Bones back in Kansas

DNA evidence pending in landmark 1879 case

Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 22, 2006 at midnight

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LAWRENCE, Kan. - He's six feet under, again. Maybe this time he'll stay there.

But the identity of the human remains in the grave bearing the name of John Wesley Hillmon is still a mystery - for now.

Forty-six of the 47 bones exhumed Friday at this city's Oak Hill Cemetery were returned to the earth Sunday in a brief ceremony under cloudless skies. It's the fourth time the same remains have been laid to rest.

Just one bone, a section of a man's left shoulder blade, is to be taken back to Boulder, where a geneticist will attempt to retrieve DNA that could prove whether the man buried here 127 years ago is Hillmon, or perhaps another man who was killed in 1879 and buried as part of a $25,000 insurance fraud.

"There are two tragedies in a human life," University of Colorado anthropologist Dennis Van Gerven said graveside, before the fractured pieces of the mystery remains were returned to the rich Kansas soil.

"One is to be forgotten, and the other is to be misremembered - to be remembered as a scoundrel when you're not, or to be remembered as a victim, when you're not.

"We want to get the story right," he said as the wind rushed through branches of the tall oak trees overhead. "Because every life should end with the right story."

The cadaver's brittle and broken vestiges were laid back loosely in the bottom of the grave, as they had been found. A few handfuls of dirt were gently sprinkled over them, before a backhoe moved in to swiftly refill the hole.

Mimi Wesson, the CU law professor for whom the Hillmon riddle has become a consuming passion, said moments before the ceremony that she was heartened by the last- minute discovery of a Hillmon relative who attended the reinterment and has given the CU team a sample of his DNA - saliva in a cup.

"Through the genealogy we have calculated, Leray Hillmon ought to have a Y chromosome identical to John Hillmon's," Wesson said. "So, by comparing his DNA to the remains, I think there's a very good chance that we will be able say confidently that this either was, or was not, John Hillmon."

And if there is no match?

"Then we have an unsolved mystery, and as we know, sometimes unsolved mysteries are as fun as the mysteries we solve," Wesson said. "I'm going to continue work on this, no matter what we find or don't find. I'll just have to wait for the results to see what direction that path takes us."

Van Gerven and his assistant, Paul Sandberg, a CU graduate student in biological anthropology, spent much of Saturday in a borrowed teaching laboratory at the University of Kansas.

There, they cleaned, photographed, inventoried and identified - to the extent possible - the 47 bone fragments and five teeth recovered from the grave Friday, where an underground spring had helped speed the total disintegration of the cadaver's coffin and skeletal structure.

The only other material recovered were eight fragmented coffin nails and a tiny glass button.

Van Gerven said his choice of the glenoid fossa - the piece of the shoulder blade that meets the head of the humerus - as the one piece to bring back to Boulder was made because it was the densest piece of bone recovered and therefore most promising to potentially yield usable DNA.

Because the five recovered molars had no roots connected, it makes the teeth a less likely source of DNA than Wesson's team initially thought.

"I'm going to turn the bone over to a geneticist," Van Gerven said. "I'm not guaranteeing a damn thing. I know as much about getting DNA out of that bone as I do about putting a satellite around the globe."

It should take at least a month to know if usable DNA is retrievable.

Hillmon, a 31-year-old aspiring cowhand, left Lawrence in February 1879 looking for ranchland. But on March 17, 1879, his traveling companion reported that he'd accidentally shot Hillmon in the head while unloading a rifle at their creekside campsite near Medicine Lodge, Kan.

Because Hillmon carried three life insurance policies valued at $25,000, the insurance companies smelled fraud on the part of widow Sallie E. Hillmon and others. In six trials over 20 years, highlighted by two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, the insurance companies came to believe the dead man was really Frederick Adolph Walters, 24, of Fort Madison, Iowa.

A letter from Walters mailed in Wichita, Kan., that claimed he'd be traveling with a person named Hillmon became the centerpiece of the insurance companies' case. It was in a ruling that the letter should be admissible as evidence that the nation's highest court created what is known as the state-of-mind exception to the hearsay rule, which endures as a cornerstone of federal evidence law to this day.

In the early days of the Hillmon saga, the remains of whoever was killed that day at Crooked Creek were dug up on two occasions for inquests and buried three times. That makes Sunday the fourth time dirt has been tossed atop them.

Leray Hillmon, a genial 52-year-old truck driver from Stevensville, Mont., was on hand to say goodbye to grandfather George Benjamin Hillmon's half-brother - that is, if the bones really are those of John Wesley Hillmon. But he wished no role in Sunday's proceedings.

"It's immaterial," Hillmon said. "It would be inappropriate for me to say anything. For Mimi, this has been her life's work for the last four years."

As a documentary film crew recorded the final restoration of the grave at the center of the Hillmon puzzle, Leray Hillmon admitted no great personal stake in its resolution.

"I've just kind of been swept up in this," he said with a laugh. "But I'm enjoying every minute of it."

brennanc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2742

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