1996 interview with Joe Corbett

By The Denver Post

Editor's Note: Below is a transcript of an interview The Denver Post conducted with Joe Corbett in 1996. The article appeared in print on Sunday, Feb. 11, 1996.

Coors killer breaks his silence

Ex-con still claims innocence after 36 years

By Paul Hutchinson and Marilyn Robinson - The Denver Post

Sixteen years out of prison, Joe Corbett still lives behind bars.

He's a prisoner of his mind, a hostage to his dreams, the slave of his own disgrace. When he walks the neighborhood, a few old-timers still nod and whisper: "There goes the guy who killed Adolph Coors."

For the first time since the kidnapping and slaying of Adolph Coors III 36 years ago — on Feb. 9, 1960 — Corbett has spoken publicly about the crime he claims he didn't commit. In two interviews with The Denver Post last week, Corbett talked of his childhood, his years in prison and his recent life in southwest Denver.

He also revealed a lifelong fascination with the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932.

Aging and slightly stooped, Corbett resembles a chemistry professor as he squints through wire-rimmed bifocals. Few would guess that his campuses were San Quentin and Canon City, not Berkeley or Boulder.

Despite convincing evidence against him, Corbett denies any role in the Coors kidnapping. At the time of his death, Coors was a 44-year-old husband, the father of four children, chairman of the Golden brewery and, as grandson of the company founder, one of Colorado's most prominent citizens.

Soon after Coors vanished near Morrison while driving to work, Corbett would become one of Colorado's most prominent criminals.

Reclusive, bookish, virtually friendless and without family, Joseph Corbett Jr., now 67, wants nothing these days so much as privacy. Because he is still recognized in public, the man with the 148 IQ spends his days in a small apartment, drapes drawn tight with safety pins, reading his books and magazines, pondering what might have been.

He disconnected his phone years ago, he said, because of crank callers.

Corbett's has been a squandered life. This much he admits. If brains were computer chips, his would be a Pentium 150. Before his life fell apart, Corbett was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oregon.

As a boy, a love of science propelled him toward medical school. Instead, he graduated from San Quentin prison in California for a murder he admits, and from Old Max in Colorado for a murder he denies.

"Sometimes things take such a turn," he said last week, "you just can't believe it."

Few people are willing to believe in Corbett's innocence. Quite possibly, though, Joe Corbett believes in it himself.

For 14 months — from Coors' disappearance on a winter morning, to the discovery of his remains seven months later, to the dramatic capture of Corbett in Canada and his conviction in March 1961 — the case riveted Coloradans as few crimes before or since.

On the subject of Coors, Corbett never talked to police and FBI agents. He never took the witness stand at his trial in Golden District Court. He never allowed interviews with the press. Through the years, he discussed the Coors case with no one, except to proclaim his innocence during parole hearings.

"I see myself as a pretty commonplace man who through sheer, bizarre circumstances got involved in something notorious," Corbett told the parole board in 1979.

Stirring things up

Even now, Corbett won't be formally interviewed. Yet he spent more than an hour last week, in two different sessions, patiently answering reporters' questions. Standing in the doorway of his tidy apartment, he wore a short-sleeved blue denim shirt, gray flannel trousers, black leather belt and shoes. It could have been a prison uniform.

"I don't want to stir things up again, because it just gets me all wrought up," he said.

As he spoke Wednesday, though, Corbett already was wrought up over a piece he'd just read in The New Yorker by the noted writer John McPhee.

The magazine's Jan. 29 edition described in damning detail the evidence used to convict Corbett — especially "dirt evidence" scraped from the undercarriage of his canary-yellow 1951 Mercury. McPhee's article, part of a larger work on forensic geology, included this bewitching sentence:

"While careful at all times to cover his tracks, (Corbett) had been writing his itinerary on the bottom of his car."

Nice literary touch, Corbett agreed.

"It's a work of fiction, though," Corbett said, voice rising. "He's got stuff in there that, if it were true, it would have been brought out at the trial. I can see why so many people think I'm guilty, that it's an open-and-shut case. But it wasn't. The jury was out three days. I sat there in the library reading this (New Yorker), and I was thinking, "Where did he get all this?'"

Upon Corbett's release from prison in 1980, he said, he set out to prove his innocence but quickly gave up hope. Unable to find work as an X-ray technician — he learned the skill in prison — he went to work for the Salvation Army driving a truck. He's now retired and living on Social Security.

"It would be futile to retry the case now," Corbett said. "What's the point? It just goes against all my instincts, all my conditioning, to say anything at all now that would add to my notoriety."

But say it he did.

Corbett described his keen interest in the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932, when the American aviator's infant son disappeared from his bedroom and later was found dead. A suspect, Bruno Hauptmann, was tried and convicted based on circumstantial evidence. The German immigrant went to the electric chair claiming his innocence, and the case remained controversial for years.

Corbett was not yet 4 years old when the Lindbergh case broke. As a precocious youngster and the son of a newspaperman, he was drawn to the "crime of the century."

"There's a whole shelf of books on it," Corbett said. "Lindbergh was a hero of my generation. You can't help but run into it (the kidnapping story) from time to time."

No alibi witnesses

Corbett believes Charles Lindbergh himself may have been the real killer. He recites a plausible if far-fetched scenario supporting such a view, pinning the theory on a recently published book written by a police officer.

Corbett's eagerness to believe in Hauptmann's innocence matches his desire for others to believe in his. Yet he turned down an opportunity to produce an alibi at his trial. That would have amounted to a lie, he said, and Joe Corbett is no liar.

He describes two alibi witnesses: "We had a man and his son who were all ready to testify that I was at a gas station having my car fixed (on the day Coors disappeared). But I told (my lawyer), "That's just not true. Someone may have been at that gas station. But it wasn't me.'"

So the alibi witnesses were never called. This story was confirmed by Corbett's former defense attorney, William Erickson, who later was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court and will retire this spring.

"Everything Joe Corbett told me was accurate — that I was able to investigate," Erickson said Friday.

Despite impressive — some would say overwhelming — evidence presented at his trial in 1961, Corbett passionately denies kidnapping Coors near his home in Jefferson County. The millionaire's clothes were found seven months later in a dump near Sedalia, leading to the discovery of his bones.

A note demanding $500,000 in ransom was traced to a Royalite typewriter purchased by Corbett at May D&F, according to the FBI. Likewise, the FBI found a clerk who identified Corbett as the buyer of a certain brand of typing paper.

That's the trouble with being Joe Corbett: People remember you — months, even years later.

Coors had been shot twice in the back. The handcuffs and leg irons that Corbett had ordered through the mail in the months before the killing — under his alias Walter Osborne — apparently went unused. The handgun that he likewise ordered through the mail apparently was used but never found.

Dirt scraped from the wheel wells of Corbett's car would place him in the vicinity of Morrison and Sedalia. The FBI collected 450 dirt samples in its effort. Corbett, though, never denied being in the area. His interest in the outdoors had naturally taken him near both sites, he said.

The McPhee article re-creates the kidnapping scene based on recovered evidence and the author's imagination. What upset Corbett most, though, was McPhee's claim that Coors' 16-year-old daughter had seen Corbett several times near the family property in the months before the kidnapping. McPhee interviewed the daughter, Cecily Garnsey, for his story.

She had figured Corbett for a deer poacher, Garnsey said.

"(The article) said repeatedly that this girl was out on horseback and spotted me, and that I had a rifle, and so on," Corbett said. "I would think the kidnapper would have grabbed her, really. She would have been easier to grab than the old man would have been.

"It's just pure make-believe. Nobody testified at the trial that I hung around the Coors property, or talked to their daughter on horseback. Anything as devastating as that, they would have had her out there on the witness stand."

True, Coors' daughter never testified at trial. But Corbett sightings in the foothills southwest of Denver — and near the bridge where Coors was abducted — were numerous in the early weeks of 1960. And Corbett's jury heard about them. A bright yellow Mercury would tend to attract attention.

The car was found eight days after the kidnapping, smoldering near Atlantic City, N.J. Someone had poured gasoline on the seats and set it afire. Through a serial number on the engine, the FBI traced the car to Osborne, aka Corbett. Meanwhile, agents tracked Corbett through Toronto, then 2,500 miles west to Vancouver, where he was captured 8 1/2 months after the kidnapping.

"I'm your man," he told agent Alfred Gunn. "I'm not armed. I give up." A loaded pistol — not the Coors murder weapon — was found in a zippered bag in his hotel room.

The FBI called it one of the biggest manhunts in its history. The agency had circulated 1.5 million posters bearing Corbett's picture. Posters appeared in barbershops, bus stations, optometry offices (Corbett couldn't get along without his glasses) and YMCAs.

Because Corbett was unwilling to discuss his case in detail last week, many questions went unasked. He did, however, explain why he fled his Capitol Hill apartment just one day after Coors was reported missing.

"I was a fugitive from California, and I had been in that area (where Coors was kidnapped)," he said. Intuition told him that police would come knocking, so he fled.

Corbett had pleaded guilty in 1951 to second-degree murder in the slaying of an Air Force sergeant.

"I shot the guy," he said. "There was a fight, and I shot him. It was a terrible thing, but I pleaded guilty."

He was sentenced to five years to life. After a stretch in San Quentin, he was transferred to a lighter-security prison in Chino. He walked away in 1955 and headed for Denver on the advice of a fellow con.

"I didn't like being locked up. That was a young man's natural desire to be free. I thought, 'Heck, I'll go to Denver.'"

Going by his alias, Osborne, he took a job as an alkali cooker for the Benjamin Moore Paint Co. According to employees, their quiet colleague suffered a curious flaw: an occasional big mouth. Co-workers told police that Corbett had bragged about scheming for "a big score" that would net him a half-million dollars or more.

For four years, the fugitive Corbett lived quietly in a third-floor apartment at 1435 Pearl St. By one report, he was tagged "Mystery Boy" by some tenants in his building.

Even now he remains mysterious. Some neighbors in the apartment building where he's lived more than 10 years didn't recognize his picture last week. His apartment manager said she never speaks to him. "I was told (by the owners) to leave him alone," she said.

Across the street, the operator of a small business remembered seeing Corbett take frequent walks. "I would see him out there sometimes and tell my boys, "That's the guy who killed Adolph Coors,'" the longtime Denverite said.

Corbett said he has learned to live with that reaction.

"Some people are very warm and nice," he said. Others are hostile. They swear at him, or glare, or, as once happened, try to run him off the road. "You wonder, "What did I do to this person to cause such hostility?'"

To believe Joe Corbett's story, you would have to believe that he's the victim of some cosmic conspiracy and a massive frameup by the FBI. But Corbett wants neither sympathy nor victimhood.

"Now, everybody wants to be a victim, and preferably of someone they can sue for a million dollars," he said. "There's just so much of this stuff — people whining and sniveling about things that are just part of life.

"I just take it in stride. It's one of those bizarre things that happened."

With his over-the-top IQ, Joe Corbett may be the only person in the world who really believes that. He seems destined to die behind bars he built himself.