by Dick Kreck
Von Phul’s bachelorhood and reputation as an aeronaut and ladies’ man made him a favorite among the young set in St. Louis. He was a frequent visitor at the graceful and stylish Jefferson Hotel, planned as an office building but built as a hotel, the city’s first with air conditioning, to accommodate the crush of visitors to the World’s Fair in 1904. The hotel’s massive Gold Room could hold a thousand revelers, and often did. It was the center of downtown life. “At midnight, things begin to wake up,” noted a local society writer, and rows of limousines dropped off well-to-do fun seekers who would dine and dance into the wee hours.
Von Phul and the newly divorced Isabel Patterson Folck were familiar faces at the Gold Room. He pursued her ardently until she chose to marry John Springer and depart St. Louis for a new life in Denver. Her marriage, however, did not diminish his interest in her, nor hers in him. She visited St. Louis often and they would see each other from time to time. Beginning in January 1911, she wrote him that series of passionate and pleading letters, promising him her
devotion “with all the love a woman is able to give” and beseeching him to be by her side. He heeded her pleadings and arrived in the Queen City on May 23, 1911. He and his rival, Frank Henwood, almost immediately became locked
in a series of clashes over the letters, culminating in the
May 24 barroom showdown at the Brown Palace and von Phul’s death on May 25.
Both Henwood and von Phul attempted to keep Mrs. Springer’s name out of the case and out of the public prints. It was futile. Her picture appeared in a Denver newspaper the day after the shooting, and there were numerous reports that the fight was over an unnamed society woman. Henwood concocted a story that the two men had quarreled over the quality of one of von Phul’s employer’s vintages. For his part, von Phul claimed that he was in Denver to set up a balloon crossing of Pikes Peak with his friend, Jack Cudahy, the Kansas City meatpacker.
In the days immediately following the shooting, von Phul’s friends and relatives rushed to his defense, insisting that he didn’t pack a weapon and that he was the possessor of a controlled disposition. His brother-in-law, Joseph Murphy, told the Denver district attorney’s office, “Mr. von Phul was not a barroom fighter or drunkard, and his friends are determined that his memory shall not live in the public mind as having met his end in a barroom brawl.” The incident at the Brown readily fit that description. Murphy hinted that the shooting “was the result of a carefully worked out
conspiracy, hatched in St. Louis and carried out at a place where the murderer would have tremendous and interested wealth behind him.”
Murphy even went so far as to say that his brother-in-law “has not carried a weapon for two years.” He noted, “When Tony was younger, he spent some time on a ranch in the Southwest and there he formed the habit of carrying a revolver. When he returned to St. Louis, I had a talk with him and convinced him it was a certain way to get into trouble in a city. He agreed with me and put the weapon away. Since then I know he has not carried a revolver.”
If von Phul didn’t carry a weapon, it had a habit of
following him around during his brief stay at the Brown Palace. The whereabouts of his revolver was one of the key bits of evidence in Henwood’s first trial. Von Phul had three different rooms at the Brown and twice left his pistol behind, to be picked up by the maid who was moving his luggage to his new room. Ultimately, the weapon was turned over to the clerk at the front desk and locked in the hotel’s safe the night before the barroom showdown.
Although his family insisted that von Phul didn’t carry a gun, Mrs. Corinne Johnson Swan, a Denver socialite,
disagreed. She knew von Phul briefly in St. Louis and was supposed to testify at Henwood’s first trial, but was scared off by an anonymous phone call that warned, “If you dare go on the witness stand in the Henwood case, you’ll regret it.” She found von Phul boastful and arrogant, although she hastened to make clear that the two of them “were never more than friends.” Shortly before Henwood’s 1913 trial, she told The Denver Post,
Von Phul was always boastful when drinking. I never heard him threaten to kill anyone or anything like that but I always gathered that perhaps he might not hesitate to shoot if in a temper when drinking. One night at the Planters [Hotel in St. Louis] after he had taken a glass or two too much, he shifted his revolver from one pocket to another. He was seated next to me. I asked him point blank why he should go about armed. [He said,] “I’m never dressed until I have my gun on me—I need it in my business.”
Tony’s cousin, Henry von Phul, a former sheriff in Cripple Creek, Colorado, was sure it was a murder plot. “I believe it was a plain case of murder. My investigations go to show that Henwood is a bad man. He was looking for trouble. Our family does not relish the idea of scandal nor are we looking for it, but this affair is going to be probed to the bottom.”
As he lay dying, with only a few hours of life remaining, von Phul declined to name the woman in the case, other than to say of his assailant, “This is an awful mess to make over a woman.” He preferred to regale his nurses with stories of his ballooning exploits. “It is too bad this thing happened,” he said shortly before he lapsed into unconsciousness about an hour before he died. “I had arranged for a flight in Kansas City on July 5. I hoped to make a new record.” The race was preliminary to that fall’s International race where von Phul was scheduled to represent the Aero Club of St. Louis. It was not to be. His last words to his nurses were, “Well, if that fellow has put the quietus on me, I’ll die game.”
As death crept over him, he remained calm. Clyde MacKinley, stage manager for the Follies of 1910, who had known von Phul for almost a decade, recalled, “He knew he was badly hurt but he never showed a bit of fear. He was the gamest man I ever knew. He knew he was going to die—
I know from some of the things he said to me. For one thing, he said, ‘I wish I could get well, just to get even with that
fellow in my own way. Maybe he can get away with it, but
he oughtn’t.’”
After his death, von Phul’s body was claimed by his cousin Henry, then taken by train to Kansas City where it was met by two of his closest friends, Dewey Hickey and Charles Michel, who accompanied it to St. Louis. The aeronaut’s funeral at New Cathedral Chapel on May 29 was one of the city’s largest, attracting three thousand mourners. Despite being desperately ill, von Phul’s ailing seventy-eight-year-old father, Frederick, insisted on keeping a vigil beside the casket.
Pallbearers came from von Phul’s cadre of friends in
ballooning and from the Hot-Time Minstrels, with whom he frequently performed. Honorary pallbearers were the six
surviving founders of the Aero Club, Albert Bond Lambert, Capt. John Berry, Capt. H. E. Honeywell, Harlow Spencer, Andrew Drew, and James W. Bemis. Active pallbearers, all Hot-Time members, were Hickey, Ralph W. Coale, Clinton Boogher, H. C. Collins, Marlon Lambert, and Joseph M. O’Reilly.
The gathered throng that heard Father O’Connor’s ten-minute sermon at the New Cathedral Chapel “were moved to tears” as he warned his audience of the fitfulness of life and admonished them to be prepared to meet a sudden end.
Tony von Phul. (Rocky Mountain News, May 26, 1911. Courtesy of the
Colorado Historical Society)
Tony von Phul, right, in balloon with an unidentified man,
circa 1908. (Courtesy
of the Missouri Historical Society)
The coroner attributed Tony von Phul’s death
to “gun shot wounds.”
(Dick Kreck collection)
Chapter Four
Frank Henwood:
“I Can’t Try My Case in the Papers”
What do you want?”
The prisoner’s voice trembled as he looked over the two men entering his cell at City Jail.
“I am going to take you over to the West Side criminal court, where you are to be arraigned,” answered Deputy Sheriff Henry Lewis.
Frank Henwood rose from his bunk. “I wish you’d telephone my friend, Frank Loveland; he doesn’t know it.”
Lewis led Henwood out of the jail to a patrol car waiting at the curb and the two men drove the eight blocks from City Jail at Fourteenth and Larimer Streets to the West Side Court building at West Colfax Avenue and Speer Boulevard, a decrepit two-story building put up in 1874 as the Arapahoe County Jail. Two tiers of cells had once occupied the back of the building. Even the windows of the sheriff’s office were covered with bars. Politicians and jurors had campaigned for years to have the building replaced.
As he entered the room, Henwood recognized his attorney, John T. Bottom. Henwood turned to Lewis. “You needn’t send for Loveland but I wish you’d tell him. Where will I be?”
“In the County Jail.”
Looking stylish in a tailored gray suit, a shirt with a high white collar, and a dark tie, his derby tilted jauntily over his right ear and carrying a briefcase, Henwood strode into court for the first time just after 10 a.m. on June 1, 1911. Tucked under one arm was a Thermos bottle. Jammed into the left pocket of his coat were several days’ editions of newspapers, ones he read faithfully to keep up with his case.
The arraignment lasted less than thirty minutes. District Attorney Willis V. Elliott charged Henwood with “the willful, deliberate and premeditated murder of one Sylvester Louis von Phul” at the Brown Palace Hotel on the night of May 24.
Speaking for his client, Bottom entered a plea of not guilty to either willful or premeditated intent to kill but admitted the killing in self-defense. He also requested that Judge Greeley W. Whitford set a time for hearing arguments for bond. Judge Whitford set the date as Saturday, two days away.
Henwood was led out of the court and taken to the warden’s office in the new County Jail, separated from the courthouse by a 150-foot expanse of grass. Opened in 1891, the jail was an imposing cut-stone structure that combined the look of a cathedral and medieval castle. There, Henwood was weighed (162 pounds), then escorted to a cell.
When Loveland visited Henwood in his cell, he found his friend despondent. A second victim, mining man George Copeland, had died of two gunshot wounds during the night. Warden Patrick Riordan woke Henwood at 5 a.m. to tell him that Copeland, an uninvolved bystander, had died of loss of blood at 12:20 that morning. Henwood stared at Riordan without speaking, then flung himself down on his cot. “I will go mad!” he shouted. When Loveland arrived, Henwood was on the verge of collapse. He refused to eat, choosing instead to lie motionless on his bed. He declined to answer reporters’ questions. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t think since I heard of Copeland’s death. I can’t talk. I shall go mad.”
The next day, he was back in court, facing arraignment for the murder of Copeland. He now stood accused of double murder. Again he pleaded not guilty. His trial was set to begin on June 20, but Bottom immediately asked for a five-week delay. Like his request for bond, it was denied.
On Tuesday, June 20, a crowd composed mainly of women began jockeying for seats in Judge Whitford’s courtroom at 7 a.m., three hours before the trial was to begin. So many tried to gain entry that once the seats in the courtroom were filled and standing room was taken, the doors were left open so the overflow in the hallway could hear the proceedings and so some badly needed air could reach the stuffy courtroom. Attorneys for both sides lingered outside the court until past 10. Henwood waited in a side room, chatting with bystanders. “I feel fine, perfectly at ease,” he said as the jail mascot, a fox terrier, played at his feet. “It’s funny but it isn’t bothering me at all.”
Henwood, a fancier of dogs, became friends with the fox terrier shortly after he moved into his cell. The dog belonged to the warden, Riordan, but preferred Henwood’s company. The animal was named Ellis Thrush Riordan, in honor of its former owner, Justice of the Peace Ellis Thrush, and E.T.R. made it his job to roam the jail halls, checking in with various prisoners; Henwood was his favorite. He frequently slept at the foot of Henwood’s bunk and seemed to know when things were going badly in the courtroom. He often trailed Henwood on his walks between the jail and the courtroom. In July, E.T.R. disappeared after following his owner to a streetcar stop near the jail. He was never found, leaving Henwood alone again.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” called the bailiff. The principals in the unfolding drama hurried to their places. Judge Whitford was known as a hard-line interpreter of the law. He had arrived in Denver in 1887 and became partner in a law firm that also included Platt Rogers and John F. Shafroth. He served as U. S. district attorney from 1897 to 1901 and in 1903 was a member of the convention to draw up a city charter for Denver. He also was a staunch Republican and counted John Springer among his many influential friends.
Spectators applauded when Henwood entered the room and took his chair at the defendant’s table, seated directly behind Bottom and another attorney, Milner Cleaves. To his left, across the table, were prosecutors John Horne Chiles and Elliott. The jurors sat against one wall, opposite a bank of three high windows that could be opened to let some air into the courtroom. In one corner, a table was set up for reporters. The judge sat behind a large desk elevated above the proceedings and flanked on either side by lamps.
The reception for Henwood did not sit well with some. “That’s like people,” one guard grumped to another. “Place a man on trial for boiling his wife, and he will get notes from admiring women. Charge a man with cutting up his family into bits and cooking the flesh from the bones with acid, or have him up for marrying a dozen women and killing them all with an ax, and he will get great bunches of flowers. What is it that makes people act like that?’’
Whatever it was, onlookers couldn’t get enough of the defendant. Some commented on his dapper grooming. He wore a newly pressed blue suit, set off with a narrow black scarf tied under a neatly fitting turnover collar and offset by the white edge of his vest. His thinning hair was combed back and parted neatly. A spectator whispered to her friend, “He’s nice looking.” A reporter covering the trial was less impressed:
He has the nose of a prizefighter and the eyes of a society woman. His eyebrows are thin and delicately curved. Above the bridge of his nose he carries the expression of an artist, below the leer of a thug. His nose is coarse, jerked at the end and flat over the nostrils. The lips are long, loose and lagging, over a heavy jaw that bunched at the corners of his mouth. Two natures look out.
If the gathered crowd expected a show, they were disappointed. Judge Whitford had gone to Iowa because of the death of his brother, and Judge Hubert L. Shattuck, sitting in for him, granted prosecutor Elliott’s request that the trial be delayed one day.
As spectators filed out, Henwood hurried through the prisoner’s entrance, where he was greeted by E.T.R. “Well, we got away from them, E.T.R. And they didn’t bother me much, either, and they’re not going to bother me much. We’ve got our nerve, haven’t we, E.T.R.?” His path to the jail fifty yards away was blocked by a crowd of curious onlookers and photographers, and he hurried ahead of his attorney. “Hold on! Don’t go so fast,” said Bottom. Henwood pushed on but his progress was slowed by the dog, who kept nipping at his pant leg. He stumbled over the excited dog, then bounded up the steps and into the jailhouse.
Inside, he was confronted by a handful of reporters who wanted to question him. Heeding his attorney’s advice, he declined, saying, “You know I would like to talk to you fellows if I could but it would not do at this time. I can’t try my case in the papers.” He did, however, shake hands all around and allow as how he was pleased to meet them.
When Henwood’s trial began the next day, prosecutor Elliott, regarded as a brilliant attorney with a bright political future, had a surprise for the defense. He would seek a
first-degree murder conviction, not for the killing of von Phul but for the death of George Copeland, who took two bullets in the shooting. Though Henwood went on trial for shooting Copeland, the latter’s name was scarcely mentioned du
ring the trial. On the other hand, the shadows of von Phul and Isabel Springer hung over the courtroom like specters.
It has been written frequently in accounts of the scandal and the subsequent trials that the prosecution chose to try Henwood for killing Copeland instead of for the murder of von Phul to keep Isabel Springer, the woman in the case, out of the courtroom and out of the newspapers. If true, the tactic was a spectacular failure. The city’s four fiercely competitive newspapers freely mixed fact and conjecture in the days leading up to the trial. The Denver Post, whose main headline the day after the shooting screamed aeronaut von phul shot to death in brown palace; two wounded, already was hinting at the cause, noting in the fourth paragraph of its first story, “In the early evening Henwood and von Phul quarreled over a prominent Denver society woman.” On May 26, Isabel’s photograph was printed on page one of The Post. She was identified as “a friend of Henwood and von Phul.”
Henwood’s explanations that the fight was over wines or the relative merits of the chorus girls in Follies of 1910 unraveled quickly. Three days after the shooting, The Denver Republican reported that Joseph A. Murphy, von Phul’s brother-in-law in St. Louis, was prepared to tell all. “We have no wish to drag anyone down, particularly a woman, but Mr. von Phul was not a barroom fighter, or a drunkard. We believe we can furnish information that will be invaluable and will ask that Henwood be held without bail until we can take the matter up with the Denver district attorney.”
Even the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in von Phul’s hometown jumped into the act, citing sources who claimed that a dinner party at the Brown Palace suite of Springer and his wandering spouse erupted into a scuffle between Henwood and von Phul in which a woman’s voice, allegedly Mrs. Springer’s, was heard to shout, “Don’t kill him, Tony!”