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk about it. Can’t you see I’m
a goner?”
He told Cooke, “Henwood was a fool for making so much of a fuss over one woman.” As his life ebbed, von Phul’s mind wandered and his conversation rambled, mainly about his ballooning adventures. He asked one of his nurses for oxygen. “I remember the time I was nearly killed when [actress] Eva Tanguay was a passenger. That was home in St. Louis. I never thought about the parachute which always I carried for protection, and the boys had neglected to attach it. We were up a thousand feet before I noticed it. As luck would have it, the gas began to leak, we had to throw everything overboard in the way of ballast, and managed to alight all right.” He recalled other narrow escapes in his balloon and lamented that he would be unable to make a planned flight over Pikes Peak with his friend Jack Cudahy.
As he slipped nearer death, his conversation became incoherent, although one of the nurses said she thought he talked more about his ballooning adventures.
Near 10 a.m., Deputy District Attorney Edgar McComb, policeman William A. Dollison, and Chief Armstrong arrived at St. Luke’s Hospital to take von Phul’s testimony on the incident. However, von Phul’s situation was so critical they couldn’t talk with him without a doctor’s permission, and attending physician W. W. Grant was away from the hospital. The trio was forced to wait outside von Phul’s room for more than an hour before Dr. Grant returned.
The three men started into von Phul’s room, but a nurse stepped out and said, “He’s dead.” It was 11:20 a.m., almost exactly twelve hours since the shooting.
A coroner’s inquest the following day was quick and to the point. After fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury, composed of Frank D. Meek, E. H. Cumbe, H. J. Gebhart, W. H. Cavanaugh, Henry Kachel, and John Moran, found:
That the said Sylvester L. von Phul came to his death by gunshot wounds having been fired by Frank H. Henwood in the City and County of Denver in the state of Colorado about 11:35 p.m. on Wednesday, May 24, 1911, in the barroom of the Brown Palace Hotel at Seventeenth and Broadway; and we further find the said Sylvester L. von Phul died at St. Luke’s Hospital about 11:30 a.m. May 25, 1911, and we further find that said shots were fired with felonious intent.
Just after midnight on June 1, 1911, Copeland, the unlucky bystander who had stopped two bullets, followed Tony von Phul in death at St. Luke’s Hospital. He succumbed after doctors amputated his left leg because they couldn’t control the hemorrhaging.
r /> With the two men’s deaths, Henwood’s claim of self-defense was doomed.
The Marble Bar at the Brown Palace Hotel, scene of the May 24, 1911, shooting. (Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Department)
George E. Copeland, the second victim of the shooting. (The Denver Post, June 1, 1911. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
A newspaper depiction of how Tony von Phul and George E. Copeland were shot by Frank Henwood. (The Denver Post, June 22, 1911. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
Chapter Three
Tony von Phul: “An Awful Mess”
Tony von Phul was the kind of man other men liked to
be around.
He took risks, possessed more than his share of self-
confidence, and was a rough-and-ready adventurer. His given name was Sylvester Louis von Phul, fine for a man of
comfortable background, which he was, but hardly apt for a dashing young man—some said a bounder—whose passions included ranching, racing horses and cars, soaring in balloons and, to a great extent, romancing beautiful and, sometimes, married women. “Tony” fit him better.
He was born in St. Louis in 1878, the youngest of six
children, into a well-known St. Louis family said to be related to Pierre Laclede, one of the city’s founders. His father, Frederick, was an official with the city’s street department. Von Phul grew up in middle-class surroundings and attended public schools, where he may have been a childhood friend of Isabel Patterson.
After a four-year scientific course he was graduated in 1895 from Christian Brothers College High School, where he was a star baseball and football player. He launched a promising and profitable career in a St. Louis brokerage office but lasted only five years before his restless nature took hold. Unable to be constrained by a desk job, he set out for the Bar L Ranch near the town of Coalridge in
the Indian Territory, where he learned to “ride, rope and muster the horse.”
By 1903, he was back in St. Louis and becoming a noteworthy jockey. At one point, he won a steeplechase by fifteen lengths on a horse called Mrs. Grannon, and in 1904 he won three of five events at the city’s premier horse show. He followed that up by winning ten of fifteen races he entered as a “gentleman jockey” against other amateur racers in 1906.
A glowing profile of the successful young man, based largely on his family connections, appeared in The St. Louis Republic in 1909. “Von Phul is poor of purse,’’ it noted. “He has been earning his living these many years. He was born handicapped with a name which spelled wealth, ancestry and affluence. But this mattered not to him.”
He seemed to know no fear. “He from very boyhood had lived in a whirlpool of thrills, of dangerous excitement. He spoke not in the spirit of bravado. He seems to know not what nerves are; what it is to chill; neither does he become enthusiastic. He would have made a champion prize fighter.”
Life on the ranch had toughened the strapping young man. He was good with his fists and harbored a temper that led him to use them frequently. One night, while returning to St. Louis, he was stopped by two highwaymen at a bridge approach to the city. “Two glittering guns were thrust at his head. With a well-directed blow he knocked one of the robbers down, after which he went after the other one. He succeeded in disarming him, after which he beat him up severely and then took him to the East Side police station.” He could be on the other side of the law as well and was known to have a violent temper when drinking. In one well-publicized brawl with a policeman, he had three teeth shot out.
In 1908, von Phul experienced the kind of epiphany that comes to young men craving adventure—he discovered
ballooning, a pastime that fit his demeanor. An aggressive and fearless pilot, his cap turned backward to enhance his already heroic appearance, he escaped death a number of times while soaring over the Midlands.
Ballooning became his passion. His first ride, on December 6, 1908, with a friend, Captain H. E. Honeywell, as pilot, made him a confirmed flyer. As he did with other pursuits, von Phul became proficient, “one of the best pilots in St. Louis,” said one observer. On their flight, Honeywell and von Phul drifted as high as 6,700 feet and landed in Willisville, Illinois, three hours after liftoff from Second and Rutger Streets in St. Louis. He qualified as a pilot in 1909 and was made a member of the Aero Club of St. Louis, one of the nation’s largest such groups. St. Louis was a center of American balloonists, and the Aero Club boasted four hundred members. Only Cincinnati and Chicago could claim as many enthusiasts. Von Phul was a leader among the Aero Club’s fliers. In 1909, he won the club’s silver trophy for a 548-mile trip.
Death, or at least the possibility of it, was no stranger to him. Preparing to launch his balloon one day, his helpers released the balloon just as he was stepping into the basket. The balloon and its scrambling passenger shot into the air. Only quick action allowed him to grab a guy rope and pull himself into the car.
Women were frequent passengers. In 1910, he was accompanied by actress Gertrude Hoffman, a beauty who appeared with numerous versions of the Ziegfeld Follies. As von Phul and Hoffman lifted off, she began singing at the top of her voice
“I Don’t Care,” a racy ditty of the day made popular by Ziegfeld star and another von Phul sailing companion, Eva Tanguay. “[It] could be heard until she was several hundred feet in the air.” Even if she didn’t care, the duo landed safely in Illinois.
In 1909, von Phul, his status among the ballooning crowd growing, and Maj. Albert Bond Lambert, another noted aeronaut, sailed from St. Louis to Ridgeville, South Carolina, 685 miles away, in fifteen hours and twenty-nine minutes.
Their takeoff from St. Louis on October 15 did not portend a safe flight. “The ascent was one of the most dangerous ever witnessed at the gasworks, owing to the puffy wind,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat noted in a front-page story. Only quick work by the two aeronauts, who dumped two-and-a-half bags of ballast, allowed them to clear telegraph wires by twenty feet at one end of the takeoff zone. En route to South Carolina, the men narrowly averted a crash in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee when clouds parted suddenly to reveal a large mountain in their path. Dumping ballast allowed them to rise over the obstacle. At one point, the balloon, clocked at speeds up to seventy-four miles an hour, rose to 12,400 feet where temperatures fell to minus six degrees.
Lambert recalled in a 1928 reminiscence,
We left St. Louis at 6:30 p.m. and landed near Charleston, South Carolina, the next morning at 8 a.m. Shortly after daylight, we saw the ocean from an altitude of fourteen thousand feet. We had to come down in a hurry. We struck the top of the last tree with high tide ahead. I managed to hang on but Tony fell into a large bramble bush. The news of our flight preceded us. After a rough wagon ride we reached Charleston to be greeted by the Chamber of Commerce, which organized a luncheon in our honor. Von Phul mysteriously disappeared and was not to be found in spite of a diligent search. About 4 p.m. he made his appearance. “Where have you been?” was asked by a large crowd gathered around. “Down in the Turkish bath, having the thorns pulled out,” he said.
It was with Wooster Lambert, a St. Louis millionaire and Albert’s younger brother, that von Phul had another of his brushes with death in 1910. Lambert, a first-time flier, and von Phul lifted off in St. Louis III at 9:45 a.m. “As the big aerostat shot upward,” reported The St. Louis Republic, “young Lambert kept his eyes toward the sky as if to see if they were going to hit a cloud, although Mrs. Albert Bond Lambert, Mrs. Marion Lambert and Miss Jane Blackwell tried to get his attention long enough to wave goodbye.”
The two men were riding comfortably at eight thousand feet when clouds caused the balloon’s gas to cool, leading the rig to drop to four thousand feet before they could dump ballast and rise back to eight thousand. Von Phul discovered that the line regulating the gas supply had become entangled, and the basket began to slowly sink toward the Mississippi, finally hitting the water a hundred yards offshore.
“There was nothing for us to do,” von Phul told a reporter. “We were entirely helpless. Of course, we threw every pound of weight over but we came down faster and faster. It would be hard to describe our feelings, neither of us expecting to ever escape alive. But luck seemed to be with us, for like a plummet we dropped into the Mississippi River.” A passing launch towed them to shore. The Republic mockingly described the journey as “a record for slow speed, having consumed two and a half hours to cover six miles.”
By 1911, von Phul had logged more than fifty flights, including participation in the world-famous 1909 International, during which he and aide Joseph O’Reilly flew seven hundred miles from St. Louis to Wahkon, Minnesota, winning the Centennial race and apparently winning the Lahm Cup. They were disqualified from the latter because von Phul failed to pay the one-dollar entry. He paid for his ballooning habit, which cost him one hundred dollars every time he lifted off, by working as a representative of the Anheuser-Busch brewery and, later, as a salesman for a champagne and wine distributor. He was eager to take a trip in the adventurer’s new toy, the aeroplane. The club was planning to purchase one of the Wright Brothers’ flying machines, and von Phul pronounced the idea of powered flight was “exactly what I have been waiting for.”
It wasn’t about money. The handsome, risk-taking flier was in it for the thrills. The Republic trumpeted of him, “If Von Phul was possessed of the spirit of hysteria—one who courted publicity just for the sensation of reading his laudations, or was one who danced before the public in order to further his interests, the story of his life, battles and career would not be worth the thought. In all his deeds, all his triumphs and his successes on the track, in the arena, in the air, in fact, everywhere he has profited little.”