Joseph Corbett Jr. was convicted of two killings ten years apart in two states. In December 1950, as a 22-year-old former student, he picked up an Air Force sergeant who was hitchhiking in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and shot him. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 1951. Four years later he walked out of a minimum-security prison in California and disappeared into a new identity.
On February 9, 1960, living in Denver as "Walter Osborne," he blocked a one-lane bridge over Turkey Creek near Morrison, Colorado, and waited for Adolph Coors III, the president of the Adolph Coors Co. brewery in Golden. Coors was shot and taken away, and a ransom letter demanding $500,000 arrived at his home. No ransom call ever came. The search for Corbett ran from Colorado to New Jersey and across Canada before police arrested him in Vancouver that October. A Jefferson County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in March 1961 and fixed his punishment at life imprisonment. He was paroled in 1980, insisted for the rest of his life that he had not killed Coors, and died by his own hand in Denver in 2009.
Corbett was born in Seattle, the second son of Marion and Joseph Corbett. His father was a newspaperman, the telegraph editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and 5280 magazine, which reviewed FBI reports, newspaper files and Corbett's letters from jail for a 2009 feature, reported that father and son were not close. His mother encouraged his reading, which ranged across German, Russian, philosophy, physics and mathematics. He was president of his eighth-grade class and finished in the top quarter of his high school class, though he grew fast and awkwardly and was said to have a poor opinion of himself.
At the University of Washington he scored 91 out of 99 on an entrance assessment and enrolled as a physics major, but he struggled with the course load and left. In 1950, according to 5280, his mother died after falling from a balcony while he was repairing a banister. He transferred to the University of California at Berkeley and had dropped out by October 1950. Philip Jett, whose 2017 book is the fullest account of the case, has written that Corbett's IQ was measured at 148 and that he was proud of his intellect, methodical and close to obsessive in his habits. 9News and a Denver Public Library caption describe him as a former Fulbright scholar, but neither gives a year or program for such an award, and it is not confirmed.
The first victim was an airman stationed at Hamilton Field, the Air Force base in Novato, Marin County. A wire report published in January 1951 named him as Sgt. Allen Reed and said he came from Ligonier. 5280 gives his age as 20. Little else about his life appears in the reports: no family statement, no description of his service and no account of his funeral. He was a young enlisted man far from home in the last days before Christmas, trying to get a ride.
A few days before Christmas 1950, Corbett stopped for the hitchhiking sergeant. Reed was found shot to death beside a road in Marin County on December 22, 1950. 5280 reported that he had been shot twice in the head. The 1951 wire report said his wallet was missing and that the authorities believed he had been picked up by a motorist, robbed and then killed. Denver's 9News, drawing on FBI material, described the shot as fired into the back of his head.
Corbett was arrested in January 1951 in possession of a stolen car. The contemporary report places the arrest in Los Angeles; 5280 says he was caught in Beverly Hills. He first claimed that he had shot the airman in self-defense, 5280 reported, and later said it had been a robbery gone wrong.
In January 1951 Corbett appeared before Justice of the Peace N. Charles Bratton in San Rafael, the Marin County seat, and pleaded not guilty to murder. He spoke in a clear, steady voice, the report said. His father had driven down from Seattle to arrange his defense, and he was represented by Albert E. Bagshaw, a former district attorney of Marin County. The case was continued for a week to set a date for a preliminary hearing.
By the spring he had changed his plea. The FBI states that Corbett pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sent to the California Institution for Men at Chino; his mug shot there is dated March 19, 1951. The federal district court in Denver, reviewing his record in 1967, likewise described a prior conviction for second-degree murder in California in 1951. 5280's 2009 feature states instead that he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received a maximum of life. The two official records, the FBI's and the federal court's, agree on second degree. The plea settled the case without a trial, so no court ever ruled on his claim of self-defense.
According to 5280, Corbett spent a year at San Quentin, where his IQ was measured at 148, and then three years at a prison mental hospital on Terminal Island, where doctors described him as markedly schizoid and warned that he could explode. His father, who had remarried, visited with his new wife, Helen Marie, and the two men began to repair their relationship.
On August 1, 1955, Corbett escaped from a minimum-security unit. He hid clothes in a laundry cart, 5280 reported, and slipped out through a window screen.
Corbett borrowed his brother Walter's name and first lived as Walter Osborne in Los Angeles, where he worked for an ice company and joined a union. In December 1955 he moved to Denver and rented apartment 305 at the Perlmor Apartments, at Pearl Street and Colfax Avenue, for $75 a month. The Jefferson County historian Jerry Grunska gives the address as 1435 Pearl Street. Neighbors called the quiet tenant "Mystery Boy." He told some people he was married, though he was not, and Jett found that he gave different names for his supposed wife on different forms.
In the spring of 1956 he won a night-shift job at a Denver paint company, Benjamin Moore, over more than a hundred other applicants. The Colorado Supreme Court's opinion records that he worked there from March 1956 to October 2, 1959. A co-worker later testified that Corbett had talked about guns and money, had said he had been planning something for several years and had mentioned the Coors family and its business.
The court record traces a series of purchases, all mailed to the Osborne name in Denver: a Smith and Wesson K-2 revolver in June 1957, navy hand and leg irons in March 1959 and four pairs of handcuffs on April 25, 1959. Late in 1959 a clerk sold a Royalite portable typewriter to a man who gave the false name William Chiffins; at trial the clerk identified Corbett as the buyer. Another clerk was "almost positive" that Corbett had bought a box of Eaton's Berkshire paper. On December 9, 1959, a man named Pace who worked at the Uranium Enterprise mine near Turkey Creek said Corbett stopped to ask him about the mine and the road.
On December 23, 1959, Corbett sold his 1957 Ford Fairlane. On January 9, 1960, he bought a yellow 1951 Mercury with Colorado plate AT-6203. Between February 6 and 8, four local residents saw a yellow Mercury near the Turkey Creek bridge, and Cecily Coors, the victim's teenage daughter, had noticed a man waiting near the bridge more than once, Grunska wrote. Jett wrote that Corbett spent almost 30 months on the plan. The night before, Jett found, he got a haircut, collected a suit from the cleaner, loaded camping gear and food into the car, wrote the ransom letter and watched Peter Gunn on television.
Adolph Coors III, known as Ad, was 44. He was born in Golden in 1916, the grandson of the brewery's founder. He was president of the Adolph Coors Co. and is described in later accounts as its chairman and chief executive. His younger brothers, Bill and Joe, ran much of the family business, Bill the brewery and Joe the porcelain company. Grunska and 5280 both note that Ad was allergic to beer.
He was nearly six foot two, slender, bookish and quiet, with a stutter and a quick temper by Grunska's account. He skied, played softball, rode horses and ran Black Angus cattle on a 480-acre ranch in the foothills near Morrison, about 15 miles from Denver, where the family lived in a house on the Dakota Hogback above Turkey Creek. He and Mary Grant Coors had been married for nearly two decades and had four children, three of them teenagers. A 2009 newspaper account, quoted by Law Week Colorado, said he had no known enemies. The family avoided publicity and distrusted outsiders. Ad's father, Adolph Coors Jr., had himself been the target of a kidnapping plot in 1933.
Coors left the ranch at about 8 a.m. in his International Harvester Travelall station wagon to drive to the brewery in Golden. Road construction sent him over the one-lane bridge on Turkey Creek, where, Jett wrote, Corbett had backed the yellow Mercury onto the span with its hood raised as if it had broken down. Coors stopped to help. Jett's reconstruction has Corbett drawing a pistol, Coors grabbing his gun hand, and the two men struggling until Coors broke away toward his car and Corbett fired twice. Neighbors heard a loud shot at about 8 a.m., the Supreme Court recorded.
At about 10 a.m. a milkman found the Travelall blocking the bridge with its engine running and the radio playing. Grunska's account adds that Bill Moomey, the company's advertising director, had gone looking for Coors when he missed a 10:30 meeting, and found the car with the milk truck driver, Dan Crocker. Officers found two hats in the creek, Coors's cap and a brown felt fedora from the May Co. store, and later recovered his glasses from the water. Below bloodstains on the railing was a pool of blood about 18 inches by 8 inches. Sheriff Art Wermuth of Jefferson County brought in bloodhounds, which lost the scent.
The first ransom letter, addressed to Mrs. Adolph Coors III at Morrison, was postmarked in Denver at 3 p.m. on February 9. It told her that her husband had been kidnapped, that he would die if she went to the police or the FBI and that he would be freed within 48 hours of payment. It demanded $200,000 in tens and $300,000 in twenties, used and unmarked, and told the family to place an advertisement for a tractor in The Denver Post, signed "King Ranch, Fort Lupton," and wait by the telephone. "We have no desire to commit murder," it said. FBI experts found that it had been typed on a Royalite portable on Eaton's paper.
The FBI entered the case after 24 hours, the waiting period then required under the federal kidnapping law. Mary Coors followed the instructions. The advertisement ran from February 11, the family assembled the cash, and on February 22 she sent a note to reporters saying the family was ready to pay. No call came. Over the following months she received about twenty letters claiming to be ransom demands, the Supreme Court noted. Corbett had left his apartment on February 10, though his February rent was paid, telling his landlady he was going to Boulder to finish a degree.
The partial plate, "AT-62," came from people near the bridge, and by February 13 the FBI had narrowed it to four Mercurys. Three were cleared. The fourth belonged to Walter Osborne of Pearl Street, who had moved out the day after Coors vanished. On February 17, 1960, firefighters found a burning 1951 yellow Mercury without plates at a dump in Atlantic City, New Jersey; a battalion chief testified that the fire was arson. Its vehicle identification number was still readable and matched Osborne's car.
The FBI learned that Osborne had acquired a gun, handcuffs and a typewriter before he vanished, and that an insurance policy from his former job named a Joseph Corbett as beneficiary. Fingerprints from Colorado driver's license records then showed that "Osborne" was Joseph Corbett Jr., the escaped California murderer. In his empty apartment agents found handcuff boxes, tent poles and leg irons. Clerks at the May D and F store in Cherry Creek identified Corbett from a photograph as the buyer of a fedora like the one in the creek.
On March 30, 1960, the FBI placed Corbett on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, as number 127. Philip Jett told Colorado Public Radio in 2017 that Adolph Coors Jr. asked J. Edgar Hoover personally for help and that the FBI sent more agents than in any case since the Lindbergh kidnapping. Hoover called Corbett the most wanted man since John Dillinger, and in August 1960, Grunska wrote, the FBI issued a nationwide alert describing him as 32, six foot two, 170 pounds, blue-eyed, brown-haired and extremely nearsighted. The bureau also noted that he was a proficient typist, a neat dresser and a gun enthusiast.
Corbett had gone to Canada. He was seen in Toronto from February 21, 1960, the court recorded, and rented a room there until August 31, when he left without notice, abandoning clothes, books and tools. 5280 reported that he left behind a wallet, a driver's license, a union card and a copy of Robert Traver's novel Anatomy of a Murder. Through the spring and summer, the FBI later wrote, the trail went cold, and investigators came to believe that Coors was dead.
On September 11, 1960, a man testing a new pistol at an illegal dump in the hills of Douglas County, south of Denver, found a pair of trousers. Grunska names him as Ed Greene, a pizza driver; the court record spells the name Green. In the pockets were keys and a penknife engraved "AC III," 43 cents and a monogrammed handkerchief. After a search by 26 FBI agents, bones were found nearby. Richard Hanes, then a new assistant to District Attorney Leo Rector of the Fourth Judicial District, recalled in 2019 that he carried the skull in a box to a dentist in Castle Rock, whose records confirmed that it was Coors.
The right shoulder blade had two holes that a pathologist attributed to high-velocity objects. Coors's jacket, shirt and undershirt had matching holes, and powder residue showed a contact or near-contact shot. He had been shot twice in the back.
The November 1960 issue of Reader's Digest carried the case, and readers in Canada recognized the man in the photographs. A tip led the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI to an apartment Corbett had already left, and a rooming-house manager in Winnipeg reported a similar man driving a red Pontiac. On October 29, 1960, a Vancouver police officer spotted the car outside a motor hotel. Police, assisted by the FBI's legal attaché in Toronto, went to the room, where Corbett had registered as Thomas Wainwright. The FBI's account has the man who answered saying, "I give up. I'm the man you want." 5280 gives his words as "I'm your man." He had $89 and a loaded pistol in his suitcase, and he declined to discuss Coors's death.
He appeared in Seattle on October 31, 1960, and was ordered returned to Colorado. Because Coors's remains had been found in Colorado, no federal kidnapping charge was brought, and the state prosecuted. The federal court later noted that he was held for about twelve days without arraignment and questioned before counsel was appointed; the questioning produced no incriminating statements. On November 28, 1960, his Underwood typewriter was found near Castle Rock.
Corbett was charged by direct information in Jefferson County with the murder of Adolph Coors III. He pleaded not guilty. Declared indigent, he asked for William H. Erickson, a Denver lawyer, who was appointed alongside H. Malcolm Mackay; his father sent money for suits. Erickson had at first refused because many of his friends and clients were close to the Coors family, and he agreed only after the trial judge asked him to help. District Attorney Ronald J. Hardesty prosecuted.
The defense was refused bail, which the courts upheld because the charge was a capital offense and because of his record and his escape. Motions to move the trial out of Jefferson County, near the brewery and the family's homes, or to postpone it because of publicity, were denied in January 1961. The Denver Post had published a detailed account of the FBI's evidence in September 1960, and national magazines had run stories, some mentioning his criminal record and his refusal to take a lie detector test.
Jury selection began on March 13, 1961, in Golden, with about 300 prospective jurors. The jury was sequestered and Judge Christian D. Stoner banned cameras and broadcasting from the courtroom. 5280 reported that the trial lasted 13 days.
The prosecution's case was circumstantial. It rested on the purchases of handcuffs, leg irons and the Royalite typewriter, on the testimony about the yellow Mercury near the bridge, on Corbett's departure from Denver the day after the shooting and on the burned car in Atlantic City. Prosecutors also used geological evidence: mud and pink feldspar dust from under the Mercury that, 5280 wrote, gave agents a geological fingerprint, and gravel that Grunska says matched the Dakota Hogback. The FBI says it sent 23 agents, five laboratory examiners and a fingerprint expert to support the prosecution. Mary Coors testified briefly about her husband's last moments at home. Beulah N. Lewis, a 73-year-old chiropractor who came forward only after the trial began, testified that she had seen two men struggling on the bridge, and she identified Corbett in court as one of them. The fedora from the creek fit Corbett's head, Grunska wrote.
The defense argued that Corbett, a wanted escapee, had left Denver because of federal scrutiny, and that the timing of his flight was coincidence. He did not testify, and the defense called no witnesses. Grunska wrote that the judge told the jury to disregard a kidnapping charge, since a kidnapping conviction then carried an automatic death penalty in Colorado.
Several incidents drew mistrial motions: a remark by the district attorney about the Coors family during jury selection, which was struck; coffee served to the jurors in a carton marked "Coors"; and questions about the officers guarding the defendant. Judge Stoner denied them.
The jury deliberated for more than 16 hours. Jett told Colorado Public Radio that it came close to deadlock. It found Corbett guilty of first-degree murder and fixed his punishment at life imprisonment; Judge Stoner sentenced him to life at hard labor at the state penitentiary in Cañon City. 5280 and Grunska date the verdict March 30, 1961; the FBI and several news accounts give March 19, 1961.
Corbett's lawyers took the case to the Colorado Supreme Court on a writ of error, listing some 103 claimed errors. On November 18, 1963, the court affirmed in an opinion by Justice McWilliams, with Justices Day and Hall dissenting. It held that the circumstantial evidence was enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, that bail rulings could not be reviewed after conviction, that the refusal to move or postpone the trial was within the judge's discretion because jury questioning showed no disqualifying prejudice, and that the defense had no right to the FBI's report. Rehearing was denied on December 30, 1963, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1964.
He then petitioned the federal court in Denver for habeas corpus against the warden, Wayne K. Patterson. On July 3, 1967, Chief Judge Arraj denied the petition. He found that the publicity had been spread over months and was mostly objective, that the jury had been sequestered and the trial orderly, and that the jurors had said they could decide on the evidence. He criticized the officials who had released information before trial and urged judges to be open to changes of venue in such cases. He also called the defense lawyers' work "of the very highest caliber," and concluded that Corbett had received a fair trial.
In prison Corbett became a licensed X-ray technician and worked in the prison hospital, where, 5280 reported, he was credited with saving several inmates' lives. A request for parole in 1967 was denied, and later requests were also refused, partly because of the publicity, according to Grunska. In 1973 Colorado required parole hearings for inmates who had served ten years or more.
Starting in 1978, Ad Coors's son, Adolph Coors IV, went to Cañon City three times to meet him. Corbett refused each time. On the last visit Coors left a Bible with a note that read, in part, "I want to forgive you for what you did to my family."
When Corbett applied for work release, he told the parole board that the circumstantial evidence wrapped around him could have caught anyone. He was freed on parole on December 12, 1980. Sources differ on how long he had served, giving 18 years, 19 years, and about 19 and a half years.
Corbett was required to stay in Colorado while on parole. Ron Olson, his parole officer from 1980 to 1985, helped him find an apartment and work. Erickson told Grunska that Corbett lost one job and burned out a truck motor in another before he settled into driving a truck for the Salvation Army, and that he later turned up at Erickson's door collecting for Goodwill. The husband of Cecily Coors called Olson every year to ask about him. At some point in the 1980s Corbett stopped working, and in his last decades he rarely left a third-floor studio apartment on Federal Boulevard in southwest Denver.
He never admitted the killing. In a 1996 interview with The Denver Post, as reported by Law Week Colorado, Grunska and Denver's 9News, he denied any part in it, called the stories about him fiction and said he was dogged by people whispering that there went the man who killed Adolph Coors. When the 5280 writer Robert Sanchez finally found him at his door in early 2009, after about a dozen visits the summer before, Corbett declined to talk. "It's nothing personal," he said. "I have nothing to gain from the notoriety." He added that he had put the case behind him.
On Monday, August 24, 2009, Corbett was found dead in his Denver apartment of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 80 and had been diagnosed with cancer.
Ad Coors's remains were cremated and scattered over Aspen Mountain. Several months after the killing Mary Coors sold the Morrison ranch and moved with the children to Denver. Their eldest daughter, Mary Brooke, died of cancer in 1968 at 26, and Mary Coors died seven years later, at 60, after a fall at a friend's home in Aspen, 5280 reported. Bill and Joe Coors ran the company, and the brand went on to grow nationally. Asked decades later about the case, Bill Coors told 5280: "It's obvious. The guy was murdered."
The case became one of the best-known crimes in Colorado history. Sam Bock of History Colorado told Denver's KDVR in 2026 that it generated headlines across the country, and the History Colorado Center displays artifacts connected with the Coors family. The FBI later made the original ransom letter its artifact of the month.
The geological work drew lasting attention. John McPhee described it in "The Gravel Page," published in The New Yorker in January 1996 and collected in Irons in the Fire (1997), an essay that explains how the killer of Adolph Coors was traced through mineral grains on the underside of a car. Philip Jett's book The Death of an Heir appeared in 2017.
The trial also shaped the career of its lead defense lawyer. William H. Erickson later served on the Colorado Supreme Court and was its chief justice from 1991 to 1996. A 2018 profile in Colorado Lawyer recorded that he believed Corbett had been hurt by pretrial publicity, by a trial judge who favored the prosecution and by a venue close to the brewery, and that the experience shaped his later work on criminal justice standards. When a federal judgeship opened, the profile noted, his strongest supporter was Joe Coors, the victim's brother.
Proven: the second-degree murder of Sgt. Allen Reed, by Corbett's own guilty plea in 1951, and the first-degree murder of Adolph Coors III, by a jury verdict in 1961 that was affirmed on appeal and upheld on federal habeas review.
Corbett's own position: he claimed self-defense in the 1950 shooting before pleading guilty, and he denied killing Coors from his arrest until his death. No court accepted either account, and no confession exists in the Coors case.
Never established in court: how the 1950 shooting happened. Corbett's plea meant there was no trial. The 1951 report said the authorities believed the airman had been robbed and then killed; Corbett said, at different times, self-defense and a robbery that went wrong.
Details that vary between sources: whether his 1951 plea was to second-degree murder (FBI; federal district court) or first-degree murder (5280); whether he was arrested in Los Angeles or Beverly Hills; the year of his mother's death; whether the Perlmor Apartments were in Denver (5280, Grunska) or Golden (Jett excerpt); Coors's age (44 in most accounts, 45 in the FBI's); who found the Travelall first; where the trousers were found (about 12 miles southwest of Sedalia, per the FBI, or of Castle Rock, per the court record) and on which day in September the bones were recovered; the verdict date (March 19 or March 30, 1961); and how long he served. Accounts that he was a former Fulbright scholar give no details and are unconfirmed.
Seattle: Joseph Corbett Jr. is born, the second son of Joseph and Marion Corbett.
1950: his mother dies after a fall; he transfers to the University of California at Berkeley and drops out by October.
December 1950: he picks up Sgt. Allen Reed, a Hamilton Field airman, and shoots him; Reed is found dead beside a road in Marin County on December 22.
January 1951: arrested in the Los Angeles area in a stolen car; pleads not guilty in San Rafael.
Spring 1951: pleads guilty to second-degree murder; mug shot at Chino dated March 19, 1951.
August 1, 1955: escapes from a minimum-security unit.
December 1955: moves to Denver as "Walter Osborne."
March 1956 to October 2, 1959: works at a Denver paint company.
1957 to 1959: buys a revolver, leg irons, handcuffs and a Royalite typewriter.
January 9, 1960: buys a yellow 1951 Mercury.
February 9, 1960: Adolph Coors III is shot on the Turkey Creek bridge near Morrison; the ransom letter is mailed from Denver.
February 10, 1960: Corbett leaves his apartment.
February 17, 1960: the Mercury is found burning in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
February 21 to August 31, 1960: Corbett in Toronto.
March 30, 1960: added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list as number 127.
September 11, 1960: Coors's trousers and then his remains are found in Douglas County.
October 29, 1960: arrested in Vancouver.
March 13, 1961: jury selection begins in Golden.
March 1961: convicted of first-degree murder; life imprisonment.
November 18, 1963: Colorado Supreme Court affirms; rehearing denied December 30, 1963.
1964: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
1967: parole denied; on July 3 the federal district court denies habeas corpus.
1978: Adolph Coors IV begins visits to Cañon City; Corbett refuses to see him.
December 12, 1980: released on parole.
1996: Denver Post interview; he denies the killing.
2009: declines an interview with 5280.
August 24, 2009: dies by suicide in Denver, aged 80.