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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
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History sleuth says evidence backs Colorado cannibals story |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Thursday, 16 September 2004 |
History sleuth says evidence backs Colorado cannibal's story
By ROBERT WELLER, Associated Press Writer September 16, 2004
DENVER - More than 130 years after Alferd Packer ate his five companions to survive a Colorado winter, a museum curator is making a case that the nation's most notorious cannibal was innocent of murder.
David Bailey says he's no Indiana Jones, but years of research on a 142-year-old pistol and detective work at the site where Packer was stranded support at least part of Packer's story.
"Curators normally don't get an opportunity like this. We usually are in the museum piecing things together," said Bailey, who works at the Museum of Western Colorado in Grand Junction.
Packer was convicted of murdering the five men - prospectors he was guiding - but always insisted he had killed only one of them, Shannon Bell. Packer said he shot Bell after Bell killed the four others in the party and then attacked him with a hatchet.
Ten years ago, Bailey happened upon a gun in the museum's collection that was marked as having been found where Packer and the five prospectors were stranded high in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado in the winter of 1873-1874.
Bailey said his research confirmed the gun in the museum's collection, an 1862 Colt Police pistol, had been found in a 1950 dig at the site where Packer had allegedly killed the five men.
Bailey began wondering if Packer's story could be true. "When we started the case we just wanted to know either way," he said.
Bailey and the museum staff then began looking at documents. They found the journal of a Civil War veteran who had seen the bodies and said one of them, Bell, had died of two gunshot wounds.
Bailey and other staff made several expeditions to the remote site near Lake City, 130 miles from the nearest interstate highway in Hinsdale County, which covers 1,124 square miles and has a full-time population of 790.
Among other things they found was lead residue on Bell's clothes. Tests with an X-ray spectrograph showed the lead matched the lead in the three bullets still in the gun - two chambers were empty. Later, a bullet fragment was found in a sample taken from under Bell's body.
At his trial, Packer said he had gone out to look for food and when he returned to camp he found the redheaded Bell "roasting a piece of meat which he had cut out of the leg of the German butcher," Frank Miller.
Packer said he shot Bell as he attacked with the hatchet. Afterward, he said, he tried every day to find a way out of the mountains "but could not so I lived off the flesh of these men ...."
He predicted that someday he would be vindicated. He told a story of the men crying and praying as they starved, trying to live off pine gum and rosebuds.
"I have always suspected Packer was innocent. That is why it is good that Bailey is digging up fingerprints," said Colorado historian Tom Noel. "He has done good work."
Last month Bailey was honored for his work by the American Association for State and Local History.
Forensic anthropologist Walter Birkby of Tucson, Ariz., who was involved in an exhumation of the bodies in 1989, remains skeptical. He said there was no evidence of a gunshot wound, and that what appeared to be a bullet hole was the result of an animal gnawing on the bones.
Noel wasn't the only one who suspected Packer was innocent. Under pressure from a campaign led by Denver Post columnist Poly Pry, Packer was granted a conditional parole in 1901. He had escaped execution only on a technicality.
Packer spent 18 years in prison, tending a garden and offering his opinion on everything from tourism to the Boer War. He complained he was rotting in prison "while the Donner Party people are becoming millionaires in California."
During the winter of 1846-47, 81 people traveling to California were trapped in the Sierra Nevadas and half of them died. Some members of the group ate the flesh of the dead to survive. And some of those who made it out of the mountains later became wealthy.
After Packer's release he made dollhouses and handed out candy to children, living on a pension from his service in the Civil War.
He is immortalized today at the University of Colorado, where the student union food court is named after him.
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On the Net:
Colorado State Archive file on Packer: http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/pen/packer/
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=12939263&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=222077&rfi=6 |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Death is the golden key that opens the palace of Eternity.” Milton
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