Murder at the Brown Palace

by Dick Kreck

  When the votes were counted, Springer was defeated 29,544 to 24,565, a difference of 4,979 votes, most of which came in the poorer precincts where voter fraud was practiced openly. Speer, a consummate political manipulator, and his administration provided a kind of early-day welfare program in which policemen gave coupons to the poor, who could redeem them at local saloons for sandwiches and beer, assuring that both voters and saloonkeepers, a powerful political force, would remember his largesse at elections.

  Particularly blatant was the use of repeaters, operatives who voted under several names in a single precinct. In the Third Ward, two men, each representing himself as Robert Ihle, voted within ten minutes of each other. James Warren, dead for six years, nevertheless exercised his civic duty. One young man showed up at the polls with three voter cards. When asked his name, he said, “Either Love, Lawton or Long. I don’t care which,” and voted. In the poorer, traditionally Democrat wards, Speer ran up overwhelming numbers—3,182 to 741 in the Fourth Ward, for example—which Springer was unable to overcome in other parts of the city. Speer backer Walter S. Cheesman commented after the election, “It cost us more to defeat Springer than any other man who ever ran for office in Denver!”

  On May 22, 1904, only five days after his election loss, Springer’s thirty-five-year-old wife, Eliza, finally lost her struggle with tuberculosis and died at the couple’s home at 930 Washington Street, leaving him a single parent of their eleven-year-old daughter, Annie. Eliza’s declining health had been a constant concern for him throughout the campaign and, commented in the News, “her husband’s campaign is believed to have sustained the waning strength of the invalid.” Tragedy would strike again at the Washington Street mansion when his seventy-two-year-old mother, Sarah, fell down a small flight of stairs and died on January 10, 1909.

  After the results of the mayoral election were made public, there was talk of a protest but Springer decided against it. First, contesting the election would cost fifteen thousand dollars, with no guarantee that the fraud would be rooted out. But there was another reason, one not revealed until the

  following September during the state convention of the Republican Party at the Broadway Theater. Still a force in Republican politics, a smoldering Springer rose at the

  convention to nominate his good friend, Greeley W. Whitford, for congressman-at-large. While he was at it, the vanquished mayoral candidate took the opportunity to excoriate the election process, and the men behind it:

  I will tell you, my friends, why our contest for the municipal election has not been prosecuted. Mr. Will Evans came to the office of my trust company, where I and several of my fellow candidates on the Republican city ticket were assembled and he said to us there, ‘Mr. Springer and gentlemen, unless you desist from this contest you will have the four public utility corporations of this city buck you and your trust company at every point.’ What could we do? It was annihilation for us to proceed, and we laid down. But I tell you, fellow Republicans, over in the courthouse, locked up from the vision of honest men, are the ballots of the last election, which tell of the election of the entire Republican city ticket by majorities ranging from 6,000 to 7,000 votes. And those ballot boxes are sealed by the word and will of the man who keeps Bob Speer and his cohorts in office today.

  Springer further explained to the delegates why he decided not to contest the election. “I conferred with others interested in pushing the cases and said, ‘Boys, we had

  better quit before we begin. We have not money enough to beat four corporations in this town.’” Evans denied all

  the charges.

  Springer had a word, too, for those Republicans who heeded the call of the manipulators behind the Speer

  campaign and voted Democratic. “There are people upon this platform who fought the Republican ticket in every ward. There were thousands of good and loyal Republicans who gave their time, work and money to elect the Republican ticket who are not in this convention, but many of you who are today claiming the right to dictate the nominations of this convention did not support that ticket at all. All that I ask of them now is that they will not go out from this convention after nominating this ticket and secretly knife it as they did before.”

  The cheering crowd egged him on with cries of “Give it to ’em!” and “You’re right, John!” He kept up his diatribe until one delegate shouted, “Why don’t you nominate yourself?” Springer turned toward the catcaller and said sternly, “Let me tell whoever made that insulting remark that if he and his kind had been in with the Republicans on the 17th day of May,

  I should have been mayor of Denver this moment!”

  Springer’s political career, which began with him as a Democrat until he went to work for the William McKinley presidential campaign in 1896, never again reached such heights. In the fall of 1904, he was strongly supported by Western cattle interests to run as vice president on the Republican ticket with President Theodore Roosevelt. He went to the national convention in Chicago with high hopes but returned empty-handed. The same year, his name was mentioned, briefly, in the Colorado gubernatorial race but his excoriation of Republican defectors to the cause of Speer and the Democrats in 1904 did not earn him the love of the loyalist element of the party. Political commentator Polly Pry, in her magazine of the same name, observed,

  Hereafter precautions should be taken to prevent this erratic political adventurer from getting inside the doors of a Republican convention hall. By his action...at the state convention, he forfeited all right to claim association with Republicans as a member of the party, and not only did he read himself out of the party...but he read himself out of the confidence and trust of everyone connected with the organization and of gentlemen generally. When John W. Springer made that harangue, attacking the party and party leaders, he was acting as the mouthpiece of a few bandits who, disgruntled at their loss of influence and prestige in the party, are banded together to work to the defeat of the ticket this fall.

  His political ambitions blunted, he was still an important figure in the state Republican Party when President Roosevelt visited Denver in May 1905. An elaborate banquet was staged for the president on the top floor of the Brown Palace Hotel with many of the city’s leading businessmen in attendance, including Walter Cheesman, Edward P. Costigan, Charles Kountze, Edward Keating, Wolfe Londoner, John Shafroth, George Tritch, and Edwin Van Cise. Springer was seated at one of the head tables, along with former governor James Peabody, Dennis Sheedy, and Crawford Hill. Speakers, including Mayor Speer, a Democrat, rose one after the other to praise Roosevelt and his programs. Springer was not called upon.

  In 1906, he was touted as a possible U.S. Senate candidate, but when the fractured Republican Party gathered in Denver that fall, it was Simon Guggenheim, backed by the political machine, who got the party’s Senate nomination. Springer often inserted his name into the discussions whenever a high political office came available. Newspaper editors took note. In July 1906, the Ouray Plain Dealer editorialized, “Springer is going up like a rocket just now, or thinks he is, but he will come down like a stick this fall. Springer takes himself very seriously. He thought he was going to run for the vice presidency with Roosevelt, but he ran for mayor instead, and did not run very fast either.” He was dismissed by the Leadville Courier as “another four-foot boat with a six-foot whistle.” Polly Pry sniped, “Few people seem to take John W. Springer seriously. There’s nothing serious about a joke.” The abortive Senate campaign was his last attempt at political office.

  

  In April 1907, Springer, forty-seven, married Isabel Patterson Folck, a twenty-seven-year-old St. Louis divorcée with a reputation as a carefree socialite whom he had courted in St. Louis and Denver the previous summer.

  Springer ensconced his bride in the red brick, seven-bedroom mansion at 930 Washington Street, built in 1891 by Edwin B. Hendrie, president of Hendrie & Bolthoff, a Denver manufacturer of mining equipment. Springer paid nineteen thousand dollars for the house in Septe
mber 1903. Almost immediately, he added two lots to the property and built a large carriage house for his prized horses. Irene Frye Gay, whose family bought the house in 1926 when she was ten years old, heard “the old lady across the alley” tell her mother numerous tales about Isabel. “She used to come out in the thinnest of negligees and stand on the stoop and give orders to the servants. She was not a principled, devoted wife.”

  Springer’s wealthy ex-father-in-law, Colonel Hughes, did not approve of Springer’s courtship of Isabel because she had been married and divorced and because she was known in St. Louis as a free spirit seen frequently at balls and other amusements. He had checked. Hughes convinced a judge of Isabel’s unsavory reputation, and he was appointed guardian of Springer’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Annie Clifton Springer, after her mother’s death, and moved with her to St. Louis in January 1907. She called her grandparents Gramps and Bammy. Two years later, Hughes severed his connection with Springer and with the Continental Trust Company by selling the firm’s assets to a syndicate headed and organized by his former son-in-law. The transaction included the Continental Building at Sixteenth and Lawrence Streets in Denver, and Springer succeeded Hughes as president of the company.

  Annie, a tall, red-haired beauty known as Clifton to her friends to differentiate her from her grandmother, also named Annie, returned to Denver in 1912 and married Lafayette Hughes, son of the late Senator Charles J. Hughes (no relation to Colonel Hughes). Her grandfather moved to remain close to her. Worth an estimated ten million dollars, the colonel built an elaborate home for the newly wed Hugheses and a thirty-six-room mansion for himself on an entire block of land in Denver’s exclusive Country Club neighborhood. At the same time, he reacquired the bulk of the stock in the Continental Trust Company, buying two thousand shares of Springer’s three thousand shares in the firm.

  Springer divorced Isabel in 1911, following the scandal at the Brown Palace, and in 1915, now fifty-six years old, he married for a third time. Again, his bride was a much younger woman, Janette Elizabeth Orr Muir Lotave, who, like Isabel before her, was twenty-seven years old when she went to the altar with Springer. Asked how she and her new husband met, Janette replied smartly, “I have known Mr. Springer for the last ten years. He was a very dear friend of our family. We decided that we should get married, and that is all there is to it.” Springer, who bought and sold Denver properties with alacrity and owned fine homes in various parts of the city, moved his bride into the newly purchased and newly christened Springer Lodge, formerly the five-acre country estate of J. J. Henry, at 1655 Vrain Street, with 125 feet of frontage on Sloan Lake.

  Janette guarded her age closely. It doesn’t appear on the couple’s marriage certificate, on her death certificate, or on her cemetery headstone, but, according to information given in the U.S. Census, she was thirty-two years old in 1920. She, too, was a divorcée, whose marriage at seventeen to Parisian painter Carl Lotave had ended in Colorado Springs in 1909. Springer and his bride, equally as beautiful as Isabel, were married on August 26, 1915, in a private ceremony at the El Tovar Apartments, 1515 Grant Street, with her sisters, Josephine Aymer and Katharine Muir, as witnesses. Neither the bride nor the groom had attendants.

  Springer made every effort to erase his four-year marriage to Isabel. On the couple’s marriage license he listed his

  previous wife as deceased and answered “No” on the line marked “Divorced?” In Who Was Who in America, the new Mrs. Springer is listed as his second wife, ignoring the existence of Isabel. Information on file in the alumni office of DePauw University, his alma mater, makes no mention that Janette was his third wife.

  

  One more great public appearance on a grand stage remained. Springer’s oratorical abilities led him to be called upon to deliver the eulogy for the Elks Club at the elaborate funeral for William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in Denver on January 14, 1917. The Great Scout’s farewell was a majestic affair befitting the man whose frontier exploits made him the idol of millions. His body lay in state in the rotunda of the state capitol, where eighteen thousand admirers passed by his open casket in three hours. An estimated ten thousand people were waiting in below-freezing temperatures in a line that snaked from the capitol’s Colfax Avenue entrance up Broadway to Sixteenth Street when the coffin was closed and the funeral procession moved slowly to the Elks Lodge at Fourteenth and California Streets. Governors, legislators, Civil War veterans, aging cowboys, wizened mountain men, and dignitaries in a long line of automobiles were among those who bade him farewell.

  Springer, a member of the Elks Denver Lodge No. 17, was in full flower when he intoned the praises of Cody, a friend and fellow Elk. He was at his oratorical best:

  With his upturned face to the noonday sun, William Frederick Cody, on January 10th, 1917, met the death angel face to face, and drifted out into a dreamless sleep that knows no waking. It was the peaceful ending of the most picturesque life in American

  history. As his friend I lay my humble tribute this Sabbath afternoon in the lodge room of the Elks’ Home of Denver, Colorado, upon the bier of him whose achievements are the household knowledge of the entire world.

  With America’s entry into World War I less than three months away, Springer took the opportunity to link patriotism and Cody, “who blazed the way for his generation, who subdued the wild beasts, fought the Indians, bridged the rivers, tunneled the mountains, built the railways and made an empire out of a wilderness which is now inhabited by millions of prosperous, happy and contented Americans.”

  He added,

  God forgive the misdirected and misguided Americans who in their mad scramble for wealth, are neglecting, opposing and maligning efforts now being made to defend this matchless heritage bequeathed to us. We owe unswerving allegiance to the army and navy of the United States, and we should prepare for the future a complete and adequate defense. We should compel military training as the surest preventative of war.

  He concluded on a stirring note:

  Sleep on, Old Scout! Under the aegis of the old flag, our hallowed Stars and Stripes, may he rest forever and a day. His grave shall catch the first light of the rising sun, while the moon and ten thousand stars keep watch when the shadows have dropped down from the eternal snowcapped peaks beyond. The mountain pines shall sing their requiems about his tomb, and in the hush and peacefulness of this abode, the spirit of William Frederick Cody shall live and dwell with us like a sweet benediction, forever and forever.

  After the scandal of 1911, Springer withdrew slowly from public life. He began to sell off pieces of his Cross Country Ranch and to spend more of his time in town. In 1913, he sold the remaining property to Colonel Hughes, who died in 1918 and left the ranch to his granddaughter—Springer’s daughter—Annie.

  In 1932 Springer, then seventy-three years old, underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen. Though he survived, he never fully recovered his health. His life was darkened again by tragedy in 1940, when Annie committed suicide in the bathroom of her Country Club mansion with a single .32-caliber bullet to her heart. Annie, forty-eight years old, was suffering from an ear ailment but believed she had a malignant growth in her head. An autopsy revealed that her fears were unfounded. Annie’s will provided evidence of how far her father’s fortunes had waned. Among the state’s wealthiest women, Annie specified that her father be allowed to live in her home and that he receive twenty-five hundred dollars annually from her estate as long as he lived.

  His time as a power broker long past and in poor health, Springer chose to live quietly in a small house in Littleton until his death at age eighty-five on January 10, 1945. He was the last living principal in one of the most sensational scandals in Denver history. His wife Janette died in 1957, and they are buried beside each other in Littleton Cemetery under a huge blue spruce and a simple granite marker that reads: springer/Janette E./Died Oct. 3, 1957/John W./1859-1945.

  John W. Springer, circa 1911. (Courtesy of the Denver Public Library,
Western History Department)

  John Springer renamed the home on his twelve-thousand-acre Cross Country Ranch “Castle Isabel” after his marriage to Isabel Patterson

  Folck in 1907. Frank Henwood was a frequent guest. (Courtesy of the Littleton Historical Museum)

  John Springer’s political ambitions knew few bounds. In 1904, he went to the Republican convention in Chicago believing he would be selected as vice presidential running mate for President Theodore Roosevelt. He wasn’t. (Dick Kreck collection)

  John Springer’s show horses and fine carriages were the envy of Denver’s equestrian set, and he frequently entertained guests for horse shows at the city’s Overland Park. (Denver Newsletter & Colorado Advertiser,

  June 20, 1908. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)

  Janette Lotave Springer, John W. Springer’s third wife. (Rocky Mountain News, August 25, 1915. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)

  Chapter Six

  Guilty: “A Prosecuting Judge”

  Monday, June 26, 1911, another day in which the

  thermometer was predicted to reach 90, promising another stifling courtroom, began with a surprise. Prosecutor Willis V. Elliott, who battled ferociously for more than a week to keep out of the proceedings testimony that Tony von Phul had threatened Frank Henwood, had a change of heart.