The Death of an Heir

by Philip Jett

  The brothers saw nothing out of the ordinary. But Hedricks approached holding a cap and a hat he’d spotted earlier. “I found these washed up on the creek bank by the bridge. They’re not soaked through. Still mostly dry. Recognize them?”

  Bill took the tan cap in his hands. Joe took the brown fedora.

  “This one’s Ad’s, my brother’s,” said Bill.

  “You sure about that?” Hedricks asked.

  “Yeah. That’s Ad’s cap, all right,” said Joe. “Calls it his ‘luck hat.’”

  “What about the fedora?” asked Hedricks.

  “Never seen it before. You, Joe?” Bill asked.

  “No. I don’t think it’s Ad’s,” said Joe. “Says on the inside here, ‘Cruiser’ from the May Company, size 7⅜.”

  Bill examined the inside band, and then looked inside Ad’s cap. The worn label displayed size 7⅛. “Different sizes,” said Bill. Hedricks had already noticed.

  Hedricks returned to his patrol car to place the hats on the front seat.

  “I’m going to walk along the creek and see if I can find anything,” Joe said. “Ray, why don’t you come along with me? You go upstream. I’ll search down.”

  Each hiked slowly, struggling a hundred yards along the stream, and saw nothing. Bill and Hedricks combed the roadway on the bridge’s ends. Bill saw what appeared to be tire marks, scratching out gravel, headed east on State Road 70. The four men gathered around the tire tracks.

  “Looks like someone left in a hurry,” said Bill.

  “Maybe some souped-up job,” said Joe softly.

  “Based on the tire size, it’s probably stock,” said Hedricks.

  Uneasy silence fell over the men. They could hear the shallow creek rippling over the rocky creek bed and the wind whistling as a crow cawed in the distance, all producing an eerie cacophony.

  Bill finally offered, “It looks to me like there’s only one explanation.”

  “What’s that?” asked Joe.

  “Ad’s been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped!” barked Ray.

  “Looks that way to me, too,” said Hedricks. “Hijacked.”

  “There’s another possibility,” said Ray. “Ad could’ve taken somebody to the hospital and went in their car to save time, or maybe Ad was the one hurt.”

  “And not call the brewery or pick up his car? It’s been more than four hours,” said Bill. “By the same token, if Ad had been taken to the hospital, they would’ve called by now. They’d have his billfold with his driver’s license, and there’s his car with the registration on the steering column. No, I’m afraid kidnapping’s the only scenario that makes sense.”

  Joe dropped his head. There was silence again as the men considered Bill’s conjecture. They knew he was right.

  “Ray, why don’t you fetch Mary? I think she needs to know what’s going on. Maybe she can help the patrolman,” said Bill, who knew a worried Mary had telephoned the office that morning to find out if Ad had arrived. “We’ll look around some more.”

  “Sure, Bill,” answered Ray, who immediately walked to his car, wishing Bill hadn’t selected him to be the messenger.

  Joe heard Ray’s car tires crunching the gravel as it pulled away. He turned with his hands in his coat’s pockets and shook his head. “Bill, I think one of us should tell Mary, not Ray.”

  “All right. Take my car, then,” said Bill.

  Joe hurried to the car and sped away, hoping to arrive in time to tell Ray to let him do the talking. What Joe didn’t know until later was that Ray, unfamiliar with the area, had taken a wrong turn, and would eventually give up and return to the bridge instead.

  Mary heard a car and raced to the front door. She saw Joe step out of Bill’s car. Joe showing up couldn’t be anything but bad, she thought, like when a policeman or clergy arrives with tragic news. Mary fought a sudden weakness coursing through her body. She nearly sank to her knees, but she grabbed a table’s edge before stepping outside and meeting her hesitant brother-in-law.

  “Where’s Ad? Have you found him?” The only thing that prevented Mary from bursting into tears was hope that Joe was going to say Ad was okay.

  “We don’t know yet, Mary,” said Joe in a solemn voice, leading her back inside the house.

  “What? You mean you still don’t know? Then why are you here?”

  “The state patrol discovered Ad’s car not far from here, abandoned. Bill is there now with the patrolman. They’re searching for clues to where Ad might be. We thought you should come and talk to the patrolman. You might be able to tell him something that can help.”

  “Has he had a wreck? Is he hurt? Maybe he’s at the hospital or out wandering dazed somewhere.”

  “No, it doesn’t look like a wreck. I don’t know. Come on and you can ask the state patrolman. I think it’d be better to hear from him and see the situation firsthand.” Joe was trying to ease the news and put as much off on the patrol officer as he could.

  “Situation?” Mary paused and glared at Joe, who remained stone-faced. “Okay. Let me grab a coat.”

  Joe waited as Mary hurried down the hallway into her bedroom. She wasn’t hysterical or crying, but he could tell Mary was desperately holding back and it could burst out any moment. The possibility made him uncomfortable. Mary reemerged and the two stepped outside and started across the carport. Mary dropped her keys. She knelt and picked them up and motioned for Joe to wait a moment while she hurried back inside. She opened the door and rushed out again, fiddling with her coat and gloves. Joe held the front-passenger door for Mary as she scooted into the car, clutching a framed photograph of Ad she’d brought along to give to the patrolman.

  “We’ll be there in less than five minutes,” Joe said as he pulled down the long driveway.

  “That close?”

  “His car’s at Turkey Creek Bridge.”

  Joe could see Mary about to break down. Perhaps because the disappearance occurred so close to home. “It’ll be all right. Try to be calm. We really don’t know anything yet. It may be nothing. Maybe something stupid. I don’t know.”

  “Was he kidnapped?”

  Joe was surprised by Mary’s question. “Could be. I don’t know. It could have been some kind of fender bender and there was a fight or someone got hurt and was taken to the hospital. I don’t know. The state patrol is checking with doctors and hospitals now. We’ll know something soon.”

  “A fight?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. Like I said, we’ll know something soon. Try not to worry.” Joe knew the strongest possibility was kidnapping. He simply didn’t want to be the one to tell Mary.

  Mary sank into the front seat and raked a trembling hand across her forehead to move her bangs blown down on her eyes. She looked at Ad’s photo on her lap. I bought him that shirt and tie, she remembered. We were in Phoenix.

  Before the two reached the bridge, Joe slowed the car and turned toward Mary. “There’s something else. The patrolman found Ad’s cap in the creek with another man’s hat. That’s why I said there might have been a fight. He’ll want you to identify the cap. But there’s no question to me and Bill it’s Ad’s.”

  Mary let out a sigh and said nothing.

  Joe and Mary arrived at Turkey Creek Bridge about 1:15. Mary stepped out of the car and was met by a burst of cold wind. She saw Ad’s Travelall parked on the other side of the creek. Funny, she’d seen it many times, pulling into the drive and out, parked in the driveway, always connecting it with a good feeling of Ad. But today, it seemed unfamiliar to her, as if it belonged to a stranger. She didn’t want to go near it.

  “Wait in the car. I’ll get the patrolman,” Joe said.

  Detectives from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office had arrived and joined Bill, Hedricks, and Frost. Lieutenant Ray Kechter had already ordered the ends of the bridge roped off as Joe approached. Bill introduced Joe to the county lab technician, Dale Ryder, who was snapping photographs of the bridge, car, roadway, and creek. Two
deputy sheriffs, Bob Stockton and Ed Pinson, were combing the bridge and creek sides for additional clues, along with Ed Queen, Al Pedrett, Stanley Smith, and Bill Brandes of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. Soon, state patrolmen would be setting up barricades on the roadway.

  “I asked Mary to wait in the car,” Joe said to Bill as Hedricks approached with the cap and hat in his hands.

  “Let’s go with him,” said Bill.

  The three walked toward Mary, who stepped out of Bill’s car.

  After making introductions, Hedricks said, “I’m sorry, but I have to ask if you recognize these.”

  Mary reached for Ad’s cap. She softly rubbed her fingers along its brim. “Yes. This is my husband’s. Ad Coors.” She kept examining it, ignoring the patrolman’s outstretched hand to retrieve the cap. “Oh, you need it back?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the officer, taking the cap back gently. “And this one?” Hedricks asked, holding it out toward Mary.

  Mary shook her head repeatedly, refusing to touch the hat. “No. I don’t know who it belongs to. Ad hasn’t worn a fedora in years.”

  The patrolman glanced up at Bill and Joe. His sorrowful eyes broadcast to them he was only doing his duty.

  “What time did your husband leave home this morning?”

  “Around eight o’clock.”

  “Was he going to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you heard anything from anyone this morning or seen anything out of the ordinary? Any threats?”

  Mary hesitated. “No.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Coors. That’s all for now. You may be questioned again later by county detectives.”

  “Where is my husband?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. We don’t know anything yet. We’re making calls, and we’ve alerted all state and local agencies to be on the lookout for him. I see you brought a photograph. Good. That will help. As soon as we learn anything, the state patrol or sheriff’s office will contact you.”

  “Don’t worry, Mary, they’ll find Ad,” said Ray Frost, who’d just returned.

  “Over here!” shouted one of the investigators. His yell startled Mary.

  Everyone hurried toward the county investigator standing on the bridge. Joe stopped Mary.

  “Why don’t you wait in the car where it’s warm?” said Joe. “I’ll be back directly and take you home.”

  Mary wrapped her arms about her chest and returned to the car with her head down, not noticing the mud and ice she trudged across. She wanted to join the others, but then again, she didn’t. She sat in the car and shut the door, not wanting to watch them do whatever they were doing. Instead, she fiddled with her gloves, removing one and then another, and carefully unsnapped her purse and placed them inside. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t ignore what was happening only a few yards away. She raised her head and gazed through the windshield.

  “Look,” said a kneeling Lieutenant Kechter. “Blood. Here, here, and here. And over there,” he said, pointing.

  “Don’t get too close. We have to take samples and photographs,” said Ryder.

  Bill and Joe knelt beside what appeared to be blood on the dirt edge of the bridge. It was more of a viscous stain, the blood having soaked deeply into the loose dirt. Ruts on the bridge laid bare wooden planks, and gravel and dirt rose like edges of a furrow, having been pushed by traffic to the sides of the bridge, providing a barrier between the middle of the road and the blood.

  “I walked by here twice and didn’t notice,” said Bill.

  “Me, too,” added Joe.

  “It kinda blends in with the dirt over here and then with the shade from the railing and the dark sky today. That’s understandable. We know what to look for,” said Ryder.

  To the Coors brothers, the spot of blood appeared a few inches in diameter, and more like droplets than a solid mass of blood—“Definitely made of drops, individual drops,” Bill would tell an officer. They also were directed to a fleck of blood on the railing above the bloodstained soil.

  Mary, sitting in Bill’s car, saw Joe stand up, looking agitated.

  “Bill, I think I’ll take Mary home,” Joe said, after seeing Mary gazing in his direction from inside the car.

  “Good idea. Why don’t you stay with her? I’m gonna stay here.”

  “Okay, but call Ad’s house or send Ray to get me if you find something important.” Joe hesitated, not wanting to leave, even though it was his idea. He walked to the car, trying to keep his head up so not to alarm Mary. He opened the car door and sat behind the wheel.

  “What was it, Joe? What’d they find?”

  Joe started the engine and began backing out. “Some blood drops on the ground.”

  “Blood? Oh, Joe.” Mary couldn’t contain it any longer. She lowered her face into her hands and started crying. The sounds of her weeping filled the car, making Joe uneasy and awkward.

  He stopped the car. “It wasn’t that much, really. It looked like a man had been on his hands and knees, maybe bleeding from a hit on his head.”

  Mary continued crying.

  Joe handed Mary a handkerchief. “I’ll take you home and call the doctor to come give you something for nerves. I’ll stay there with you. And I’ll call Holly. She’ll come over, too.” Joe’s wife, Edith Holland “Holly” Coors, could soothe Mary much better than he.

  “I know it sounds bad,” Joe continued. “Look, it may not’ve even been Ad’s blood. He may’ve whapped somebody in a fight. And even if it was Ad’s, it doesn’t mean he’s hurt bad.”

  Joe was trying his best to calm Mary and did believe what he said. Only, he wasn’t a forensic expert. He could be wrong—dead wrong.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Jefferson County sheriff directed his deputies in the search for Ad Coors from his office at Golden. The wooden placard on his government-issue metal desk made it clear who was in charge: ART WERMUTH SHERIFF. Calls were made to his deputies’ homes. Days off were canceled, ranches were left unattended, moonlighters dropped what they were doing. Adolph Herman Joseph Coors III was missing.

  All seventy-three Jefferson County sheriff deputies were called in, except for a handful that still had to patrol the county. Colorado state patrolmen and volunteers also joined in the search. The sheriff had an unenviable task. He not only had meager clues, but worse, he had to handle the powerful Coors family, all in front of newsmen and their cameras.

  The onetime gas station owner, then part-time evergreen farmer, then part-time insurance salesman and bailiff, was appointed sheriff of Jefferson County by the Board of County Commissioners in January 1957 (elected in his own right a year later) when seventeen-year sheriff Carl Enlow, accused of taking payoffs for ignoring illegal gambling in the county, was sentenced to three years in a federal prison for tax evasion. The board believed they had in Wermuth, a man famous for his courage and toughness, the person best suited to clean up Jefferson County and restore dignity to the office of sheriff.

  Eighteen years earlier, the exploits of the stocky, imposing Sheriff Wermuth were written about in Life and Time magazines, comic books, and even in packages of War Gum, not as a sheriff but as the “One-Man Army of Bataan.” One article stated that the “flamboyant” Wermuth “brags a heap but always makes good.” The son of a World War I colonel and a graduate of Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, the athletic young Wermuth entered World War II in the Philippines, where by 1942 he was credited with more than 116 kills single-handedly. Photos of Wermuth in the Philippines and of his mother and sister back home were splashed in newspapers all across the country.

  After Bataan was captured by the Japanese, Wermuth spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war, moved from prison camp to prison camp, and was attacked by his own country when an aircraft from the USS Hornet fired on and sank an unmarked Japanese prison ship that he was aboard. After his liberation by Soviet troops in August 1945, he weighed only 105 pounds. Wermuth, who’d been listed as killed in action, received the Distinguishe
d Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, five Purple Heart decorations, and a promotion to the rank of major.

  But on February 9, 1960, Wermuth was engaged in a different type of battle in his quiet Colorado community. Around one o’clock that afternoon, he’d sent his best investigators to identify and process evidence at Turkey Creek Bridge—Captain Harold Bray, Lieutenant Ray Kechter, Corporal Bob Stockton, and lab technician Dale Ryder. Later that afternoon, Captain Bray and state patrol chief Gilbert Carrel set up search headquarters at the bridge site. Recently arrived heads of the Jeep Patrol, Mounted Posse, and Alpine Rescue Team also helped make assignments from the site.

  “Tell your men to fan out from the bridge,” Wermuth instructed his chief investigator, Captain Bray, on a two-way radio. “Go downstream and up north past Soda Lakes toward Morrison and south toward the Coors house. Let’s go for a mile and a half radius.… I know that’s a lot of territory … The jeeps can cover wherever they can go. The posse takes everything else. Tell ’em to look in every hole and behind every rock no matter how tough. It’s gonna be dark by 5:30.… Hold on, Harold.”

  “What is it, Lew?” Wermuth said on another bandwidth to Undersheriff Lew Hawley. “Right, right. Okay, tell ’em to remove the whole damn plank from post to post.… That’s right. We can cut out the piece with the blood here later.… Good.”

  “Harold? You there?” asked Wermuth. “Get some men to scope the area around the bridge on foot. I want ’em close to the ground. Tell ’em to eyeball everything, footprints, wrappers, bottles, anything that appears fresh.… I don’t care. Do it again.… I’d say a five hundred–foot radius from the creek bed to start with.”

  Deputies in coats and new military-like uniforms (dark green shirts, brown bolo ties and belts, gray trousers, white peaked caps, and brown boots) got busy scouring the area on foot. Several handled a group of bloodhounds, though none located a scent except on the bridge. Ninety-six other men in denim jeans, coats, boots, and cowboy hats, part of the Evergreen Troop of the Mounted Posse, rode out on horseback from the area, similar to the posses of the Old West, slowly combing for clues over rugged terrain, in the cold temperatures and strong winds, leaning from their saddles, looking for anything that might help find Ad Coors. Some wore holsters, others bandoliers, and most carried rifles or shotguns. Another thirty-two were searching as part of the Jefferson County Jeep Patrol. Another nine in the Alpine Rescue Team climbed nearby rocks and mountains. All were experienced and tested, and knew the terrain well.