Professor Digs Up Fresh Dirt on Mystery of the Colorado Cannibal

The first clue came when Alferd Packer wanted only whiskey for breakfast after claiming to have survived a hard winter lost in the Colorado Rockies eating rosebuds and moccasins.

Hmmmm. Wonder where Alferd’s appetite went those past three months? Funny, but wasn’t he looking . . . well, a tad pudgy? And, say! What about those five other guys who went with him on that ill-fated quest for gold?

Wherever could they be?

With a bit of prodding, Alferd confessed: Flowers and shoe leather weren’t the main course. That’s right. We’re talking Prospector Surprise here. Friends fricassee. Campers a la carte.

No doubt about it, the saga of the Colorado Cannibal was strange enough when it happened 115 years ago.

But things didn’t really start cooking around here until this summer, when a law professor wearing a skeleton T-shirt pedaled up on his bicycle to claim Alferd’s leftovers.

Suddenly, an obscure Wild West legend turned into a bona fide media event, and a remote mountain hamlet found itself not only confronting but capitalizing on a most unsavory past. The mayor began dressing like an undertaker and serving sodas from a coffin. A local band changed its name to the Rolling Bones. Bad puns abounded: Taste the Thigh Country; Have a Friend for Dinner; Al Packer Had It His Way.

And in the end, the professor’s $15,000 project--replete with an archeologist, anthropologists, forensic scientists, firearms experts, document analysts, geophysicists and, of course, the sheriff’s brother Byrne-the-backhoe-operator--managed to dig out the victims, but not the truth.

The tale really began in November, 1873, when a party of 21 prospectors left Salt Lake City by wagon train for the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. There was said to be gold in Breckenridge, and lots of it.

Two months later, the group arrived at the Ute Indian encampment, where kindly Chief Ouray urged them to stay until spring, when the frozen mountains would once again become passable.

But by the end of two weeks, some of the gold-seekers had grown restless, Alferd Packer among them. With 23-year-old Alferd as their guide, six men set off on their own for an Indian agency 75 miles away. They took 10 days’ worth of provisions. Historical accounts describe Packer as an unlikely leader--lazy, quarrelsome, unfamiliar with the rugged territory and tormented by epileptic seizures.

What really happened that winter will never be known, since Packer alone survived and his various accounts were contradictory.

When he reached the agency 65 days after leaving the Ute camp, Packer, looking surprisingly well-fed, claimed to have gone without food for two days. Nevertheless, he passed on breakfast, snorting whiskey instead.

At first, Packer insisted that the lost party had stumbled through the deep snow, weeping and praying, eating only rosebuds, pine gum and their moccasins, which they roasted first. When his shoeless feet froze and Alferd could no longer keep up, the others left him behind.

A Different Tale

But when Packer returned to the agency a month later to help search for the missing men, he spun a different tale.

This time, he said two of the others had died of hunger and exposure while the third was accidentally killed. All were eaten by the survivors, who then began sacrificing each other one by one, first the oldest, then the fattest.

Finally, it was down to Alferd and Shannon Wilson Bell, a big redhead with bug eyes. When Bell got that by now-familiar lean and hungry look, Packer allegedly killed him in self-defense, had dinner, packed a bite to go and showed up at the Indian agency a few days later.

A search party failed to find the victims, but in August of 1874, a wandering artist for Harpers Weekly magazine did.

Alferd Packer was arrested, but escaped from jail and remained a fugitive for nine years, until the day one of the original 21 prospectors recognized his high, whiny voice in a Wyoming saloon.

In a rambling, two-hour statement during his trial in Lake City, Packer offered yet another version of the movable feast:

Roasting a Leg

This time, Packer said Bell had gone berserk while Alferd was gone, and killed all the others with hatchet blows to the head. Alferd came back to find Bell roasting a leg belonging to Frank Miller, a German butcher. When Bell came at him “silently, with gritted teeth,” Packer shot him in the abdomen, then drove a hatchet through his forehead.

And then he ate him.

Alferd was convicted and sentenced to “be hung by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead.” A possibly inebriated saloon keeper dashed from the courtroom to relay the verdict, and it was his outlandishly misquoted version that found its way into Western lore:

“They was sivin Dimmycrats in Hinsdale County, and ye et five iv thim. . . . I sintins ye t’be hanged be th’ neck ontil ye’re dead, dead, DEAD, as a warnin’ ag’in reducin’ the Dimmycratic popyalashun iv th’ state!”

A legal technicality saved Alferd’s skin, and after a second trial and conviction, Packer was sentenced to 40 years in the state prison--eight years for each of his five victims.

Paroled After 14 Years

A Denver Post sob sister called Polly Pry crusaded for his release and Alferd was paroled after 14 years. He was thought to have lived a quiet, lonely life as a security guard at the newspaper.

He suffered a stroke and died in April, 1907. The death certificate listed the cause as “senility, trouble and worry.”

And nobody gave the Colorado Cannibal too much thought again until this summer, when James Starrs showed up in nearby Lake City with a bunch of experts and identification tags labeled “The Bone Zone.”

Starrs, a professor of law and forensic sciences at George Washington University, has often used the Packer case in class, pointing out that there was absolutely no forensic evidence used to convict the man.

Maybe, he thought, there was still evidence to be found. Evidence, presumably, that Alferd didn’t eat.

With that, Starrs assembled his group of experts, made some special T-shirts, notified the press, packed his trusty bike and headed for Colorado, where a modest plaque marked the massacre site at the end of what ironically turned out to be an orthopedic surgeon’s driveway.

Lake City, once a mining boom town and now a hamlet of just 217, sprung up a few years after Alferd chowed down, and had never made much of an effort to capitalize on the cannibal. The annual Packer Banquet each autumn was more of an intimate, community gathering. “There’s usually decorations on the table like ham bones or a rib cage,” Mayor Bob Hall said.

Added town clerk Michelle Pierce: “We’ve always been kind of embarrassed by Alferd Packer.”

But Lake City, now highly dependent on tourism, dug into the story with gusto.

Look-Alike Contest

The photography shop sponsored an Al Packer look-alike contest and a theater troupe re-enacted the trial in the actual courtroom, letting audiences serve as the jury. A window display downtown featured a stewpot and a “Finger-lickin’ good” sign.

It worked. Every room in town was booked, either with the usual summer tourists from Texas or with reporters. One motel owner asked a stunned Chicago journalist to share his room with a biker named Bob, who was passing through and having a heck of a time finding a place to stay.

The first morning of the Packer Dig, as television satellite trucks idled, the self-named Bone Team uprooted the grave marker and used $30,000 worth of infrared equipment to painstakingly sweep the ground, searching for what Starrs called “anomalies.”

After much canvassing, infraredding, charting and consulting among themselves, the Bone Team began digging, discovering bones right below where the grave marker was.

The first find was a piece of skull. Sandra Jarman, the landowner, had been hovering over the Bone Team all morning, and now she thrust a triumphant fist into the air.

“What a day! What a day!” she cried. “Left temporal, left temporal! I’ve got goose bumps!”

Bone Team Hungry

Maybe it was just coincidence, but the discovery made the Bone Team hungry, and they immediately dropped their shovels to picnic on some baloney sandwiches.

At the end of the day, Starrs, wearing a skeleton T-shirt with the slogan “Gimme Five,” held a press conference to announce the “national significance” of his work, namely that it brought together scientists from various disciplines.

Unfortunately, Starrs lamented, major corporations and universities failed to recognize this “national significance,” and the dig was about $10,000 in the hole, so to speak. Starrs blamed it on Geraldo Rivera and the darned Al Capone vault.

To make ends meet, the professor would be selling 200 T-shirts like the one he was modeling, and would also auction off the four wooden posts that had cordoned off the grave site since the 1920s. Starrs also told a reporter looking for a copy of the professor’s press packet to purchase one for $12.95 at the town crafts fair.

The Bone Team left town with boxes of remains and drove to Tucson, where they began to literally try to piece their story together. At most, they will be able to tell whether Alferd Packer was a cannibal and a liar, or just a cannibal. Who killed whom, and more importantly, who ate whom, can never be proved.

So far, though, they claim to have found evidence supporting Packer’s final version of events.

Cut marks on “a significant number of bones” indicate victims were skinned, Starrs said, and there is strong evidence that four of the five victims were repeatedly hacked with something like a hatchet.

“If ever there was demonstrative evidence of overkill,” the professor concluded, “this is it.”