Pod Insights Conspiracy Theories The Colorado Cannibal: Alfred Packer About this episode A man stumbles out of the Colorado wilderness in 1873. After his traveling party ran out of food in the dead of winter, he’s the only survivor. Except he looks surprisingly well-fed. Alfred Packer’s story of what became of his companions changes not once, but twice. In the end, we know that he ate them in order to survive. The question is, did he kill them first?
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Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 America's Wild West. Filled with outlaws, rootin' tootin' cowboys, lone gunslingers, and sunset showdowns. Tumbleweeds blew, boots kicked up dust, shadows told time, and danger lurked around every saloon door. It's a bygone era that feels straight out of the movies. Mostly because it is. Yes, the iconic American Wild West is by and large an invention of Hollywood. The mythos first started with pulpy dime novels, then moved to traveling shows until it eventually made its way onto the silver screen.
0:49 Speaker 00 The truth is, the real Wild West wasn't so wild, and it was much more diverse. About 25% of all cowboys were black. And not to mention, Mexican cowboys or vaqueros were essential to developing the ranching industry in California and Texas. As for all those gunfights, many frontier towns actually banned firearms entirely. You couldn't legally carry guns in public. Some towns, though, like Palisade, Nevada, reportedly used Hollywood's myths to their advantage. They staged fake shootouts, bank robberies, and battles
1:33 Speaker 00 just to boost tourism, complete with fake blood and blank cartridges. The whole town and even the local indigenous tribe were in on it. Visitors failed to notice that the violence only ever broke out when trains rolled into the station or that only locals ever got hurt. They were too busy hiding or running for the hills. Today's case takes place during this era of myth-making, at a time when gold fever struck America hard. But unlike most stories we tell on this show, it plays out backwards. See, the official account is that a conspiracy happened.
2:18 Speaker 00 That in 1873, a wilderness guide named Alfred Packer lured a group of prospectors into the mountains to rob them, kill them, and eat their flesh.
2:35 Speaker 00 But that story might not be entirely true. Alfred definitely ate his companions, that much we know. But the harder question to untangle is, did he kill them first?
2:52 Speaker 00 Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, at the Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. This episode contains discussions of death, murder, and cannibalism. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us.
3:22 Speaker 00 You know how they say tragedy plus time equals comedy? Well, it's been more than 150 years since Alfred Packer was convicted of murdering and cannibalizing five fully grown men. And at the University of Colorado Boulder, you can now eat at the Alfred Packer Grill, where the slogan is, "Have a Friend for Lunch." And if you time it right, you can even attend UC Boulder's annual Alfred Packer Day, where guests can sign up for a mystery meat eating contest, enter a look-alike competition, race in coffins, and buy branded t-shirts that say things like, "Finger looking good."
4:06 Speaker 00 Then you can hop over to Lake City, Colorado, and spend the night at a place formerly called The Cannibal Cabins. Ah, cannibal humor. It's dark. And you may consider it in bad taste, but the fact that all the pageantry exists proves how notorious Alfred Packer has become to a slice of America. And given that notoriety, you might think there's consensus around what kind of person he actually was. But that's not the case. The jury is still out on the man who faced two different juries in his lifetime. Was the Colorado Cannibal a villainous traitor? Or a misunderstood victim?
4:51 Speaker 00 First, let's talk about a much smaller mystery: his name. You may have heard me say Alfred Packergrill earlier. That was a mistake. In some places, he's referred to as Alfred, R-E-D, and in others Alfred, E-R-D. Why? Well, it's unclear. There's one story about how he once got a tattoo and the artist accidentally misspelled his name. I don't know why he would have been tattooing his own name, or where, but he apparently thought this mistake was so funny, he sometimes went by Alfred after that, and signed his name that way, too.
5:30 Speaker 00 But, most legal documents and his headstones say Alfred, so that's what I'm rolling with. In 1872, Alfred is about 30 years old and a war veteran. He enlisted in the Union Army to fight in the Civil War, not once, but twice. He apparently really liked military life, but he was discharged both times due to his epilepsy. Seizures have been a problem for him from a very young age. Alfred now works as a wilderness guide in Utah, but he's about to leave the state on an adventure of a lifetime. Like so many Americans, he's read and heard incredible stories of the riches the West
6:13 Speaker 00 holds: gold that's just there for the taking. It's why he decides to join a group of 21 prospectors headed to southwestern Colorado. He wants to change his life forever. He needs the money. He's so desperate that he had to lie in order to go on this trip. He told everyone he could pay for his share of the provisions, but the truth is, he can't. It's fall by the time the prospectors set out. The group assumes they'll be able to make it to their destination before the cold hits. But Mother Nature has other plans. Winter arrives early and comes with a vengeance.
6:58 Speaker 00 And in the San Juan region of Colorado where they're headed, winter can last up to nine months. Snow, sleet, and heavy winds pummel Alfred and his group, slowing down travel and endangering everyone's lives. Weeks into their journey, they run out of provisions entirely and resort to eating animal feed meant for their livestock. Then, in late January, they have their first stroke of luck. They reach an encampment, home to the Ute Indians, and the Ute leader welcomes them with open arms. He gives them food and shelter
7:40 Speaker 00 and tells the prospectors to wait out the winter with his tribe. It's too dangerous to continue. Most of the men heed the warning and accept the generous offer. But a few decide to carry on anyway, blinded by their own greed. This includes Alfred Packer. In his mind, fewer men means more money. Alfred joins a group of six others, among them a butcher, a teenager, an elderly man, a prospector, and a miner. Since Alfred seems to have the most wilderness experience as a guide, the consensus is he should act as leader.
8:25 Speaker 00 When they leave the Ute camp, winter is still raging. We know they travel into the San Juan Mountains, but beyond that, we can't say what actually transpires next because we only have one source for that information, and he may not be the most reliable narrator. Alfred is the only one to make it out alive. Depending on what you read, he spends anywhere from 57 to 66 days in the wild. But all accounts agree that Alfred reappears in a town near Gunnison, Colorado sometime around mid-April. He looks ragged, he looks tired, and he tells the following story.
9:10 Speaker 00 "While in the mountains, his group got lost. Everyone was struggling, but Alfred's feet froze, and he developed snow blindness, which is an eye sunburn, ow, caused by overexposure to UV rays, usually as they bounce off snow or ice. He reached the point where he was too weak to keep up with the others, so they abandoned him. After that, he managed to survive on rabbits and rosebuds. He says he has no idea if his companions are still alive." Now, there's something that doesn't quite add up for people about Alfred's account.
9:48 Speaker 00 For a man who just spent two months on the brink of starvation, he looks surprisingly well-fed. In fact, his first stop after reaching civilization isn't to get food. He's much more interested in whiskey, which people are happy to provide. It's obvious he's been through a lot. But something strange happens when Alfred goes to pay his tab. The man who couldn't pay for his provisions on the trip pulls out a big, fat wad of cash.
10:28 Speaker 00 In April 1873, Alfred Packer returns from a near-death trip in the San Juan Mountains. And over the next few weeks, he spends a lot of time getting drunk and answering questions. Turns out, in 19th-century rural Colorado, a man stumbling out of the wilderness is very high on the list of interesting things to talk about. Now, when he's sober, Alfred mostly avoids questions, brushes them off, changes the subject.
11:00 Speaker 00 But when he's drunk, he opens up, which presents a problem for Alfred because, again, he's drunk a lot. And over time, people start to notice inconsistencies in his version of events. Nothing major, but when combined with his behavior since coming back, some start to question whether he's telling the truth. And it's not just that he came back looking plumper than people expected, or that he was flush with cash. It's also the fact that he was younger and fitter than many of his companions, and supposedly
11:40 Speaker 00 more knowledgeable of the mountains. So, how is it that he was too weak to keep up and didn't know how to avoid something as preventable as snow blindness? And if he really was such a liability to the group, how come he's the only one who made it back? After a while, a theory starts to develop that maybe Alfred is actually the reason the others didn't make it. Maybe he lured them into the mountains intentionally, knowing he'd have the upper hand. Maybe his plan was to rob them all along. It's just a rumor,
12:21 Speaker 00 but it changes everything for Alfred. He's brought in for a more official interrogation, and suddenly, his story changes. He says he wasn't actually left behind. After his group ran out of food, things got dire. They were starving, freezing, buried in snow, and slowly, one by one, they started to die. The oldest went first from hunger and exposure, and given the severity of their situation, they made the choice not to waste his body. A decision they didn't take lightly.
13:03 Speaker 00 They needed food, needed calories. The way they saw it, it was their only chance of survival. And maybe from death, there could be life. Another member of their group died from hunger and exposure as well. A third Alfred says was accidentally killed. Uh, what that means, I don't know. But he says each time, they ate the dead and left the remains right where they were. Their bodies scattered along the route, miles apart from one another. The last two alive were Alfred and a man named Shannon Bell. And that's when things took an unexpected turn. Bell tried to kill Alfred.
13:47 Speaker 00 During the attack, Alfred got a hold of his gun and shot Bell in self-defense. And well, Alfred continued on with the trend. He reluctantly ate Bell to survive. Now, that is a messed up story, but if Alfred is telling the truth, can you blame him for any of it? I mean, you can say you would never stoop to cannibalism. But have you ever been in a situation like that? It's not like they were killing each other for meat. Every death was either natural or an accident. Minus Bell, but that was self-defense. So Alfred wouldn't be at fault for that either.
14:29 Speaker 00 Even the story about Bell losing it makes total sense. Those kind of elements can drive anyone mad. No, really, we have covered cases on the show in which extreme isolation and cold weather may have induced violence. Whether it's on a base in Antarctica, the frozen mountain of Akankawa, or Dyatlov Pass. Alfred's new story also puts into perspective his behavior when he returned from the wild. Why he wanted to drink to forget. Why he was too ashamed to tell people what really happened. Sure, it's weird that he took money from the dead. But is it any worse than eating them?
15:15 Speaker 00 It's not like they were going to put it to use.
15:19 Speaker 00 After Alfred's confession, a search party goes out to look for the deceased remains, but they don't have any luck. So Alfred's latest version of events becomes the official story for almost a whole year. Until a traveling illustrator working for Harper's Weekly stumbles upon what looks like a massacre. He finds the decomposing remains of the five missing prospectors all in one spot. Four have fractured skulls, one is headless, all show signs of butchering,
15:59 Speaker 00 and a forensic exam later suggests some may have been murdered in their sleep. The evidence very clearly contradicts Alfred's accounts, both of them. Even if all of the injuries happened after the men died, Alfred said their bodies were left scattered miles apart from one another, which just isn't true. So the question becomes, why lie? The answer, though, doesn't come anytime soon. Officials arrest Alfred for murder, but it's not long before he escapes, by some accounts, the same night as his arrest,
16:41 Speaker 00 after someone allegedly hands him a key to his cell. Whether that's true or not, we know Alfred gets out. He goes on the run as a wanted fugitive and evades capture for years. He apparently spends time in Arizona and Montana, as well as Colorado, living under an assumed name. And he's only caught by complete chance. He's drinking in some saloon in Wyoming when a man walks in who recognizes him. The man just so happens to be one of the original 21 prospectors. He was just one of the smart ones who stayed behind at the Ute encampment. The man reports Alfred to officials,
17:26 Speaker 00 who arrest him and send him back to Lake City, Colorado, where he's finally put on trial for murder. And on the stand, he gives his third and final account of what happened. He didn't get abandoned. His companions didn't die one by one.
17:47 Speaker 00 This time, he says that during their travels, the snow and harsh winds forced his group to take shelter in a mountain ravine. By that point, they were already starving and losing grip on reality. Out of everyone, Alfred says he remained the most level-headed, and it became clear to him that if he didn't do something, they were all going to die. So, one day, he went to look for a way out of the mountains. When he left the ravine, the others were huddled under a blanket for warmth. But when he came back, everyone but Shannon Bell was dead. Bell had killed the others, hacked up their bodies,
18:31 Speaker 00 and was roasting a human leg over the fire.
18:37 Speaker 00 As soon as Bell saw Alfred, he lunged at him with a hatchet, but Alfred managed to shoot him twice. And that didn't kill Bell, but it put a stop to his attack. Alfred then wrestled Bell's hatchet away from him and finished the job with a blow to his head. Alfred admits he ate the men's bodies to survive, but reluctantly, and only after several days. He even boiled and ate the moccasins on their feet first. More importantly to the charges at hand, he swears he didn't kill anyone except Bell, and that was in self-defense.
19:16 Speaker 00 Now, that's a truncated version of Alfred's story. At trial, his testimony reportedly lasts over six hours. And it's safe to say his ramblings don't win over the jury. They quickly find him guilty, and the presiding judge sentences him to die. His words to Alfred are, and this is a quote, "You will be hung from your neck until you are dead, dead, dead, and may God have mercy on your soul."
19:49 Speaker 00 Now, you'd think that would be the end of Alfred Packer, or at the very least of his freedom. But spoiler, it's not.
20:03 Speaker 00 Between 1873, when Alfred Packer committed his alleged crimes in the wilderness, and 1883, when a judge sentences him to die, something big happens. Colorado becomes a state. Why is that important to our story? Well, certain laws changed in that timeframe. Most relevantly, laws around capital punishment. The death penalty only became legal after Colorado achieved statehood. Prior to then, it was banned. And that fact becomes Alfred Packer's saving grace. See, a precedent had already been set by the Colorado Supreme Court.
20:45 Speaker 00 Crimes that took place while Colorado was a territory could only be subject to the laws that existed at that time. And because that didn't happen in Alfred's first trial, his lawyers are able to completely overturn his sentence on a technicality. The news does not go over well with the people of Lake City. Most locals have already made up their minds about Alfred, and some are ready to hang him themselves. So, a decision is made to move his second trial to a new town, Gunnison, which is 50 miles away. The hope is, things will be a little less heated.
21:25 Speaker 00 At the second trial, Alfred can't be charged with murder again, also due to legal technicalities, but he can be charged with manslaughter. So, that's what happens. And the second trial goes about as well as the first. A jury quickly convicts, and a judge sentences Alfred to 40 years in a state penitentiary. Eight years for each victim, which, at the time, is the longest sentence ever handed down by an American judge. From prison, Alfred appeals the decision over and over, and the Colorado Supreme Court reviews his case five times.
22:06 Speaker 00 Even though the court never changes its mind about Alfred's guilt, others in the public eventually do. But before I get into what happens to move that needle, I want to ask you to try your best to take cannibalism out of the equation when evaluating Alfred's guilt or innocence. No one has ever accused Alfred Packer of wanting to eat his companions. He described the experience as torture. He said it all happened in a blur. The horror of what he had to do stuck with him for the rest of his life. His motivation for that part of the story is not really up for debate.
22:50 Speaker 00 But the taboo associated with cannibalism might unfairly tip the scales for what is up for debate, whether he killed his companions with foresight or otherwise. In our modern world with modern resources, it's hard to imagine a scenario where cannibalism would be socially permissible. But that wasn't always true. Now, back in the day, there was an unwritten rule for sailors that if disaster struck at sea and it came down to it, the crew would be drawing straws to see who would be killed for food. And the practice was, for the most part, accepted by wider society.
23:35 Speaker 00 It wasn't a topic of conversation at the dinner table, but there wasn't any blame either. And Alfred's world was much closer to that mentality than ours. In fact, believe it or not, another group of prospectors got lost in the mountains at the same time as Alfred. And when they came home, they admitted that things reached the point where they seriously considered randomly selecting who would get sacrificed.
24:06 Speaker 00 So with that out of the way, let's talk about Alfred's alleged murders. After Alfred is locked up in a state penitentiary, a few things happen to sway public perception. First, he always maintains his innocence and is apparently really well behaved during his sentence. So he gets some minor brownie points for that. But more importantly, in 1899, years into his sentence, a reporter from the Denver Post named Polly Pry takes an interest in Alfred's case. She interviews him in prison and walks away absolutely convinced of his innocence.
24:49 Speaker 00 And she becomes a fierce advocate. She launches a full-blown media campaign on Alfred's behalf, painting him as a really honest and sympathetic figure. She makes a big deal about how prison is making Alfred's health problems, most likely related to his epilepsy, worse. She writes things like, "The corroding desire for freedom has eaten into his heart, and the blind injustice of the world has seared into his soul." Now, as far as I or my team can tell, her deep-rooted convictions don't stem from any more evidence coming to light.
25:32 Speaker 00 She just has a gut feeling, a belief that the world judged Alfred too quickly and too harshly, that the final story he told in court is indeed the truth. Evidence or not, Polly is persuasive. She's able to convince a lot of people of Alfred's innocence, and some get really passionate about it. Public discourse gets so heated that two people are shot and almost killed in an argument about it. Alfred supporters eventually sign a petition requesting he be pardoned.
26:14 Speaker 00 And though a pardon never happens, the pressure is enough that the governor of Colorado has Alfred released on parole after serving just 15 years of his 40-year sentence. To some, it's justice. To others, his release is a crime unto itself. But even though Polly Pry may be the first person to reevaluate Alfred's case, she and her hunch are not the reason we're still talking about it today. Alfred Packer mania with all the festivals and restaurants and merchandise kicks off more than a century after his trip into the mountains.
26:57 Speaker 00 In 1989, a law professor at George Washington University named James Stars decides to do something kind of wacky: exhume the bodies of Alfred's alleged victims. He'd spent years using Alfred's case as an example of a successful murder conviction achieved without the use of any forensic evidence. So he finally decides to see what the forensic evidence says. Stars works with all kinds of experts: an archaeologist, anthropologists, document analysts, geophysicists, and more. And the project ends up costing $15,000.
27:39 Speaker 00 In the end, it, well, it seemingly doesn't find a smoking gun, but it does introduce Alfred Packer's story to a brand-new audience and kicks off a strange and very niche tourism industry in Lake City and beyond. It creates enough publicity that the story reaches Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the co-creators of South Park, and they make a movie in 1993 called Cannibal the Musical, starring Trey as Alfred, E.R.D. Flash forward another five years, and a museum curator named David Bailey finds another
28:21 Speaker 00 piece of the puzzle while doing some inventory: an 1862 Colt revolver with three .38 caliber cartridges still loaded inside. And it has a label that reads...
28:35 Speaker 00 This gun found at the site where Alfred Packer killed and ate his companions. That leads Bailey down a decade-long rabbit hole that's all about, well, a hole. A hole in a hip bone. See, James Starr's earlier investigation operated under the assumption that the hole was created post-mortem, most likely by some scavengers' teeth. But Bailey runs some tests that find lead inside the hole. Lead that matches the chemical composition of the bullets found inside Alfred Packer's gun.
29:20 Speaker 00 Bailey then runs a test where he shoots those same bullets from Alfred's gun into the hip bone of an elk. And it creates a hole that mirrors the one found on the human remains. Why is that important? Well, it's enough to convince Bailey that Polly Price Hunch was right. Alfred Packer was innocent. Here's the logic. A gun is the most effective tool for killing. But there were three bullets still loaded in Alfred's gun, and only one of his alleged victims showed signs of being shot.
30:00 Speaker 00 Shannon Bell, the man Alfred said was the real killer, the person he says he shot in self-defense. If Alfred's plan was to kill and rob his companions all along, why didn't he just shoot them? And why wait so long to do it? It seems like a lot of trouble. In these days, there are other points people make to support Alfred's innocence, like how he was, by most accounts, pretty strange. When testifying on the stand, he often referred to himself in the third person and apparently went on long-winded tangents about unrelated personal vendettas.
30:43 Speaker 00 According to one former Lake City Town Clerk, archival research suggests Alfred may have been feared and misunderstood for reasons beyond his control, related to both his personality and his health problems. And there's some doubt around whether he got a fair trial. At the time, publicity around the case made jury selection nearly impossible. Of the 57 prospective jurors, 44 admitted they already knew about the case and had formed opinions on Alfred's guilt. To keep the trial on track, the judge ordered a local sheriff to go out and find unbiased candidates, but some doubt whether he actually did.
31:28 Speaker 00 For a job that seemed impossible, the sheriff somehow miraculously filled the jury quota in a matter of hours. But not everyone is as convinced as David Bailey, and they have fair points too. Alfred's trial was filled with damning character witnesses, and there are accounts of him acting really suspicious from the very beginning of his prospecting trip. Like, he apparently annoyed everyone in the group by asking each person how much money they had on them. That, and he was apparently lazy. Later, when Alfred saw he might get out of prison early, he apparently started brainstorming
32:12 Speaker 00 ways he could monetize his own mythos. You know those sensationalized Wild West shows I mentioned earlier? Alfred thought about touring the country as Packer, the man eater. As for me and my team, there's one question we never found a satisfying answer to. Alfred told many stories. He started with no murder or cannibalism. He ended with cannibalism, but a killer that wasn't him. But in between those, he told a third, one where he said there was no real killer at all, just natural deaths and self-defense. Why tell that story at all?
32:55 Speaker 00 If it really was the truth, why not jump straight to pinning the blame on Bell? If you have thoughts, we would love to hear them. These days, it seems like everyone forms their own, very different opinion. But when Lake City and its surrounding towns hold mock trials, reenacting Alfred’s case and David Bailey’s evidence is included, more times than not, Alfred is acquitted. In hindsight, there’s too much reasonable doubt. As for what happened to Alfred, when he got out of prison, he didn’t tour the country as Packer the Man-Eater.
33:37 Speaker 00 He spent some time in Denver, working for the Post, before he moved to the countryside to be closer to the mountains. He lived a quiet life until he died in 1907. Some accounts say his dying words were, “I’m not guilty of the charge.” But even in death, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction with Alfred. Some sources say he died from a stroke, others from trouble and worry, and still others from stomach problems, which, if you ask me, fizzles too on the nose for the Colorado Cannibal. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories.
34:22 Speaker 00 We’re here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, @TheConspiracyPod. If you’re watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today’s episode include Diana Di Stefano’s article, “Alfred Packer’s World: Risk, Responsibility, and the Place of Experience in Mountain Culture,” for the Journal of Social History, and the National Geographic article, “Was the Colorado Cannibal a Victim?” You decide, by Everett Cole. Until next time, remember, the truth isn’t always the best story. And the official story isn’t always the truth.
35:06 Speaker 00 This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, edited by Miki Taylor, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I’m your host, Carter Roy.
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