Dead Man’s Name Finally to Be Cleared

Today, California looks back more than 70 years at a bloody crime scene tucked in a rugged canyon here on the state’s northern coast to offer an apology and a pardon to Jack Ryan.

As history now stands, he is the notorious Coyote Flat killer, made famous in sensational headlines that once riveted the nation’s attention to the unfolding mystery of who killed Henry Sweet and Carmen Wagner in 1925.

But in one more unusual chapter to this story, Gov. Pete Wilson will officially correct the state’s record books today to reflect that Ryan was innocent. The governor’s clemency proclamation will also find that Ryan was forced into a confession by a corrupt district attorney who ruled this town at a time when modern society had not yet erased its Wild West mores.

“Jack Ryan was a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the governor wrote in his pardon, a draft copy of which was obtained by The Times. “The evidence is overwhelming that through a series of violent and intimidating acts that no civilized society should tolerate, including at least two attempts on his life, he was unjustly railroaded into pleading guilty for crimes he did not commit.”

Ryan, who was called a “half-breed” in newspaper accounts because his mother was a Hupa Indian, served 25 years in San Quentin State Prison before he was paroled at age 50. He died in 1978 and is buried in an unmarked grave in the Sierra foothills outside Redding.

Ryan has no living relatives who might be comforted or benefit from the governor’s finding. And most of the players in the Coyote Flat murder story are dead.

But in a series of recommendations made in the last few years, from a Humboldt County district attorney’s investigator all the way up to the California Supreme Court, Wilson has been urged to grant Ryan’s pardon to preserve the integrity of the state’s justice system.

“We must remember that a just society may not always achieve justice, but it must constantly strive for justice,” Wilson said in his pardon. “As the philosopher Francis Bacon said some 380 years ago, ‘If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.’ Therefore, so that justice is maintained, I grant Jack Ryan posthumously a pardon based on innocence.”

Ryan’s case has been on the desks of four previous California governors; three denied his petition for clemency before Ronald Reagan in 1969 commuted his sentence to time served, based on a finding of rehabilitation.

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That probably would have been the end of the Ryan story and the Coyote Flat murder case if it were not for a tenacious investigator from Eureka. He followed up a secondhand report that one of Ryan’s accusers had admitted shortly before her 1981 death that she had lied.

Investigator Richard Walton, working on personal time, spent more than a decade following the trail of a killer who stalked his jurisdiction 23 years before he was born.

He did more than 400 interviews, gathering the elderly recollections of newsboys who hawked the sensational headlines, posse members who scoured the back country and sheriff’s deputies who witnessed Ryan’s forced confession. He also obtained some of the original courtroom evidence by reaching the family of one of America’s earliest forensic scientists, who had been called to Eureka from San Francisco to help solve the high-profile mystery.

Five years ago, when Walton presented his report to the state Parole Board, its members broke into applause in recognition of his effort. Later, he was recruited by the FBI to lecture about the techniques of “cold trail” homicide investigations.

“This case centered around hoof prints, horsehairs and how long it took to ride from one end of the county to another,” Walton said. “I did it because it just seemed like the right thing to do. And the more I looked into it, the more wrong it seemed to be.”

The murder trail began about 40 miles southeast of Eureka in a still-remote area of rolling green hills, gushing mountain streams and oak groves. There, next to an empty cabin, 21-year-old Henry Sweet’s body was found on Oct. 11, 1925.

He was shot once in the back with a high-powered rifle and he lay in a dusty road next to the Roadster that he had just loaded with camping equipment and a deer carcass that was tied to the running board.

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Four days earlier, Sweet had left his Eureka home for a short hunting trip with a companion, 17-year-old Carmen Wagner. But when Sweet’s body was found, the girl was missing.

Walton said he believes that Sweet was involved in bootlegging and was killed over a debt, and that Wagner simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the next two weeks, news of the mystery spread across the state and the nation as the search for Wagner developed a daily following of captivated newspaper readers. At one point, the Humboldt Times declared in a banner headline: “Mad Homesteader Holds Carmen Captive; Posse Encircles Cabin.” The news turned out to be erroneous.

The volunteer posse grew to about 40 members. And reporters from as far as San Francisco trekked into the hills. Finally, on Oct. 23, Wagner’s body was discovered in a shallow grave about six miles from the scene of Sweet’s killing. She had been shot twice, once in the head and once in the throat.

Ryan, then 23, and his half-brother, David Walter, were arrested for the killings the same day. Sheriff’s deputies were forced to keep a close guard on the pair to prevent them from being lynched by an angry mob.

Soon, Walter was found to have a verifiable alibi and he was released. But the case against Ryan grew darker. The girl’s watch was recovered from Ryan’s chaps after they had been searched previously and nothing found. Then, shell casings purportedly from Ryan’s gun were found near the girl’s body, again after the area had been previously searched.

Ryan’s trial, in which testimony raised suspicions about the planted evidence, lasted five weeks; at the time, it was the longest case in Humboldt County history. On March 12, 1926, the jury of 12 white men acquitted the defendant.

That, however, only seemed to deepen the Coyote Flat mystery and heighten public interest.

What happened next, officials say, was the corruption of Eureka’s justice system by a man who grew powerful as a bootlegger during the height of Prohibition. Stephen Earl Metzler ran for Humboldt County district attorney in 1927 on a platform to end the “dry squads” that were cracking down on illicit whiskey makers and to solve the Coyote Flat murders in two years or resign.

The following reconstruction of what happened next is taken from the findings that Wilson will sign into history today:

Metzler soon launched a campaign to intimidate Ryan in hopes of obtaining a confession.

In October 1927, Ryan’s half-brother David was found murdered. His teeth were kicked in and he was strangled through the mouth with barbed wire. The case was never investigated by Metzler. But the prosecutor began writing letters to Ryan, including one that warned he would end up like his brother if he did not confess.

Metzler arranged for a trip-wire to be set up so it would fire a booby-trapped rifle at Ryan when he rode on a trail he regularly traveled. He also arranged for a woman to get Ryan drunk in hopes of obtaining a confession in a motel room while authorities listened in an adjoining room. Ryan instead asserted that he knew nothing about the case.

Then two gunmen surprised Ryan as he was driven over a bridge by the same woman. They fired three shots. Ryan escaped by leaping from the car into the river. The incident was reported in the May 8, 1928, Humboldt Times.

Metzler’s campaign finally snared Ryan on July 12, 1928, when he secretly paid a woman $100 to swear a complaint that Ryan had raped her 13-year-old daughter. Ryan was immediately arrested. And soon afterward, two other women stepped forward with similar accusations.

After two months in jail, Ryan confessed on Sept. 12 to two of the rapes. That night, from early evening until early the next morning, he was interrogated by Metzler and others about the Coyote Flat mur ders. When Ryan appeared in court on Sept. 13 to be sentenced for the rapes, he stunned the audience by pleading guilty to the murders.

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The next day’s Humboldt Times headline--”Jack Ryan Confesses Coyote Flat Murders”--was stripped above a series of dramatic accounts about the interrogation and “the crime that . . . is perhaps the most atrocious crime ever committed in the state of California.”

“District Attorney Metzler not only ‘broke’ Ryan, but himself broke down and wept as the lips of the wily Jack Ryan gave forth the story of the actual killings,” the paper reported. “Ryan, when he had signed his confession, threw his arms about Metzler and they wept together. ‘Metzler, you’re a good man. You knew all the time,’ Ryan cried.”

Ryan was immediately sentenced to life in prison after Metzler gave a passionate speech about why the defendant should not be hanged. Walton said he believes Metzler was trying to avoid the automatic Supreme Court review that was required of death penalty cases.

The judge agreed. Within 10 hours of his confession, Ryan was loaded into a transport headed for San Quentin.

In the story’s epilogue, Metzler was eventually convicted of bootlegging and served about 15 months in prison. On his release, he drew on the influence he still wielded over powerful Washington lawmakers, Walton said. They eventually won a pardon for Metzler that was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Metzler continued to oppose Ryan’s appeal for parole whenever it was raised by state authorities. Metzler died in Los Angeles in 1956 at age 70.

Ryan was described as a model prisoner at San Quentin, where he worked as a cobbler. His parole in 1953 ordered that he never return to Humboldt County. So, at age 50, he moved to Redding and began work as a day laborer on highway projects.

Ryan spent the last two decades of his life becoming very close to a family near Burney. He soon befriended the grandmother and, on her daughter’s death, he helped raise the woman’s grandchildren.

He is buried in the family’s tiny graveyard. Family members have asked Walton to protect their privacy. But they are awaiting word from the governor. And when it comes, Walton said he plans to read the proclamation in a ceremony at Ryan’s grave.

“Unfortunately, we cannot do justice for Jack Ryan, the man,” the document says. “But we can do justice for Jack Ryan, the memory.”