# 3 Cases So Disturbing… Netflix Won't Cover Them | 227

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 9 May 2026, 35 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/10f1e70d4/podcast/play/119720291/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-4-9%2F423793041-44100-2-db02f9b38db94.mp3

Join me for 3 cases that are too disturbing for Netflix (allegedly.) Episode 227 of the true crime podcast btw. Also don't forget to request cases in the comments and drop a rating. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 unsolved mysteries, true crime, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, missing persons, murder investigation, forensic evidence, serial killers, crime scene analysis, dark history, criminal psychology, real life horror, police investigations, DNA breakthroughs, forensic genealogy, crime documentaries, criminal profiling, mysterious disappearances, solved cases, justice system, law enforcement stories, cold case files, creepy mysteries, true crime storytelling, crime reconstruction, chilling cases, investigative reporting, modern forensics, victim advocacy, unidentified remains, crime scene forensics, disturbing cases, true crime analysis, hidden clues, infamous crimes, real crime stories, forensic evidence, serial killers, unsolved cases, too dark for netflix, historical true crime, billy the kid, genetic genealogy, forensics, cold case mysteries

## Transcript

[0:00] It was Father's Day morning 1991, and four security guards
[0:04] punched in at one of the tallest buildings in downtown Denver.
[0:08] They drank coffee, and a few of them watched a little television
[0:11] in the break area. Between rounds, They walked
[0:15] their patrol routes through corridors that on a normal
[0:17] weekday held thousands of office workers, but on this Sunday held
[0:22] almost no one at all. By the time the city woke up
[0:25] Monday morning, every one of them was deceased in a basement
[0:29] vault room, and a bag of cash was gone.
[0:32] The man Denver police are convinced committed this act
[0:35] would walk out of a courthouse a free man.
[0:37] Less than a year later, and the case remains a truly disturbing
[0:41] unsolved mystery. The United Bank Tower sat at
[0:45] 17th and Broadway, a bronze glass slab that for a brief
[0:49] stretch in the 1980s was the tallest building in Colorado.
[0:54] Bank operations occupied the lowest floors, with a vault
[0:58] complex and processing rooms tucked into the basement levels
[1:02] and a banking lobby on the floors just above.
[1:05] Office tenants filled the rest of the tower.
[1:08] On weekdays, the place hummed with thousands of workers and
[1:11] customers. On Sundays though, it was nearly
[1:15] empty, with most offices dark from Friday evening until Monday
[1:19] morning. That's the world the four guards
[1:22] walked into on June 16th. No customers, no tellers,
[1:26] nothing on the calendar except a vault that had been loaded with
[1:29] cash on Saturday. The senior man on shift that day
[1:33] was Philip Mankoff, a long time guard at the building who knew
[1:37] every corridor and stairwell by memory.
[1:40] He was in his 40s and reportedly well liked by both his crew and
[1:44] the bank's full time staff. Working alongside him was
[1:48] William Renee McCullum Junior, a guard in his early 30s who often
[1:53] pulled the late in weekend shifts.
[1:55] He was known by the banks full time staff as the most outgoing
[1:58] of the group, the easygoing 1 who'd swap a joke in the staff
[2:02] lounge before heading back into the corridors.
[2:06] Rounding out the team were two younger men.
[2:09] Scott McCarthy was in his early 20s and relatively new to the
[2:13] post, but he'd already developed a reputation for being
[2:16] meticulous about his patrol logs and his check insurance.
[2:21] Todd Wilson, also in his early 20s and the newest of the four,
[2:26] had reportedly been considering a future in law enforcement.
[2:30] He saw the guard job as a stepping stone towards something
[2:33] more permanent. But of course, that wasn't to
[2:37] be. By every account that
[2:39] investigators were later able to reconstruct, the morning of June
[2:43] 16th began without incident. Patrol logs and witness
[2:48] statements paint a picture of routine, the slow rhythm of a
[2:51] quiet weekend shift built around coffee, breakfast, and casual
[2:55] chatter. Mankoff and McCullum took the
[2:58] early hours together, and McCarthy and Wilson came on
[3:02] later in the morning. Cameras inside and around the
[3:05] building recorded portions of those early hours, footage that
[3:10] detectives would later comb through looking for a single
[3:13] glimpse of an unwelcome visitor. The vault on the lower level had
[3:17] been loaded with currency on Saturday for processing the
[3:20] following week. Estimates of how much cash sat
[3:24] behind those steel doors that morning have varied over the
[3:27] years, but the figure has consistently landed in the low
[3:30] hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[3:33] What investigators eventually pieced together is that the
[3:37] gunman, or possibly more than one, somehow made it past the
[3:42] building's substantial layers of security.
[3:45] He then ended up face to face with the four guards on the
[3:48] lower level of the bank. There's no consensus on how that
[3:52] initial contact happened. 1 theory holds that the guards
[3:56] were summoned down to the vault area one at a time, under the
[3:59] pretense of routine work. Another holds that whoever did
[4:03] this had keys, codes, and intimate knowledge of the patrol
[4:07] schedule, and simply met the guards in spaces where they'd
[4:11] ordinarily expect to be working. A third, more disturbing
[4:16] possibility is that the gunman was somebody the guards
[4:19] recognized and trusted, and that they let him in themselves.
[4:24] He may have even identified himself as a cop, and for
[4:28] reasons that are about to become apparent, at least two of the
[4:31] suspects could have pulled that off.
[4:34] What's certain is that all four guards ended up in the same
[4:38] room. They were forced to lie face
[4:40] down on the floor, and then, one by one, each of them was shot in
[4:45] the head at close range. The gunman pulled a quantity of
[4:49] cash from the vault, made his way back through the building's
[4:53] locked doors and disappeared into a Denver Sunday that was
[4:56] just starting to come alive. The first call to Denver police
[5:01] came shortly after 8:00 on Monday, when bank staff arriving
[5:04] for the start of the work week noticed that something wasn't
[5:07] right. A few doors that should have
[5:10] been secured were open, and surveillance equipment had been
[5:13] disrupted in places. The morning shift of guards who
[5:18] were supposed to relieve their counterparts were nowhere to be
[5:21] found. When officers entered the lower
[5:24] level, they found the bodies of all four men together.
[5:29] Each had been bound and forced into the same position, and each
[5:33] had been cut down with a single round at point blank range.
[5:37] The scene was, by every account, exceptionally controlled and
[5:41] almost clinical in nature. There were no signs of a chase
[5:45] or prolonged struggle, and no evidence that any of the guards
[5:48] had fought back in any meaningful way.
[5:52] Whoever had handled the four of them had done so with a level of
[5:55] calm that veteran detectives found chilling.
[5:58] The vault had been opened and partially emptied, and that
[6:02] partial robbery would really send this case in a particular
[6:05] direction for investigators. The perpetrator had been
[6:09] selective about what he took, leaving behind sealed bundles
[6:13] that would have been traceable and grabbing loose circulated
[6:16] bills that wouldn't. That kind of selectivity
[6:19] required familiarity, the sort of knowledge a casual stick up
[6:23] man simply wouldn't possess. It was the first hint that this
[6:27] hadn't been an outside job at all, but rather the work of
[6:31] somebody whose understanding of the bank's procedures ran much
[6:35] deeper than a stranger could fake.
[6:38] From the very first hours of the investigation, the focus began
[6:42] to drift toward people who had once worked in the building.
[6:46] Denver detectives recognized almost immediately that they
[6:49] weren't looking at a typical robbery gone wrong.
[6:53] Whoever had walked into that bank had known the building, the
[6:56] procedures and the personnel involved with a level of
[7:00] intimacy you can't fake. He'd known where the cameras
[7:03] were, which ones to disrupt and how to move through the building
[7:08] without setting off the systems that should have flagged him.
[7:11] He'd known the codes or had a way around them.
[7:15] And he'd known that on a Sunday morning, the building would be
[7:18] at its most vulnerable. That last detail narrowed the
[7:22] suspect pool considerably. The number of people who'd ever
[7:26] held that level of access to the United Bank Towers secure areas
[7:30] was a finite list, and most of the names on it were obvious
[7:34] dead ends. Current employees had ironclad
[7:38] alibis, and many retirees were living out of state.
[7:42] But a few names sat uneasily in the middle of the list, and
[7:46] investigators kept circling back to one in particular.
[7:50] That name was James William King.
[7:54] King was a former Denver cop who'd retired from the
[7:56] department years earlier and gone to work at the bank as a
[7:59] security supervisor. He was in his 50s by 1991, with
[8:05] a long career in law enforcement behind him and the kind of deep
[8:09] institutional familiarity with the building that comes from
[8:13] years of weekend shifts. He'd been employed at the United
[8:16] Bank Tower for several years before being let go in early
[8:20] 1991, only months before the slayings.
[8:24] According to bank management, the parting hadn't been
[8:27] amicable, and he seemed to have a chip on his shoulder.
[8:31] King reportedly believed he'd been treated unfairly and that
[8:34] the bank had effectively pushed him out of a job he'd performed
[8:38] competently. In the eyes of investigators, he
[8:41] had something almost no other suspect could claim, a working
[8:45] knowledge of the building's security protocols combined with
[8:49] a fresh, identifiable grievance. Within weeks, detectives had
[8:54] built a circumstantial case that they considered strong.
[8:58] Witnesses placed a man matching King's general description near
[9:01] the building that weekend. A bank employee thought she'd
[9:05] recognized him during a brief Saturday encounter on the 2nd
[9:08] floor banking lobby. Other employees who were working
[9:12] there on the day and saw him also identified him.
[9:15] But there was a serious problem with this.
[9:18] None of these individuals identified him on the first try,
[9:22] instead identifying him on the second try.
[9:25] After a rather bizarre move, detectives presented the
[9:29] witnesses with a photo lineup where they drew a hat and
[9:32] sunglasses on the members of the lineup.
[9:35] Even then, some of the witnesses didn't believe it was him.
[9:39] There were patterns of behavior in the days before and after the
[9:42] slayings that struck investigators as suspicious as
[9:45] well. There was a sense that all of
[9:47] these threads woven together would be enough to put the right
[9:50] man on trial. By September of 1991, King was
[9:56] in custody and charged with the robbery and the much worse
[9:59] offenses. But as you may have guessed from
[10:02] my introduction and the title of this video, this trial was going
[10:06] to be a real problem. The case that went to trial in
[10:11] 1992 was, on paper, quite strong, at least according to
[10:16] prosecutors at the time. Personally, and perhaps this is
[10:21] hindsight speaking, but I really don't see how they thought that.
[10:26] The state claimed they had a defendant with motive,
[10:29] opportunity, and operational knowledge that virtually nobody
[10:33] else in Denver possessed. Prosecutors had a fairly weak
[10:38] and seemingly biased eyewitness identification, but it was
[10:42] theoretically better than nothing.
[10:45] They had behavioral anomalies in the days surrounding the crime,
[10:49] which they believed indicated King was planning something
[10:52] sinister. For instance, he had a blueprint
[10:55] of the building in his possession and it was in a
[10:57] folder that was labeled Plans. Yes, he had a floor plan of the
[11:03] building he used to work security in located in a folder
[11:07] labeled plans, and this was a key piece of evidence for the
[11:11] prosecution in the industry. That's what we call a Hail Mary
[11:15] pass. He also shaved his mustache
[11:19] after the event, which prosecutors believed was him
[11:22] trying to alter his appearance. They had a profile of a
[11:26] disgruntled former employee with the rare combination of police
[11:30] training and inside knowledge. And they had a story that, in
[11:34] the prosecutor's framing, accounted for nearly every
[11:37] troubling detail at the scene. What they didn't have was much
[11:42] in the way of physical evidence. And when you're trying to prove
[11:46] your case beyond a reasonable doubt, that's a bit of a
[11:49] problem. Now, I have to say here that
[11:52] King, as a veteran cop, would obviously know a thing or two
[11:56] about the rules of evidence at trial.
[11:59] It seems to me that the prosecution attempted to infer
[12:02] that this absence of physical evidence was actually evidence
[12:05] he did it, which is obviously extremely problematic.
[12:10] There were no fingerprints tying King to the bank.
[12:13] There was no genetic material, no fibers, no recovered weapon,
[12:19] and crucially, no recovered cash.
[12:22] The bag of bills that the perp had walked out with on Father's
[12:26] Day morning had simply evaporated.
[12:29] Nothing in King's home, vehicle, or financial records gave
[12:33] investigators any physical evidence whatsoever.
[12:37] The prosecution was left-leaning hard on circumstantial threads
[12:41] and on identifications that the defense was ready to attack.
[12:46] King's attorneys hit back, and they hit back extremely hard in
[12:50] such a way that makes me question why this prosecution
[12:53] went ahead anyway. Remember that the double
[12:56] jeopardy rule was in play here, so this was, in essence, the
[13:01] prosecution's one chance to make their case that King was the
[13:04] guy. It's also notable that the
[13:07] defense only has a very narrow disclosure duty, so it's
[13:11] possible that the prosecution was blindsided by certain
[13:14] evidence, at least to some degree.
[13:18] King's attorneys argued that the eyewitness identifications were
[13:21] unreliable, the product of a fleeting glimpse and powerful
[13:25] suggestion in the days afterward.
[13:28] They argued that the timing didn't add up, that King had
[13:31] alibi witnesses placing him elsewhere during portions of the
[13:34] relevant window. They highlighted the absence of
[13:38] physical evidence, relentlessly asking the jury how a man could
[13:42] have committed such a controlled surgical operation without
[13:46] leaving behind a single trace. They pointed out that the
[13:49] building's security, as airtight as it had appeared on paper, had
[13:54] vulnerabilities that other former employees and contractors
[13:58] might have exploited just as easily.
[14:01] They brought in one of his neighbors, who testified that
[14:04] she had seen him mowing the lawn on the morning the crime was
[14:06] committed. She specifically remembered what
[14:09] day it was because she gave him a Father's Day greeting.
[14:14] Then there were the alternative suspects that the defense
[14:17] trotted out. The first one was a convicted
[14:20] bank robber who had confessed to the crime.
[14:23] He later changed his story and claimed he wasn't involved,
[14:27] claiming that he had essentially invented the story for
[14:29] underworld clout. The other was far more
[14:33] interesting since he was a former bank guard who had been
[14:36] accused of stealing a large sum of money from the bank.
[14:40] When federal agents went to investigate him, they found ammo
[14:44] consistent with what was used at the scene, as well as some fake
[14:48] police badges and replica grenades.
[14:51] He had no alibi for the time of the robbery and was described as
[14:55] an angry loner with an axe to grind.
[14:59] The trial itself drew enormous attention in Denver.
[15:03] Local media covered every day of testimony, and the courtroom
[15:07] filled with relatives of the four guards who wanted to look
[15:10] the accused in the eye for themselves.
[15:13] Through weeks of arguments, King maintained the same composed,
[15:17] almost detached demeanor, which some took his callousness and
[15:21] others took his righteousness. The jury deliberated for several
[15:26] days, and when they came back, they delivered a verdict that
[15:32] stunned the prosecution and rocked the city.
[15:36] King was acquitted on every count.
[15:39] He walked out of the courthouse a free man, and he stayed free
[15:42] for the rest of his life. He never faced charges related
[15:46] to the case again and went to his grave maintaining that he
[15:50] hadn't done what investigators had spent the better part of a
[15:53] year trying to prove he'd done. In the years after the
[15:58] acquittal, the case settled into a peculiar limbo.
[16:02] Officially, it remained open, but practically no one was
[16:05] actively pursuing new leads. The investigators who'd built
[16:09] the case against King mostly believed they'd had the right
[16:12] man, and that the rules of double jeopardy now made any
[16:16] further attempt at conviction impossible.
[16:20] The cash, as far as anyone has publicly disclosed, was never
[16:24] recovered, and neither was the weapon.
[16:28] No accomplice has come forward, and no deathbed confession has
[16:32] surfaced from any of the people once tied, however loosely, to
[16:36] the case. And so, after more than 35
[16:40] years, the file on the Father's Day Bank massacre remains
[16:44] exactly where it's at after the 1992 verdict, open, cold and
[16:51] waiting for an answer. In the last days of July 1993, a
[16:59] young Hollywood nightclub owner was found slain inside his own
[17:02] home in the Hollywood Hills. He was 26 years old, Co ran one
[17:07] of the most fashionable venues in Los Angeles and counted
[17:10] musicians, actors and entertainment industry insiders
[17:15] among his close friends. There were no signs of forced
[17:19] entry, nothing of obvious value was taken, and no clear answer
[17:24] to the question of who'd walked into his home and walked back
[17:27] out again. When the city was rocked by
[17:30] another attack that would dominate American and world
[17:32] headlines, Brett Cantor's name started surfacing in
[17:36] conversations that have never quite gone away.
[17:40] Brett Cantor grew up around Los Angeles and moved into the
[17:44] nightclub scene as a young man. By his mid 20s, he'd Co founded
[17:49] The Dragonfly, a venue on Santa Monica Blvd. that opened in the
[17:53] early 90s and quickly became one of the destinations of the
[17:57] moment. The club drew a steady mix of
[18:00] musicians, actors and industry hangers on.
[18:04] It hosted live performances by acts moving through Los Angeles
[18:08] on tour, with a heavy focus on the alt rock scene that was
[18:11] breaking through nationally at that time.
[18:15] By all accounts, Cantor was a natural at the work, absolutely
[18:19] oozing a natural sort of charisma that's necessary in
[18:22] that industry. People who knew him described
[18:26] him as magnetic and easy to talk to, the sort of person who
[18:30] remembered names and made a room feel a little better when he
[18:33] walked into it. He was reportedly well connected
[18:36] to an operator who knew people across music, film and nightlife
[18:41] more broadly. Cantor's life touched a lot of
[18:45] people, and any of them, in theory, could have known where
[18:48] he lived and what time he tended to come home.
[18:52] On the morning of July 30th, 1993, someone close to Cantor
[18:56] went to check on him. After he'd gone silent for some
[18:59] time, they let themselves into his home in the Laurel Canyon
[19:03] area and found him on the floor of his bedroom.
[19:07] Patrol officers and detectives from the Los Angeles Police
[19:10] Department responded, and the scene gave them an unusual mix
[19:14] of signals. There was no sign of forced
[19:17] entry, and the condition of the home suggested Cantor had likely
[19:20] let his attacker inside, or that the attacker had keys or some
[19:25] other means of access. Nothing obvious had been taken,
[19:29] and the stab wounds were close range and numerous, the kind of
[19:32] attack investigators tend to read as personal.
[19:36] Investigators photographed the scene, collected what physical
[19:40] evidence they could, and began the long process of working
[19:44] backward through Cantor's final days and the people he'd been
[19:47] near. They interviewed friends,
[19:50] family, club staff and business contacts, and they looked at his
[19:55] finances and his relationships. They looked at the dragonfly
[20:00] itself, where he'd been spending most of his waking hours.
[20:05] The club had its share of normal friction, since busy Los Angeles
[20:09] nightclubs in the early 90s tended to attract a complicated
[20:13] cast. Unfortunately though, nothing
[20:16] provided any insight into who could have possibly committed
[20:19] this sick act. Less than a year later, on June
[20:22] 12th, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to
[20:27] death outside Nicole's condo in Brentwood.
[20:31] The case became the most watched criminal trial in American
[20:34] history, dominating headlines, talk shows, and televised
[20:38] proceedings for the better part of two years.
[20:41] OJ Simpson was tried and acquitted of the criminal
[20:43] charges in 1995, then found liable for the deaths in a 1997
[20:49] civil trial. Notably, in a criminal case, the
[20:54] elements of the offense need to be proven beyond a reasonable
[20:57] doubt. In a civil case, the ACT simply
[21:00] needs to be proven on the basis of a balance of probabilities, a
[21:04] much lower standard. Over the years, a strange thread
[21:09] began drawing the Brentwood case and the Cantor case together,
[21:13] and Brett Cantor and Nicole Brown Simpson had moved in
[21:16] overlapping social circles. According to people who knew
[21:20] them, both Cantor and Nicole were at the very least
[21:23] acquainted. Some accounts go further,
[21:26] suggesting the two were friends or that Nicole had visited the
[21:30] Dragonfly. The exact nature of their
[21:33] relationship has never been fully established in public, and
[21:38] a lot of the specifics rely on the memories of friends speaking
[21:41] many years after the fact. The crimes also had surface
[21:45] similarities, given that both attacks were committed with a
[21:49] knife in a residential setting in Los Angeles within a year of
[21:53] one another. None of that is proof of a
[21:55] connection, since knife attacks happen and the city is enormous
[22:00] and patterns tend to look stronger in hindsight than they
[22:03] really are. But it was enough to keep the
[22:06] two cases LinkedIn the public imagination for decades.
[22:10] Though in my opinion, I can't see any evidence whatsoever that
[22:14] connects the two cases. And Speaking of the OJ trial,
[22:18] the Cantor case was raised during a pretrial hearing, but
[22:22] never actually raised by the defense before the jury at the
[22:25] trial itself. The judge at a pretrial hearing
[22:29] allowed O JS team to review the evidence from the Cantor file
[22:33] for potential exculpatory material.
[22:36] That basically means that there was enough evidence to suggest
[22:39] there was some potential Nexus between the cases, but not that
[22:43] an actual connection existed. Despite having access to
[22:47] everything, and despite raising the alternative killer theory at
[22:50] trial, the defense never actually linked Cantor before
[22:54] the jury. Personally, I think this should
[22:57] say everything that needs to be said about the credibility of
[23:01] this theory, since the defense would have raised it at trial if
[23:05] there were any possible connections.
[23:08] Strip the speculation away and you're left with what
[23:11] investigators had. On the morning of July 30th.
[23:14] A young man was dead in his bedroom.
[23:17] The door was undisturbed. He'd been stabbed repeatedly
[23:21] with his throat cut. Nothing of value was missing,
[23:25] and there were no witnesses inside or out.
[23:29] He had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and yet no
[23:33] clean suspect emerged among any of them.
[23:36] Detectives reportedly leaned toward the theory that whoever
[23:40] attacked Cantor was someone he knew.
[23:43] The intimacy of the wounds suggested a personal motive of
[23:46] some kind, though personal for someone with such a wide social
[23:50] and business circle could mean many things.
[23:53] It might have meant a soured friendship, a business dispute,
[23:57] an entanglement nobody else knew about, or something more random
[24:01] that had nothing to do with the dragonfly at all.
[24:06] In the decades since, the case has lived in a strange space
[24:09] where it's been mentioned largely in relation to the OJ
[24:12] Simpson saga, which is how I found out about the case.
[24:16] Because of this connection, and the fact that the Simpson saga
[24:19] is such a behemoth in the world of true crime, Brett Cantor's
[24:23] cold case, even though only loosely related, is never
[24:27] forgotten. The Los Angeles Police
[24:30] Department has at times indicated that the case remains
[24:33] technically open, though they haven't named any suspects.
[24:38] Importantly though, they have openly stated that they don't
[24:41] believe the case has any connection whatsoever with
[24:44] Nicole Brown Simpson or Ron Golden.
[24:48] And personally, I agree with this assessment and I think the
[24:52] best indicator of this is that even O JS team didn't think the
[24:56] connection was worth putting forward to a jury.
[25:03] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with my usual reminder to hit
[25:06] the subscribe button and the notification bell.
[25:08] Also, remember to hit that share button and send this video to
[25:12] your friends and family members that enjoy true crime content
[25:15] and Unsolved Mysteries. And don't forget to check out
[25:19] the membership or the Patreon if you want to take your support
[25:22] for my work to the next level. On a cold morning in November of
[25:29] 19 O 4A Denver streetcar conductor reportedly noticed
[25:34] something strange on the rails. A man was lying motionless
[25:38] beside the line, his head split open and his pockets turned out.
[25:43] He looked, by every account, like just another vagrant in a
[25:46] city full of them. But this man wasn't a vagrant at
[25:50] all. He was Al Swearengen, once the
[25:53] wealthiest and most feared saloon keeper in the Dakota
[25:56] Territory. He was the man who'd built
[25:59] Deadwoods Gem Variety Theater into the most profitable den of
[26:03] sin West of the Mississippi. How he ended up bleeding out
[26:07] beside a streetcar track, broke and forgotten, is a question
[26:10] nobody's ever answered. Swearengen was born on July 8th,
[26:15] 1845 in Oskaloosa, IA, the son of a relatively prosperous Dutch
[26:22] American farming family. He had a twin brother named
[26:25] Lemuel, and the two of them came of age in a county that valued
[26:29] the kind of quiet respectability that Al would spend the rest of
[26:33] his life setting fire to. He drifted through a few small
[26:37] business attempts in his 20s, and around 1876 he made his way
[26:42] West into the Black Hills with one of the early waves of
[26:46] fortune seekers. These prospectors had been
[26:49] pouring in after the Custer expedition all but confirmed
[26:52] gold in the region, but Al didn't bother with a pan or a
[26:56] pickaxe. Al understood from the start
[26:59] that the real money in a gold rush isn't in the dirt.
[27:03] It's in the men coming out of the dirt with money in their
[27:06] pockets and nothing to spend it on.
[27:10] By the spring of 1877, he'd opened a small dance hall on
[27:14] Deadwood's Lower Main St. This venue was so successful
[27:18] that within months he replaced it with a larger purpose built
[27:22] structure he named the Gem Variety Theater.
[27:25] On paper, it was a respectable establishment offering
[27:28] vaudeville acts, comedy routines and live music.
[27:33] In practice, the entertainment was a thin curtain in front of
[27:36] an industrial scale House of ill repute, where any vice you could
[27:40] imagine was freely for sale. Most contemporary accounts agree
[27:44] women were lured to Deadwood under false pretenses, often
[27:48] promised legitimate stage work or marriage prospects.
[27:52] They were then trapped at the gem under conditions that ranged
[27:55] from coercive to outright violent.
[27:59] It was, in our modern terms, a human trafficking operation.
[28:04] But Al didn't care, because the gem made him rich.
[28:08] By the early 1880s, he was reportedly clearing several
[28:12] $1000 on a busy night, which in modern terms put him well into
[28:16] the 1,000,000 per year. He moved among the most powerful
[28:20] men in the territory, paid off the people who needed paying
[28:23] off, and built a reputation as somebody who could make problems
[28:28] disappear. His marriage to a young woman
[28:31] named Nettie Ross ended in divorce within about a year,
[28:36] with her sighting his cruel nature, and his subsequent
[28:39] marriages followed a similar pattern.
[28:42] Whatever quote UN quote charm he possessed in business clearly
[28:46] didn't translate to the home, which perhaps shouldn't be
[28:50] surprising given the true nature of his operation.
[28:54] The gem itself kept Catching Fire, and it burned down in
[28:57] September of 1879. That time, Al rebuilt almost
[29:02] immediately, but when it burned down again in December of 1899,
[29:06] he didn't. He simply walked away from
[29:09] Deadwood, walked away from the trade he dominated for over 20
[29:13] years, and effectively vanished from the public record for long
[29:17] stretches. There were rumors at the time
[29:20] that he'd been quietly forced out by enemies he'd spent two
[29:23] decades accumulating, and other rumors that he'd simply run out
[29:27] of money and credit. The years between the second
[29:31] fire and his death are murky, and that's putting it
[29:34] generously. Swearengen seems to have
[29:37] drifted, attempting various small ventures and allegedly
[29:42] losing money in mining speculation.
[29:45] He's believed to have bounced between relatives in Iowa, old
[29:49] business contacts in Colorado and acquaintances scattered
[29:53] across the West. By the early 1900s, the man
[29:57] who'd once owned the most lucrative property in Deadwood
[30:01] was effectively destitute. He was in his late 50s, his
[30:05] health was reportedly failing, and the political winds had
[30:09] shifted hard against him. Deadwood had cleaned itself up,
[30:14] at least on the surface, and there wasn't really a place
[30:17] anymore for somebody like Al Swearingen, even if he returned.
[30:23] He was last reportedly seen alive in Denver during the first
[30:26] half of November 19 O 4, where he was apparently looking for
[30:30] work and possibly trying to reconnect with old contacts.
[30:35] Whether he found any of those contacts and what they wanted
[30:37] with him is the heart of this unsolved mystery.
[30:42] What we do know is that on the morning of November 15th, his
[30:46] body was found near the streetcar tracks in the city's
[30:48] downtown. The official version of events,
[30:52] as it filtered out through newspaper coverage in the days
[30:55] that followed, was that Swearengen had been struck down
[30:58] by a moving streetcar. He had, the story went, either
[31:03] fallen onto the tracks while drunk, suffered some kind of
[31:07] medical episode, or simply been careless, crossing the line in
[31:11] poor light. The injuries to his head were
[31:14] consistent, A coroner reportedly suggested, with being thrown by
[31:18] the impact of the streetcar, and there was no further inquest of
[31:23] any consequence. The body was identified, the
[31:27] death was logged and the matter was effectively closed within 48
[31:31] hours. But almost nothing about that
[31:34] explanation held up to even casual scrutiny, and the people
[31:38] who knew him said so almost immediately.
[31:41] Old Owl's pockets were empty when he was found, which would
[31:44] be unremarkable except that he'd reportedly been seen with cash
[31:48] on him the day before. The wounds to his head were
[31:51] described in some accounts as crushing injuries to the skull.
[31:56] These were more consistent with a heavy object swung
[31:59] deliberately than with being clipped by the front of a
[32:02] streetcar at low speeds in an urban environment.
[32:05] His body was put on a train back to Iowa, and he was buried in a
[32:09] family plot in Oskaloosa beside relatives he'd spent most of his
[32:14] adult life avoiding. The Denver of 19 O 4 was a city
[32:19] with newspapers, police records, hospital admissions, coroner's
[32:24] logs and A streetcar company that kept meticulous
[32:27] documentation. And yet, for an event as
[32:30] supposedly straightforward as a man being struck by A streetcar
[32:34] in the middle of downtown, the documentary trail is remarkably
[32:38] thin. The streetcar in question is
[32:41] never clearly identified in any surviving record, and the
[32:45] conductor who supposedly reported the body is unknown.
[32:50] The coroner's full report, if one was ever filed in any
[32:53] detail, is now missing, only known from contemporary
[32:58] reporting. What we know about his final
[33:01] months comes mostly from a handful of brief newspaper
[33:04] articles in the Denver and Black Hills press.
[33:08] What's more, the people back in Deadwood and around the country
[33:11] had reason to remember Al Swearingen.
[33:15] Swearingen had spent close to 30 years cultivating grievances
[33:19] among minors he'd cheated, women he'd trafficked and business
[33:23] partners he'd betrayed. He had also been in the business
[33:27] of paying off lawmen and politicians.
[33:30] And Swearingen, as a man who now had nothing to lose, was a
[33:34] danger to these folks as well. What's clear is that in his
[33:39] final years of life, the organization that he had built
[33:42] up around himself had crumbled. Any one of them, none of them or
[33:48] somebody we've never even heard of, could have been there in
[33:51] Denver that November. The Pinkertons were active in
[33:56] Colorado at the time, and they weren't above cracking skulls.
[34:00] Quite literally. So were freelance enforcers
[34:04] working for mining interests, gambling syndicates and assorted
[34:08] private parties with reasons to settle old accounts.
[34:13] The theory I buy into is that Al didn't die in a random streetcar
[34:16] accident, but was eliminated, robbed and left beside the
[34:20] tracks to make the death look ordinary.
[34:23] The empty pockets matter because he had allegedly been seen with
[34:27] money shortly before his body was found.
[34:30] A skull crushed by a heavy object can be made to resemble
[34:33] impact trauma, especially if investigators were already
[34:37] inclined to accept the simplest explanation.
[34:40] Swearingen had enemies everywhere, and by 19 O four he
[34:44] was no longer powerful, protected, or useful to anyone.
[34:48] He was a broke, aging liability with a past full of dangerous
[34:53] secrets. And because he was so widely
[34:55] despised, police may not have felt much pressure to dig
[35:00] anyway. With that said, I can't
[35:03] recommend the show Deadwood enough, and Ian Mcshane's
[35:06] performance as Al Swearingen is timeless.

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