by Philip Jett
The trial, which included jury selection, had lasted thirteen full days and two half days on Saturdays. The prosecution had examined ninety-two witnesses and presented one hundred and four exhibits during the trial. The defense had not called a single witness.
CHAPTER 24
At 10:45 on the snowy morning of Tuesday, March 28, the jury began its deliberations. Joe Corbett was out of his suit and back in prison clothes at the county jail. The man who tried his best to keep Corbett in a cell, District Attorney Ron Hardesty, was home sick in bed with a stubborn cold. Defense attorneys were in their offices, trying to catch up on other work. All they and everyone in Golden and Denver could do was wait.
That first morning, Leroy Sweet, an employee of the US Bureau of Land Management, was selected as the jury foreman. His first order of business was to take a ballot of the jurors to see where everyone stood before deliberations. He was surprised by the results. The vote was four guilty, three not guilty, and five undecided.
“All right, it’s almost a tie. Let’s roll up our sleeves. We’ve got some work to do,” said the foreman.
They deliberated more than three hours before taking a break at noon. They returned after lunch and deliberated all afternoon and into the night with only a break for dinner. More ballots were taken. Progress was slow. Jurors were unsure, sought answers to questions, and reviewed the evidence more. They kept going until they retired, frustrated, at 11:30. No one wanted to be a part of a hung jury.
The entire day, Corbett rested in his cell. Perhaps resting is not the right term. He was dreading the verdict. While he hoped he would be acquitted, he knew that a guilty verdict would be the death knell for anything he’d wanted to do in the future. He would be sent to a maximum-security prison for the remainder of his life.
The following day, the jury reconvened its deliberations. When a bailiff exited the jury room after delivering lunch, he was questioned by a reporter.
“Anything?”
The bailiff shook his head.
“How did they look? Mad? Crying? You think they’re almost ready?”
Bailiffs were instructed not to discuss the case with anyone.
Foreman Sweet directed another ballot: ten guilty, two not guilty. Quite a bit of movement toward guilt, yet their job was unfinished. The two could stand pat or convince others to join or rejoin them. Even if they did decide not guilty, or the jury ended up hung, it didn’t mean Corbett would go free. California officials had placed a hold on Corbett and were prepared to fly to Colorado to escort him back to complete his second-degree murder sentence, probably in Folsom Prison, should the jury fail to find him guilty of Ad Coors’s murder.
“What is taking them so long?” Mary asked a friend. “It’s clear to me he did it. There’s plenty of evidence. The FBI doesn’t make mistakes. Don’t they know that?”
She was not the only one worried about the delay.
“What in blue blazes is going on over there?” Hardesty asked Juhan on the telephone. Juhan’s choice of expletives indicated his shared displeasure.
Wermuth was just as agitated about the delay. He’d hoped for the gas chamber and had tried his best to obtain a confession to send his infamous guest there. Corbett had to get life, thought Wermuth, otherwise the entire state would be a laughingstock and him with it.
But not everyone was upset. Defense attorneys Erickson and Mackay were encouraged by the continued deliberations. Perhaps the defendant would receive an acquittal or a hung jury. Their client had professed his innocence despite their doubts, but it was their job to see he got the best defense they could give, and that meant an acquittal.
“Everything Joe Corbett told me was accurate, that I was able to investigate,” Erickson told a reporter of The Denver Post years later.
A few hours afterward, another ballot was taken. It was close—eleven guilty, one not guilty. A single holdout stood between Joe Corbett and a first-degree murder conviction. But only those in the jury room knew the count. Those on the outside could only speculate and hope.
The continued wait had become agonizing. Corbett read. Mary tried to keep busy. The lawyers worked on other cases. They believed they knew what the outcome should be, but they also knew it was impossible to predict what happens in a jury room. The dynamics inside that room take on a life of their own during deliberations. Ordinary citizens can reason with extraordinary clarity, sometimes with more insight than the lawyers.
At last, after several hours of deliberation and an astounding twelve ballots, the foreman stepped out of the jury room at 4:17 on Wednesday and motioned to one of the bailiffs, A. W. Buell. “We’ve reached a verdict.”
The bailiff entered the judge’s chambers to notify Judge Stoner.
“Call Wermuth and the lawyers. Round ’em all up. Tell ’em to hurry. This jury wants to go home,” said Stoner.
Wermuth delivered his message with a laugh. “Get your suit on, Joe. The jury has a one-way ticket to give you.”
Without expression, Corbett sat up from his bunk and began dressing. Minutes later, with Wermuth on one side and Captain Bray on the other, as they’d done several times before, Corbett and his armed escorts walked across the street and into a courthouse already filled with people, many of whom had spent all day there awaiting a verdict.
Assistant District Attorneys Hite and Juhan arrived quickly, but a sick Hardesty would be the last to show.
Corbett sat quietly as he waited for his lawyers. The only emotion he displayed was an occasional smile as Sheriff Wermuth stood near and needled him with wisecracks. But Corbett didn’t break his silence. He simply ignored the sheriff. Secretly, he may have wanted to say, “You may be joining me soon, Mr. Sneak Thief.” But Corbett’s defense attorneys joined their client at the defense table. Nothing more was said.
A single “sound camera” was set up to record the verdict and share its film with other radio and television stations. The judge had forbidden television cameras and live radio during the trial.
The gallery grew quieter with each passing minute until the courtroom was completely still.
“All rise!” shouted the bailiff as Judge Stoner entered. “The First District Court of Colorado, the Honorable Judge Stoner presiding—” The judge banged the gavel before the bailiff could finish.
“Has the jury reached a unanimous verdict?” he asked as soon as he was seated.
“We have, Your Honor,” replied the jury foreman. It was 4:45 on March 29, 1961, one year, one month, and twenty days since Ad’s disappearance.
“The bailiff will pick up the verdict of the jury, if you please,” instructed Stoner. The bailiff handed it to the judge. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will listen to your verdict, if you will, please. ‘We, the jury, duly empaneled and sworn in the above entitled cause, find the defendant Joseph Corbett Jr. guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the information herein, and fix the penalty at imprisonment for life, at hard labor, in the penitentiary.’”
The room rustled with commentary, but most were not surprised. Corbett actually smiled and laughed, in all likelihood from nervousness or defiance. However, the jury’s sentence of life in state prison could not be imposed immediately. Corbett’s defense counsel had six weeks in which to prepare and present an argument for the judge to consider granting a new trial—a procedural long shot.
“At last,” was Mary’s only comment after receiving a call from a friend. She hung up the phone and returned to her bedroom. Ad Coors’s remains would be cremated and spread on Aspen Mountain three months later as part of a small family ceremony. Corbett’s conviction changed nothing in Mary’s life.
“No comment,” were Corbett’s words as he was led back to jail by Sheriff Wermuth. He’d said nothing to his jailer or lawyers or the judge. He’d been self-contained for five months. He wasn’t about to change now. (But in a brief 1964 interview, Corbett uncharacteristically changed his tune. “No man should be incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. I am innocent.” He
did so again three decades later in 1996. “I can see why so many people think I’m guilty, that it’s an open-and-shut case. But it wasn’t. The jury was out three days,” Corbett told Denver Post reporters through a cracked door. “It would be futile to retry the case in the newspapers now. What’s the point?”)
Defense counsel’s motion for a new trial, which included a list of legal errors that supposedly occurred during the trial and pretrial proceedings, was denied by Judge Stoner on May 12, 1961. That same day, the judge signed the order committing Corbett to prison:
THAT THE SAID defendant Joseph Corbett Jr. alias Walter Osborne be … conveyed by the Sheriff of the County of Jefferson with all convenient speed to the Penitentiary of the State of Colorado, there to be delivered to the Warden or Keeper thereof, to be by him kept and confined therein for life at hard labor, to be clothed and fed as the law directs.
On the morning of May 23, 1961, a shackled Corbett, accompanied by his armed escort Sheriff Wermuth and Wermuth’s wife, Julia, made the 125-mile trip by automobile to the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, where Corbett would begin his life sentence at hard labor. The prison, called “Old Max,” had been built in 1871 and enlarged in the 1930s, including the addition of a gas chamber. It was not a pleasant place to spend a single day, much less one’s life. It was built of sandstone and rough concrete, hot in the summer and cold in the winter, a prison of the Old West, built to lock up stagecoach bandits, cattle rustlers, and gunslingers.
“So long, Joe,” said Sheriff Wermuth, after receiving a “body receipt” signed on behalf of the warden, Harry Tinsley. A few minutes later, Corbett was clothed in prison garb and led to his cell. Gone was his old Chino prisoner number, A-17293. Now he would simply be known as Joe, Prisoner No. 33322. Unlike the minimum-security prison at Chino, Corbett wouldn’t be escaping from Old Max.
But Joe Corbett would get out. Colorado changed state law to require a parole hearing after ten years for those serving life sentences. By 1978, Corbett had become the longest-serving inmate at Cañon City’s state prison. Since he’d been an exemplary prisoner credited with saving many prisoners’ lives working in the infirmary as a lab technician (not quite hard labor), the parole board decided to release Corbett, but yielded to a public outcry led by the governor and the Coors family. A year later, the parole board again approved his release, this time unmoved by public opinion. Corbett flew to San Francisco to live with a cousin, only to violate his parole the next day by returning to Denver, where he was spotted by a reporter. An immediate manhunt ensued. Everyone believed Corbett was out for bloody revenge. The Coors plant beefed up security, and the Coors family received protection. A sheriff’s deputy was posted at Hardesty’s house.
It turned out Corbett was in Denver for only four hours to close a bank account, returning to San Francisco the same day. He was arrested five days later and returned to prison. He was paroled for the final time over a year later on December 12, 1980, at the age of fifty-two, having served only eighteen and a half years for murdering Ad Coors.
A lot had changed in almost two decades. He walked out of prison wearing a pastel blue leisure suit the same year the space shuttle Enterprise was towed through Denver on its way to California. He would live the rest of his life in Denver, only ten miles from where he murdered Ad Coors. He said he was going to get his degree and find a job as a lab technician, but as had been the case before, his plan was all talk, and the only steady work he could find outside prison was as a driver for the Salvation Army. When that stint was over, he lived off his meager Social Security checks. As an elderly man, Corbett said he was haunted by whispers, “There goes the guy who killed Adolph Coors.” Perhaps what haunted him was his conscience.
Corbett shot and killed for a third and final time on August 24, 2009. Suffering from terminal cancer, he took his own life by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head while lying in bed in room 307 at the Royal Chateau Apartments in Denver, where he’d lived for twenty-nine years. He was eighty-two. He didn’t leave a note and never admitted his guilt. The once intelligent college student with a bright future perhaps had become the last victim of the murderous side of Joe Corbett.
“I just take it in stride,” Corbett had said in a brief final interview by Denver Post reporters though a cracked apartment door in 1996. “It’s one of those bizarre things that happened.… I’ve put it behind me. It’s a gruesome memory.”
As for Mary Coors, it was impossible to put it behind her. She never recovered from the crippling blow. Mary’s short life had been filled with deaths. Besides Ad dying at forty-four, Mary’s mother died at the age of fifty, her father at fifty-nine, and most tragically of all, her daughter, Brooke, at the age of twenty-six from lymphoma, leaving behind a husband and a young son; and then Mary, who died at the age of sixty on July 26, 1975, from injuries suffered falling down stairs at a friend’s home in Aspen. She is buried in a solitary setting under a large Douglas fir at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver beside her daughter, Brooke. She never remarried.
Adolph Herman Joseph Coors III. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection)
Adolph Herman Joseph Coors III shortly before his death. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection)
Mary Urquhart Grant Coors. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection)
One of the “No Hunting” placards posted around Ad Coors’s ranch. The irony is obvious. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection)
Primitive Turkey Creek Bridge: The scene of the attempted kidnapping that ended in murder. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Jefferson County Mounted Posse and Jeep Patrol gather at Turkey Creek Bridge to search for Ad Coors. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH 2129 RMN)
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Jeep Patrol examines a map of the area surrounding Turkey Creek Bridge. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH 2129 RMN)
Three posse riders cross Turkey Creek Bridge on the night of the kidnapping. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH 2129 RMN)
Undersheriff Lew Hawley boards a plane on his way to the FBI Lab. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Ransom note mailed by Joe Corbett to Mary Coors after Ad Coors’s murder. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Jefferson County’s Captain Morris points out a bloodstain on Ad Coors’s Travelall’s front seat. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Joe Corbett’s 1951 Mercury sedan burned in Atlantic City, New Jersey. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
FBI Wanted Poster issued six weeks after the kidnapping, on March 22, 1960. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH1625)
California arrest record of Joseph Corbett Jr. shows that he escaped prison on August 1, 1955. (California Dept. of Corrections & Rehabilitation)
A young Corbett following his arrest for the murder of USAF Sergeant Alan Lee Reed in 1951. (California Dept. of Corrections & Rehabilitation)
Jefferson County Sheriff Arthur Wermuth (left) escorts Joseph Corbett Jr. from the Denver Jail following his extradition. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Joseph Corbett Jr. awaiting a hearing in Golden, Colorado. (Douglas County History Research Center, Douglas County Libraries)
Joseph Corbett Jr. in the Jefferson County Jail following his extradition from Canada. (Douglas County History Research Center, Douglas County Libraries)
Jefferson and Douglas County authorities inspect the crime scene. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Ad Coors’s right shoulder blade: The two fatal shots are visible. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Ad Coors’s bloody jacket: Two bullet holes are visible on the right. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Ad Coors’s bloody shirt: Two bullet holes are visible on the right shoulder. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Ad Coors�
��s bloody undershirt: Two bullet holes are visible on the right shoulder. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Douglas County Coroner Doug Andrews and Sheriff John Hammond view Ad Coors’s skull in a box. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Ad Coors’s skull and lower jawbone discovered at the dump site. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Joseph Corbett Jr. escorted to court by Sheriff Arthur Wermuth. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Barney O’Kane, Ronald Hardesty, Joseph Corbett Jr., and Malcolm Mackay at a pretrial hearing. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Joseph Corbett Jr. with one of his attorneys, William H. Erickson, during the Coors murder trial. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Left to right: Defense attorney Malcolm Mackay; prosecutors Ronald Hardesty and Richard Hite; and defendant Joseph Corbett Jr. listen with the jury as the judge reads the verdict. (The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection WH2129 RMN)
Jury’s verdict: Guilty of first degree murder. (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
