McParland was not finished, however. He continued to attempt to unsettle Orchard and undermine his allegiance. “I told him that in the case of the Mollie Maguires the attorneys for the tools had advised them . . . not to speak, knowing that if they did it would endanger the lives of the inner circle, who in reality were the clients, . . . just as the inner circle of the W.F. of M. is now the client of the lawyers and not himself, as he thinks he is. I told him that it is the duty of the lawyers to buoy up the spirits of the tools . . . until they have been executed.”
He then explained how “taking him to the penitentiary was for the purpose of protecting him from his friends, as he was a menace to those whose orders he had obeyed until such time that they killed him or that the state convicted and hanged him.” And so it went for three hours, until McParland left with the promise to “use my influence to see that he got some exercise.”
For three days McParland allowed Orchard “time to reflect.” Then, on January 25, he returned to find the prisoner—who had been allowed to bathe, shave, and exercise—pleased to see him. “[H]is manner was entirely changed from what it was on my [first] visit.”50 For three and a half hours, McParland reasoned, warned, encouraged, assured, and comforted Orchard, also giving him legal, moral, and spiritual guidance. Stating that he knew by his forehead Orchard was “a man of intelligence and reasoning,” McParland explained how that showed he had “the ability of doing a large amount of good, as well as evil . . . if he had formed associations with law-abiding citizens when he first started out in the world instead of a crowd of socialists, anarchists and murderers, he would have become a shining light in any community.”
McParland also reminded “him that he was not the client in this case, but that the clients were the Inner Circle of the Western Federation of Miners who paid the lawyers, not for the purpose of clearing him but for the purpose of keeping his mouth shut. His lawyers in advising him this course knew full well that he would be convicted and eventually executed.”
But, Orchard asked, “[I]f I become a States witness in giving my evidence I would probably have to admit some crimes that I committed in the State of Colorado. . . . Then what?” No problem, McParland smoothly assured him, since “if he acted properly in this case we would get the leaders and that was all that the State of Colorado and the State of Idaho wishes, and that I thought I could assure him that he would not be prosecuted for any crime that he committed in Colorado.”
But wouldn’t the public demand his execution, Orchard asked, to which the detective responded: “if he acted in good faith . . . that the sentiment that now existed would be reversed, that instead of looking upon him as a notorious murderer they would look upon him as a saver . . . of all States where the blight of the Inner Circle of the Western Federation had struck.”
After a while, McParland “asked him if he believed in an Allseeing and Divine Providence,” and Orchard said, “Yes.” McParland quickly pounced, pointing out “what an awful thing it was to live and die a sinful life, and that every man ought to repent his sins, and that there was no sin that God would not forgive.” Then McParland “spoke of King David being a murderer, and also the Apostle Paul.” Orchard asked about this, and McParland “told me about King David falling in love with Uriah’s wife, and ordering Joab . . . to put Uriah in the thick of the battle, and then ordering the rest to retreat, so he would be killed; and of St Paul, who was then called Saul, consenting to the death of Stephen, and holding the young men’s coats while they stoned him to death.”51
Through all this, Orchard’s belief and trust in McParland was clearly growing. “My God, if I could only place confidence in you,” he said, walking over to the detective. “I want to talk. . . . I know every word you have said is true. . . . You certainly have not got to build a reputation as a detective and I am satisfied that all you have said is for my good.” Wanting to build a more intimate relationship, he asked McParland about his home in Denver and whether he still kept bulldogs. These details took McParland aback, while reinforcing his conspiratorial notions: “By this conversation the indications are that the Inner Circle was keeping tab on me.”
Eventually Orchard stood, to conclude the interview, but then suddenly asked why “you never arrested Thomas Hurley. . . . You certainly knew where he was and it has been a mystery to me and several others why you did not take him back to Pennsylvania.” Actually, all evidence points to McParland not knowing Hurley’s whereabouts, but that did not stop him using the question for his own ends. “Hurley was simply the tool of Jack Kehoe, the head of the Inner Circle of the Molly Maguires, just as you are the tool of Moyer, Haywood, Simpkins and others,” he said. “While I might have known where Hurley was located, as we had convicted all of the Inner Circle, including the leader of the gang, what did I want with convicting and hanging a poor tool like Hurley?” The explanation was hardly honest, but, McParland would have thought in true Pinkertonian form, the ends justify the means.
• • •
When McParland returned to the penitentiary the next morning, Orchard’s confession was his for the taking. Orchard later claimed that this was because he had tried to pray on the previous night, but, plagued by overwhelming guilt, “the only real hope I could see for me was to make a clean breast of all, and ask God to forgive me.”52 However, an examination of Orchard’s continually expanding confessions—from the one he gave to McParland to another serialized in McClure’s Magazine to what later appeared in a full-length book53—indicates that Orchard’s religious conversion came after he met Edwin Hinks, the dean of the Episcopal St. Michael’s Cathedral in Boise, several months later.54 Thus his confession was likely based not so much on easing his spiritual suffering as on trying to make sure he did not hang.
The confession poured out after McParland arrived on a gloriously bright Saturday morning, accompanied by the penitentiary’s chief clerk, George C. Huebener. For three days, McParland asked, Orchard answered, and Huebener recorded—hour after hour. By the time he was finished, Orchard had given seventy-six typed pages of confession.55 On January 31, McParland returned with Wellington B. Hopkins, his own secretary just arrived from Denver. By the end of the day there were another forty typed pages further attesting to Orchard’s guilt.56
In this detailed, compelling, and historic statement,57 Orchard admitted to killing eighteen men, making attempts on the lives of numerous others, and causing massive property damage. He claimed he had set off one of the three charges that destroyed the Bunker Hill concentrator in 1899, carried out the bombing that killed two men at the Vindicator Mine in 1903, and executed the Independence depot bomb massacre that killed thirteen in 1904. He acknowledged murdering detective Lyte Gregory in Denver not long before the Independence depot bombing and attempting to assassinate Fred Bradley—one-time president of Bunker Hill and Sullivan—first by poison and then by explosive, in San Francisco later that same year. He also set bombs to kill Colorado governor Peabody and Associate Justice Luther J. Goddard and Chief Justice William H. Gabbert of the Colorado Supreme Court, the last of which was foiled when an insurance salesman was killed instead. Orchard had then “taken care” of Steunenberg.
Orchard claimed that several of these crimes—including the Independence Mine and the Gregory murder—had been carried out with an accomplice named Steve Adams, who had also murdered Arthur Collins of the Smuggler-Union Mine in Telluride in 1902 and two claim jumpers in northern Idaho in 1904. Most important, he said all the acts had been committed at the order of—and with payments from—the WFM inner circle, including Haywood, Moyer, Simpkins, George Pettibone, and Vincent St. John, the former president of the Telluride union.
McParland now had everything he needed and more—dates, accomplices, details. In four days Orchard had either claimed responsibility himself or had implicated others in virtually every major outrage and mysterious incident in the Colorado and Idaho mining disputes of the previous decade. And virtually all led back to
the inner circle of the WFM. In fact, they led there so conveniently that ever since there have been those who have questioned the accuracy and honesty of the confession, and have even suggested that McParland himself was its author.58
Clearly McParland expected such refutation, and he prepared for it by including two questions on both January 29 and 31: whether he or the stenographer made any promises of immunity, and whether he or anyone else used “force or coercion to get you to make these statements, and if not, then why did you make this statement, being that it not only incriminates a number of your associates but also yourself?”59 Answering “no” in both cases, Orchard elaborated:
On meeting Mr McParland and talking with him on three different occasions I awoke, as it were, from a dream and realized that I had been made a tool of, aided and assisted by the members of the Executive Board of the Western Federation of Miners, and once they had led me to commit the first crime I had to continue to do their bidding or otherwise be assassinated myself, and therefore, not caring what would become of me, knowing that I did not deserve any consideration, and on account of the crimes that I assisted in, I resolved as far as in my power to break up this murderous organization and to protect the community from further assassinations and outrages from this gang.60
Although McParland saw this statement as bolstering the validity of the confession, in some ways it actually detracts from it. The language sounds so much more like his than Orchard’s that it empowers the arguments stating he had a hand in shaping the final document.
Conversely, there are significant reasons to believe that the statement was Orchard’s. For one thing, McParland obviously took great pride in having extracted it. For another, Orchard unreservedly claimed it as his own—he eventually testified to and published facts that were slightly different, but he never disputed anything in the original confession. Most important, for months thereafter McParland went to great lengths to validate the information, clarify the details, check its accuracy, and find corroborating testimony, something he would not have done so assiduously had he been the real author of the confession.61 Meanwhile, even as McParland’s operatives did this legwork, the Great Detective turned his own attention to the men named as the instigators of the atrocities—men he intended to see hanged.
CHAPTER 20
BATTLE LINES ARE DRAWN
From the moment news of Steunenberg’s killing was made public, it was of huge national interest to a press and readership not yet fully recovered from the startling assassination of President William McKinley four years before in Buffalo, New York.1 Much of the press quickly attributed Steunenberg’s murder to a plot of the WFM, and the fact that Haywood, the union’s best-known leader, was a rabid exponent of socialism—a movement closely connected to anarchism in the public mind—made a yet stronger link to the presidential assassination, which had been carried out by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.
By the beginning of February, a month after Steunenberg’s assassination, it was known that Orchard had been arrested, but the content of his confession—even that he had confessed—was limited to the prosecution team and the highest levels of Pinkerton’s. In fact, McParland had given Orchard detailed instructions about what he could even say to Miller, his lawyer.2
Although the confession was an enormous first step toward prosecuting the alleged conspirators, there was still a vast amount of work to be done: finding corroborating evidence; establishing a motive; locating witnesses; and taking into custody the men who would be tried. Normally, by this stage, the lead prosecutor would have taken charge of these operations. For that position, the State of Idaho had selected its most renowned legal figure, James H. Hawley.
Born in Iowa in 1847 Hawley moved to Idaho at the age of fifteen; within three years he had achieved such success in mining that he sold his holdings to pay for a college education in San Francisco.3 After returning to Idaho he was elected to the territorial House of Representatives when he was only twenty-three, and shortly thereafter was admitted to the bar. Four years later he was chosen for the Territory’s Senate. He twice served as a district attorney for the State’s Second Judicial District, before being named a federal district attorney. In 1892–93, Hawley represented the miners on trial in the Coeur d’Alenes, and was credited with being the man who suggested that they join with the Butte union, leading to the formation of the WFM.
In general, Hawley cared little about the way he dressed or looked. When he was mayor of Boise he would hold meetings slouched in a chair, legs crossed at the ankles, boots on a table, and a faraway look in his eye. But once in court he became a tiger, and he was said to connect with a jury better than any other lawyer in Idaho. He had already become a legend in criminal law and was reputed to have been involved in more murder cases than any lawyer in American history.4 His appointment as the prosecutor was therefore a major coup for the State.
Yet, despite the involvement of Idaho’s governor, chief justice, and most prominent attorney, there is no doubt that the true leader of the prosecution was McParland. Not only did his recent experience with the WFM in Colorado make him the most familiar of the prosecution team with the union, but his army of agents could not be equaled by the State. The others therefore were guided by his decisions on how to proceed.
In the days following the confession McParland concentrated on six members of the WFM whom Orchard had closely linked with major crimes. Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone were in Denver. St. John was in Burke—where he had fled after being arrested but not charged for the murder of Arthur Collins and under the name John W. Vincent had become the leader of the local miners union.5 Adams and Simpkins had disappeared. There could be no doubt about the importance of the last two, and not just because of their own alleged roles. The Idaho statutes held that the testimony of an accomplice was not enough to convict unless it was corroborated by other evidence,6 and Adams or Simpkins were needed to support Orchard’s confession. However, the search for Simpkins was not going well (in fact, he was never found, and his disappearance remains one of the case’s greatest mysteries7). Thus, locating Adams was vital, and McParland repeatedly emphasized its importance.
With his operatives searching for Adams and Simpkins, and maintaining a watch on St. John, McParland’s primary task became the “procedure relative to extraditing Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone from Colorado to Idaho. Owing to the fact that neither of these three parties has been in Idaho during this conspiracy we cannot say that they are fugitives from justice, and we may have considerable trouble in extraditing them.” Therefore, McParland was “perfecting plans by which we hope to get them into Idaho in a legal manner, where there is little doubt but that we can convict them.”8 This plan—and the way it was carried out—would prove to be the most legally and socially contentious aspect of the murder investigation and trials.
Before any action was taken, McParland needed to make sure that Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone did not disappear. As the three appeared uneasy about Orchard acknowledging their or the WFM’s involvement, he decided to “relieve their suspicion to a certain extent.” This was done by Hawley “leaking” the story to the editor of The Idaho Daily Statesman that detectives had “discovered that there were two men at Caldwell on the night of the murder who assisted Orchard”—one being Simpkins—and that they were “hot on the trail.” The editor then slipped the “confidential” story to the Associated Press to make sure it went nationwide, meaning that the trio in Denver, who would have known there was no other assassin in Caldwell at the time—were “thrown off the track and will rest secure for the time being.”9
Once that was accomplished, McParland, Hawley, and Gooding developed the two main prongs of their attack.10 The first was for Idaho and Colorado to agree formally but secretly to the extradition of the three WFM leaders. The second was for them to be arrested and rushed to Idaho with such secrecy and swiftness that there was no chance the operation could be stopped by any legal process. They also aimed to ar
rest Adams and St. John before they found out what had happened to their cronies.
To prevent anyone from discovering the particulars of the plan, on February 6 McParland put together an extensive “cipher list of names of parties interested in this matter” for use in telegraph and written communications.11 For locations, he substituted names of southern towns, and for the individuals, he took code names from the animal world. The inner circle received names of vicious, dangerous creatures—thus, Haywood was Viper, Moyer was Copperhead, Pettibone was Rattler, Simpkins was Scorpion, and St. John was Coyote. The men whom McParland hoped would help the prosecution were given ambivalent names: Possum for Orchard and Fox for Adams. The prosecution team was rather grander, with Gooding being the curiously spelled Lyon, Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald the most noble (to McParland) Elk, Hawley, Tiger, and Colorado associate justice Goddard, Bear. Finally, he assigned bird names to Pinkerton’s men, including Eagle to William Pinkerton, Hawk to Robert Pinkerton, Blackbird to Fraser, Lark to Hasson, who had just replaced Taber as the Spokane superintendent, and for himself the wisest of all: Owl.
The plan was initiated six days later, when Canyon County attorney Owen Van Duyn, as directed, filed complaints against Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone, charging them with the murder of Steunenberg. It was clear that the three had been in Colorado at the time, and therefore the filing of these documents has long been controversial.12 However, Hawley argued that a technicality of Idaho law allowed the men to be prosecuted as principals to the murder, and therefore for Van Duyn’s affidavits to be considered suitable for sending to the judge, and thence to Gooding.13 According to this interpretation, Gooding was thus legally justified in ordering extradition papers, which were presented to Governor McDonald on February 16.
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