Hungry For Justice

What would you do when faced with a life-or-death situation? Alferd Packer had to answer this question for himself, and do something that is -- for many -- unthinkable. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grimm and Mild from Aar and Manky.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Humans have always explored. We've gone to the depths of
the ocean and the reaches of space. It's brought us
to new lands or new to us and into contact
with all different kinds of life, and that contact with
the other, the unfamiliar has often seemed scary. Just take

(00:40):
a look at old maps drawn up by Western European
travelers as ships began to sail around the world. The
sailors brought home fantastic stories that were almost too big
to believe. They talked about monsters, and about savages, and
often about cannibals. The term was coined by none other
than Christopher Columbus. He wrote in his diaries about his

(01:03):
alleged encounters with them, describing cannibals as a dog headed
men who ate human beings. Amerigo Vespucci did the same
during his explorations of the continents that now bear a
derivation of his name, and when Queen Isabella of Spain
legalized the enslavement of Native Americans in fifteen oh three,
she did so by alleging that they were cannibals too.

(01:27):
What's true is that many cultures have participated in cannibalism
long before records existed. We have evidence stretching back over
one hundred thousand years that tells us as much. Today,
the idea of eating a loved one or enemy might
give you the itck like nothing else, But we have
to understand that not all cannibalism was created equal across

(01:50):
the world. Endo cannibalism has been a grief practice in
which one's community consumed parts of their body. Rather than
an act of destruction, it was a profound celebration of
a life in which the dead carried on in the living.
Exocannibalism is the act of eating those outside of one's community.

(02:10):
This flavor of consumption, if you'll forgive the pun, was
also marked by community ritual. Seldom was anyone eating someone
else without a lot of care. It's very easy to
point fingers at people who aren't us, to say, but
we aren't like them. But where do you draw the
line and how do you decide what's monstrous? What Queen

(02:34):
Isabella and her ilk failed to acknowledge was the widely
accepted practice of medicinal cannibalism in Europe, it leaned on
the beliefs of sympathetic magic, or that like serves like.
For example, drinking from a human skull was said to
help with headaches, blood was said to help with bleeding.

(02:54):
Rendered human fat had a number of uses. Executed bodies
were the most highly prized, as it was believed that
a quick traumatic death gave no time for a life
force to slowly seep away. The hypocrisy is glaring. When
colonists came to the New World, they were regaled with
tales of indigenous cannibals. Cannibalism was practiced in some Native

(03:18):
American societies, particularly in some groups in the North and West,
but for many it was never simply to fill their
bellies in a stroke of irony. It was likely the
English settlers who became the first gastronomic cannibals in that
part of the world. The winter of sixteen oh nine
to sixteen ten in Jamestown, Virginia has been remembered as

(03:40):
the Starving Time. A seven year drought, fractured leadership, and
a siege by Powaton warriors had created a fatal predicament
for the colony. In that period, about three quarters of
Jamestown ended up starving to death. Of the sixty or
so settlers who remained, they scraped by on whatever they

(04:00):
could find, including the flesh of their recent debt. Archaeological
evidence of these years was discovered as recently as twenty thirteen,
when human bones bearing the marks of butchering were discovered
in a trash pit. It was one of many pits
and one of many bodies that have been found at
the site. America has long been a land of cannibals,

(04:22):
but that distinction has never really belonged to one group.
Despite what European colonists thought about themselves, they were certainly
not above cannibalizing their peers, as the incident in Jamestown
proves to us. So what really separates the monstrous from
the rest of us? If anything at all? I'm Lorn Vogelbaum,

(04:45):
Welcome to American shadows. The promise of hidden riches sang
like a siren, and hungry prospectors came from all over
to heed its call. In November of eighteen seventy three,
a party of twenty one men left Utah to search

(05:07):
for silver in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. In
this group was the thirty one year old Pennsylvania born
drifter named Alfred Packer. He was a curious man, this Alfred.
He was a little bit odd. It was hard to
know who he really was. He prided himself on being
a great entertainer, but his tall tales often fell short

(05:30):
of convincing. He had a way of contradicting himself and
just seemed to try a little too hard to sell himself,
often alterating important details about his life in the process.
What we also do know as fact is that he
was discharged from the Civil War on the account of
being a severe epileptic, experiencing bouts of seizure as many

(05:53):
as three times every forty eight hours, and he had
worked all sorts of odd jobs, but it's likely it
was hard for him to hold anything down for a
significant period of time. Taking bromide seemed to help his condition,
but they weren't totally curative. This was a part of
the story he was always sure to leave out. Packer

(06:14):
had volunteered to lead the silver hunting party. He set
off with confidence with twenty men in tow into the
dense forests and jagged mountains of Colorado. There actually wasn't
even a set path to their destination. Any expedition to
that part of the country was sure to be a
treacherous one, and it was imperative that the guide knew

(06:34):
the land well. What his team didn't know was that
Alfred wasn't the expert on the Colorado Mountains that he
claimed to be. Even so, the first part of their
trip was fairly smooth. Spirits were high, folks were filled
with hope. They had big dreams about what they'd find
in the mountains and what they'd do with it all
once they got home. But it wasn't long before things

(06:57):
began to unravel. Into their journey, Packer had an epileptic
episode and fell into the campfire. He was saved by
a companion, but when he came to he brushed it off,
claiming it was the first seizure he had ever experienced.
But he soon began to have seizures several times a day,
and the other travelers began to suspect that he was

(07:19):
lying to them. It soon became clear that there were
other things that Packer couldn't hear himself of. He was
outed as an habitual petty thief. He was also quarrelsome
whiny and apparently greedy with rations. He was said to
be surly and bragged about a jail stint he served
after buying the services of frontier sex workers. But Packer

(07:42):
was no dummy. He knew his party had grown to
disdain him, and he felt the same right back. He
called this a cordial hatred and was happy to continue on.
Others didn't share that feeling. By the time they crossed
the Green River, about eighty five miles from the Colorado border,
the party had come to the mounting realization that Packer

(08:04):
had been lying to them about knowing where he was headed.
Horror and rage gripped the men. All of the other
issues they could live with, this they quite literally could not.
On January twenty fifth of eighteen forty seven, the party
was surrounded by a group of Ute warriors as they
approached the Colorado border. The party was on reservation land,

(08:26):
and one account tells that the Ute took pity on
the sorry, hungry prospectors in front of them. Chief Urray,
who was present that day, offered to take the men in.
He warned them not to continue and offered them his
hospitality until the spring thaw came. For a few weeks.
The party stayed with the ute, but they soon grew

(08:47):
Antsy worried that the riches would be gone if they
waited until spring to set out again. They calculated that
they only had forty more miles to go. On February second,
five men broke from the park. Alfred tried to join them,
but was threatened with a gun. He would get his
chance a week later, when five other prospectors decided to

(09:08):
leave the Ute encampment. Chief Yurey told them not to go,
and that he wouldn't even allow for his own people
to try. But the prospectors refused his advice, and Urrey
reluctantly drew them a map in the snow. He illustrated
two trails over the mountains, a lower trail which was
eighty miles long, and an upper trail, which was only

(09:30):
forty miles. The party set out for the upper trail
in the dead of winter, without a single snowshoe in sight.
Two and a half months later, on the morning of
April sixteenth, Alfred Packer wandered out of the mountains and
into the Las Pignos Indian Agency. He was alone, with
none of his companions anywhere to be found. The winters

(09:58):
in the San Juan Mountains are long, dark and harsh.
The peaks are impassable and inhospitable, which are both very
bad things if you find yourself stranded among them. By
some stroke of luck that felt nothing short of divine intervention,
Alfred Packer had made his way out of the mountains

(10:19):
with just a backpack and a rifle. He was ragged
and ravaged, but otherwise appeared to be in good health.
He'd endured temperatures down to negative fifty degrees fahrenheit in
the wild for over fifty seven days, and people were
simply impressed. His party was lost. Packer told the folks
at the agency, Oh, this surprised no one. What did

(10:41):
surprise them, though, was that he didn't appear to be hungry.
In fact, he looked rather well fed. According to one story,
rather than scarfing down a breakfast upon arrival, he opted
to throw back a few shots of whiskey instead. It's
then that a story began to come now. He claimed

(11:02):
that soon after he and the other men left Chief
Uray's encampment, he began to suffer from frostbitten feet and
snow blindness. His traveling companions elected to leave him behind
with a rifle and supplies. Where they ended up, Packer said, well,
he could only assume that they had died from the
cold themselves. But as fate would have it, Parker wasn't

(11:24):
the only one who showed up at the agency that day.
A Preston Nutter, a doctor Cooper, and a fellow by
the name of Italian Tom, all members of the crew
who stayed behind at the ute camp, appeared just hours
after Alfred did. This did not please him. In fact,
Parker grew visibly upset at their arrival. Nutter asked where

(11:46):
the rest of his party was, and Packer repeated his story.
Packer began to move quickly. He started talking about returning
home to Pennsylvania and sold his Winchester rifle for ten dollars.
He and three other men to hit the road and
head to the nearby town of Swatch. During their trek,
Nutter poked at Packer. He had long been suspicious of him,

(12:09):
and the intervening months apart did nothing to change that.
Why he asked Parker did he have the knife that
had belonged to Frank, one of their lost prospectors, and
Packer quickly said that Frank stuck it in a tree
and left it there, which of course made no sense.
Once they arrived in Sewatch, Packer aroused even more suspicion.

(12:29):
For a guy who was constantly broke, he seemed to
have suddenly, somehow come into some serious money. He ended
up spending almost two thousand dollars in today's money at
a local saloon over a two week period. With every
passing alcohol soaked night, Packer's story got more dramatic and
more unbelievable. The inconsistencies were glaring, and the looks began

(12:53):
to fly. But Packer wasn't wholly oblivious. He noticed that
his companion were growing uneasy as soon he began to
make plans to depart to Watch, but once again timing
was not on Packer's side. As he prepared to leave,
he ran into the general of the Las Pignots Agency,

(13:14):
a fellow by the name of General Charles Adams, And
even if he wasn't completely oblivious, he also couldn't resist
sharing his story again, so he sat down for breakfast
with the general's wife and told her all about his
time in the mountains. While his wife was occupied. General
Adams took it upon himself to do some digging. He

(13:36):
was quickly informed about the suspicious Packer and soon formed
a plan of his own. General Adams decided that a
party would be formed to go search for Packer's men,
and Packer, it was decided, would be their paid guide.
What Alfred Packer, General Adams and all the men in
Sewatch didn't know was that at that very moment, more

(13:58):
men from Packer's original party were arriving at the Las
Pinos agency. When General Adams and Packer returned, these prospectors
did not give their former guide a warm welcome. Instead,
it ended up being an interrogation. They wanted to know
what really happened up in those mountains. It didn't take
long for Packer to crack. He broke down, it suffered

(14:21):
a short seizure, and then confessed the journey was harder
than they thought. He admitted that they had been foolhardy,
and over confident. The conditions were unlivable, with snow above
their head for miles at some points. Soon they began
to run out of food, so they began to forage,
but that was no good. They grew hungry enough to

(14:43):
start eating their leather shoes and then one by one
they died. The first to go was old man Swan.
They decided to eat him right then and there. The
survivors ate their dead as they each slowly perished through
their journey, and when they were down to two men,
Packer and a man called Bell, they made a pact

(15:06):
to not kill and eat the other. But Bell eventually
went back on his word and came at Parker with
the butt of his broken rifle. So Packer did the
only logical thing, he shot Bell dead. While General Adams
may have believed Packer's tale, the other men present didn't.
They knew and respected Bell and doubted he would have

(15:27):
gone back on his word. The General determined that if
Packer's story was true, a Bell's body would be lying
with his broken rifle, and if that's what was found,
Packer would be set free and sent home to Pennsylvania,
all expenses paid. So they all set off. Packer quickly
became disoriented. Once he was back on the trail, he

(15:49):
was lost and wouldn't be able to lead them to Bell.
Perhaps this was disingenuous, of course, he didn't want to
be caught, But don't forget that he actually wasn't a
wilderness guide. He didn't have a very good idea of
where he was going, and probably where he had gone
to begin with. But Parker was taken into custody and
installed in the cabin of the Swatch County sheriff for

(16:12):
the summer. Three months later, an illustrator from Harper's Weekly
stumbled across the mutilated remains of five men near the
Gunnison River. Their bodies were all laid within a few
feet of each other, covered in blankets and clothes, and
badly decayed. All bodies showed bullet holes and all had
flesh cut from bone. The one man's skull was crushed

(16:35):
and another's was separated from its body. They were also
missing all valuable assets cash included, of course. Finding the
remains of all bodies together completely invalidated. Packers claimed that
they had all died slowly over time. The artists drew
a sketch and brought it to the local authorities. They
quickly set off to the mountains to corroborate the story.

(16:58):
After the authorities buried the remains of Packer's victims, the
team returned to the jail to confront him. However, the
cabin was empty. Packer had escaped, Alfred Packer took to
the road again. It was easy to be anonymous in

(17:19):
those days. For the better part of a decade, Packer
stayed out of the hands of the law. He had
gotten lucky. Though his digs at the watch hadn't been
so bad. He was still being held without any evidence
of wrongdoing. He maintained his innocence, and not everyone was
as quick to blame him. It would later be revealed
that two men not only helped Springham loose, but gave

(17:40):
him food for the journey. They were upset the town's
resources were going to behold a man convicted of nothing,
and so they quietly released him, and just days before
the bodies of Packer's party were discovered. His luck couldn't
last forever, though, and he was recognized by a fellow
prospector in Cheyenne, Wyoming in eighteen eighty three. The man

(18:02):
wrote to General Adams, who made quick work of getting
to town. There he found an apprehended Packer taking him
down to Denver by train. A Packer tried to work
a deal. If General Adams could protect him from the
angry mob that surely awaited him back in Colorado, he
would provide the real truth about what had taken place

(18:23):
in the mountains all those years ago. The men made
an agreement. Flanked by a sheriff and a deputy, a
Packer made his confession. Packer claimed that his party fractured
one day when one of the men, Swan, sent Packer
ahead to scout into the mountains in order to find
their way. A Packer claimed he was gone a whole day,

(18:43):
and on his return saw something wildly frightful. There sat
his companion Bell, hunched and wild eyed, over a fire
and roasting a piece of meat. Four other men lay
dead around him, all in various states of mutilais. Some
were shot, and some were slashed, and some had hunks

(19:04):
of flesh cut from their bones. It's then that Bell
jumped up and came for Packer, and reacting quickly, Packer
shot him in the stomach and then whacked him over
the head with a hatchet. Bell was dead, and now
Packer was alone. He tried and tried again to get
out of camp, but the snow was impassable, so for

(19:25):
sixty days he stayed, making fires and living off the
flesh of his companions. As the spring pain he grew
hopeful who cooked the last of the meat, took what
he could and left the camp. This time he had
make it out. His first confession. He told the men
was crazed and he couldn't be held responsible for what

(19:45):
he had said. He had been through quite an ordeal,
and they had to understand. The news broke in papers
from the mountains to the sea. It was a sensational story,
and this man, after all, had just admitted to eating
his friend. There was certainly a pantalizing drama to that story,
but the question remained how much of it was true.

(20:09):
Many thought Packer killed his companions in cold blood. Swan's
family said that he had left home with six thousand
dollars in cash and gold, which would have provided Packer
with plenty of motivation for murder. Others suggested he had
knocked out members of his party with morphine, which he
had also used to treat his epilepsy, before killing them.
In their minds, he had this particular condition and used

(20:33):
it to aid in cold blooded murder. Packer's trial began
on April ninth of eighteen eighty three. He was only
charged with the murder of Swan. This was strategic for
the prosecution. Team and hopefully an easy sell to the jury,
and if he got off well, they could bring more
charges against him in the deaths of the other four men.

(20:55):
For the first two days, men testified against him. On
the third day he took the stand. He told his
story once again about finding Belle at a campfire, surrounded
by his dead companions. He admitted to taking their money,
he admitted to eating them. He denied killing anyone. But
bell Packer left the courthouse that day feeling confident in

(21:17):
his performance. He looked forward to being a free man.
But even if he was telling the truth where it mattered,
he lied about other things on the stand, his age,
his military service, his epilepsy. He just couldn't stop himself
from lying. He was convicted in the death of old

(21:38):
man Swan and sentenced to hang. But once this verdict
came down, his team petitioned since the crimes happened on
the Ute reservation, it was out of the state court's jurisdiction,
and they were right legally on the grounds of territory,
Packer couldn't be charged with murder. They were also right
about something else. Murders took place. Colorado was not yet

(22:02):
a state that meant that they could not legally apply
the laws of the state to the crime which had
been made after the crime occurred. There had been a
law allowing the state to prosecute murders that had happened
in the territory, but that law had since been repealed
and rewritten. Packer could not legally be tried for murder,

(22:23):
but he could still be tried from manslaughter the laws
allowed for that. Packer won his rights to a second trial,
which took place in eighteen eighty six under the new
Colorado legislation. He was tried for a voluntary manslaughter of
all five men instead of the murder of one. His
second trial was almost identical to the first. The same

(22:45):
witnesses appeared and the same evidence was presented. A verdict
was quickly reached. A Packer was guilty of killing his
companions and sentenced to forty years in prison, the longest
custodial sentence in American history at that point. By all accounts,
he was a model prisoner. It was even said that
he used his pension to help the formerly incarcerated get

(23:07):
back on their feet. After sixteen years behind bars, he
petitioned for the fifth time to be paroled. His request
was denied yet again, but he caught the attention of
a curious reporter from the Denver Post named Polly Prye.
She began a media campaign for his release, and the
tide of public favor slowly began to turn towards him.

(23:31):
It was revealed that he had largely been convicted on
flimsy circumstantial evidence. In January of nineteen o one, the
Governor of Colorado made it his final act before retiring,
to grant Parker parole. He would spend the rest of
his days in a quiet flower garden, raising chickens and rabbits.

(23:51):
He fought until the day he died in nineteen o
seven for a full pardon. According to the telling, his
last words were, I'm not guilty of the charge. Alfred
Packer always maintained that he may be guilty of eating

(24:13):
the men after they died, he may be guilty of
taking their money, but the only one of them he
killed was Bell, which was an act of self defense.
There have been multiple investigations into the matter to determine
whether Packer had lied about the events in those mountains
or not. But in the words of James E. Stars,
George Washington University law professor and Packer expert. While there's

(24:38):
no question that Packer was a monumental liar, it's likely
that he sometimes told the truth. Investigations in recent years
continue to focus on what really happened that long cold winter.
Physical evidence points to murder, yes, but it doesn't point
researchers in the direction of who did the killing. Today

(25:00):
case is still being debated, but the general consensus remains
we can't know what really happened. Did the pathological liar
lie or did he tell the truth? Who shot first?
And what were the specific circumstances around that violence. Was
Packer a calculated murderer who led these men to their doom?

(25:22):
Or was he a victim of circumstance? Or was the
truth somewhere in between. Today, Packer's cannibalism can be just
as much of a punchline as it is a horror.
The University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, has a
dining hall named after him. Slogan is have your friends
for lunch. We remain fascinated by cannibalism, whether in fact

(25:47):
or fiction or in some murky space in between. We
see it span centuries and cultures of myth and legend,
and propped up high on the silver screen, we can't
look away. The act represents many different things for each
of us. How far we'll go to survive, what it

(26:07):
means to be civilized, the link between the known and
the other, and fundamentally, what it means to be human.
How far will any of us go to survive? It's
a question we can all ask ourselves, but can't ever
truly know until we are in the most desperate of circumstances.

(26:30):
In the case of Packer, he is the only one
who truly knew what happened. There's more to this story.
Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all
about it. The frigid Yukon was once a place for outlaws.

(26:57):
It's here that rum runner Louis Lincoln and his Auto
found themselves caught in a blizzard one night. The unfortunate
auto accidentally stepped through some ice, soaking his foot and
chilling him to the bone. By the time the two
brothers made it back to their cabin, they were in
pretty bad shape. The frostbite had set into Otto's foot,
and it became clear that his big toe in particular,

(27:20):
was at risk for developing gangreen, so Louis did what
he had to in order to save his brother's foot.
He amputated the toe and popped it into a nearby
jar of booze. Why the story doesn't say, but it
seems likely that there was a thought that it could
be preserved with the hope that it someday might be reattached.

(27:42):
Or perhaps it was just a humorous and macabre souvenir.
He had done the work of growing it himself, so
why throw it out. The toe, though, would never again
meet its maker. It languished in its boozy tomb until
nineteen seventy three, when it said the local boat captain
named Dick Stevenson found the jar of alcohol while cleaning

(28:04):
out a cabin. He was delighted. Stevenson picked up the
jar and ferried it down to his local watering hole.
There he brought it around the bar, daring patrons to
dunk the toe in their drinks, and thus the Sour
Toe Cocktail Club was born. Sadly, though, the original toe

(28:25):
was not long for this world. In nineteen eighty a
miner was going for the sourte cocktail world record, and
on his thirteenth glass he swallowed the toe by accident.
Not to be dissuaded by this temporary roadblock, the club
carried on and lives on at the Sour Toe Saloon,
still in operation in Dawson City today. It's said that

(28:49):
plenty of amputated toes have been donated for the cause.
One even arrived with a warning, don't wear open toed
shoes while mowing the lawn. So if you may make
it to Dawson City and are feeling brave, saddle up
to the bar. The club is still taking members, and
lucky for you, the bartender will make the cocktail with

(29:09):
any alcohol of your choice. You might even get a
chance to hear a taunting jingle. You can drink it fast,
you can drink it slow, but your lips must tough
that gnarly tow. American Shadows is hosted by Lauren Vogelbaum.
This episode was written by Robin Minietter and researched by

(29:31):
Alex Robinson, with fact checking by Jamie Vargas. It's produced
by Jesse Funk and Trevor Young. The executive producers Aaron Menke,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show,
visit griminmild dot com and four more podcasts. My Heart
Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.