Murder at the Brown Palace

by Dick Kreck

  [Date unknown]

  I was very disappointed when I went to bed last night, because I did not hear from you. I waited up until very late expecting a telephone [call] from you. ...Be sure and phone me today.

  With lots of love and kisses.

  Isabel

  The correspondence was ardent and frequent.

  [Date unknown, probably mid-May]

  Dear Tony Boy,

  I did not get your message until yesterday. I had a frightful headache last night and could not answer you until today.

  I am very sorry you feel the way you do, and Dear Boy, I must assure you you are wrong—wrong—wrong.

  I want you to give up that trip and come here directly. I shall expect you here in a week and no later. I want you here and you must come. If you do I will tell you what you will be glad to hear, something I cannot put down here. There are reasons why you should at least postpone your trip and you will be glad you came.

  Frank is still here, and is, of course, still acting naughty.

  I have quite a surprise in store for you—something that will please you I am sure, and the other will be all adjusted as soon as you arrive and you will be yourself again.

  I heard from A. last week. He told me what you had said and I am glad you told me first. A. is all right, but—well, you understand. We were out of town day before yesterday and you were spoke of frequently.

  You must come directly here as soon as you arrive and I will share your surprise with you. Cora was in town Saturday and Mrs. C and I were with her and F. all afternoon. She should be here [there?] by this time—perhaps you have seen her. She will be in Denver again next week. You will find us quite merry and there will not be the same affair as that of a month ago. I still watch out for that and you shall help me. V. is still here and asks for you often.

  I shall expect you, Tony, next week. Wire me if you cannot come, and wire me when you start. The other matter will be satisfactorily arranged you may be sure. So, until I get your wire, as always,

  Belle

  Why Isabel would mention Frank Henwood’s attentions to her in this letter remains a mystery, although she liked to point out that men found her attractive.

  

  Only one of von Phul’s letters to Isabel was published. It was written shortly before he left Kansas City for Denver and was sent, as usual, via Florence Welch, who passed it on to Isabel, who sent it via her maid to Henwood without opening it because Henwood had told her a few days earlier that she must no longer communicate with von Phul. Isabel was nothing if not accommodating. The date it was written is unknown. Henwood’s defense attorneys point to the line “just show him where he gets off or I will” as proof that von Phul had murderous intentions toward Henwood when he came to town. The signature, “M,” was von Phul’s code name. He also signed his letters “Mabel.”

  [Date unknown]

  If you are too busy to write me a letter, just say so and I won’t expect them. I have not heard from you for three days. I leave here about the 23rd for Denver, if [my] father does not die, but I am afraid the old man is in pretty bad condition and am holding myself in readiness for a quick trip home. The least I expect from you is for you to behave yourself while I am under this terrific strain, and have nothing to do with that double crosser. No, you don’t have to take him out to the ranch or have anything to do with him—just show him where he gets off or I will.

  M

  Isabel sent frequent telegrams to von Phul, all of which expressed her love for him. “I love you better than anyone else. I belong all to you, as you already know,” read one.

  Even more desperate was one she sent on May 20, only three days before he arrived in Denver for the final countdown to his death. “For God’s sake, wire me. I can’t stand your silence any longer. I am crazy to see and be with you. You know what my answer will be when you come. Isabel.’’

  What Tony’s question was cannot be known for sure, but her promises helped compel the St. Louis aeronaut to ignore his father’s ill health and rush to Denver.

  It is unclear why von Phul warned Isabel—according to what she told Henwood—that he would show the letters to her

  husband unless she resumed their St. Louis romance. Von Phul certainly wasn’t happy with the appearance of Henwood in Isabel’s life. There were various rumors and theories. In the days following the shooting, friends of von Phul claimed that Henwood conspired with “a Denver society woman” to plot von Phul’s murder. “Mr. von Phul was not a barroom fighter or a drunkard.” Both Springer and von Phul pursued Isabel while she was living at the Jefferson Hotel in St. Louis following her separation from her first husband, and von Phul may have been angry that she chose to marry the millionaire businessman instead of a balloon-riding adventurer. A conspiracy theorist could hypothesize that Isabel, experienced in the ways of men, plotted to prod Henwood into killing von Phul, thus freeing her of both suitors.

  Certainly, von Phul could not have been threatening her with exposure because she was breaking off their relationship. She wasn’t. Beginning in January, she repeatedly pleaded with him to visit her in Denver, reminding him that “your little sweetheart is thinking of you.” In mid-May, she wrote, “I want you here and you must come. If you do I will tell you what you will be glad to hear....” And just days before he arrived at the Brown Palace, she telegraphed, “I love you better than anyone else.” Not the words of a woman who wanted to end an affair.

  Most likely is that von Phul resented the sudden appearance in Isabel’s life of the wandering gas salesman, Henwood. His visits to the Springer ranch, the trips to the theater, and the elaborate parties at the Springer hotel suite, at which he was a guest, must have infuriated von Phul, who was hearing love from Isabel but seeing evidence that he was not the only love in her life. He had her “foolish little letters” and, having already proved himself a bully, would not have hesitated to use them to bring her back into line. His jealousy proved to be his undoing.

  Chapter Nine

  A Second Chance: “I’ve Got a New Trial”

  Frank Henwood could not have picked a worse time or place to commit mayhem.

  Denver, barely a half-century old, survived a shaky frontier beginning, droughts, fires, floods, arsonists, gunslingers, crooked politicians, swindlers, and murderers. The economic collapse of 1893 was a distant memory. By the second decade of the new century, a sense of reform gripped the Queen City of the Plains. Murders and high-society peccadilloes did not fit in with the vision of its forward-looking and civic-minded citizens. Two particularly sensational murder cases within six months raised their ire. The shooting at the Brown Palace in May 1911 was followed in September by an equally sensational case in which a young housewife, Gertrude Gibson Patterson, shot her abusive husband in the back then claimed he committed suicide. A last-minute, mystery witness testified that he had seen the shooting, which occurred after Mrs. Patterson’s husband struck her several times. She was acquitted.

  The Reverend H. Martyn Hart, dean of the Cathedral

  of St. John in the Wilderness, spoke for many in July

  1911 when he denounced in a sermon men and women

  taking the law into their own hands. “America generally

  is rotten with this sort of crime, and it is high time that something was done to arrest it before it becomes too late. When will Denver be freed from the blot which now rests upon its name? Unavenged, the blood of more than a score of unfortunate men—murdered within this city—is calling

  for retribution.”

  The Post, which thrived on vivid accounts of crimes with equally vivid headlines, thundered in a page-one editorial two days after the Brown Palace incident, “This gun-toting habit is getting to be such a fierce and uncontrollable proposition that the police do not seem able to cope with it. [If] this indiscriminate mowing down of human beings continues...

  something may happen that Denver will regret far more than an ordinary murder or two. It must be taken for granted that a man w
ho carries a revolver means to use it.”

  Author Upton Sinclair, muckraker and Socialist, had little patience with the upper classes or with the newspapers that reported on their daily lives and transgressions.

  It goes on, and everybody in the hotels knows that it is going on, including the management of the hotels; but do you read anything about it in the newspapers? Only when it gets into the law courts; and then you get only the personal details—never the philosophy of it. Never are such facts used to prove that the capitalist system is a source of debauchery, prostitution, drunkenness and disease; that it breaks up the home, and makes true religion and virtue impossible!

  For the most part what you read about these leisure-class hotels in the newspapers is elaborate advertisement of the hotels and their attractions, together with fatuous and servile accounts of the social doings of the guests: columns and columns of stuff about them, what they eat and what they drink and what they wear, what games they play and what trophies they win, how much money they have, and what important positions they fill in the world, and their opinions on every subject from politics to ping-pong. They are “society.”

  The city’s growing population yearned for respectability. They were an enthusiastic part of a nationwide campaign known as the moral uplift movement. A new breed of politicians and a stringent rewriting of ordinances would shut down Denver’s thriving red-light district and curtail licenses and locations for saloons. Under Mayor Robert W. Speer, huge civic improvements would be made, including the building of Civic Center and the creation of parks and the planting of thousands of trees.

  So fervent was the rush to morality that a visiting federal judge was moved to plead against using the courts to enforce morality instead of laws. Three weeks before the shootings at the Brown Palace, Judge Robert E. Lewis warned, “The moral uplift movements of the present day prompt men to accuse other men of crimes on the slightest pretext. The courts of the land have nothing to do with regulating the morals of the people.”

  

  When Henwood blew into Denver late in 1910, he

  immediately became part of Denver society, partly because he had grown up in well-to-do circumstances and enjoyed the high life and partly because he was desperate to forge a new career for himself and needed monied contacts to finance his new enterprise as a promoter for the gas company. It was his friend and business partner, Frank Loveland, who helped him. Loveland made sure Henwood met the right people. “Ever since Henwood first came to Denver I have known him about as well as anyone ever did,” Loveland liked to brag. “I have introduced him to a number of people. Mr. Springer liked him very much and as Mrs. Springer does a great deal of entertaining and whatever entertaining is done in the family is done by her, Henwood was often seen with her. Never, however, without Mr. Springer.”

  Widely traveled, Henwood fit in easily into his new

  environment. One observer noted,

  That he comes of people of breeding and culture is manifest even upon short acquaintance. He has all the earmarks that tell of good blood and careful training. He is a good conversationalist, talks freely of his travels, knows much of music, is exceptionally well-read on matters of [the] moment and is a close student of affairs in general.

  Loveland’s friendship and society connections aside, Henwood was often too brash for his newfound acquaintances. Some of the women he met in Denver’s leisure society found him overbearing and controlling. One said of him, “He was the sort of man who quarreled with waiters in cafes. If things didn’t exactly suit he raised a fuss about them and sent them back, and argued with the waiter.” Another remembered, “We might have our tastes and all that but it didn’t make a bit of difference. If there was a certain kind of wine that Henwood liked, we must drink it—and like it, too.”

  He had a reputation as a brawler and troublemaker,

  particularly if he had been drinking. Before his arrival in Denver, he had taken the worst of it in a barroom fight with a total stranger in Seattle. In an odd way, the scars he gathered through the years, particularly one over his right eye and another, longer one just in front of his right ear, gave him an air of danger. In Denver, he flew into a fury one night over some slight at Tortoni’s, a popular and upscale Arapahoe Street restaurant, and broke several chairs. He was bested in a fistfight with a chauffeur outside the Navarre, a fashionable bar, restaurant, and brothel on Tremont Place, opposite the Brown Palace. He was arrested at the Brown early one morning for banging on the door of a young actress to attract her attention.

  Still, he managed to win the friendship and support of powerful Denverites. His business arrangement with John Springer quickly ripened into a friendship and the young promoter became a constant companion of the Springers. The spirited Isabel had no reservations about inviting Henwood to join their theater parties or to travel to the Springers’ Cross Country Ranch.

  Henwood lived what could be described charitably as a checkered life. Born in Italy in 1877 while his parents were vacationing there, he was the only son of Harold F. Henwood Sr., a prominent New Jersey businessman and philanthropist, who died only six months after Frank’s birth. Young Henwood was well provided for. His father left him an estate of forty thousand dollars and, for a time, he received a thousand dollars a month for living expenses, which enabled him to travel the world as a gentleman vagabond.

  As a young man, he drifted from town to town, trying his hand at various trades, including newsboy, piano salesman, motion-picture promoter, and real-estate seller. At various times, he lived in New York City, Memphis, Seattle, Alaska, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Australia. He rested

  frequently, to recover his health. Henwood suffered from poor physical health much of his life. He frequently went long periods without employment and was hospitalized on several occasions for unspecified ailments. Mental instability was suggested by his frequent scrapes over women and his propensity for barroom brawls.

  

  Following Henwood’s conviction in 1911 for second-degree murder, John Bottom set about heading off his client’s being sent to the state penitentiary at Cañon City for the rest of his life with a series of simultaneous legal maneuvers. Judge Greeley Whitford had set July 5, a week after a jury ruled him guilty of killing George Copeland, as the date to begin the legal process of trying Henwood for the murder of von Phul. Bottom argued that the killings were one act, not two, and “that one conviction is all that can be had.” District Attorney Willis V. Elliott, too, found little joy in Henwood’s conviction because he had been sure the jury would return a verdict of murder in the first degree. He was reluctant to see Henwood go to trial for shooting von Phul because if a jury found Henwood not guilty, based on his claim of self-defense, it would invalidate the verdict in the Copeland case. If, the reasoning went, Henwood were not guilty of the

  murder of von Phul, he would also be not guilty of killing Copeland, leaving the state with no convictions. Henwood would go free.

  On July 7, Bottom filed a plea of former jeopardy in Denver District Court, based on his previous claim that the two slayings were, in fact, one act and Henwood therefore could not be tried a second time. It fell to Judge Whitford to determine whether the shots fired by Henwood constituted a single act even though two people were killed. He was in no hurry to step into the controversy, citing a crowded court docket to postpone the hearing indefinitely. At the same time, Bottom began the long process of appealing the Copeland conviction to the Colorado Supreme Court. In his motion, he charged ninety-one errors in the trial.

  While the appeals dragged on, Henwood continued to pass his life in the County Jail, where he had come to live fairly comfortably. As comfortably as one could in a steel cage. Reporters enjoyed extraordinary access to him. In July 1911, The Post’s Louise Engel Scher visited Henwood’s jail “home” and found him in a talkative mood, about everything but his trials and his family.

  Scher asked Henwood about his childh
ood and his mother. “Let’s not talk about her. She’s dead.” His eyes, she wrote, teared up and he ran his hand through his hair and said, impatiently, “Why should my people interest the public?” He was less shy about Cora Carpenter and Thomas Lepper, the two Springer servants who, he said, had lied against him in his first trial. He praised John Springer, “a good man, a kind man...the one man who stuck by me, encouraged me and helped me with my company.” He vowed that when freed, “I’m going to stay right here in Denver and face this thing out. Surely, anyone who is just will know that I did this thing in self-defense, as Mrs. Springer told me three times the afternoon of the shooting that Mr. von Phul had threatened to kill me.” He had become adept at using the newspapers to present his case to the public.

  As summer evolved to winter, Henwood was no closer to freedom. Despite the delays, he remained upbeat. He began work on a dogsled in the jail workshop because he planned an expedition to Alaska, a place he read about extensively and was fond of, after his release. His moods continued to swing wildly and some feared for his sanity. In February 1912, he got drunk and initiated a fight with guard Isaac Goldman because Goldman refused to let him use the telephone in the jail office, one of the privileges Henwood had grown accustomed to.

  The prosecution and the defense swapped legal arguments through the summer of 1912. On February 3, 1913, the state Supreme Court, ignoring most of Bottom’s laundry list of complaints about the trial, agreed with him on a key point: Judge Whitford was wrong when he told the jury that there could be no manslaughter in the case. In its decision to reverse the verdict and grant Henwood a new trial, the judges referred to state law,

  These statutory provisions are a recognition of the frailty of human nature, the purpose of which is to reduce a homicide committed in the circumstances therein contemplated to the grade of manslaughter, either voluntary or involuntary, as the facts may warrant. It appears from the statutes that the unlawful killing of a human being, without malice and deliberation upon a sudden heat of passion, caused by a provocation apparently sufficient to excite an irresistible passion in a reasonable person, constitutes manslaughter.