I went to
Colorado last year to look into the murder, in 1929, of my
grandmother’s brother. I heard about it 86 years after the fact when
someone working on a college writing project posted a message on the Ancestry
website seeking relatives of Elmer Stephenson.
The student was working on a story about her grandmother, a pioneer
woman from Colorado whose stepfather was Stephenson. He had come into her life when she was a very
young girl and the two had a loving relationship.
Lena Estelle Hampson |
I didn't even know much about my grandmother. I knew that she had a lovely, 19th Century name, Lena Estelle. She was a good businesswoman, working alongside her husband, Thomas Jefferson Hampson, while he and his brothers made a success of several grocery stores in Colorado in the 1890s. The first store was in Salida, Colorado. Soon, along with their Spanish immigrant businessman partner and successful silver miner, Don Valdez, they opened another store in Rifle and finally one in Grand Junction.
Hampson Brother's store in Salida |
I heard my
grandmother was funny and clever. I also
heard she was disciplined. After a late
pregnancy, she handed over the new baby to my Mom and went back to work. Mother was twenty years older than her new sister, Barbara, and Mom spent those years living in Lena Estelle's home and raising Barbara. That established my Mom's brand of being the mother of choice after a divorce,
an early death, or some kind of breakdown, mental or physical.
My grandmother
died just a few months before I was born and was just 62. While I wish I would have known her, her
developing dementia made her a bit of a stranger to everyone, let alone me, in
utero. I heard that she had stopped being
a reliable babysitter for my toddler brother.
Once, in December 1941, she lowered my brother, then two, into the
bushes below the window of the room where his crib was. She had noticed a whole lot of Japanese troops marching down West Second
Street in Medford, Oregon and did what she could to protect her grandson.
Trout on the menu for the President and his hunting cabinet. I wonder if Elmer is in the shot. Jake Borah is on the left just under the server's arm |
Borah apparently was a real comic. According to the Vail Daily Enterprise, a day or so before taking a party out on
The President on the left of the picture. |
In 1907, Elmer was among the first rangers hired into the brand new federal agency called the United States Forest Service and he thrived at the White River National Forest headquarters in Yampa. He was respected, a community leader, deemed fair by the most suspicious rural ranchers and farmers.
Early White River Forest Ranger Station |
Yampa's Main Street. The Royal Hotel, built the year Lillian and Elmer met, burned to the ground earlier this year. |
The note on the Ancestry site continued:
“Elmer was murdered in 1929 and my great grandmother was accused of his murder. She was acquitted and I don't believe they ever found out who killed him.”
If you know anything about these events, or would like to know more, please contact me.”
I was all ears, of course, and soon was talking to Sue, Anna Stell's granddaughter. While her great grandmother was acquitted of murder, Sue told me that some in her family were still out on the long-ago jury verdict.
Elmer seemed in good spirits that day, a Thursday, July 11, 1929 when he left Yampa and headed out to the house for lunch. Friends recalled him passing the pool hall, lingering at the door, watching silently, and then calling out:
“That was a hell of a shot!”
Lillian prepared pot roast for Elmer that day, brewing a fresh pot of coffee and taking out the biscuits when she heard the car in the driveway. After lunch, she said she went to town to have the carburetor on her car adjusted and go to the post office.
Returning
to the house, Lillian saw Elmer on the floor of the kitchen experiencing
violent convulsions. As the alarm spread and the neighbors and the doctor rushed
in, Lillian offered several explanations. To some neighbors, she was sure that
Elmer had purchased and consumed bad liquor.
To others, she seemed to theorize it was a suicide. “Why did you do this?” “Why did you do this,
Elmer?” Later, to the local newspaper,
she attributed his death to a forest fire a couple of weeks before that seemed
to sap his strength and weaken his heart.
AP Photo of Lillian |
At Elmer's ranch in Yampa. Clockwise from left: Barbara, Mildred, Lena Estelle, Lida Hampson, Helen Hampson. The two girls in the foreground are from the Higbee family, cousins of Mildred, my Mom. |
When the
autopsy was performed on a Saturday morning, July 13, Elmer’s organs were full
of strychnine. There was no alcohol in
his blood and very little food in his stomach. It was sensational news. All their troubles as a couple, her obvious
and long-term relationship with Rundle, the terrible things she said about
Elmer around the little town, the divorce papers that arrived the morning of his death, their clash over Elmer not springing for Walter’s bail money and
a string of seeming half truths posited by Lillian seemed to point to her as
the murderer. And there was that $3,500
insurance policy on Elmer’s life, taken out a few days before his death.
Farrington Carpenter as a young lawyer in Hayden, Colorado |
After Elmer died, the rumors abounded across tiny Yampa, 310 people living there in
1930 at 7,800 feet. When Lillian and Rundle came into town, they usually caused
a quiet and intense stir. Elmer had many
friends. She sent at least two letters
to Carpenter asking him to do something.
On
September 15, 1929 she wrote Carpenter in her large and florid handwriting:
“O, how
much longer must I remain in the shadow?”
“I have
been very lonely and sad. And – often
call out involuntarily for Elmer to come to my aid.”
“Please do
all you can, dear friend, in your line of duty, to bring this most complicated situation
to an early closing.”
“My sweet Lida,
farewell. You’re right. I am a rotter, no hope. Farewell.”
Lillian eagerly sent the book to Carpenter and he sent the note to handwriting analysts in New York, Chicago and Denver. In February, 1930, the Chicago expert reported
that the handwriting was not Elmer’s, but was, in fact, Lillian’s. That was it for Farrington Carpenter. He promptly sent deputies to Mancos where
they arrested Rundle and Stephenson, charging her with murder and Rundle as an
accessory.
In the
Colorado State Archives, the box that was brought to my table and an associated
folder proved disappointing. There were
the original letters from Lillian to Carpenter, some notes and handwriting comparisons
by the
handwriting expert, the autopsy report, written by hand on a Yampa Pharmacy letterhead, the alleged suicide note in the Masonic book. There was no transcript or other investigative materials. Since Lillian had been acquitted, there was no appeal and no need for a transcript.
handwriting expert, the autopsy report, written by hand on a Yampa Pharmacy letterhead, the alleged suicide note in the Masonic book. There was no transcript or other investigative materials. Since Lillian had been acquitted, there was no appeal and no need for a transcript.
What does
exist are the accounts of the trial in the Steamboat Pilot, the Steamboat
Springs newspaper, and also wire service stories appearing in papers across the
country. The trial took over the large courtroom
in the Steamboat Springs Courthouse, reduced today to the place where the Routt
County Commission meets and makes policy.
Probably the most interesting and potentially most important item in the archival record is a letter written anonymously and sent to Elmer's employer, the Barker Commercial Company in Los Angeles. It was written eight months before Elmer's death.
Probably the most interesting and potentially most important item in the archival record is a letter written anonymously and sent to Elmer's employer, the Barker Commercial Company in Los Angeles. It was written eight months before Elmer's death.
“This man,
Elmer E. Stephenson, stood high in the community, but for a long time this man has
been drinking and this has led to affairs with married women and very young
girls involved.”
“This man
can furnish alibis by the score,” the letter continued. “He is a keen thinker and has a knowledge of
technicality in Law and Life but he will fall and that soon.”
“He is now
visibly headed for a drunkard’s ending”
The letter
described an incident in a company shed where Stephenson and a girl “barely
sixteen” spent several hours. He had
given her silk stockings “on the condition that he let him put them on
her," the letter stated. "He gave her a drink that knocked
her silly…regular flapper talk.”
“And unless
he is removed, your place of business will be destroyed in Yampa…and he will
fall and that soon.”
Without the
transcript, we don’t know how this letter came into evidence, but the jury saw it and it gave Lillian’s defense an
opportunity to point to someone else who wanted Elmer dead.
Carpenter
wasn’t happy with the judge. He set a
high standard for bringing in the strychnine.
He had to show that the killer bought it. That made everyone in Routt County a potential suspect. The judge also wouldn’t let the handwriting
report come in because the other expert opinions weren't brought in as well. Finally, Carpenter thought
Lillian was not only a good witness in her own defense but also a highly manipulative one:
“She
sported a new hairdo and wore a low-cut, tight-fitting velvet dress over her
fulsome figure. The male jurors could
not keep their eyes off her. Whenever
their attention strayed, she would lean forward and pour out a glass of ice
water, sipping this for several minutes just as I was trying to make an
important point – such as the difference between manslaughter and murder – to
the ogling jurors.”
Trial was held on second floor, right hand side |
Lillian lived 28 years after she left the courthouse with John Rundle. She married him soon after the trial. For the next nine years, they lived on the ranch outside of Yampa, but in 1939 they sold it, all 546 acres. A few weeks later, In 1940, she announced that she had acquired the lease of the Golden West Cafe in Yampa, but soon thereafter moved up the road about 20 miles north to the town of Oak Creek.
She was seriously ill in 1954, enough so to bring her son, Hop, down from Leadville where he continued to work in law enforcement, even was elected Sheriff despite his criminal conviction.
She returned to the hospital in Oak Creek several times in 1958 and died in March. Nothing Lillian did was without considerable drama. The day she died, John Rundle was admitted to the hospital for reasons not specified. Her son Hop could not attend the funeral later that week because of a serious heart condition. She is buried in Yampa's cemetery under the name Lillian C. S. Rundle. Elmer is there too, a few yards away, with an empty plot reserved for Lillian C. Stephenson next to his grave, an unfortunate oversight of the estate administrator or perhaps a conscious decision by Lillian herself. John Rundle died three years after Lillian and is buried a couple of hundred miles away in Crawford, Colorado.
Carpenter never pursued the case after the acquittal. No retrial, no investigation of other possible suspects, nor was there an effort to change the cause of death to a suicide. Subsequent prosecutors stayed away as the case grew colder than a late Colorado frost. She beat them. All of them. Fair and square.
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