by Philip Jett
“Okay, good. Thank you, gentlemen,” Mary said as she stood. “Any more coffee before you go?”
“No thanks.”
Bray and Hawley began walking slowly toward the door accompanied by Joe. Mary and Bill followed with the sheriff.
“Well, good night.”
“Good night.”
The two investigators stepped outside while the sheriff talked a bit longer.
“Hey, pooch,” said Hawley to Ad’s bluetick hound, approaching with tail wagging.
“I’ll say it again. That’s the hardest part of the job,” Bray said. He lit a cigarette and released a puff that was more of an extended sigh. The wind was cold, but it felt good to him.
“It’s peculiar,” Bray noted. “Ad’s brothers thought he’d only been blackjacked. Just hit over the head. I don’t get that. Wishful thinking, I guess. And they took the news of the kidnapping like cool customers.”
“It’s that rich blood, I guess,” said Hawley. “Keeps ’em calm under pressure.”
There was a pause as Bray smoked.
“So, why didn’t you tell her?” Hawley asked. “Somebody’s got to tell her.”
“The FBI will take over the case tomorrow,” said Bray. “Ever work with the FBI on a case?”
“No.”
“I have. The sheriff won’t like it. The FBI runs the show. Usurps all authority and treats the locals like flunkies. Always need to know what you know but never tell you what they know,” said Bray, who nonetheless had a decent working relationship with Special Agent Werner.
The men got into the car and shut the doors. Bray turned to Hawley. “So let them tell her about all the blood.”
* * *
That same evening, Jefferson County lab technician Dale Ryder suggested to Undersheriff Hawley that he and Captain Bray travel to the Denver Police Department Crime Laboratory to compare the blood discovered on Kipling Street in Morrison with that retrieved from Turkey Creek Bridge. There was some question whether the Kipling Street sample was even blood. So far, county investigators had centered their search at Turkey Creek Bridge, but wondered if it should be expanded to Kipling Street. Around 6:30 that evening, Ryder and Bray met up with Lieutenant Joe Moomaw of the Denver Police Department.
Moomaw switched on the laboratory lights and stepped up to a counter. “Let me see what you got.”
Ryder opened the lid of a pasteboard box. He reached inside and removed clear plastic bags and glass jars containing blood, soil, blood smears, and two small pieces of wood blotted with specks of blood.
Moomaw reached up and clicked on an overhead light. He slipped on rubber gloves and opened the two glass jars that contained samples from the bridge and Kipling Street. Using tweezers, Moomaw lifted a tiny piece from each container and placed the specimens on separate petri dishes, probably made at Coors Porcelain. Then he applied drops of alcohol with an eyedropper, followed by a few drops of phenolphthalein and a few drops of hydrogen peroxide. The samples immediately turned pink.
“They’re both blood, all right,” said Moomaw. “But I can’t say if they’re human or not, or from the same person, but they both contain hemoglobin. I’d have to use more of the samples to determine if they’re human and their type, but it’s my understanding these samples are headed to the FBI Lab.”
“Yes, they are. Okay, well, that’s something, I guess,” Bray said. “We’ll have to wait for the feds to tell us more tomorrow.”
Captain Bray phoned Hawley and told him what the test revealed. Hawley instructed Bray to meet him at the entrance to St. Anthony’s Hospital and bring Ryder, Moomaw, and the collected evidence. Hawley had already spoken with Special Agent Werner to coordinate his flight to Washington, D.C.
Around ten o’clock, the four men stood outside their cars in the St. Anthony’s Hospital emergency parking lot and smoked. The temperature had dipped into the twenties, and a tempestuous wind made it feel even colder.
“I hope Coors is somewheres warm,” said Moomaw.
The shivering men all nodded, and someone grunted, “Yeah, me, too.”
Ryder handed Hawley the pasteboard box tightly bound with string, containing the blood specimens, the small pieces of railing, and the cap, hat, and eyeglasses discovered at the bridge.
Hawley placed the evidence in his car and headed to the airport to catch a 1:40 a.m. United Air Lines flight to Washington, where the samples would undergo analysis in the FBI Laboratory. He hoped they’d have some answers tomorrow.
* * *
Earlier that night, at nine o’clock, Corbett walked to the back door of the Perlmor Apartments and reached into his pants pocket. No key. He checked his other pocket and then those in his coat. Amid all his nervous activity, he’d left the key in his apartment. The wind was cold as he cautiously trotted around to the front of the building and rang the buzzer connected to his landlady’s room, trying his best to remain in the shadows.
“Yes?”
“It’s Walter Osborne,” he whispered into the intercom. “I forgot my key.”
The door lock clicked open, and Corbett hurried to his landlady’s room near the front door.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Merys. I know it’s late,” Corbett said, doing his best to appear calm.
“Oh, that’s okay. Hold on one second while I grab the master key.”
Soon the two stood outside the door to room 305, and she unlocked it.
“There you go,” Mrs. Merys said.
“Thank you.”
“No trouble at all. Good night,” said the landlady, turning to leave.
“Mrs. Merys? I need to talk to you about something,” said Corbett, looking up and down the hallway.
“Yes? Is it your heater? No hot water?”
“No, the room’s fine. It’s just that…”
The landlady and her tenant stood in the hall and talked for a few minutes. That was the longest Mrs. Merys had ever conversed with her reclusive tenant. As she went down the stairs to return to her room, she was surprised by what he’d told her.
CHAPTER 8
Golden is located on the Colorado Front Range, the first upwelling of the Rocky Mountains from the Great Plains. Founded in 1859 as part of the Colorado gold rush, the mining town became the first capital of the Colorado Territory and the seat of Jefferson County. After the gold panned out, German, Swedish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants stayed to make Golden their home. From 1860 to the 1950s, the population seesawed between 1,000 and 2,500 before swelling to more than 8,000 residents by 1960.
Residents of Golden enjoyed a traditional Western way of life. Men and women in boots and cowboys hats walked along sidewalks shared by those in suits and fashionable dresses. On Washington Avenue, the main thoroughfare, automobiles shared the road with horses and an electric trolley. Few communities can boast the picturesque scenery that surrounds the valley town—a river rushing through the middle called Clear Creek, Lookout Mountain to the southwest (where Buffalo Bill is buried), North Table Mountain on the north side, and to the south, South Table Mountain with its Castle Rock casting a crown above the Coors brewing and porcelain companies. And if its citizens wanted a change of pace from the serenity, Denver awaited only fifteen miles to the east.
On the morning of Wednesday, February 10, the citizens of Golden awoke to headlines on the front page of Rocky Mountain News: ADOLPH COORS III FEARED KIDNAPED! and The Denver Post: ADOLPH COORS III DISAPPEARS; FBI ENTERS SEARCH. They were stunned. It seemed unfathomable to them. The outpouring of concern and kindhearted remarks by the townspeople filled the airwaves and print.
“I don’t know of anybody who didn’t like Ad Coors,” said Walter G. Brown, Golden city manager.
Kriss Barnes, assistant vice president of Golden’s First National Bank, told reporters, “I can’t understand how anybody in the world would have anything against Ad Coors. He’s reassuring, mild-mannered, and considerate.”
“Ad is kind and generous,” said Pete Puck, who worked at the Coors Porcelain plant and helped o
ut on Ad’s ranch. “This disappearance is a terrible thing, a terrible thing.”
Ad’s ranch manager, Bill Hosler, agreed. “He’s just as nice as can be.”
Many people in town knew Ad. They’d gone to school with him, hunted, skied, or transacted business with him. Many had a genuine affinity for the eldest Coors brother.
“He’d always smile and call me by my first name. Just a real nice guy,” said Louis Kubat, who played softball with Ad in the Arvada League when Ad played first base for Golden years earlier.
Almost anyone asked would say he was a good man. Good, despite the fact he was rich. But Goldenites couldn’t begrudge him that. He wore his wealth humbly. That was one of the things people liked most about the Coors family: their humility.
“Nicest guy you’d ever meet,” said Arthur Jensen, the chief brewer in the Coors kettle room. “Always wore a smile and said hello and called you by your first name, and let you call him Ad, not Mr. Coors or whatever. He always seemed interested in what I was doing, and I liked that about him.”
“Everyone in town knew my father,” Spike recounted as an adult. “He was just like Grandpa and Great-Grandpa, a complete workaholic, a financial success, active in the town, and respected by everyone.”
That’s why townspeople were in disbelief. At gas stations, taverns, and beauty and barbershops all around town, everyone was talking about the disappearance. To many, an attack on a Coors was an attack on Golden and everyone in it. Coors was Golden, and Golden was Coors.
Who would do such a thing? That was the question of the day at establishments all around town. Anyone who dared denounce a Coors now did so at his peril. Even a person who had no beef with a Coors could become a suspect just because he was peculiar. For instance, Jack Peters, in charge of Coors plant security, heard from a guard that a man named Robert Everhart should be checked out. Peters telephoned Captain Bray and told him that although he couldn’t put his finger on anything specific, there were “suspicious and odd circumstances surrounding Everhart, too numerable to mention.” He was investigated and eliminated as a suspect.
Others were more specific in their charges. Anyone who’d ever harbored ill feelings toward a Coors was suspected. Anyone in a dispute over property rights years earlier, or someone Ad may have cut off in traffic, or an employee that had been fired by a Coors, any kind of run-in was enough to raise suspicion. The theories and suspects abounded that morning and throughout the day. One possibility in particular made everyone in town a bit nervous: could it be a union man?
“Both major Coors industries have been embroiled in labor strife during the past few years,” reported Rocky Mountain News that day. “Colorado unions, in recent months, have placed an unofficial boycott on Coors products because of what they term unfair labor practices at Coors.… Bill Coors, however, did say Tuesday night that he discounted any beliefs his brother’s disappearance stemmed from labor difficulties at the Coors firms.”
“Ad was never a part of the difficulty at the brewery,” Walter Brown said.
Union leaders especially hoped a member hadn’t committed this crime. If he had, the news would drive a stake through Local 366 once and for all.
When asked about the possibility, Joe Coors scoffed. “All we want, all the whole family wants, is Ad’s safe return.” When pressed by a reporter, Joe said, “Ad’s received no threats from anyone, particularly labor. We are completely baffled. Bill and I are very strong in the feeling, however, that this has nothing to do with the labor movement.”
* * *
That same morning, a motorcade of four dark, unmarked sedans drove down Washington Avenue, passing beneath the famous banner that stretched across the street:
The FBI was officially on the case. Code name: COORNAP. Each sedan carried FBI field agents as unmarked as their cars—dark suits, ties, starched white shirts, fedoras, trench coats, trimmed hair, shaven faces, and sunglasses or eyeglasses. That was the directive from J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, D.C., the agency’s director since 1924. Another fifty officers of the FBI Western Kidnap Squad were combing a thirty-mile radius. Hoover stamped the case top priority. He’d given Mr. Coors his private assurances. A quick resolution of the high-profile case would also give the agency a gold star just as the motion picture The FBI Story was playing in theaters around the country.
One of the bureau-issued sedans dropped two agents at Mr. Coors’s house and Joe’s home to man the telephone surveillance and recording devices that had been set up by Denver undersheriff A. S. Reider and Denver Police chief Walter Nelson, with the help of Golden Telephone Company employee Carl Horblett. Other agents stopped in Golden to question persons in town. The remaining agents stopped at the Adolph Coors Company to question anyone who might have useful information, particularly Bill and Joe Coors, who had returned to work that day.
Similar cars with agents headed to Bill Coors’s house in Denver to operate the telephone recorder and to Ad’s home near Morrison to question Mary and relieve the county deputies who were conducting surveillance inside and outside her home, watching for kidnappers who might be staking out the ranch to drop off a ransom note. One agent joined deputies standing on the road in front of Ad and Mary’s house, stopping all passing cars and trucks and questioning their occupants. Other agents drove to the sheriff’s office to question deputies and investigators, and to Turkey Creek Bridge to question anyone who lived nearby who might have seen or heard anything Tuesday morning.
Agents arriving at the bridge site were met by newsmen from Denver, Golden, and other Colorado towns, and by correspondents from national news services who’d flown into Denver the night before. Reporters in turn were met with a curt “No comment.” All questions were referred to Special Agent in Charge Scott Werner at the FBI office in Denver. “The FBI will maintain complete silence until the release of the victim,” said FBI special agent Edward Kemper. “Our interest is the safe return of Mr. Coors.” The FBI also instructed members of the Coors family not to speak to reporters.
County investigators had completed their collection of evidence at the bridge the day before the FBI’s arrival. The remaining task for the sheriff’s office at Turkey Creek Canyon was to find Ad Coors. Volunteers arrived early that morning and set up tables near the bridge with pots of hot coffee, doughnuts, sandwiches, and water for those men in the mounted posse and jeep patrol who had spent the entire night searching and for those who’d arrived at sunup to join or relieve them.
An H-19 helicopter sent from Lowry Air Force Base outside Denver hovered above the lifting fog, trying to spot a man stranded or hurt, or anything that appeared out of the ordinary among the rocky hills and ravines. US Air Force C-45 and C-47 airplanes and Civil Air Patrol Piper Super Cubs were standing by to take off if needed.
Despite all the manpower, horses, jeeps, and aircraft, there was no sign of Ad Coors. “We haven’t been able to find a thing,” said Captain Morris of the sheriff’s office. “We’re as baffled now as we were yesterday.”
The FBI took a different tactic. Agents, along with some county investigators, visited all houses in the Turkey Creek Canyon area and interviewed their residents. One was Mrs. Rosemary Stitt:
It was about eight o’clock, right after I sent my kids off to school, about twenty minutes after. The bus picks them up around twenty till every morning. First, it sounded like somebody hollered down at the bridge. I can hear people talkin’ down there pretty plain most times. Hear their cars crossing over. I live only ’bout a quarter mile away. But yesterday the wind was blowing really hard so I couldn’t hear so plain. I was sittin’ in front of my sewing machine by the window. It sounded like one or two words is all. It was two different people, I think. Then I heard a cracklin’ noise like lightnin’ striking a tree. As a little girl, I heard lightnin’ split a tree in half right next to the house. That’s what it sounded like. I looked out the kitchen window to see if a tree fell down out back but didn’t see nothin’. So it was then I got to thinkin’ it might be a gunshot. Ju
st one shot. Or, it coulda been two really close together.
I talked to Bill about it last night, that’s my husband, and he asked if it sounded like a .22 that him and my son shoot at rabbits or like a .38 they shoot ever once in a while at targets they set up in the hills. I said it sounded more like the .38 ’cause it sounded like lightnin’. The shot came about a minute or two after I heard the hollerin’. I thought it might be poachers shootin’ game on the preserve. We’ve had some trouble with hunters up here. Or maybe some surveyors I seen workin’. I didn’t hear nothin’ else, so I went back to doin’ housework.… Later on in the mornin’, though, about ten thirty, eleven o’clock, I heard summore hollerin’ and a horn honkin’. About fifteen, twenty minutes after that, the milkman showed up and told me about a car blockin’ the bridge down yonder. He asked to use the telephone, but we ain’t got one. So he left and said he’d telephone the police at his next stop.
Mrs. Pauline Moore, who lived with her husband, Cloyce, two and a half miles from Turkey Creek Bridge, told the FBI a similar story:
Right around eight o’clock yesterdee, I was hangin’ the wash on a clothesline out back. The wind was blowin’ real hard. I could barely get a clothespin on ’em. Then I heard a shot in the canyon real clear. I usually work on Tuesdays cleanin’ folks’ houses in Denver, but my boss called the night before and told me not to come in. The shot I heard was a far-off shot, not a close up, but a far-off shot, towards the bridge.
After hours of exhaustive interviews, the FBI learned that no one in the area had actually seen Ad Coors or his abductors on the bridge. No one could tell how many kidnappers there were. No one reported seeing a struggle or a shooting. No one saw the abductors’ car leaving the scene. Several did, however, report seeing suspicious vehicles at or near the bridge during the days before the disappearance. There was only one problem. They saw too many.
Mrs. Stitt told the FBI, “My husband said he seen a 1954 blue-green Ford parked on the bridge the week before, once with the doors open and lights on, but nobody around. Coulda been a 1955 or ’56, he said.”
