No one noticed at first when the grave of a Cripple Creek gold miner named Robert Speed was dug up in the winter of 1906. The caretaker of the cemetery recalled thinking the ground looked disturbed, but he didn’t realize until later that the miner’s coffin had been emptied and then hastily reburied.
Many people in the town of Victor, located in the Cripple Creek mining district, remembered the day Speed was laid to rest. It was a crisp Sunday morning that came on the heels of a rockfall at the Portland Mine that claimed the life of the well-liked miner. When his funeral procession wound through the streets of town, mourners turned out in large numbers to pay their respects.
It seemed the mines around Cripple Creek were having bad luck. The day after Speed’s funeral, an explosion ripped through the Three Jacks mine tunnel, which was leased by a miner with curly red hair named John McEachern. The lone witness to the blast was a miner known as Crowley, who had previously served as a police officer in Cripple Creek under a different name. He had been standing at the mouth of the tunnel on Straub Mountain, and recalled seeing McEachern thawing 40 pounds of dynamite deep inside the tunnel just moments before it went boom. The ill-fated miner had been “blown to shreds.”
A recovery party that included the coroner entered the tunnel and cleared away rocks and debris. There wasn’t much left of John McEachern. Only “15 pounds of bones and flesh” were recovered from beneath the rubble. Not a lot to fill a casket. Nonetheless, a funeral procession was held, and he was buried in the same cemetery as Robert Speed.
Two weeks after the meager remains of John McEachern were laid to rest, a strange tip was received by Marshal Naylor, the head law enforcer in Victor. Someone seemed to think the unlucky miner hadn’t died in the explosion at the Three Jacks tunnel and urged the marshal to revisit the scene. The unidentified tipster suggested he track down McEachern’s wife as well, for she had abruptly packed up and taken the children to Colorado Springs.
Marshal Naylor’s suspicions were aroused. He wasn’t well acquainted with McEachern, but learned the man had a mixed reputation in Leadville, where he worked as a miner before coming to Victor with his young wife and three children a year earlier. Shortly before the family left Leadville, their home burned down in a fire McEachern’s neighbors accused him of setting to collect an insurance settlement.
It wasn’t difficult for the marshal to convince the state mine inspector that a closer look inside the tunnel was warranted. Along with two Cripple Creek police officers, they visited the scene of the blast. The men examined the tunnel, sifted through piles of broken rock, and were just about to give up when the mine inspector uncovered a small section of human skull. Attached to it was a tuft of black hair. It didn’t add up. Unless McEachern’s red hair had suddenly turned black, the remains in the tunnel weren’t his.
A consultation with the coroner produced the notion that the men should inspect the grave of Robert Speed, the black-haired miner who was buried the day before the Three Jacks tunnel explosion.
Marshal Naylor proceeded to the cemetery with the coroner and the two police officers from Cripple Creek. They located the plot where Speed was buried. The floral tributes at his grave were strewn about, and the ground was disturbed. Someone had been digging there. As the men put their shovels into the dirt to excavate the coffin, they felt the weight of their suspicions that grave robbers had already been there two weeks earlier to resurrect the miner’s corpse and deliver it to the Three Jacks tunnel to play the role of John McEachern.
An empty coffin proved their suspicions correct.
Marshal Naylor set his sights on tracking down the wife and children of John McEachern. Police officers in Colorado Springs located the family in a rental home. A search of Mrs. McEachern uncovered $2,200 in cash concealed in her hat and corset. This was part of a $3,000 life insurance payout she received from the Northwestern Life Insurance Company eleven days after the explosion. A second policy had also been taken out, but the insurer had not yet paid.
The family was brought back to Victor and Mrs. McEachern was questioned. She denied that her husband had faked his death to collect the life insurance money, and insisted he was dead. She refused to answer any more of the marshal’s questions. Unable to get anything useful out of the woman, Marshal Naylor turned his attention to the miner known as Crowley, who claimed to have seen McEachern thawing dynamite in the tunnel the morning of the blast.
Crowley was no easier to crack. He swore he knew nothing about a life insurance plot and hadn’t received a dime from the settlement. It was clear both he and Mrs. McEachern were lying, but the truth couldn’t be pried out of them. Other leads would have to be found. So would the whereabouts of John McEachern himself, whom the marshal believed was hiding out somewhere alive and well.
Mrs. McEachern had a sister in Victor with whom she was close. The sister was married to a man named Maudlin who wasn’t always on the right side of the law. He and John McEachern knew each other well. Marshal Naylor expected one or both of them would know something about the insurance plot and the whereabouts of John McEachern. He proceeded to the Maudlin home, where he found the couple behaving in a way that suggested they were hiding something. The marshal and his men had a look around the property. When they opened the door to the basement, someone fired at them from inside. They returned fire. A yelp was heard and John McEachern emerged with a wound from where a bullet grazed his chest.
Everyone was taken into custody. The Maudlins refused to say much when questioned by Marshal Naylor. McEachern said even less. When asked questions such as what had caused him to blow up a dead man, he responded, “I know nothing about the explosion. My mind has been a blank.” Crowley was also taken into custody after the Maudlins cracked and said they knew for certain he had played a role in the conspiracy.
Marshal Naylor believed McEachern still had one more accomplice who hadn’t been identified yet. A local swindler and prizefighter named Kellogg came to mind. Kellogg had made a bad name for himself counterfeiting gold ore and sylvanite and using these “specimens” as payment in saloons. He had also been seen visiting with the wife of John McEachern shortly before she left for Colorado Springs. The marshal located Kellogg and brought him in for questioning. That’s when he finally learned the identity of the anonymous tipster.
Kellogg revealed that John McEachern approached him the day after Robert Speed died and offered him $1,500 from the life insurance settlement to exhume Speed’s body and carry it up Straub mountain to the Three Jacks tunnel. It would be an arduous task for which the prizefighter’s strength was needed. Kellogg agreed, and McEachern gave him a promissory note for $1,500. But then two things happened.
First, Kellogg got cold feet at the cemetery. Standing over Speed’s grave with a shovel, he realized dragging a dead man out of his coffin was an act he couldn’t stomach. He left McEachern and Crowley to commit the gruesome deed without him, using nothing but a rope to yank out the corpse and a sack to wrap it in to drag it a half mile along Wilson’s Creek and up the mountain to the tunnel.
Second, Kellogg became disgruntled when McEachern’s wife refused to pay him the $1,500 he’d been promised. She gave him $50 in cash and not a penny more. Kellogg hadn’t done his job, but he believed he was entitled to his full cut. When further efforts to collect on the promissory note signed by John McEachern didn’t work, Kellogg settled the score by tipping off Marshal Naylor to the conspiracy.
Everyone involved was now in custody. John McEachern and Crowley were charged with obtaining money under false pretenses and conspiracy to defraud the Northwestern Life Insurance Company. Both were found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. Mrs. McEachern was forced to repay the money from the insurance settlement. The other accomplices, including Kellogg, faced varying charges.
Three years into McEachern’s prison sentence, he broke out and fled to Mexico. Authorities caught him and sent him back to Colorado. Upon his release from prison, he returned to Leadville and took up counterfeiting. That landed him in jail for another three years. When he got out, he committed a string of burglaries for which he was again arrested, though he escaped to Utah before his trial. He was quickly captured there, but escaped by jumping off a moving train in handcuffs on the ride back to Leadville. Later McEachern turned up in Nevada, got himself into even more trouble, and returned to Colorado with the intention of disappearing into the crowds of Denver. The Secret Service located him in the heart of downtown and arrested him.
