by Dick Kreck
Women found him alluring. During his second trial, two women seated in the courtroom gallery compared notes on him.
“I’d just like to go up and hug him,’’ said one.
Her friend responded, as she knitted, “Who? Henwood?”
“Yes, I just think he’s too lovely for anything.”
“Ain’t he? Have you ever seen them eyes?”
“Yes, and aren’t they the dearest, most appealing things? Goodness! If I was on a jury I’d turn him loose in a minute.”
The bailiff warned them to quiet down.
When he first entered the jail, Henwood was a likable prisoner. Everybody said so, and they appreciated that he shared the plentiful gifts—food, reading material, and clothing—that arrived daily from supporters. Fowler, who covered Henwood’s 1911 trial and later became a notable author and screenwriter, recalled the dapper Henwood in the 1946 book, Denver Murders,
Henwood was a somewhat serious-minded fellow, as who wouldn’t be when being condemned to life imprisonment in the pen? I don’t think he had any sense of humor even before he shot von Phul. But he was a whimsical fellow, tall, bald, with rather loose lips but nice eyes. His forehead was high, quite aside from the fact that he was bald, but the baldness accentuated his height. He walked a little stooped. I should say he weighed 192 pounds and was easily six feet tall. He wore well-tailored clothes and was always well-shaven, and indeed looked like an intellectual warden rather than a prisoner.
On October 16, less than two weeks before his scheduled execution, Henwood received the commutation he said he would turn down. Governor Elias M. Ammons signed an executive order giving Henwood life in prison instead of hanging. “The policy of capital punishment is not involved,” Ammons wrote. “The only question to be determined [is] whether the death penalty in this case is excessive.” Ammons was answering the recommendation of Judge Butler and also the pleadings of John Springer, who appeared before the parole board and told his story of the circumstances surrounding the affair between his wife and von Phul. “I would have killed von Phul myself had I known the situation; this man Henwood butted into my business.” He explained the results of his own investigation into von Phul’s behavior with Isabel Springer before the shooting,
I have spent thousands trying to learn the truth of this matter, and it has not been in vain. Isabel’s mother on her deathbed sent word to me that von Phul had threatened in her presence to kill Isabel with a revolver which he pointed at her. Von Phul was holding over my wife’s head letters she had written years before. He blackmailed her and was trying to get diamonds and money from her. Instead of coming to me, she went to my friend, Henwood, a man I had helped and placed where he could earn a living.
Rush called the commutation “a travesty. The action of the board of pardons is but in line with its past record of helping murderers escape the penalties imposed by verdicts of juries and judgments of courts. It is poor encouragement to those of us who are trying to make murder unpopular in this city.” For Springer’s story of blackmail, Rush had one word: “Piffle!’’
“God bless the governor,” Henwood exulted. “I have lived in hell for fifteen months, the hell of doubt, the hell of uncertainty, the hell of waiting, waiting. But today I can see the light even in my cell and I know I live. Good God, it has been awful! I have learned that I love life. I am a nervous wreck. I am a shadow, a walking phantom, yet with my few remaining faculties of thought and desire I cling to the body, to the life, to the living. I have been mad at times and in my lucid moments I have oftentimes questioned whether or not I was wholly mad all the time.”
The next day, a rejuvenated Henwood rose early and wrote letters to friends and family. He carefully arranged his personal effects, including a scarf pin, a book, a cigarette case, a pocketknife, a watch and chain, and a ring, on a table. “I want those who have been my friends to have something of mine that may testify mutely after I have gone up there [Cañon City]. To whom are they being given? That I will not tell. They are going to be given to my friends, and none but the recipients shall know.” On October 18, he was transported by train to the penitentiary in Cañon City to spend the rest of his life.
Accompanied by deputy sheriffs William Arnett, Robert Thompson, and Samuel Pollard, and another prisoner,
Dave Minton, who was serving eighteen months for larceny, Henwood left the County Jail at 7 a.m. and walked to Union Depot by way of Speer Boulevard, Market Street, and Seventeenth Street, his first time away from the jail since the cell door clanged shut behind him in the wee hours of May 25, 1911. Except for a group of firemen at City Hall and two dozen people at the depot, his 8 a.m. departure aboard the Denver & Rio Grande’s Pacific Coast Limited went almost unnoticed. Only two friends—Bottom, his attorney, and Mrs. Thomas McCue, the widow of his financial benefactor—were there to see him off.
An estimated three hundred onlookers were waiting at the Cañon City depot and lining the streets to the prison when the train arrived after a five-and-a-half-hour journey from Denver, 160 miles to the north. It was a much-changed man who stepped off the train. His clothes hung loosely on his lank frame, and his face was a pasty pallor. His mood was upbeat, and he chatted lightly with his guards, but his face darkened when the stone walls of the prison and a crowd milling around the front gates came into view. Those waiting were denied a look at him. He was taken in a side entrance at 1:40 p.m. Inside the walls, his mood improved. He took a deep breath and told a guard, “It’s much better here than at the County Jail, and I know I am going to be satisfied.”
Like any other inmate, Henwood, now thirty-seven, was issued white-and-black striped prison garb, given a shave and photographed, front and side, and traded his name for a number. Until his death, he would be number 9318. When he was admitted to the prison on October 18, 1914, he was listed as standing 5-foot-11 and weighing 147 pounds. In addition to various scars, he had two vaccination marks on his left arm. The admission report noted, “Teeth good—four gold, two upper left, one lower left and one lower right.” Most revealing, under the category “Temperate” were written the words “No—Morphine.’’ He and Mrs. Springer shared more than their love of theater and societal gatherings.
Henwood fit into prison life quickly. He was assigned to the carpentry shop, a job, it turned out, for which he had considerable skill. He was a model prisoner. Unfortunately, his time behind bars had left him fragile mentally. Despite the governor’s commutation, Henwood believed he was going to be hanged. Every Friday, known to the prisoners as “death day” because it was the day hangings took place, Henwood became incapacitated, unable to work, and waited by his cell door for the warden to take him on that last long walk. No amount of persuasion by prison officials could change his mind. Some feared he was becoming insane, consumed with paranoia. He believed that unnamed persons were putting “odious thoughts” into his head and trying to induce him to confess as he slept.
His mental state worsened in 1916 when his wife, whom he had not seen in years, filed for divorce because he was a felon. In 1917 came the news of the death in New York City to drugs and alcohol of Isabel Patterson Springer, the woman for whom he had risked his life.
He was fighting an uphill battle, mentally and physically. In April 1921, he was among twenty-one murderers who sought pardons for their crimes. He was turned down, for the second time.
A year later, Governor Oliver Shoup issued an executive order granting Henwood clemency, with the stipulation that he never return to Denver. The governor acted after prodding by John Springer, who broke into tears in his appeal before the governor, by the ever-faithful Mrs. McCue, and by a group of influential, and wealthy, supporters.
An angry Judge Butler wrote to Shoup. “Life is altogether too cheap in Colorado. The small value it now possesses ought not to be still further reduced.” He reminded Shoup that when he and former state Supreme Court Chief Justice W. H. Gabbert recommended that Henwood’s sentence be commuted from
death to life imprisonment, “we meant for life and not one day less.” Henwood, Judge Butler told Shoup, “should be let out only when dead. Two juries found him guilty of murder, and two judges sentenced him. It appears that friends can organize and by persistent effort can eventually procure his pardon.”
Tony von Phul’s cousin, Henry, the former Cripple Creek sheriff, was even more to the point. The day Henwood walked out of prison, von Phul wrote to the governor, “You have seen fit to release from the penitentiary Harold F. Henwood, a degenerate lounge lizard and make-believe society man and double murderer. You should be ashamed of yourself for degrading the high office you now occupy. You might try paroling him to St. Louis or Cripple Creek, where his friends would be especially interested in his welfare.”
Nevertheless, Henwood, wearing a steel gray suit and a straw hat and carrying a new suitcase, walked out of the penitentiary gate at 4:20 p.m. on May 28, 1922. In his pants pocket was a five-dollar bill, a going-away gift from the state. John Bottom and Mrs. McCue were there to greet him.
Four days after his release, Henwood had an accidental encounter with a Denver Post reporter on a train and vowed he was ready to make a new start. “I am going to work hard to prove that I am not the worthless pup many people believe me to be. I am going to make good. Never again am I going to touch liquor. I am going to tend strictly to my own business. Butting in on other people’s business got me into all my trouble.”
With help from Mrs. McCue, Henwood moved to New Mexico and began a new life under the name Francis Collins and appeared to be getting his life straightened out. He became assistant manager of a hotel in Socorro, New Mexico, with promises from the hotel’s owner that he would be made a partner in the enterprise. But Henwood’s instability, which had dogged him since his privileged youth, his time as a world traveler, and his brief episode in Denver, got the best of him again.
Only ten months after his release, he was returned to a cell in Cañon City after he threatened to kill a young woman because she refused to marry him. It constituted a violation of his release, and he was back behind bars, this time for good, on March 26, 1923. Henwood continued to enlist support from friends and lawyers for his release but it was not to be. His health deteriorated, and his weight fell alarmingly. In hopes that removing his tonsils would improve his condition, he was operated on by Cañon City physician Dr. E. C. Webb on September 27, 1929. At 6:45 a.m. the next day, with only a nurse attending him, Henwood died of “acute dilation of the heart.” He was fifty-two.
He had a premonition of his demise. Four days before he died, he wrote a letter to Boulder attorney Michael Rinn, whose appeal to Governor Billy Adams for commutation because of Henwood’s failing health had been denied. Henwood pleaded to Rinn:
The truth is, dear Mike, I am dying on my feet. I have just one fighting chance to live. That is to get out and get to Hot Springs, Arkansas. God knows that each day takes just a little more of what strength I’ve got left, and with my weight around 117 pounds, instead of 187, which I formerly weighed, it’s pretty hard digging. No one here or in Denver realizes all that the loss of a single day means to me in my fast-weakening condition.
At the request of his mother in her will, Frank Henwood, who never found a permanent home while he was alive, was laid to rest forever beside his parents, Harold and Margaret, in Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City, New Jersey.
He spent fourteen years, eleven months, and ten days in the Cañon City penitentiary “because I did just what any other man would have done under the circumstances.” He swore to the end that he acted only to save his friend’s marriage and to protect Isabel Springer.
As his life neared its end, he grew reflective. He told a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News: “There’s a moral to my case, that every young man ought to have a vocation. It saves regret, it saves remorse. It paves the way to clean living. I think that I suffered from having too much money. I tried hard enough to make good but every career requires a certain amount of education along practical lines. It was that which I had just commenced to acquire when this thing happened.
“I have regrets.”
Frank Henwood leaving court after being found guilty of first-degree murder. (The Denver Republican, June 19, 1913. Courtesy of the Colorado Historical Society)
This previously unpublished photograph of Frank Henwood, center, with Deputy Sheriff W. W. Arnett, left, and an unidentified man was taken by Rocky Mountain News photographer Harry Rhoads in 1913. (Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Department)
A haggard Frank Henwood photographed at the state penitentiary on October 18, 1914. (Courtesy of the Colorado State Archives)
The Henwood family memorial, Holy Name Cemetery, Jersey City, New Jersey. (Dick Kreck collection)
Epilogue
Isabel Patterson Springer’s headstone, Fair View Cemetery, Fairview, New Jersey. (Dick Kreck collection)
In the course of researching this book, I discovered that Isabel Patterson Springer slept forever beneath the grass of the Fair View Cemetery in New Jersey without a headstone.
Fulcrum publisher Robert Baron and I agreed that this was an ignoble end for the beguiling Mrs. Springer, so we split the cost of having a simple granite headstone placed on her grave in the summer of 2002. It reads, “Isabel Patterson Springer/
“Sassy”/1880–1917.” Long after her death, the cautionary tale of Isabel’s rise and fall as one of the most beautiful and admired women of her time in Denver still draws men to her.
I’m glad she no longer lies in an unmarked grave.
John Springer’s Cross Country Ranch went through a long metamorphosis after Springer’s daughter Annie became the owner. Annie and her husband, Lafayette Hughes, sold the ranch to Oklahoma oilman Waite Phillips, who renamed it Sunland Ranch, then sold it and the adjoining Wolhurst estate to Frank Kistler in 1926. Kistler renamed the ranch Diamond K, but when he was left bankrupt by the stock-market crash of 1929, he sold it for $375,000 to Lawrence Phipps Jr., who called it Highland Ranch. Marvin Davis owned it briefly before selling it to the Mission Viejo Company, which planned a subdivision that became home to ninety thousand residents. The Highlands Ranch suburb south of Denver is now the largest town in Douglas County.
The original Springer castle on the ranch property, much modified and enlarged from its earliest days, stands empty in its magnificence and is used occasionally today for charity events.
John Springer sold his seven-bedroom mansion at 930 Washington Street to Frank R. Read for thirty thousand dollars in 1910, and in 1926 it was sold to the family of Irene Frye Gay. In 2002, Mrs. Gay still owned the house, operated as the Frye Apartments.
The Brown Palace lives on in its splendor, still a center of social activity. Ellyngton’s restaurant satisfies today’s guests in the space once occupied by the hotel’s dining room. The Marble Bar, where Frank Henwood and Tony von Phul met in a murderous confrontation, still serves as a bar, Churchill’s, that provides a masculine environment with cigars and hard liquor much in evidence. The Brown Palace Hotel, still Denver’s finest, remains to this day the place for classy affairs.
—Dick Kreck
Murder at the Brown Palace: A Chronology
1907
April 27: Isabel Patterson Folck and John W. Springer marry in St. Louis.
1910
November 2: Frank Henwood arrives in Denver.
1911
May 23: Tony von Phul arrives in Denver.
May 24: Henwood shoots, mortally wounds von Phul and George Copeland and seriously wounds James W. Atkinson at the Brown Palace Hotel.
May 25: Von Phul dies at St. Luke’s Hospital at 11:20 a.m.
June 1: Copeland dies at St. Luke’s at 12:20 a.m. Henwood pleads not guilty to charge of killing von Phul.
June 2: Henwood pleads not guilty to charge of killing Copeland. Trial in Copeland case set for June 18.
June 10: Application for continuance denied.
June 20: First trial commences.
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June 28: Trial ends. Jury retires at 10:30 p.m.
June 29: Jury returns verdict of guilty of murder in the second degree.
July 1: Springer granted a divorce from Isabel Patterson Springer.
July 28: Henwood’s motion for a new trial denied by District Judge Greeley Whitford. Henwood sentenced to life in prison.
September 27: Application for a delay in carrying out the verdict filed with the state Supreme Court.
1913
February 3: Henwood granted a new trial on charge of killing Copeland; by the state Supreme Court freed of count of murdering von Phul.
March 24: Plea of former acquittal in Copeland case not allowed.
May 28: Second trial on charge of murdering Copeland begins.
June 18: Jury returns verdict of guilty in the first degree, fixes the penalty at death.
June 28: Verdict appealed to Judge Charles C. Butler.
July 18: Appeal denied by Judge Butler.
July 27: Henwood sentenced to be hanged the week of October 27. Judge Butler asks Governor Elias M. Ammons to commute the penalty to life in prison.