Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  While some of the prosecution team rejoiced over the arrests, McParland was livid when he found out that some of his key instructions had not been carried out. Having been forced by other duties to remain in Denver, he ordered that Adams be placed in solitary confinement on death row and treated as Orchard had been. But the detective was ignored, and Adams was put in the same cell as Orchard. Moreover, he was allowed to see a lawyer, who suggested that before any discussions with the authorities they get an agreement from Governor McDonald that he would never stand trial in Colorado. “Now, this is a very unfortunate state of affairs,” McParland fumed when he discovered what had happened. “It is unnecessary for me to say that with the leverage I had, founded on Orchard’s confession, it would have taken me about ten minutes to have Adams make a full confession with no promises.”49

  McParland was also uncertain of the status of St. John, since his operative was “not able to inform me why St. John was arrested”—that is, on what specific Idaho complaint, as the major charge against him was for the Collins murder in Colorado. “And except that Adams met St John in Burke and told him that he was going to murder ex-Governor Steunenberg we cannot convict St. John, and if St. John is discharged I do not see how we are going to take Adams to Telluride to prosecute St. John, as Adams himself was the principal in the murder of Arthur Collins.”50 It is clear from McParland’s comments that—despite hopes to link St. John to several disappearances that had been assumed to be murders51—in actuality he had little true evidence of criminal activity by him other than Orchard’s confession. However, after so many years obtaining confessions from defendants, McParland so implicitly trusted his own skills that he tended to believe he could tell truth from lies. This was particularly the case when the information matched what he wanted to hear anyway—such as Orchard’s confession.52

  Despite McParland’s disgust, Orchard transpired to be the ideal first step for the process through which the detective wanted to put the new prisoner. As Adams later recalled: “Orchard commenced to talk at once. Said he had made a confession that implicated me in . . . all the crimes in Colorado and everywhere else that I had been around. . . . That he and I would never be tried on these charges if I would corroborate what he had said. He said their object was to get evidence against the officials of the WFM. That they were the men they wanted and he named Haywood, Moyer, Pettibone, St. John and Simpkins. . . . He told me over and over again that Governor Gooding, McParland and the States lawyer had promised to stand by us and see that no harm came to us.” Moreover, wrote Adams, “He kept this up continuously for four days.”53

  But Orchard’s promises of freedom were only the carrot—the stick was provided by Fred Bond, a convicted murderer awaiting execution. Hoping for clemency, Bond had been to see Gooding, and he returned to repeat the governor’s remark that if, as Adams said, “I did not tell what they knew I knew and what they knew I ought to know they had evidence that would hang me so damned high salt peter would not save me.”54

  Meanwhile, on the afternoon of February 25, in order to control growing speculation about how Orchard’s statement related to the abduction of the WFM leaders, Gooding suggested to McParland, Whitney, and Hawley that he “give out to the public through the press that Orchard had made a confession, [and] would also state . . . that he had withdrawn the reward. . . . This is something that will help the prosecution, as one cannot go from house to house and tell people that the Pinkerton Agency never operates for rewards.”55 The next day, in a widely released story, Gooding referred to “a full confession” that “implicated all those now under arrest and others, including J.L. Simpkins.” He attributed the confession “to the great brain of James McParland, who has been employed by the state to run down the murderers,” adding: “McParland was aided in his work by Orchard’s early training. In his boyhood the Bible was read night and morning . . . The impression of the early days came up and smote his conscience when he was brought face to face with his God. He told me that he believed in a Supreme Being and a hereafter, and that now his one thought was to make his peace with his Maker.”56

  Meanwhile, knowing his lawyer was away, McParland visited Adams, wasting no time in pointing out that the prisoner was effectively on his own. Soon he was telling Adams that: “It is your duty that you owe to your family, your fellow men and your God to corroborate Harry Orchard’s confession against the officials of the Federation. There isn’t a doubt but what they are guilty.” Moreover, McParland continued, “if you don’t you will be taken back to Cripple Creek and hung, and then where would your wife and poor little children be. You do this and you will never be prosecuted and you will come out all right and be away ahead.”57

  For two hours McParland “went over it again and again, stating it in all its different ways. All of the time repeating that if I did not corroborate Orchard I would be sent to Cripple Creek and mobbed or hung by the people there.”58

  After a night in solitary, Adams was again visited by McParland. “You better go ahead and make a statement corroborating Orchard and save yourself,” the detective stated, adding that if Adams “was turned loose [he] would be killed immediately by some member of the Western Federation of Miners.”59 With similar words from Orchard still ringing in his ears, Adams gave in, although he still had several concerns. The first—his wife and family—was put to rest when McParland assured him that he would “get her a good place to stay and the state will take good care of them and see you through.”60 To reassure him about another worry—what would happen to him—McParland cited the story of Kelly the Bum. However, unlike Orchard, who took it to heart, Adams seemed totally mystified by the tale, as he did by the detective’s Bible stories.61

  For the rest of the day, Huebener, Whitney’s clerk, recorded Adams’s confession, and when the process continued the next day, McParland’s own secretary, Hopkins, transcribed the confession. “Adams seemed in better condition today,” McParland reported the second day, “although at times big beads of sweat broke out on his face and later on his hands. He was quite nervous. As I had been made aware by [Chris Thiele] that Adams smoked continuously I had provided myself with a pocket full of cigars, and I never saw cigars disappear so fast in my life.”62

  But by the end of these smoky sessions, McParland had what he wanted—a lengthy confession that tended to corroborate Orchard’s.63 Most important were the sections pertaining to the Steunenberg murder, particularly how, in 1904, Adams had met Haywood and Pettibone in Denver, where they said they wanted to “get” the governor. Haywood gave Adams two hundred dollars for expenses necessary for the murder, but Adams drank most of the money away, and, unable to replenish it, gave up on the job, after which it was passed on to Orchard.

  But that was just the beginning. Adams also admitted to helping Orchard in the attempted murders of former governor Peabody and Supreme Court justices Goddard and Gabbert. He was there when Orchard shot Lyte Gregory, had killed Arthur Collins with a shotgun himself, and he and Orchard had together set off the explosion at the Independence depot that had killed thirteen nonunion miners.

  Adams was not as impressive an informer as Orchard. He did not remember dates, times, or details as well, but, he later claimed, when he told the detective that they would have to get the dates, McParland said, “I will help you with the dates all right.” Then, according to Adams, McParland “took some papers out of his pocket and he would read to himself and then ask me questions, and then I would answer it back as nearly as I could remember what Orchard had told me about the same transactions. He said that it did not make any difference whose names I mentioned in my statement, none of them would be prosecuted except these men connected with the Federation, Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone, St. John and Simpkins.”64

  This recollection did not align with McParland’s account that the information he obtained the first day had come tumbling out in narrative form rather than in questions and answers as on the second day.65 But for the time being
, such delicacies did not matter, because on the following day McParland was scheduled to appear before the grand jury in Caldwell.

  • • •

  “As to what transpired in the jury room I am not at liberty to state,” McParland reported haughtily the next day, March 1, “except to say that I was treated with the utmost courtesy, and the Grand Jury men just stood in amazement at the statement that I made of the crimes committed by the inner circle.”66 A day later it was Orchard in front of the grand jury, but McParland still dominated the larger newspaper headlines, as he released a statement that Adams had made a sweeping confession corroborating Orchard’s in every substantial point.

  “This second confession is far more important than that made by Harry Orchard,” he bragged. “Adams knows far more of the workings of the inner circle than Orchard did, and was able to give a mass of detailed information that Orchard’s confession did not cover.”67

  In the following days—while McParland was slowed by a “bad attack of Lagrippe or cold”68—legal issues dominated the Steunenberg case. The first of these was a victory for the prosecution, when William E. Borah, a firebrand known for the power and dynamism of his oratory, agreed to serve as Hawley’s associate counsel—and for only a quarter of Hawley’s twenty-thousand-dollar fee.69 Born in Illinois in 1865,70 Borah briefly attended the University of Kansas before being admitted to the bar, and then, in 1890, moving to Boise, where he established a flourishing legal practice representing large mining, timber, and livestock interests. Concurrently, he became a major figure in Idaho’s Republican Party. By the time he joined Hawley it seemed inevitable that he would be selected as the next U.S. senator from Idaho.

  Hard on the heels of signing up Borah, the prosecution had another triumph when, on March 7, the Caldwell grand jury returned indictments against Orchard, Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone, and Simpkins. An indictment was not returned for St. John, causing speculation that: “he is to be used as a witness for the prosecution, and as compensation for this he will be permitted to go free.”71 But McParland knew otherwise, as he groused in a report to Gooding: “Swain, of the Thiel detective agency, who had forced himself on the Grand Jury . . . testified that he had St. John under surveillance for the past year, and that he was not out of the city of Burke during that time. I do not know how much Swain was paid for this; however, his positive testimony prevented an indictment being found against St. John. . . . As St. John was at Wallace, Idaho, twice in conference with Orchard during last summer you can see as to the truthfulness of Swain’s testimony.”72

  Here was yet another example of McParland having such confidence in his own skills that he unhesitatingly believed what Orchard had said of St. John. Part of his response was that, like others,73 he did not trust Swain as far as he could spit, and that he viewed St. John as being responsible for several murders in Colorado, so was not about to give him the benefit of the doubt. But mostly McParland simply believed that when he wheedled, threatened, and enticed a confession, he had so controlled the exchange that any admission was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Although this confidence generally proved well-founded through his long career, he had perhaps not previously met quite such a fabricator as Orchard, who made a number of statements that were shown to be false, including about St. John.

  The lack of an indictment did not stop McParland from moving against St. John once again, however, as that very day he wrote to H. Frank Cary, the new superintendent of the Denver office, telling him to contact Sheriff Calvin Rutan of San Miguel County (in which Telluride is located), “to come forward with extradition papers at once.”74

  Coincidentally, at the same time McParland was hoping to extradite St. John to Colorado, Hawley and Borah made their arguments to the Idaho Supreme Court regarding Richardson’s writ for habeas corpus about the extraditions from Colorado. After much debate about how to address Richardson’s contention that the three labor leaders could not have fled Idaho when they had not even been there, Hawley chose to portray the argument as simply an irrelevancy. Even accepting “that Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone were kidnapped from the state of Colorado, forcibly and illegally brought to this jurisdiction, the fact is they are here,” he declared. “It makes no difference how the prisoners were brought here. They are here. That is the point.”75

  It was an argument that raised the hackles of newspapers across the country—particularly those on the left. But the Idaho Supreme Court was concerned solely with strict legal interpretation, and on March 12, it agreed with Hawley and denied Richardson’s writ, stating that “The question as to whether or not a citizen is a fugitive from justice is one that can only be available to him so long as he is beyond the jurisdiction of the state whose laws he is alleged to have transgressed. . . . The jurisdiction of the court in which the indictment is found is not impaired by the manner in which the accused is brought before it.”76 In other words, the way the labor leaders had been brought to Idaho might or might not have been legal, but that was beyond the purview of the court, and once there, they belonged to Idaho’s justice system.

  Richardson had undoubtedly expected this, so he immediately appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court in Boise, again filing applications for a writ of habeas corpus. In an expedited process, arguments were heard a week later, on March 19, and on the next day Judge James H. Beatty upheld the Idaho Supreme Court’s ruling and denied the writ. Richardson thereupon filed a petition for writ of certiorari, that is, an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. This was granted, and arguments were scheduled for October.77 The question of whether McParland had organized arrest or abduction had reached the highest court in the land, and little did any of the main participants realize that the Supreme Court’s eventual decision would establish national and international precedents still in effect.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE LULL BEFORE THE STORM

  When the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear the appeal filed by Richardson, the Steunenberg murder trial, tentatively scheduled for May, was postponed indefinitely, at least until the Supreme Court’s ruling after the hearing in October. Both the prosecution and the defense therefore had more time to investigate the murder, its relation to other crimes attributed to the WFM, and the tactics being used by the opposing side. No one was more expert in this than McParland, who immediately proceeded with numerous and varied inquiries.

  One of the things at the top of his agenda was continuing the search for Simpkins. On March 16, McParland received a telegram stating that a man answering Simpkins’s description was being held in Oakley, Idaho.1 Unable to determine the individual’s identity with certainty via telegraph, he sent Thiele to collect him so that Orchard or Adams could identify him. However, he proved not to be Simpkins, and the search went on.

  The hunt for Simpkins was particularly frustrating, because when Gooding had asked Swain to arrest him, the Thiel operative had procrastinated for so long that the labor leader was able to disappear. Swain then claimed that he had gone to the authorities to have Simpkins arrested, but Sheriff Sutherland of Shoshone County called that a bold-faced lie, leading McParland to muse: “[T]aking into consideration what Orchard learned through Miller . . . relative to the fact that he could buy Swain for a little money . . . it now looks to me as though Mr Swain let Simpkins escape purposely, and that he was paid for the same.”2

  At the same time, McParland had St. John taken back to Colorado, first making sure that, even though the Caldwell grand jury had failed to indict him, he was left incarcerated without charge.3 On the same day that the Idaho Supreme Court ruled on the extradition, Sheriff Rutan and Bulkeley Wells’s assistant, Bob Meldrum, caught the train north from Telluride armed with an extradition request charging St. John with murdering a deputized ore trammer named Ben Burnham at Wells’s Smuggler-Union Mine in July 1901. Before they could reach Idaho, however, a district court judge ruled that St. John should not have been held without an indictment and ordere
d him released. Within moments, Canyon County Sheriff Nichols rearrested St. John for assisting in the murder of Steunenberg, and “the smile faded from his countenance and he was chewing a tooth pick nervously as he was led away.” But Nichols had no intention of keeping his new prisoner; when Rutan arrived, Gooding immediately signed the papers allowing St. John to be taken to Colorado.

  During this time, McParland suffered a devastating personal tragedy. Early on the morning of March 16, the operator at a little station west of Pueblo, Colorado, on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, fell asleep at his post.4 At 2:30 A.M., the heavily loaded westbound No. 3 from Denver barreled headlong into the No. 16 from Salt Lake City on a curve near Adobe, twenty-five miles west of Pueblo. Derailed in a blinding blizzard, several cars burst into flames, incinerating an estimated fifty passengers, with the final figure forever unknown because, as one headline read, “Flesh Literally Cooked from the Bones and no Means of Identifying Them.” Shocked survivors told of people being hurled from the cars into the snowstorm and only being able to watch the ghastly scenes as—in another headline—“Cars Became Charnel Houses for Injured.”

  One of those identified in the disaster was thirty-three-year-old Globe Express messenger Eneas McParland, the detective’s beloved nephew. Although McParland was too professional to mention the tragedy in his report, he did speak to Orchard about it when he saw him the next day. Orchard had been considering suicide, but McParland: “Talked to me about the hereafter, and . . . said if I would truly and sincerely repent and pray for forgiveness that there was no sin that God would not forgive. He told me he had been praying nearly all day, as he had had word that his nephew, whom he thought a great deal of . . . had been virtually burned alive.”5