Francis D. Calhoon; Prisoner Became Writer on Gold Rush

Author Francis Dale Calhoon, a chemist and teacher who began writing books about California’s Gold Rush while imprisoned for killing his wife, has died. He was 99.

Calhoon died of pneumonia in a Sacramento hospital Nov. 24--just five days short of his 100th birthday.

At the age of 73, Calhoon was sentenced to five years to life in prison for the 1971 murder of his wife, Marian. While serving three years of his sentence at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, Calhoon began writing.

His books, five Gold Country sagas plus a story on his prison experience, are still in print and are sold throughout California’s Mother Lode region, said his literary executor, Lowene Saxton. Royalties from the books supported him in his old age.

Calhoon also completed but had not published three novels and an autobiography titled “An Angel on My Shoulder.”

Unusual among a predominantly younger prison population, Calhoon related only one prison experience in the unpublished story of his life. For fun, he wrote, he started a rumor that the chicken served for dinner each Sunday in the men’s prison was actually barbecued sea gull.

“He was a brilliant man whose main concern was always to do something to make the world better,” said Saxton, who met Calhoon in an adult education writing class. She said he had recently dictated letters to Gov. Gray Davis about the teaching of mathematics in public schools.

Saxton said Calhoon, blind but still mentally sharp, continued to maintain his innocence and tried to prove until his death that he was framed for the murder of his wife of 40 years on her 65th birthday.

His wife’s body was found in the living room of their Grass Valley home a day after her murder on Dec. 2, 1971. She had been strangled with a telephone cord.

Calhoon had called a friend from Southern California and asked him to check on his wife after she failed to call him at a prearranged time. The friend found the home ransacked, and police surmised that the murder occurred when the victim came home and surprised a burglar. Silverware, furs, a camera and credit cards were missing.

A grand jury, however, indicted Calhoon on second-degree murder charges five months later, and he was found guilty in a jury trial after the prosecution described the couple’s marital and financial problems.

Calhoon was convicted and sent to prison in 1973 and was released on parole three years later.

Born Nov. 29, 1899, in Northville, S.D., Calhoon served in the infantry in France during World War I, graduated from UC Berkeley, and worked as a chemist for three years before becoming a high school science teacher, football coach and principal in Northern California schools.

During World War II, he lived and worked in Modesto, developing techniques for dehydrating vegetables.