The Death of an Heir

by Philip Jett

  “About how many times did you observe the defendant wearing a hat?”

  “A number of times.”

  Hardesty moved on quickly without drawing attention to Merys’s answer, which aided the defense. He called to the stand Corbett’s coworker Arthur Brynaert, and once again he shouldn’t have asked about the hat.

  “Do you recall his hat at all?”

  “Yes, I recall his hat,” replied Brynaert.

  “What color was it?”

  “It was brown—a light tan.”

  “I call your attention to People’s Exhibit C2 and ask you if the hat you saw him wearing is similar to that one?”

  “No, sir. It wasn’t.”

  Hardesty must have been surprised. Apparently, he had not spoken with Brynaert about what his testimony would be before calling him as a witness, or perhaps Brynaert had not been completely forthcoming. Whatever the case, Hardesty had to hope it wasn’t too damaging to his case.

  Another exonerating factor was the mysterious fingerprint found inside Ad Coors’s Travelall by the FBI.

  After Hardesty had called several FBI agents to the stand to bring out the evidence of the pail found at Corbett’s apartment containing chain, which agents dusted for fingerprints and took eighteen photos of, FBI fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona from Washington, D.C., testified, “On the basis of comparing the fingerprint on the paint bucket with the fingerprints that appear on the fingerprint card taken by Deputy John Phillips, it is my opinion that this latent print was made by the left middle finger of Joseph Corbett and only his left middle finger could have made that. No one else’s finger could have made that contact print which appears in People’s Exhibit T3 [the paint bucket].”

  While Hardesty was pleased with the FBI agent’s testimony regarding the fingerprint on the pail, defense attorneys decided to attempt to flip the testimony in their favor. Malcolm Mackay handled the cross-examination of Agent Latona.

  “Now, you received a packet of film in the mail from Agent Orr in the early part of February 1960, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” replied Latona.

  “That was identified to you as coming from a Travelall automobile belonging to Adolph Coors III?”

  “That is correct.”

  “How many films did you receive at that time?”

  “Actually, only one latent fingerprint of value in those negatives.”

  “There was one latent fingerprint of value. Did you make positive identification of that one latent fingerprint?”

  “That print has not been identified.”

  “That has not been identified by anyone?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  Even before the defense attorneys put on their evidence, their cross-examination of state witnesses had revealed conflicting testimony regarding the hat and the existence of an unidentified fingerprint in Ad Coors’s Travelall to the jury. The defense would hammer those facts later on during their closing argument, ardently pointing out the discrepancy concerning the identification of the hat and how the prosecution had failed to mention the unidentified print in the Travelall even though they’d painstakingly taken eighteen photographs of the solitary print on a paint bucket from Corbett’s apartment that contained a few feet of chain. Defense attorneys hoped this evidence, taken with the fact that the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial, would create reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror.

  * * *

  Mary read the newspaper, but when she turned to the coverage of the trial, she only read the headlines. She wanted no part of it. She only wanted Corbett convicted. She’d prefer that he go to the gas chamber, but she understood that there’d be no execution.

  Mary had not attended any of the murder trial, nor had any other Coors. But on Tuesday, March 21, Mary and her brothers-in-law, Bill and Joe Coors, would be asked to testify. Mary arrived wearing a tailored camel hair coat with a brown scarf and white gloves. She entered the courthouse with Holly Coors and Cecily Kendrick. Mary was soon joined by Bill and Joe as they sat in the hallway on the second floor outside the courtroom door, waiting to be called to testify.

  Mary’s nerves should have been popping, but she’d taken something earlier to settle them.

  “Just stay calm, Mary. Don’t let him scare you. He can’t do anything to anybody now. You don’t even have to look at him,” said Holly.

  “That’s right,” said Cecily. “If anybody should be nervous or feel bad, it should be him. He’ll get his comeuppance, rest assured.”

  Mary had grown comfortable with the district attorney’s questions during the meeting with the Coors corporate attorney and Hardesty. Her biggest worry, the one keeping her up nights recently, was being in the same room with the man who killed her husband and her children’s father. He’d be sitting at the defense table not far from the witness-box. She hated him, and now she had to remain composed as she spoke about the consequences his horrible acts had caused her family. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her break down.

  Bill was called to testify first. He was handed a red crayon and asked to trace the route Ad had taken on the morning of his disappearance and to identify articles of clothing recovered from the dump site as those belonging to his deceased brother. After the lunch break, he and Joe would be called to the witness stand to testify about their arrival at Turkey Creek Bridge. But first the DA wanted to hear from Mary.

  “The People call Mary Grant Coors,” announced Assistant District Attorney Richard Hite.

  All heads in the gallery turned as Mary entered the courtroom. It felt like a march to the guillotine for her. She raised her right hand and swore “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

  Mary saw Hite approaching, glanced at friends in the gallery, and then … she saw her husband’s murderer. He was no longer merely a photograph in the newspaper, but a well-groomed man wearing a suit and tie, trying to mask that he was the monster who’d stolen the life of her husband.

  “Would you give us your name, please?” asked Hite, who would tone down his customary flamboyant courtroom demeanor out of respect for the victim’s widow.

  “Mary Grant Coors,” she said in a low, hardly audible voice.

  “What is your address?”

  “C/o Adolph Coors Company, Golden.”

  “Where did you live until July 1958?”

  “Until July 1958, at 840 South Steele Street,” she said, her voice growing stronger as she spoke firmly with deep breaths.

  “After July 1958, did you move?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “To Morrison, Colorado.”

  “Are you familiar with Jefferson County?”

  “Yes.”

  Mary was shown a black-and-white aerial photo of the area that included their ranch and Turkey Creek Bridge and was asked to point out her home and then the bridge. Those in the courtroom were hushed, hanging on her every word.

  “When was the last time you saw your husband, Adolph Coors III?”

  “About eight o’clock the morning of February 9, 1960.”

  “Have you seen him since that time?”

  “No.”

  “What was your husband’s condition of health?”

  “Very good, indeed, excellent.”

  “What was his mental health?”

  “Cheerful, good, as it always was.”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” said Erickson as he stood. “This line of questioning is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.”

  “Overruled. Please proceed.”

  “Do you recall, Mrs. Coors, how he was attired when you last saw him that morning of February 9, 1960?”

  “I certainly do.”

  Mary was then asked if she had spoken to FBI agent Raymond Fox on September 11, 1960, about the personal effects and clothes that had been discovered near the dump.

  Hite continued with his questioning. “Are
you married?”

  “Yes, I am,” Mary replied in the present tense.

  “What is your husband’s name?”

  “It was Adolph Coors III,” she said, emphasizing the past tense with a sarcastic tone.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Four.”

  “What are their names and ages?” The prosecution wanted the jurors to hear who the youngest victims of Corbett’s crime were.

  “Mary Brooke, nineteen; Cecily Grant, seventeen; Adolph Coors IV, fifteen; and James Grant, eleven.”

  Richard Hite walked to a table at which sat deputy clerk Mrs. JoAn Ardourel to retrieve another exhibit. He rejoined his witness.

  “Do you know who owned this?” asked Hite, showing Mary a key ring tagged Exhibit A.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “My husband.”

  Hite picked up each of Ad’s articles of clothing and jewelry he was wearing the day of his disappearance and, for consideration by the jury, asked Mary to identify each one—the bloody jacket, the blood-soiled and torn shirt, the pants ripped apart by wild animals, shoes that were chewed, a soiled monogrammed handkerchief, his wristwatch, his tie clip, and his gloves, all recovered from the mountainside dump. Each time, Mary answered that it was owned by her husband or it looked like his or the item he wore.

  “Thank you. You’re excused, Mrs. Coors,” said Judge Stoner, gently smiling, after the defense attorneys indicated no interest in cross-examining her.

  Mary walked past Corbett without taking another glimpse. Corbett simply looked down at his hands, making steeples with his fingers like a child. She had done as she intended. She had remained calm and unemotional.

  Everyone watched Mary as she walked gracefully down the courtroom aisle toward the door, as she’d done almost five months earlier after her husband’s estate hearing. Some in the gallery bent or rose slightly in their seats to get a better view.

  As Rocky Mountain News reported, “Her appearance was brief. But her presence will be felt for the duration of the trial.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Corbett was confined to his cell that Tuesday evening, having changed out of his suit to prison clothes. He stretched out on the narrow cot as he read Sheriff Wermuth’s March copy of Fortune. A smile flashed across his face as he recalled how that morning his attorney had wrangled over legal jargon with the judge, who scolded counsel for it in an old-school, Western manner.

  The trial actually was a welcome distraction for Corbett from the tedium of being locked in a six-by-eight-foot cell for the last five months. Besides the change of surroundings, it provided intellectual stimulation. Corbett analyzed each day’s evidence, the testimony, the judge’s rulings, and most important, the countenances of the jurors. Some days seemed to go in his favor. Other days were even funny, like the day plaster from the ceiling fell on a juror during a rainstorm, or when his former coworker Arthur Brynaert said on the witness stand, “I don’t believe the three-pawed bear treed him, but if there’d been a tree, I bet Walt would’ve climbed it.”

  Yet he’d also had bad days, like the day Beulah Lewis showed up during jury selection saying she’d seen the whole thing, scaring the daylights out of Corbett until it was revealed she was just short of a full deck. Then a few weeks earlier, the prosecution had revealed that its witness list included white-haired, bespectacled Irene Jones, who said she saw Corbett at the Shamballah Ashrama dump at 9:45 a.m. on February 9, only ninety minutes after Ad’s disappearance. She remembered it distinctly, she claimed to the DA and the newspapers, because she was test-driving a car and wanted to try it out along Jackson Creek Road toward the dump.

  “I followed this track of another car. It was snowing when I come up on this dark car. The hood was up, and this man was standing by it. He was wearing a coat and walked to my car and said he was sorry for blocking the road, saying he had car trouble, but his clothes and hands were clean. I didn’t see any grease or dirt on them. That is why it stuck in my mind. I remember him speaking in a soft voice and in an apologetic manner. Something like a school professor.”

  Once again, the witness proved to be bogus. After FBI agents interviewed Jones, they easily concluded she was mistaken. She hadn’t been at the Shamballah Ashrama dump. It wasn’t the day of the disappearance. It wasn’t snowing. He wasn’t driving a 1951 Mercury but a Chevrolet. And the man she saw wasn’t Corbett. Like Beulah Lewis, newspapers had splashed her false claims across their pages, but she wouldn’t be called to testify.

  He’d not been so lucky when, despite a fierce objection by defense counsel that it violated Corbett’s right against self-incrimination, Judge Stoner, for identification purposes, required Corbett to open his mouth to reveal his front teeth to Hilton Pace, who’d spoken to Corbett about target shooting around his mine. Also, at the prosecutor’s request, the judge instructed Captain Bray to step down from the witness stand and place Exhibit C-2, the brown felt hat found floating in Turkey Creek, on Corbett’s head. It fit. (Captain Bray’s wife later claimed that Corbett had whispered to Bray, “I’ll get even with you.”)

  “I was taking a big risk with the hat near the end of my case because if it hadn’t fit, it could have fouled the jury,” Hardesty would later admit. “But I looked him over for a while before putting it on him,” he added with a smile.

  And then he’d had really bad days like when photographs of Ad’s skull and other bones were passed around the jury. And like earlier that very Tuesday when Mary, the murdered man’s widow with four children, took the stand. Corbett saw the faces of the jurors struggling to absorb her words, words that caused each of them pain and sympathy, some telegraphing their resultant anger in his direction.

  Corbett tried to relax in his cell and put Mary’s court appearance out of his mind. He stretched out, folded his arms behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, an occupation he’d grown quite experienced at the last five months. The smooth gray surface reinforced by steel bars hidden beneath the heavy cement stared back at Corbett every day and night. Sometimes he envisioned a movie screen and would permit his imagination to run his favorite film across it. Once reality crowded in again, the ceiling transformed into simply the other side of the floor above him. That’s when Corbett would grab a magazine and hold it between his face and the ceiling, no longer wishing to view the concrete lid on his cage.

  Waiting for the end of the trial weighed heavily on the accused. He wished the trial could last for weeks or months, giving him as much time possible as a big fish in a small county jail rather than an educated minnow in an overcrowded state prison full of sharks. At times, the thought of where he was going made him nauseated. Surely at other times, he kicked himself for flubbing up the kidnapping. He could have knocked Coors out with the pistol or shot up in the air and ordered him to stop. He couldn’t stop thinking about the half-million-dollar ransom he’d forsaken. He could’ve been living the high life in South America by now.

  Corbett had had months to second-guess his mistakes. To him, it was a good plan. It should have worked. It just didn’t. If anything, he probably blamed Ad Coors for his plan’s failure. Corbett never appeared the least bit contrite.

  “Naturally, there’s some tension,” said Sheriff Wermuth to reporters asking how Corbett was coping with the wait. “But as far as not being able to sleep or sit, no. The man seems to have no feeling at all.”

  Corbett wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of seeing him squirm. Something, ironically, he and his victim’s wife held in common, though unlike Mary, most believed Corbett was impervious to emotion, particularly kindness and compassion.

  “He was calm and cooperative, didn’t seem to have a care in the world,” said Captain James Shumate.

  * * *

  “Would you state your name, please?” asked District Attorney Hardesty on March 24, the twelfth and penultimate day of the trial. Handheld fans and hats waved back and forth as the courtroom grew stuffy from an overactive boiler.

  “M
ary Grant Coors.”

  “And you are the same Mrs. Coors who previously testified?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Coors, I hand you People’s Exhibits B-5 [the ransom envelope] and A-5 [the ransom note]. I ask if you can identify the exhibits.”

  “Yes, I can. This is the letter I received on February 10 of 1960.”

  The courtroom was perfectly quiet as Hardesty began to read the ransom letter and then asked the judge if the ransom letter and envelope could be passed among the jurors. A bailiff handed them to the jury.

  “Who was present when you first observed those exhibits?”

  “My brothers-in-law, Bill and Joe Coors, and certain members of the FBI. I cannot remember who.”

  “What did you do when you first observed the letter?”

  “I felt a little bit relieved, because it gave us hope that Ad could still be alive. And the family met together, and we decided to go ahead and comply with the request in this note.”

  “What did you do in an effort to comply with the note?”

  “Well, it took a little while obviously to fulfill the requests that were put into this note. The unmarked, used money was prepared and transported to us from a bank in Boston. I stayed at home. I sent my children to be with their grandparents, because the household was very upset. I didn’t want the children upset any more than I could help. And we went ahead and got the money and waited.”

  “How often did you see your children after that?”

  “Objection, Your Honor. Irrelevant.”

  “Overruled. Let’s find out. You may answer, Mrs. Coors.”

  “I talked to them every day. They didn’t go to school. They were upset. They didn’t go to school for two weeks. They did their work at their grandparents’ home. I talked to them every evening, and I went over and saw them every other day.”

  “Do you recall whether or not the other items of the note with relation to the newspaper ad were complied with?”

  “They were as soon as possible.”

  “When did you first observe the ad in the paper?”

  “Saturday evening, the thirteenth of February.”

  “How long did the ad run, do you recall?”