At a cemetery on the outskirts of Denver, beside an old tombstone, one might sit and think at the bench under the long, sagging limbs of a dark, towering spruce.
“Very shady and cold. It’s kind of an ominous spot,” says Jenny Hankinson, curator of collections at the nearby Littleton Museum.
That’s how she knows the spot — and “pretty popular,” she says. Visitors might leave a rock or a coin or some other token.
“It’s the Halloween season,” Hankinson says, “so you never know who’s gonna put a chicken leg or something over there.”
Not that she’s ever seen the bones from someone’s dinner. That’s just what she’s heard, that the scraps occasionally show up — more left-behind tokens most fitting for the grave of one of the most notorious characters in Colorado history. Here lies Alfred Packer the cannibal.
Hankinson has heard something else.
She has heard, like many historians, that the cannibal is innocent.
Yes, 150 years after the events that brought Packer to our collective nightmare, his true legacy remains a debate.
What we know is that he emerged the lone survivor of a doomed, snowbound search for gold in the San Juan Mountains. Soon later in 1874, the thawed-out bodies of his five companions were found.
Some of their flesh was preserved by the freeze, and some of it was missing.
“What went wrong is really the question,” Hankinson says.
Packer admitted to eating his fellow man to stay alive. The men were dead before then, and not by his doing, he maintained. And if that was true then, as it would be today, he would have committed no crime.
It would have been far from the first instance of cannibalism-for-survival in the world’s history of exploration. Decades before in the San Juan Mountains, some of John Fremont’s men reportedly ate each other to prolong.
Packer is “innocent in that cannibalism is not a crime. Murder is,” says Tom Noel, the esteemed historian known as Mr. Colorado. “So if he was gonna be convicted, he’d have to be convicted on a murder charge.”
Indeed he was inside a Lake City courtroom, sentenced to death. Technicalities spared his life: Lawyers argued Packer was convicted according to state law, while the acts in question occurred when Colorado was still a territory.
A case was also made against the Hinsdale County judge being guilty of prejudice. He was seemingly influenced by the press, author Harold Schechter notes in his 2015 book, “Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal.”
From this widely unknown part of the world, as Colorado was then, Packer’s story went global, Schechter writes: “In Colorado itself, of course, the Packer case was the biggest story in years, producing what one chronicler calls (somewhat hyperbolically) ‘A newspaper onslaught unequaled in the history of American journalism.’”
At any rate, the state’s Supreme Court reversed Packer’s murder conviction. That gave way to a second trial in 1886, ending with Packer being found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 40 years in the young state penitentiary in Cañon City.
Went The Rocky Mountain News headline in response: “Packer, the Man Eater, Receives a Punishment Inadequate to his Crimes.”
The newspaper later published a letter from Packer, the next in a series of confessions he made with varying degrees of consistency.
“I am today as ever before a member of the human family, although isolated and away from that which is dear to the heart of every man,” Packer wrote from prison. “Am I the villainous wretch which some have asserted me to be? ... I am more a victim of circumstances than of atrocious designs.”
Noel, for one, has tended to side with Packer, whom he has called “perhaps the most sensational character in Colorado history.”
Not that Noel has ever deeply investigated Packer’s case, as few have over the century. For the retired University of Colorado Denver professor, Packer has mostly been a source of convenience.
“For the students who are bored by Colorado history, sometimes this will get their attention, especially now around Halloween,” Noel says.
A handy source for the classroom, yes, just as Packer has been the source of a musical and multiple made-for-TV specials and also a wilderness cookbook. The University of Colorado Boulder has the Alferd Packer Grill — the spelling of his first name is another point of debate — while Lake City has hosted Packer Days over the years.
Said the host of a History Colorado podcast that once explored the complicated legacy: “Packer has become a kind of anti-folk hero — the kitschy two-dimensional embodiment of evil and an outright joke.”
In all seriousness, Packer “is a great sideline into Colorado mining history,” Noel says.
To know Packer’s origins is to know those of many who came to populate the state — “those living on the fringes of society,” says Hankinson, with the Littleton Museum.
From Pennsylvania and apparently eager to serve the Union during the Civil War, Packer was discharged from the military due to epilepsy. The public persona that would be painted of him regarded his seizures. Western companions also spoke of his squeaky voice, others his intellect, others his conniving ways. One from his early days in Colorado, Preston Nutter, called Packer “a man without character.”
As to what brought Packer out west, it’s easy to think he heard the stories, Hankinson says: “’Come west, young man. The gold is just laying in the street.’”
It’s easy, she says, to think Packer was like many out of the Civil War: “They’re looking for new opportunities, they’re looking to make their marks on the world. And after the horrors of the war, they’re coming west, and there’s new horrors to be found.”
The San Juan Mountains were no place to be in the winter. Ute Chief Ouray’s people knew that to be true; gold-seekers among Packer’s larger group said the tribe sheltered and fed them and warned against traveling on.
On went Packer and five others.
“They had a bad case of gold fever and ignored the warning,” Noel says. “And I’m sure Packer said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you through this.’”
It seems Packer was not the mountain guide he claimed to be. Was he a killer? That became the question of onlookers around Saguache, around the Los Piños Indian Agency where Packer turned up.
“The story — I don’t know if it’s fact or folklore — is that he wasn’t asking for food, but for whiskey,” Noel says. “He looked like he’d been eating.”
Companions from his larger group arrived at Los Piños not long after him “by an odd coincidence” Schechter writes in his book, which cites first-hand journals, newspaper accounts and court statements.
The author reports Packer initially telling those companions he did not know the fates of the five men lost in the mountains. That was contrasted by his confession to Gen. Charles Adams, the man in charge at Los Piños.
Packer reportedly told Adams that he and others ate men as one naturally died after the other, and that he only killed one, Shannon Bell, in self-defense. Packer maintained self-defense in later confessions, but Adams in an interview predicted the man “would hang himself by the discrepancies of his statements.”
Early suspicions lingered on possessions of the dead that Packer took, including money and a “big skinning knife that had belonged to the German butcher,” Nutter noted. Some suspected Packer used the knife to pick the lock of his first jail cell and escape. Suspicions broadened when five corpses were depicted in a Harper’s Weekly illustration — a grisly image that hovered over Packer in court.
Schechter’s observation from the newspapers of the day: “Though not yet indicted for any crime, he was openly accused of ‘the most atrocious and cold-blooded murder ever committed in the West,’ ‘butchery without parallel in Colorado history’ and ‘the most revolting crime of the century.’”
Years later, while Packer aged in his cell in Cañon City, a controversial Denver Post reporter who went by Polly Pry wrote of “insane prejudice” and “the wild clamor of an unreasoning crowd.” Her sympathies are credited for Packer’s release 16 years into his 40-year sentence.
He’d live in Littleton until his death in 1907. Accounts recall his finals years as quiet, occupied by dollhouse-making and Wild West storytelling.
Packer made one final plea in writing: “I want to die clear in the opinion of my fellow man.”
It would not be so. Opinions vary still.
A 1989 investigation saw the corpses in the mountains exhumed and subjected to modern forensics. The project leader determined Packer guilty in a highly publicized proclamation that was highly contended. Murder was apparent, but the murderer was not, critics argued. Packer had accused Bell, the one he said he killed in defense, as the perpetrator.
In the 1990s, a curator at the Museum of the West in Grand Junction launched a yearslong investigation after discovering what was found to be Packer’s pistol, a supposed murder weapon. The investigation was said to prove Packer innocent.
A true crime historian and professor emeritus at Queens College in New York where he taught literature and myth criticism, Schechter might have analyzed the evidence more than anyone for his 2015 book. His “considered belief,” as he writes, is that Packer killed all five men in the group.
Schechter adds: “Should Packer have been found guilty of murder, given the high degree of reasonable doubt in the case? Almost certainly not.”
In Littleton, Hankinson has made no conclusion. There under the dark tree beside Packer’s grave, one can only wonder.
“I’d like to think he didn’t do it, but I don’t know,” Hankinson says. “It’s the Old West, and there are some crazy stories.”
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