The Death of an Heir

by Philip Jett

  Ad was more observant on the ranch than he’d been while he and his family lived on 840 Steele Street in Denver. The same man had parked near Ad’s house then, too, only in a 1957 two-tone white-and-gray Ford Fairlane Club Sedan. No one had really noticed the car parked down the city street among other cars lining the curb. When the mysterious man in the brown hat and eyeglasses had to change his plans because of Ad’s move to the ranch south of Morrison, he continued to watch just as before, but now folks were beginning to notice the stranger on the remote country road.

  “Yes, sir, I saw an older-model car parked at the mouth of a cave fifty feet from Turkey Creek Bridge. I was on my way home from my waitressing job. It was Saturday, Saturday the sixth of February,” answered Mrs. Virginia Massey to a question posed by assistant district attorney Richard Hite in a stuffy Jefferson County courtroom in March of the following year. She explained the type of car and its color the best she could recall, and then she looked at the defendant and declared, “Yes, sir. That’s the man.”

  * * *

  Viola Merys hurried along the third floor of the Perlmor Apartments in Denver, anxious to return to her room and relax after a long day. Though only fifty, she appeared older, wearing a hairstyle and floral dress similar to those of her mother, with a pair of eyeglasses that rested crookedly on her nose.

  “Oh!” Ms. Merys squealed when the door to room 305 swung open. “Why, hello,” she said to a tenant. “You scared me. How are you tonight?”

  “I’m fine,” said the tall, lanky tenant, stooping slightly as he ambled along the hallway.

  “I’m doing fine, too,” Mrs. Merys offered. “Oh, and before I forget, are you sure about that parking space? I don’t want to give it to somebody else and then you change your mind.” (The apartment had only eight parking spaces for thirty rooms.)

  “I’m sure. I’ve leased a spot in a garage. Good night,” he called back.

  The lease extension stated the tenant’s name as Walter Osborne. California prison records identified him as the fugitive Joseph Corbett Jr. The fastidious tenant kept a spotless apartment. He even folded his dirty laundry. His car was no different. He’d recently sold his 1957 gray-and-white Ford Fairlane to a used car dealer named Nathan Yanish. “It was immaculate, unusually spotless, and purred like a kitten. One of the very few cars I have purchased that I didn’t have to do anything to before I sold it,” said Yanish. The man known to his neighbors and former coworkers as Walter Osborne bought a 1951 yellow Mercury sedan two weeks later and kept it out of sight inside a garage, protected from the harsh Colorado winter and anyone who might be seeking to bother it—or him.

  The studious-looking young Corbett reached the end of the hallway and started down the stairwell, flanked on the street side by large window panels that split the front of the apartment building in two.

  “Good night,” Mrs. Merys said as she stopped to empty an ashtray into a metal trash can before also heading down the stairs. Such a quiet, courteous man, the landlady thought. I wish all my tenants were like him.

  The night of Sunday, February 7, 1960, was bitterly cold. Denver had collected another layer of snow the day before, and its icy surface crunched beneath Corbett’s shoes as he made his way to King Soopers grocery around the corner. He struggled back home against a bone-chilling wind, clasping his coat’s collar tightly around his neck. Once inside, the cool stairs and hallway did little to relieve his chill. At last, he stepped inside his warm apartment.

  The thin-walled studio apartment had welcomed him as its only tenant since it opened in April 1956 when Corbett moved from an older apartment on South Santa Fe Drive. The room was small, like most of the Perlmor Apartments, providing a mere four hundred square feet of living space for seventy-five dollars a month, though it seemed larger because of the bare white walls and scarcity of furnishings. A golden-brown sleeper couch along with a small black-and-white TV took up the far end of the apartment. The studio also had a miniature refrigerator and kitchen table, with a hot plate and toaster oven on a counter by the sink. A tiny bathroom lay off the kitchen area. The typical personal adornments were noticeably absent—no photographs of friends or family, no sports memorabilia, no souvenirs of trips taken, and no knickknacks. Only a portable transistor radio sat atop the TV. He didn’t even have a telephone.

  Corbett rarely watched television and listened to the radio sparingly. Like many folks during that era, he preferred to read. “The most distinguished thing about him was there was nothing you would remember him by,” said Charles Spencer, who lived down the hall.

  Corbett was a frugal man, having resigned from his job two months earlier. Forced to scrimp with money running low, he had decided the time had come to find a better job. To Corbett, this was something he really wanted. He began to think of his future. No more job hunts. No more wasting his life. He hoped this would be his last job, one that would provide him with a comfortable life full of good food, luxurious accommodations, and travel to exotic places. On his chrome-bordered kitchen table rested a new Royalite portable typewriter that would help him obtain that job. Once a proficient typist who could type fifty to sixty words a minute, Corbett was rusty, and so was his old Underwood typewriter. Casting the Underwood aside, he was anxious to give his new typewriter a trial run.

  Typically dressed in creased khakis, starched white shirt, and black oxfords, Corbett poured himself a cup of coffee and cranked a sheet of paper into the typewriter. He wanted this letter to be perfect, wholly free of errors. He knew the correct margins and punctuation to use. While in college, he’d worked for a typing service. He typed business documents, papers for other students, and correspondence.

  His run-in with California authorities over shooting and killing a man a decade earlier had taken him away from college after his junior year. Though he assured his family and acquaintances he would be going back after his release from prison, perhaps returning to the University of California–Berkeley to study courses in engineering or premedicine one day, he instead escaped and his family hadn’t heard from him since.

  After absconding to Denver four months later, he told his landlord he was enrolling at the University of Colorado–Boulder. Instead, he took a job as a laborer at Colorado Cold Storage for a few weeks, and then at Chemical Sales Company for three months, before finding a better job as an alkyd resin cooker at the three-story Benjamin Moore & Co. paint factory north of downtown Denver. It paid $2.70 an hour, earning him about $110 for the week. He worked the night shift, 3:15–11:30 p.m., with a single coworker. No one else was in the building after 5:30, which suited Corbett’s desire for solitude. Though Benjamin Moore wasn’t the job he desired, he was a loner, not liking to be around people since high school, never going to parties or participating in other social functions.

  Corbett’s former production manager at Benjamin Moore, Don Herring, described “Walter Osborne” to a Rocky Mountain News reporter: “Everyone liked him. When we needed a cooker, we put an ad in the paper and 117 people applied. Walt was head and shoulders above the others. He never missed a day’s work in the three years he was with us. The only thing you might call unusual about him was that he always kept to himself. No one ever knew anything about his personal life. But that seemed natural enough to us, since he worked the night shift, with only one helper. When Walt left, he resigned. We were very sorry to see him go.”

  Sitting with his back erect, Corbett pushed his horn-rimmed glasses to the bridge of his nose and commenced typing scales he’d learned to increase dexterity before attempting the letter. Minutes later, he selected more substantial text from the February 1960 issue of Popular Science magazine he’d just purchased at King Soopers—an article about a nuclear-bomb shelter that could accommodate a family of up to six comfortably.

  The typewriter keys clacked as they struck the paper loudly, and the ding of the bell sang out, signaling to the practicing typist to swipe the return lever, whisking the carriage to its starting position with a zing. Flipping to page 103 of
another magazine, Popular Mechanics, he continued on with a story about flying saucer sightings.

  If he made a mistake, he’d rip out the paper, crumple it, and toss it into the trash can. Other times, he’d shove his chair back and stand up to pace about the room. Corbett’s mercurial temperament could make him his harshest critic. He was a perfectionist about many things, yet he could be perfunctory about important matters, like failing to finish college and quitting his most recent job.

  Across the hall from Corbett lived Vivian Cherveny in apartment 306. When asked, Miss Cherveny agreed with her neighbor Herman Rask when he said: “He was a good neighbor. Never gave anyone any trouble.”

  But that night, they heard their typically quiet neighbor typing very late into the evening. For more than an hour, Corbett flipped through magazines and typed advertisements and news stories as the keys clacked loudly and the bell rang repeatedly. He eventually moved on to the letter and kept working at it until the letter was perfect—precise alignment, no misstrikes of the keys, and two spaces after a period, like he’d learned in school. And the words were carefully chosen to convey to its recipient his qualifications and commitment to success.

  “Understand this: Adolph’s life is in your hands. We have no desire to commit murder. All we want is that money.”

  CHAPTER 2

  When Ad arrived at the Coors brewery around 9:30 on Monday morning, February 8, he was greeted by his secretary, Jo Ann Pfalzfraf. Rather than arriving at his usual time of 8:15 a.m., Ad had taken a different route to work, one that didn’t take him across Turkey Creek Bridge, going to Denver for an errand before arriving at the brewery.

  “Ad always had time to speak and give you a smile,” Jo Ann said. “He had a large volume of daily personal work, but he was never overbearing. I’d turn on his dictation recorder, and Ad’s voice frequently started out with instructions something like this: ‘Now, you don’t have to rush with this.’”

  His brother Joe quickly pointed out the weeklong backlog of paperwork on Ad’s desk. Joe spoke in a low voice, and he was the tallest and quietest of the Coors brothers. He always talked about the “Red Menace,” most often the Soviet Union, with its Sputnik 3 satellite passing over his head every 105 minutes.

  Despite the fact the multilevel Adolph Coors Company spanned nearly 1,600 acres, Ad and his younger brothers, Bill and Joe, shared a single office on the third floor, each sitting behind a gray metal desk butted against a gray-tiled wall one foot apart from his closest brother’s desk. No wood-paneled walls; no ornate mahogany desks; no paintings and sculptures, only tradesmen’s calendars and framed black-and-white photographs of the Coors plant from days gone by. If someone came in to speak with one brother, he’d have to do so in the presence of the other two.

  Like the Earp brothers of old Tombstone, the Coors brothers of Golden stuck together at work and play. Everything Ad did, just like his father and brothers, was exemplary, from administration and sales to designing his home, to skiing, piloting the company Piper Comanche plane, and even playing the piano and the drums. There were three areas in which the Coors family demanded excellence from their children: education, athletic ability (for the sons), and physical appearance. Education was extremely important. No one married before graduating college. (Ad did have a sister, May Louise. She was the youngest. While at Vassar College, she’d met Joseph Tooker Jr. from a wealthy New York family, and after their marriage in 1948, she left Colorado to live in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mr. Coors didn’t mind. After all, she was a daughter; she’d never run the brewery.)

  At six foot one, Ad was the shortest of the three brothers. All of them were slender, but Ad’s countenance was fuller and softer, with blue eyes and light brown hair, having taken after his mother, whereas Joe and Bill had bony features like their father, Adolph Coors Jr., known to all as “Mr. Coors,” the firstborn son of the founder of the Adolph Coors Company.

  Mr. Coors was six feet tall but dreadfully thin, always dressed in a dark blue or gray suit and vest from a bygone era, high-button goatskin shoes, a starched white shirt with bow tie, topped with a gray derby he wore when coming and going from the brewery. He was a shrewd businessman, and the only thing on Mr. Coors’s mind was the brewery. So much so that he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day and often forgot to eat, becoming so thin at times, nearing 110 pounds for a man over six feet, that his wife insisted he check into a Santa Barbara sanitarium to gain weight.

  By contrast, he insisted his sons dress casually, because he did not want the Coors family to be viewed by the locals as too haughty. They wore khaki pants, button-down shirts, and high leather shoes, almost identical in appearance, except Bill sometimes wore a bow tie and Ad often wore a long-billed tan cap.

  “Ad dresses casual because he feels he is on the same level as the laboring man and can do any job in the plant,” observed Kenneth Malo, a longtime friend.

  One employee explained Ad’s ways to an out-of-town reporter differently: “Ad’s most outstanding trait is that he is not outstanding. Often he is mistaken by new employees and suppliers as a run-of-the-mill employee. None of them would ever dream he’s Adolph III, chairman of the company.”

  Despite the appearance of a middle-class existence in public, the Coors brothers belonged to several social clubs in the Denver area, like the Rolling Hills Country Club, Lakewood Country Club, Denver Country Club, University Club, Cherry Creek Country Club, Garden of the Gods Club, and the Denver Club. These were private clubs, local playgrounds for affluent white Protestant men and their families. Places where the Coors brothers could mingle with others of similar station without rousing their father’s unease about upsetting the lower class. Places where husbands smoked cigars, traded golf stories, and transacted business, and wives drank martinis and talked about kids, the latest fashions, and tennis.

  At work and at home, though, their casual business wear and easygoing personalities were indicative of their modest lifestyles. The brothers and their wives and children lived much like everyone else, without limousines, private schools, or bodyguards. The kids played on public school playgrounds, swam in the city pool, and slept over with friends, never standing out from the rest. The wives frequented the local beauty parlors, dress shops, and the neighborhood King Soopers or Safeway. They lived in middle-class homes and drove ordinary cars. Mr. Coors saw to it. After all, he owned the company stock and controlled the purse strings.

  Mr. Coors believed he had reason for his family to maintain a low profile. He’d always feared that Prohibition, the law against the brewing, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages passed in 1916 in Colorado and not repealed until 1933, might someday be voted back into law. Prohibition had almost ruined the Coors brewery when he was younger and, some believed, helped shove his eighty-two-year-old father and company founder off a sixth-floor Cavalier Hotel balcony in Virginia Beach in 1929. Mr. Coors reasoned that if he prohibited advertisements of beer that contained images of people drinking, and forbade his family from parading their riches, people would not begrudge their wealth from alcohol and support a return of Prohibition.

  But his foremost concern was the possibility of kidnapping. Thirty years earlier, just months after the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping, in February 1933, Mr. Coors’s good friend Charles Boettcher II, the son of the wealthiest man in Colorado, had been kidnapped and held for two weeks until released in exchange for ransom. The crime made the kidnapper the country’s first “Public Enemy No. 1,” hunted by the fledgling FBI and state and local law enforcement. One item found in the kidnapper’s possession was a crumpled list of five potential victims. Mr. Coors’s name was on that list.

  Though he’d dodged the first public-enemy kidnapping, Mr. Coors didn’t have long to savor it. Seven months later, he was informed of a separate plot by two former Prohibition agents to kidnap and hold him in a secluded cabin for ransom; however, the out-of-work revenuers were apprehended before they could put their plan into action.

  Yet those incidents had o
ccurred decades ago, and the Depression-era gangsters were now just old movies on the late, late show. Kidnappings of wealthy or famous individuals were almost unheard of in the United States since then, thanks to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the advent of sophisticated criminal-detection techniques. And so the Coors brothers gave their father’s stories little consideration and simply grew accustomed to living a lifestyle leaner than most sons of multimillionaires, believing Mr. Coors would not have been such a curmudgeon had he not lived through those difficult times.

  But sometimes with age comes wisdom.

  * * *

  Six weeks earlier, cash registers at the Sears, Roebuck & Co. department store in Cherry Creek rang up sales during Christmas 1959. It was a good sales season for the mail order catalog and retail company even though it competed with the May-D&F and Denver Dry Goods Company stores frequented by Denver families, like the Coorses, since the Colorado silver rush. Among those who returned to the department store after the holiday season searching for bargains on overstocked or unpopular items was Joe Corbett, on Monday, December 28, the first shopping day following Christmas.

  “Can you tell me where the camping gear is?”

  “Yes, sir. Third floor. On the left near the back.”

  Corbett stepped on the escalator and patiently rode upward behind other shoppers as the sound of Christmas songs still filled the air. Once on the third floor, he spotted a red-and-white Coleman display. The display’s shelves were lined with the items he sought: tent, kerosene lantern, sleeping bag, blankets, cooking set, canteen, twelve-piece aluminum picnic set, and a small propane stove.

  A store clerk helped Corbett carry the camping gear to the checkout counter.

  “Will that be cash or charge, sir?” asked Harry Ilgen, a clerk in the sporting goods department, readying a pencil to fill out a charge slip.

  “Cash.”

  As the clerk rang up Corbett’s purchases, the electric cash register flashed its white numbered cards indicating each item’s sales price in the register window. Buying his camping supplies amid throngs of rabid shoppers gave him a headache. Motionless, like in one of his hunting stances, Corbett strained a gaze over the heads of shoppers milling about the store, avoiding direct looks and conversation with those around him.