The Spider Man

PrisonMuseum.org

The year was 1899 and Phillip Peters had just started his career at the railroad office.  He and his bride had purchased a new bungalow on a quiet street in Denver's middle North Side.  There was music coming from the little house.  A slender youth paused to peer through the curtains of the parlor window.  He carried a mandolin and the hurried excursion from the street car had made him cough.  Several couples were busy strumming at the strings of mandolins.  The watching youth knew they were waiting for him to show them how to twitch gay chords, as he could do so well.

The Mandolin Club was in full swing, waiting for its maestro to show up for the newest lesson.  The maestro was 17.  Physicians from Illinois to Colorado had told him his hopes of seeing 18 were practically nil.  As he looked through the window, his thoughts were of the hatred he felt towards Phil Peters for his success and expectancy of life.  He stepped up on the porch and rang the bell.

There were many nights in the autumn of 1899, when the ailing youth with long slender fingers and feverish eyes was the only guest, when the Peters had asked him to dine with them.  He told them he had not finished high school, that his mother wouldn't let him get a job and how he was probably going to die soon anyway.  He told them about his boyhood in Illinois and how his father died when he was an infant.  He talked about wanting to swing a bat and play ball but it was bad for his heart, how he hated people for staring and laughing at him and that he wanted to live off by himself where he couldn't hear people mock him.

Several years later, on a snowy evening when Phil Peters was leaving work, he brushed shoulders with a shabby, slender figure.  It was the youth, he told Phil how his mother had lost their money to some men who talked her into selling her property in Illinois and investing in a mine out here, but they never saw them or the money again.  Peters invited him to dinner and he relayed that he was in the advertising business downtown and was taking care of his mother.

The next time Phillip Peters saw the one-time minstrel was in the spring of 1912.  He talked about his mothers death and that he just kept on living and didn't know what to do.  He never told him about the time he sought to get into the army and was laughed at.  He never talked about being a frail hobo, coughing out his lungs in a jungle under a
bridge in California, or of the flophouse and shadows where he stayed.

The years came and went for the once maestro, who drifted from state to state and even tried to comeback as a salesman in New York, but had given up and returned to Denver in September 1941.

A neighbor had been preparing dinners at her house for Phil Peters since his wife had broken her hip two weeks before and was in the hospital, but this October 1941 night he had not shown up. The neighbor knew he had not been doing good with his wife gone and went to see if he was all right, but no one came to the door when she rang the bell and the house was dark.

She gathered a group of her neighbors, and they returned to the Peters house.  They tried all the doors but they were locked as well as the window screens.  A girl found one screen loose and pried the window open, and climbed inside. She entered the dark house and then they heard her shrill screams. 

Philip Peters, the kindly 73 year old retired railroad auditor, was found murdered in the bungalow where he and his wife had lived for half a century. It was not a street for murder, death should tread with dignity there.

When police arrived they discovered his body in the downstairs bedroom.  He was bloody, half dressed, barefooted and had been beaten and beaten, long after he was dead with more than a dozen wounds in his skull.  Phil probably never knew who hit him. They found his watch and money laying on the dresser which ruled out robbery as a motive.  The front door was locked with a key and further secured with a chain, which could have only been done from inside the home, and the back door was locked as well.  They found 2 cast iron shakers in the kitchen, one with lots of dust collected on it and the other newly cleaned, as well as a damp towel with blood stains on it. The police believed the killer to be a giant in size and blood-crazy, and he or she had vanished without a trace.

January of 1942 was bitter cold with the temperature below zero for several days.  A group of children hurried by the bungalow and reported seeing a light inside the empty house and one neighbor reported she had seen a ghost face inside the shadowy window.  The neighborhood gossip said the house was full of "haunts"

But once Mrs. Peters recovered, she decided to return to the little house that had been her home for fifty years. One night something startled her and she fell, re-fracturing her thigh. She did not want to go back to the hospital so a nurse was her constant companion.  Then, one night the nurse reported there were goings on inside the walls and rattling noises.  An investigation disclosed nothing, but a few days later she reported seeing a spook on the back stairs that chattered its teeth at her.  She immediately resigned and a caring neighbor stepped in to take care of Mrs. Peters.

Several days later the neighbor believed she heard a mysterious noise, and without turning on the light hurried to the kitchen to investigate, where she saw a ghost at the foot of the stairs.  She told investigators it was a filthy, wraith-like thing that vanished when she screamed and she didn't know where it went.  The police decided to keep a watch on the house and at the insistence of relatives, Mrs. Peters went to live with her son in Western Colorado.

It was now July 1942 and two men from the Denver Police Department were stationed on a lookout across the street from the home.

The sun was getting low as the postman came down the street making his deliveries.  The men had been watching him when one of them caught a fleeting glimpse of a hobgoblin face momentarily in the aperture between the curtains of the bungalow.  Elbowing the other man, he too caught the movement in the window, experienced a little chill at the nape of the neck and in the guts, a little silly he thought.  Ghosts have a way of doing that to you.  Apparently the figure at the window was also watching the postman. 

The two policemen took off across the street as one was blowing the whistle between his teeth for assistance.  The face at the window had vanished as there shoulders hit the door and it collapsed.  The furniture was swathed in sheets, old magazines lay on the table, and above the piano a late nineties portrait was displayed. A frail, sickly-looking youth in a turtle-necked sweater sat in the foreground holding a mandolin.

The two men began to search the lower level, with hackles a-bristle and the rooms reeked with a strange animal smell.  More men were arriving as the two headed up the stairs just in time to see a closet door swinging shut across the room.  As one of the men opened the closet, he saw two bare feet kicking violently.  Above the feet were the lower ends of what appeared to be the most ragged pair of trousers in the world.  The cop made a flying grab for a pants-leg, but it ripped off in his hand.  He grabbed one dangling foot with both hands and hung on.  The closet was so small no one else could help him.  He gave a hearty wrench at the ankle, and it touched off an ghostly yell of pain in the attic above the closet.

Five minutes later, a scarecrow of a man, his clothing in tatters and insufferably filthy, his feet bare and his hair a noisome tangle, lay outstretched on the bedroom floor.  He was unconscious.  He had fainted as the struggling officer in the closet had withdrawn him from the hole in the ceiling. The Police Captain ordered them to get a doctor and an ambulance as the man was barely alive, looked liked he was starved. 

It was a hole not quite three times the size of a cigar-box lid.  When one of the men attempted to get himself through he found the hole was not big enough and the room in the attic was but a few sizes larger than a coffin.  A small incandescent bulb hung from a wire in the rafters and had an overpowering animal stench in the air.  He could make out a bed made of an old ironing board, tattered magazines lay among the bedding and in the cubicle hung festoons of spider weds.

Once the man had regained consciousness, he was taken to police headquarters.  There the frail, starving man told his story as he was plied with food. 

"Everything would have been all right and Phil Peters would have been alive today if he hadn't caught me robbing the ice box.  It was him or me.  I thought he had gone out but he was taking a nap. I hit him with the stove shaker when he tried to run for help.  I don't know if he recognized me.  It was nearly 30 years since he'd seen me last.  When it was over, I ran to the attic after I washed and dried the shaker.  I was sitting on the trap door when you were pounding on it from below that night you found him."

"I was in the neighborhood in September, 1941 and found the house unlocked and no one home.  I went in and stole some food.  I was in bad shape, my lungs were giving me a lot of trouble and I was at the end of my rope.  Fall was coming on and I couldn't face another winter on the road, I had to have a place to stay.  I didn't know Mrs. Peters was in the hospital.  I found the hole in the closet, climbed through and slept and slept. 

Whenever I heard him downstairs, I kept real still.  Then I got bolder and used to shadow him from room to room.  It was sort of a game.  It gave me a thrill.  It was the first time in my life I'd ever had anyone at my mercy, but I didn't want to hurt him.  It was miserable hot in the summer and my feet froze in the dead of winter in that attic, but it was all part of the price I was willing to pay.  I can't tell you why I stuck it out.  I guess it was mostly because it was a world all my own.  I used to go down and look out the windows, and watch the postman come by.  Nobody's written to me in 25 years.  Whenever I saw people on the street, I hated them and would go back to my attic."

This pallid little 5'10", 137 lb. man, now well past sixty, sat in a spacious room on the sunny side of a forbidding building.  There was a high wall outside, a wall along which men with guns walked.  There were bars at the windows and there were hundreds of books on the shelves around him.  He was clean, his hair cut and he had put on weight.  The room was the library at the Canon City Penitentiary.  The long, thin, spidery fingers that once plucked the strings of a mandolin, was the prison librarian.  There was no hurry as he leisurely reached for books while serving his life sentence.  He was in his new jungle, safe from the onslaught of the world he hated.

Theodore Edward Coneys, also known as Matthew Cornish had found his place. He entered the prison on November 18, 1942 and died at the Prison Hospital on May 16, 1967.