Kreck - Murder at the Brown Palace: a true story of seduction & betrayal

2003 Dick Kreck

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written
permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kreck, Dick.

Murder at the Brown Palace : a true story of
seduction & betrayal / Dick Kreck.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55591-463-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. MurderColoradoDenverCase studies. I. Title.

HV6534.D45 K74 2003

364.15230978883dc21

2002151255

Editorial: Ellen Wheat, Don Graydon, Daniel Forrest-Bank

Cover and interior design: Jack Lenzo, Alyssa Pumphrey, Brazen Husky Design

Formatting: Anne Clark

Cover images: View of the Brown Palace Hotel at Seventeenth Street and Broadway in downtown Denver, Colorado, circa 1900, courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Department (X-18338). Photograph of Isabel Patterson Springer, courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-125674). Photograph of Frank Henwood, courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Department.

Printed in Canada

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

Fulcrum Publishing

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Golden, Colorado 80403

(800) 992-2908 (303) 277-1623

www.fulcrumbooks.com

For my grandkids, who just keep coming

Foreword

H igh society. Adultery. Drugs. Multiple murder. All this and more, set in Denvers grand old hotel, the Brown Palace.

Hollywood murder-mystery writers could not have contrived a thriller as chilling as this factual account of a double murder on the night of May 24, 1911. It happened in the Marble Bar of the Brown Palace Hotel while the cause of it all, Denvers most whispered-about society vamp, waited upstairs in her suite.

The talk of the town for years, the deadly dispute over the citys most beautiful woman is now a faded memory. Even in 1911, when the affair exploded in the newspapers and in country club gossip, no one pulled the whole story together or tracked down the once passionately involved principals who went their separate, lonely ways.

The two men fighting over Isabel Sassy Patterson Springer did not include her unsuspecting husband, John W. Springer, the wealthy owner of Cross Country Ranch, respected businessman and aspiring politician. The ambitious Springer narrowly lost one of the most crooked elections in Colorado his tory, the 1904 Denver mayoral race, which Robert W. Speer won with the help of ten thousand phony votes. Springer was well known and well liked by Coloradans, including his seduc tively beautiful wife, twenty years younger than he.

Following the Brown Palace shootout, Denver wanted vengeance, something to end a series of murderous domestic disputes that outraged the citizenry but put no one behind bars. Frank Henwood, a pretty boy from back east, became a target for the forces of righteousness in two quirky, explosive trials.

Here, for the first time, is the complete story of Colorados most spectacular crime of passion. Dick Kreck, an indefatigable reporter who sticks to the facts, treats readers to the full lurid tale and its impact on a youthful western city struggling to cleanse itself of sin in all forms. A fascinating study of the supposedly better morals of the good old days, it is also a revealing look at journalism and the legal system when both were far more colorful and combative than they are today. Finally, it is a study in sexism, showing how a woman was universally condemned for doing what a man was expected to enjoy.

Kreck, who worked at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times before joining The Denver Post in 1968, knows Denver inside out. The Post s senior columnist has long been the journalist that city watchers go to first.

After two years of researching Murder at the Brown Palace, Kreck delivers a love story, a murder mystery, and a courtroom drama. This account is also a revealing history of how a brash young citys Victorian sensibilities were crushed.

Ironically, this most sensational murder case came during Denvers Progressive Reform Era, whose puritanical cleansing was aimed at sinners such as Sassy. The year after the murders, reformers ousted the easygoing Mayor Speer. They shut down Denvers Market Street red-light district in 1912. Four years later, voters imposed statewide prohibition on hard-drinking Denverites. Not only Sassy and her lovers but all Coloradans were herded into a new and puritanical age.

Thomas J. Noel (Dr. Colorado)

Acknowledgments

Nothing in this book is made up. Not by me, anyway.

This tale of love, lust, betrayal, and murder that shook Denver society in 1911 reads like a television soap opera or a tragic opera, but its all true. No one intimately involved escaped unscathed.

There are many people to thank for helping me shape a fuller picture of the incident at the Brown Palace Hotel, the tri als and their outcomes, and for support through the days of researching, writing, and rewriting. Among them:

Peter Aeby and Deborah Dix, who gave me access to
historical records at the Brown Palace; Lew Cady; Irene Frye Gay; Ellen Wheat, who got it from the beginning; Don Graydon, my copyeditor, whose sharp eye averted numerous blunders; the staff of the Genealogy and Western History Department of the Denver Public Library; my wife, Victoria Gits; David F. Halaas, former chief historian, Colorado Historical Society; Johanna Harden of the Douglas Public Library; Vickie Heath; Joe Hoppel, who researched Tony von Phuls life in St. Louis; Corrine Hunt; former Denver Mayor Quigg Newton; Tom Noel; Bob Rector; Shea Homes; Ann Student; and Ed Will.

And, finally, my gratitude to the reporters, most of them anonymous, who labored to cover the trials, and to the editors of the citys four fiercely competitive newspapers who printed column after column of testimony that lives on, even after official court documents have disappeared. The dialogue in these pages is based on contemporary newspaper accounts.

Chapter Two

The Shooting: I Was Ready for Him

I t was coming up midnight and men, laughing and talking loudly, crowded into the bar a few steps off the lobby of
the Brown Palace. The intimate barroom next to the hotels Broadway entrance was almost full; it always was when
the Broadway Theater let out.

Less than ten minutes after Follies of 1910 ended, about 11:15 p.m. on May 24, 1911, Frank Henwood found his way into the Wine Room, also known as the Marble Bar for its exquisite front bar covered with pale golden onyx imported from Mexico, the same material used in the lobby and on the massive fireplace mantel near the Seventeenth Street entrance.

Henwood was no stranger to the barroom, which he visited frequently after moving into the seventh floor of the Brown while pursuing well-to-do investors for his employer. As he entered, Henwood scanned the assemblage for a familiar face, then approached the center of the bar, near the beer taps, and joined three menA. C. Rollestone, vice president of the Victor Bank in the Colorado mountain mining town of Victor; retired Judge James Owen of Colorado Springs; and Charles Schilling, a dealer in dry goods in Victor, all of whom had been at the Follies performance.

That Owen and Henwood were still speaking was something of a surprise. The two met earlier in the evening when they were seated next to each other in Rollestones box at the theater. Shortly after they were introduced, Henwood, a man
for whom formalities were time wasted, smacked the judge on the shoulder, pointed to the stage, where the girls of Follies bounded about, and said, Take your choice, old boy, and Ill get her for you after the show is over. Owen was not amused and told Henwood so. But after the two men met in the barroom, Henwood apologized. I didnt mean anything, old chap. You just dont understand our free and easy Western ways.