Warning: Some details in this article may be disturbing to some readers.
(COLORADO SPRINGS) — When someone drops the words “serial killer,” what is the image that first comes to mind? 1980s camp counselor slayers, skulking around in masks? The caricature of Ed Gein that inspired Leatherface and Norman Bates? Whatever it is, I’d wager to guess that someone from the last gasping breaths of the Old West probably wasn’t your first thought. Well, only about 20 years after H. H. Holmes struck victims during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Colorado Springs saw some of the most gruesome killings in the city’s history in 1911… murders that remain unsolved to this very day.
The actual definition of a serial murder has been something up for debate since it was popularized by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Behavioral Science Unit Investigator Robert Ressler. Originally, Ressler and the FBI specifically defined serial murder as involving a minimum of four events taking place at different locations separated by a “cooling-off period.” But, even by this relatively strict definition, the chilling events that struck Colorado Springs could still be considered some of the earliest serial killings documented by our nation’s newspapers.
The Colorado Springs Gazette headline that broke on the morning of Sept. 21, 1911, certainly seemed to agree: “MAN, TWO WOMEN, THREE CHILDREN MEET DEATH AT HANDS OF FIEND WITH AXE”
It would have been a Wednesday afternoon. According to the National Weather Service’s archives, it was an average of 47 degrees in 1911, making it an assumedly brisk day for Mrs. Nettie Ruth when she left her home at 931 South Sierra Madre Street around 2 p.m. Ruth and her friend Anna Merritt went to visit Ruth’s sister, Alice May Burnham, at her home at 321 West Dale Street. That is, until the stomach-churning scent of decayed meat was the only thing to greet Ruth and Merritt as they approached the back door.
According to the Colorado Springs Gazette’s report of the incident from 1911, the lock of the back door caught, and it took a little force to turn the key. This would indicate that someone either broke into or at least picked the lock of the Burnham home. When they managed to get the door unlocked and opened, Ruth could immediately tell something was wrong: The rear room of the house was multi-purpose, acting as a kitchen, dining room, and a bedroom. And the remains of a Sunday dinner were still strewn across the room.
“Just the same as when I left my sister’s house. Sunday night, about a quarter after nine,” Ruth told the Gazette.
Neither Ruth nor Merritt could have prepared themselves for what they’d find on the other side of the door leading into the rest of the house.
Ruth described finding “great splotches of blood” on the walls to the Springs newspaper, before laying eyes upon the body of her niece lying on the edge of the bed, head apparently crushed.
The two women could not look any longer, instead running from the house. It wasn’t long after that when the coroner, the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD), and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office (EPSO) were called and rushed to the Burnham house. But, according to both the Colorado Springs Gazette’s coverage of the murders the following week and Denver’s The Great Divide’s recounting in 1915, neighbors told El Paso County Coroner Jackson that none of them had seen anyone come in or out of the Wayne house on the corner of Harrison Street since that Sunday.
The Wayne house was only a few steps from the Burnhams’ back door.
CSPD Assistant Chief Springs, with the help of other officers on the scene, forced their way into the house, only to find the Wayne family killed in the exact same manner: “Their skulls, as was the case in the house next door, had been beaten in with some heavy instrument. A blood-stained ax was found at Wayne’s back door. It had been borrowed from Mrs. J. R. Evans, a neighbor, by Wayne a few days ago to chop wood,” wrote the Gazette on Sept. 21, 1911.
In total, six lives were brutally taken that night: Alice May Burnham, six-year-old Alice Burnham, three-year-old John Burnham, Henry Wayne, his wife Blanche McGinnis Wayne, and their two-year-old daughter, Blanche.
The investigation led CSPD to believe that robbery was not the objective or inciting incident of the murders. Specifically, they cited that Mrs. Wayne was still wearing multiple gold bracelets, and a gold watch was out in the open on a dresser in the Burnhams’ house. The investigating detectives and Deputy District Attorney Burns also found that both homes’ doors were locked, with a bottle of ink in the Burham house found tipped over and evidence of an attempted clean-up.
Aside from this minor detail, it seemed nothing was disturbed in either home, nothing but the six bodies which the killer put to bed after he carried out his work.
The prime and only immediate suspect was the husband missing from the scene: Arthur J. Burnham.
According to the Gazette’s original 1911 reporting, authorities brought Burnham in for questioning roughly an hour after they responded to the crime. Deputies and detectives found him working at his job as a yardman at Woodmen Sanatorium, roughly 12 miles from his home. When police told him of his family’s fate, he reportedly asked if they were killed in a train accident.
But, according to the Gazette, Burnham’s demeanor was flat when he was taken back to his house and shown the bodies of his wife and daughter. This was enough to make CSPD detectives suspicious enough to bring Burnham in for further questioning, but his boss, Superintendent of Woodmen Sanatorium, Dr. J. A Rutledge, was able to account for him practically the entire day.
“Sunday was his (Burnham’s) regular day off, but he made arrangements so that he could get away Wednesday last week. This he did, but he was back at work Thursday morning. I can account for him from his co-workers for every minute of every other day up to the present time. Sunday, on which evening the murder is supposed to have happened, he was at work in the kitchen as usual. He peeled from 200 to 250 pounds of potatoes during the day. He quit work about 7 o’clock,” Dr. Rutledge told the Colorado Springs Gazette for their Sept. 21 issue.
Dr. Rutledge also noted that Arthur Burnham was suffering from tuberculosis and that his roommate, J.C. Shriver, could hear his coughing in his work cottage throughout that night. This testimony, combined with Burnham’s confirmed illness and Burnham’s own report of an altercation with his wife’s previous suitor, Antone Donatell, proved that there was practically no way to actually tie Burnham to the six murders.
Donatell, nor a man whom the Colorado Springs public linked to him, could provide enough detail to be charged either, leaving the community scared and befuddled as to how someone could commit a crime like this and just disappear.
This did not mean that the story of these six murders disappeared just as quickly. Hundreds flocked to the Burnham home to dare sneak a glimpse of the rooms in which the grizzly scene occurred, and newspapers as far as Indiana’s Jasper County Democrat and even the New York Times followed updates on any potential suspects. But none of this attention amounted to a killer being brought to justice.
About 100 years later, Dwight Haverkorn, a retired CSPD investigator, followed in his predecessors’ footsteps in trying to find some closure to this cold case that’s been frozen for over a century. Over his retirement, Haverkorn assembled a chronological biography of the police department, culminating in a book published in 2024.
In his book, Murder in the Shadow of Pikes Peak, Haverkorn posited that the six murders committed in 1911 were actually among a long list of killings from a single serial killer.
According to Haverkorn, 25 murders across five states in a two-month span were committed, all sharing the same tell-tale calling card: heads caved in by a heavy, blunt object, found tucked neatly in their beds, covers drawn over their bodies.
The five locations of these two dozen killings are: Monmouth, Illinois; Ellsworth, Kansas; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Rainier, Washington; and Portland, Oregon.
A key detail presented by Haverkorn in his book and in a 2016 interview with the Denver Post is a flashlight, a device that was only just gaining popularity in 1911, found in the Monmouth slayings. The device was inscribed: Colorado Springs, September 4.
Haverkorn believed that, with most of the killings happening in homes near or directly next to railroad tracks, the killer simply rode into town on a railroad car, hopped off, killed, then hopped back onto the train to start the cycle anew.
Sadly, tracking and identifying fingerprints were a relatively new concept for police forces. On top of that, the Pinkerton and Burns agencies were hired by the City of Colorado Springs to track down the killer of the Wayne and Burnham families. But after being purchased by Swedish company Securitas, the Pinkerton fingerprint records have been split between the company and the Library of Congress, making any effort to connect fingerprints of the different murder scenes nigh impossible.
Perhaps somewhere deep in the Library of Congress’s archives, or somewhere in a Swedish security company’s annals, lies the answer to a mystery. One that could give closure to 25 lives taken before their time.
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