Waved to his wife and headed for a train wreck

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Not far from my house, very near the present-day North entrance to the United States Air Force Academy, once stood the town of Husted. Named after pioneer lumberman and early El Paso County Commissioner Calvin R. Husted, the town was never what you might call a thriving metropolis. But until the late 1950s, when most of its buildings were removed in preparation for the coming academy, it was an important stop on the Sante Fe and Denver & Rio Grande (D. & R.G.) railroads. It also was the location of one of the most horrific train accidents in Colorado history.
“On the D. & R.G. railroad at West Husted was a round house, turn table that employed several engineers, brakeman, and other crew men all year,” wrote Lucille Lavelett in her book “Monument’s Faded Neighbor Communities and its Folklore.”
“The steam engines had power to pull the freight and passenger trains from Colorado Springs to Husted, but not enough power to pull the steep grade to Palmer lake to the “Divide,” therefore extra helper engines and crews of men were kept at Husted. They turned around at the ‘Y’ at Palmer Lake and returned to Husted,” wrote Lavelett.
The Colorado Springs Gazette of August 14, 1909, related the story of the rail accident there over 101 years ago.
“Nine persons are dead, and others are expected to die; between forty and fifty are injured; three engines are in the ditch; two baggage cars, including the contents, are smashed to kindling wood, and several passenger coaches are badly damaged as the result of a head-on collision between east bound passenger train No. 8, and westbound passenger No. 1, on the Denver & Rio Grande, near Husted, thirteen miles north of this city, at 10:25 a. m. today. The wreck was due to a misunderstanding of orders, it is said.”
Report from papers all over the nation carried the dispatches.
As No. 8 drew into Husted about forty miles an hour, the crew of the engine saw a light engine standing on the switch north of the station.
“Mistaking the engine for the second section of No. 1, the crew did not stop, and went through the station as fast as the two engines could draw the thirteen heavily laden coaches. As soon as the train got out of the station, the engineer of the first engine of No. 8 saw another train coming slowly down the incline. He slammed on the air brakes, and the emergency brakes, and then shouted to the other members of the two crews to jump. Before they had time to jump, No. 3 had rammed No. 1 so hard that all three engines lay in the ditch,’ according to the Nebraska State Journal at the time.
“Fireman J. A. GOSSAGE, of train No. 8, was killed as he was firing his engine, and never knew what struck him. The members of the other crew escaped serious injury by jumping.”
The smoker, attached to train No. 8, was the car in which the people were killed. All those badly injured were in the same car.
Other reports said that J.A. or Jack Gossage, the fireman on the helper engine who lived at Husted and had just waved to his wife as the train passed his home was trapped between the engine and the tender when the collision occurred.
Jack Gossage's wife continued to work for the railroad for many years afterward as a cook for crews in Husted, and the Gossage name eventually became quite famous for other reasons in Colorado Springs. Jack Gossage is grandfather to Colorado Springs standout and major league baseball hall of famer Rick “Goose” Gossage.
“The wreck occurred just east of the east switch at Husted. The impact of the trains was terrific and the locomotives and the baggage and smoking cars of both trains were badly damaged,” reported papers at the time.
“The shrieks of the wounded were pitiful and those who were not injured among the passengers immediately started the work of rescue. It was impossible to accurately determine the number of dead, but first reports indicated that eight had been killed.”
Later reports blamed the wreck on one of the train crews negligence.
An August 20, 1909, account in Carbon County, Utah, related the following:
“The coroner's jury which investigated the head on collision on the Denver & Rio Grande railroad at Husted, Colo, Saturday morning, when ten persons were killed and three score injured returned its verdict on Tuesday. The verdict finds that the wreck was due to criminal negligence on the part of the train crew, composed of Engineers Lezsig, and Hollingsworth, Fireman Wright, Conductor Dalton and Brakeman McElhern. The verdict also declares that the evidence shows that a defective system for issuing train orders was employed by the railroad at the time of the wreck. An order was sent to Denver to arrest the members of the train crew.”
Wilbur F. Fulker and his brother Iven were passengers on the southbound train out of Monument involved in the collision. Wilbur took a series of photographs with a new camera using glass plates that famously chronicled the accident. Wilbur’s son, also Wilbur, is the tuba-playing inspiration for the Colorado Spring’s landmark “Uncle Wilber’s Fountain” at Acacia Park and longtime teacher and administrator at the Colorado Deaf and Blind.
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Ski Stoner and you can ski anywhere

The first time, on long wooden skis, heavy leather boots,
They laced both front and back.
It started there and progressed up slope —
Until you got the knack.
With bamboo poles, a jacket snug and
Cable bindings snapped down tight.
To the bunny hill, a glove-eating monster
A hundred kids, like ants, on hills of white.
The diesel smell and clang of fitful starts and stops,
The rope tow’s safe, you know
Oscar Hamilton will save you fingers, if only treated right.
As you aged and skied and learned the ropes,
The T bar loomed, the ridge, the trees,
The bumps, the open track.
On holidays and weekends, for just nine bucks
Stoner slopes always asked with grace,
Nudged politely, said its piece,
“Please come back.”
The red plastic locks would form a chain on winter coats,
and tell of countless visits,
Chili in the lodge and hundreds of people
Drinking in the mountain spirits.
If you helped the Clarks, and stayed at the lodge,
You knew you may be scrubbing dishes.
The T-bar spring was a deadly tool.
It would take your hat, rip your shirt, rake your back,
Snatch you bald, and prove the fool.
The trick it seems, you skied it twice
On boards, its true, both up and down the hill
From ‘51 to ’83, to the slope, the kids they came,
From towns along the river,
but the special use permit was not renewed,
and Tramway asked for things that area just couldn’t deliver.
It closed, they pulled the hut, the T-bar was taken down.
By ’91, the deed was done. The area was no more.
But if you learned it there, skiing up and down its slopes,
‘Ski Stoner,” they said. “And you can ski anywhere.”

poem by Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com
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High-flying haylift for hard luck horse

Rescue party was still unable to retrieve the horse and the haylift continued for nearly another month

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

There are many paths to the top of a mountain but the view is always the same.
In truth, Bugs was just a regular packhorse that happened to be at the wrong place at the right time. And, like Andy Warhol’s proverbial 15 minutes of worldwide fame for people of the future, Bugs transformed into “Elijah” the marooned horse of the Colorado Rockies as the world worried about him.
“Stranded forlornly on the two-mile high Continental Divide in Colorado, a shaggy dark bay horse named Bugs was a prisoner of and the most-worried-about horse in the U.S.,” said the April 30, 1956, edition of Life Magazine. “Last autumn, Bugs and another horse, a gray, strayed off from a pack string belonging to surveyors mapping the range. Obeying the horsey instinct to seek higher ground they retreated before deepening valley snow to the ridge and were cut off by 40 foot drifts.”
Gunnison pilots Wally Powell and Gordon Warren discovered the two horses, in February as they were flying over the Collegiate Range near Buena Vista.
“Mayor Ben Jorganson, of Gunnison, Colo., hired Powell to drop hay to the horses. On the first haylift flight, Powell discovered that the gray horse had disappeared. Newspapers, recalling the stranded prophet who was nourished by ravens, renamed the survivor Elijah. People sent money to the mayor and two expeditions set out to rescue the horse,” according to the story in Life.
Reporter George McWilliams from the Denver Post, who had christened the shaggy equine Elijah, offered daily updates, often dominating the front page and all sorts of complex plans to rescue the poor bugger were contemplated.
“Officers at the U.S. army’s Mountain Cold Weather Training Command at Camp Hale, Colorado, began studying the idea of using infantry troops to rescue the hapless horse. An American Airlines pilot bound from New York to Los Angeles asked for Elijah’s precise location so that he could point out the animal to his passengers. Officials at the Centennial Race Track on the outskirts of Denver started a fund with which to feed Elijah and kicked in the first $100 themselves. They also offered to feed and stable the horse if no one claimed him after his rescue, but dozens of children clamored for the chance to keep him too,” wrote Gayle C. Shirley in Amazing Animals of Colorado: Incredible True Stories.
“On the morning of April, 11, a five-person Post rescue team led by Bill and Art Turner donned snowshoes and made the 7-mile climb to Elijah’s windswept hermitage. Although they weren't able to return with the horse in tow, they did bring back two important bits of information: Elijah was ‘fat and sassy’ and he was most definitely Bugs,” Shirley wrote.
According to the Denver Post, “the Turners … called the horse to them, put a rope halter on him and fed him a bag of oats. Bill Turner said he not only recognized Elijah as his horse, but found his brand — Heart Two Bar — on the horse’s left shoulder.”
But because of the drifts this rescue party was still unable to retrieve the horse and the haylift continued for nearly another month.
Finally, in late May, armed with snow shovels and prepared to dig through 20-foot drifts, Turners were able to retrieve the horse after two days of slow-going, back-breaking, path clearing to a high mountain road.
The horse was welcomed into Buena Vista by hundreds with an impromptu parade in his honor, but that was just a start. Thousands paid tribute at Centennial Race Track that afternoon as he was whisked up there for a ceremony, more parades in Denver, visits to Denver Post, and few days later he was briefly checked in to the Brown Palace Hotel.
“Elijah was given a small stall that had been specially prepared for him in one corner of the lobby. The management had taken the preparation of laying a piece of canvas under his bead of straw,” according to a report in the Denver Post.
“It was first planned to have the horse on view in the lobby all day. But he seemed so anxious to get away from it all that the Turner brothers led him back to the trailer and returned him to the track.”
A Reader’s Digest story, written by Bill Hosokawa, executive news director for the Denver Post, telling the tale of Elijah further fanned the flames of fame for Bugs but the humble packhorse was eventually able to return to a rather simple life.
“During his last years, Elijah was free to roam in his chosen pastures during the winter months, high above the hustle-bustle of humans,” wrote Kenneth Jessen in “Bizarre Colorado: A Legacy of Unusual Events & People.”
“In March, 1971, Bill Turner came across Elijah, crippled and in poor condition. The 27-year-old horse was suffering from a broken leg and could not be moved from his high mountain pasture. Bill Turner did the humane thing and put a bullet into the indomitable old horse. He didn’t notify the media at first because he figured Elijah had already had his share of publicity. Elijah’s carcass was left in a cluster of rocks among the tall, majestic peaks,” wrote Jessen.
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Up and over the pass with an extra passenger

A young man, looking as real and alive as anyone else

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Dangerous, isolated, difficult to build and even to keep open, the Rio Grande Southern had its share of strange occurrences, especially in the stretches along the Dolores River and up over Lizard Head Pass from Rico to Telluride.
Frequently beset by blinding blizzards and threatened at any time of year by rock slides, snow slides, and mud slides or any combination of the three, the steep grades and high lonesome stretches also had the ability to inspire spirits, it seems.
Or at least to encourage them to appear.
One such spirit was Isidor Henschel, or ‘Jimmy the Jew’ as he was known in the camp of Rico.
In route to Ophir, Henschel died in a train wreck in 1901 when, hopping a freighter from Rico to save time, he turned out to be in the wrong place at exactly the wrong moment.
“At Rice’s Spur, just over the Sunny Side of Lizard Head Pass, the freighter had stopped to pick up a lumber load,” writes Mary Joy Martin in her 2001 book “Something in the Wind: Spirits, Spooks & Sprites of the San Juan.” “ In the process, the freighter escaped back down the hill toward Rico, piling up at Snow Spur, the flat cars helter-skelter, the caboose wrecked, the body of Jimmy crushed by the timbers.”
For years afterward, as long as the RGS ran, folks claimed Jimmy periodically appeared in trains, including the Galloping Geese, traveling on that same lonesome stretch of tracks.
But according to Dan Asfar, in his book “Ghost Stories of Colorado,” Henschel never did anything to call attention to himself.
“He simply appeared on the train from Rico to Ophir just when the locomotive began chugging up the ascent to Lizard Head Pass. His manifestation was always the same; a young man, looking as real and alive as anyone else, sitting at the window seat, wearing the crisp Navy uniform he had been buried in. Most times, he appeared so gradually that people did not even notice he was there. Then, just as quietly, he would fade out of sight when the train approached Rice Spur.”
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Three things to be done with a woman

“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” — Lawrence Durrell, 1957

Painting’s origin, identity, and ownership all were the subjects of Telluride discussions for years

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Though it is only a painting of a woman, the reverent sentiment survives just the same.
In Telluride in the early 1960s, the legal fight and war of words over a life-sized nude called attention to the painting “The Lady Known as Who?”
“As for the painting itself, it probably wouldn’t make the grade at the Metropolitan Museum. Female it is, the proportions of shoulders and arms leave much to be desired though her hips have never been found wanting by generations of hard rock miners. They are wide and spacious, having the same sweeping curves which characterize the rump of another important and cherished inhabitant of Colorado mining towns, the durable mine mule,” wrote Barron Beshoar in the Denver Westerner’s Monthly Roundup in August of 1961.
The painting’s origin, identity, and ownership all were the subjects of Telluride discussions for years, according to Beshoar.
“The most popular story of the her origin revolves around an impecunious young artist and a girl who worked “On the Line” on Pacific Avenue just a block off Colorado Avenue. According to this oft-repeated tale, the artist, suffering from a severe case of gold fever, drifted into Telluride when the camp was at the height of its boom. Such mines as the Alta, the Black Bear, the Tomboy, the Liberty Bell and the Smuggler, were pouring out millions in gold, copper, lead, and zinc. Hundreds of men crawled over the mountains looking for new properties. But the poor artist couldn’t get together enough money for a grubstake because of a fatal flaw in his physical make-up — his hands were callous free and lily white so naturally no one would trust him.
When he ran completely out of funds, according to the story, he wound up “On the Line’ where one of the girls took pity on him.
“She was a beautiful and good-hearted Erskine Caldwell sort of girl. She provided the artist with meals and various comforts of life, and finally posed for the painting, which he sold for enough money to provide the needed grubstake, and he removed her, via the bonds of holy matrimony, from her life of degradation and shame.”
According to the stories, the couple lived happily ever after when his grubstake was transformed by luck into paying claims. Also, it was rumored that grateful miners continued to bring the now faithful wife rich samples of high-grade ore which the couple processed in their house.
The picture never hung in the bawdy houses on Pacific Avenue of the likes of The Pick and Gad, The Idle Hour, The Gold Belt, The Silver Bell, The White House and the Cozy Corner, but instead made it over to the more respectable climes of Colorado Avenue where it hung on the wall of the National Saloon and the Cosmopolitan.
“Certainly it was traveling between the two saloons fifty years ago as it is clearly remembered by a number of local citizens who were also traveling between the two saloons at that time,” noted Beshoar in 1961.
During prohibition, it ended up over at The Diamond, a gambling and drinking joint run by Harry Counterman.
“After Counterman and his girl, Bessie Young, who ran The Idle hour, went out of business and went off somewhere and committed suicide, Thurston “Slim” Parsons came into possession of the gambling equipment and the painting by paying $300 back taxes to the San Miguel County Treasurer,” said Beshoar.
Parsons kept the painting in several of his businesses over the years including (only briefly) The Roma Bar and Café. But his wife wouldn’t stand for it there, and it was banished to a beer garden up the street, next door to Frank Wilson’s Busy Corner Drug Store. The beer garden closed it doors in the ‘30s and it traveled from there to a private gambling club called The Telluride Club in rooms rented to Parsons by Wilson, above the Drug Store, where it watched over poker games until that club closed in 1948. Parsons left it the rooms when he closed the business.
“From that point on, the stories about the gal in painting begin to differ,” wrote Beshoer.
“Slim Parsons says he asked Druggist Wilson for the picture after the latter had it taken downstairs and put in back on the wall in the beer garden room and is using the one-time beer garden as a gift shop in the summer and storage space for some of his excess from the drugstore.”
According to Parsons quoted by Beshoar, “ I told him I wanted the picture, but he could have some of the chairs and tables and stuff upstairs if he wanted them. I don’t have any sentimental attachment to that picture, but it is my property and I want it. In fact, I don’t really care for it very much, but want to hang it in the Elk’s Club.”
Parsons attributes the paintings origin to a dance hall girl in Telluride of times past but doesn’t think Wilson’s correct in the specific identity.
“There were two such paintings, if the woman Wilson talks about was painted, I think she was the model for the other one,” Parsons told Beshoar back in 1961. “Last I heard, that one was hanging in the Stockman’s Café in Montrose.”
Druggist Wilson had a much different view. He insisted it was not just another nude.
“Why, one day an old miner came in here and squinted up at that picture and said, ‘Why Frank, I see you got a picture of Audrey,’ I said. ‘How do you know that’s Audrey?’ The old fellow said, ‘Why, I would recognize her anywhere.’”
Wilson said he told Parsons that he might want to rent the upstairs rooms and he needed to get his stuff out there. Parsons came by and took some stuff, but left the painting.
“People had drawn all over it. I was going to send out to the dump in the trash, but my son Bob worked on it for about four days cleaning it. He is a history major and he said he would like to have it.”
The cleaned-up painting was hung on the wall downstairs in the former beer garden again, in 1949, but Parsons returned to claim it more than decade later.
“He got right up on the player piano and was going to take it right off the wall,” said Wilson.
Wilson, who according Beshoar had holsters nailed to the underside of his counters in his drugstore and kept several pistols in readiness for possible trouble, cried, “I would not let anyone take this painting and I wouldn’t sell it to anyone.”
Wilson who had a reputation for caution in money matters, added however, “... Course I wouldn’t give a nickel for it, either.”
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Elementary memory like a cherished toy

Memories rival the best toys on any shelf

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Like a cherished toy, stored carefully between uses in felt-lined, wooden box, I take my grade-school memories out and play with them at times.
I remember, though not always clearly, all the way back to kindergarten in Dolores. The building was new, maybe even the first year or so, dark red brick, clean polished tile. New metal tables with dark, simulated-wood grain, Formica tops. Morning and afternoon classes. They tabbed me as a morning person. And as students, we were asked to bring a small carpet we could unroll and use for the nap-time break.
Ridiculous, I thought at the time, we don’t need no stinking nap. We are burning daylight. I need to find a girl friend. Such rebellion resulted in an ‘outlaw’ reputation at early age.
First grade was tougher, intentionally, I assume. They sent the ‘outlaws’ to Mrs. Denby’s class. Mrs. McRae’s for those that need nurturing. Mrs. Denby’s for those that need some discipline.
First through third grades were back in the old building. Orange-chipped brick with high-buffed, oaken floors that creaked to the sound of marching munchkins. The floors were always polished to high shine with only the occasional interruption facilitated by the orange-colored, sawdust-like compound that they put down when someone barfed all over them.
In each of the classrooms of that old building was a room not encountered since, a coat room — a long narrow partition with hooks down each side to hang coats, shoes and other articles of childhood. A place to escape to, when the going got rough, to wrestle with the neighbor kid — or if the occasion presented itself, to steal a kiss.
Early in my educational career, the old building was heated with a coal-fired furnace, the kind with two great hoppers that some poor, unfortunate soul every morning had to shovel huge scoops of slow-burning anthracite in though the top opening covered by a red hatch. The furnace room was just off to the right as you pushed the crash bar on one of the big double doors out to the playground. A place of great mystery, and teachers constantly warned of the terrible, disfiguring accidents that could occur if you were to wander into the off-limits area. If it is that dangerous, several of us thought at the time, then why is it right in the middle of the whole campus?
But accidents do happen, I tried to explain.
Like the time I accidentally poked Arthur Meyers in the forehead with a pencil. The teacher’s attempt at a ‘scared straight’ warning, involving potential lead poisoning, fell on deaf ears I am afraid. Because I had it (upon good authority) that modern pencils are constructed almost exclusively with graphite centers.
In those early years, the playground itself was tougher place. Much tougher than the coddled children of recent times experience. Just dirt, and a little gravel with coal cinders under the high-bar swing sets and ‘the maximum vertical lift steel slide of death’ on the far edge of the playground. More than one hapless Dolores student left a hunk of scalp, or several square inches of hide hanging from the metal of that big boy, or in the dirt below.
Of course that was by no means, the only available hazard. Red rubber kick balls flying out of nowhere and everywhere, a decrepit Driver’s Education trailer with steel ‘temporary’ stairs that could knock out the most firmly seated of teeth when properly approached, and students contributing to their own delinquency (everybody was Kung Fu fighting, man those cats were fast as lightning, Huh!)— it is a wonder anybody survived third grade. Later the quality of road rash was vastly improved when, in a stroke of infinite wisdom, it was decided to black top the entire surface.
Third grade was a watershed year.
I, as with other fellow condemned ‘outlaws,’ had the good fortune of once again being placed in the ‘needs discipline’ class. We had two teachers that year, rather than just one.
I recall, on perhaps the very first day, Mrs. Rucker, introducing us to the theory of détente. Standing war-like in an offensive crouch, with a four-foot wooden paddle raised high in hand (the paddle air-vented with several offsetting rows of holes drilled in the center), the five-foot, three-inch, 60-year-old music teacher found it necessary to show us her muscle and identify her willingness to apply corporal punishment.
With the other teacher however, that is where the power resided.
Mrs. Wallace, was not only the afternoon third-grade instructor of English, vocabulary and Social Studies; she was also the principal and perhaps, more importantly, lived diagonally right across the street from my family. She was a person I cared about not disappointing, at least not permanently.
When I went back to Dolores recently after a long absence, I noticed that the old orange-brick building has been replaced. Of course, Mrs. Denby, Mrs. Rucker, Mrs. Wallace and most, if not all, elements of the old playground are now long gone.
But still, stored away in safe place, protected in cushioned fabric and encased in a strong box, are set of memories that could rival the best toys on any shelf, in any toy room.
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Springs officer murdered before Thanksgiving

“The most personal of all of holidays.”

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

America was a little different then. Colorado Springs too.
On November 26, 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the upcoming holiday.
“HYDE PARK, Wednesday—Thanksgiving day is the most personal of all our holidays, I think, because it carries us back to our own past history and we are primarily celebrating the survival of our first ancestors in this country. There may be other countries which have their own Thanksgiving days but this is our day, the day when we review the things that we in the United States have to be thankful for.” Less than 10 years separated that time from her husband’s official establishment the holiday on the fourth Thursday in November. Before then, Thanksgiving had moved around a bit.
That same day, actor John Wayne and his entourage touched down at the airport in El Paso, Texas, and the ‘Duke’ stopped on the tarmac to shake hands with a toddler on his way to the premier of “Hondo,” based on the book by Louis L’Amour. The show, of course, was in Three-D and WarnerPhonic Sound and Color.
The population of Colorado Springs, according to the 1950 Census, was 45,472, and that included the recently annexed town Roswell that was brought into the fold in June of that year.
Patrolman Richard Burchfield reported for duty on November 26, 1953 and left the station in Colorado Springs at 7:40 that evening. He had told his wife a few days before that he thought he knew who was involved in a series of stickups around town.
At 7:55 that night, the officer called to ask if any detectives were in, police reports said. When told they were, he stated he would be in shortly. This was taken to mean he had someone in custody or had some pertinent information for the detectives.
“Shortly after 8 p.m., Robert McVay of 540 East Boulder, spotted the police car on the west side of El Paso Street, near Bijou, and five blocks from the police station; he saw a man on the outside of the car, stooping down and looking in. He became suspicious when he and his wife saw the man run up the street and enter a car, so McVay drove two blocks north, made a U-turn and went back. The man was still sitting in the car so McVay drove home, then decided to make another trip and drove to the police car and again saw the man looking into the car; McVay stopped and asked ‘Do you need any help?’ to which the man replied ‘Hell no!’ Returning home, McVay tried to call police but the lines were busy, so he drove to the station and reported the incident. Detective Irion and Officer Garred went to the scene with him and found Burchfield slumped behind the steering wheel dead.,” according to an account by Carl F. Mathews on unsolved crimes in the Pikes Peak region. Mathews was the former Superintendent of the Bureau of Identification in Colorado Springs Police Department.
Burchfield had been shot eight times, behind the right ear, over the right eye, once in the right cheek, twice in the right shoulder and three times in the right arm. Nine shells, (along with the bullets identified by the FBI lab as coming from a Colt Woodsman automatic .22 caliber pistol) were found in the car.
“The suspect was thought to have been the holdup artist who had committed seven stickups in the month previous and had been describes by most witness as young, apparently 17 to 25 years of age, about six feet tall, an of slender build. His latest holdup had been that of Alton Peterson, who had been stopped in the 1400 block of North Cascade at about 7:15 p.m. which led officers to believe the killer was the holdup man,” wrote Mathews.
A witness account by Mary Lowe, living at 233 North El Paso, which was diagonally across the street from the scene of the killing, described hearing shots and an outcry. She told police she looked out her upstairs window and saw a man running up the street to a parked car, apparently a dark Ford Coupe, 1941 or 1942 model. He backed up, made a U-Turn and drove a short distance north, stopped and ran back to the police cruiser where McVay had talked to him after his third trip around the area.
“Police asked all parties who had Colt Woodman pistols to bring them to the station for checking and number I.D. s, but without results so far as any connection with the shells found in the car,” Mathews said.
Burchfield was 34 at the time of his murder and a father of three children. Rewards totaling nearly $1,700 were offered and private contributions and returns from movie houses (perhaps from the Three-D version of “Hondo.”) made up a purse amounting to $3,650, which was given to the widow.
“It was theorized that the man was in the police car when Burchfield started to question him, drew the pistol and shot the officer as outlined. No real clues have ever been found,” wrote Mathews.
Officer Richard Burchfield's murder, five blocks from the police station in his own patrol car, has never been solved. In Colorado Springs that year, for the police, for the family of Richard Burchfield, for witnesses Robert McVay, Mary Lowe and robbery victim Alton Peterson, and for others … it was as the former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, “the most personal of all of holidays.”
America, and Colorado Springs, too, is a little different now.
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