At a cemetery on the outskirts of Denver, beside an old tombstone, one might sit and think at the bench under the long, sagging limbs of a dark, towering spruce.
“Very shady and cold. It’s kind of an ominous spot,” says Jenny Hankinson, curator of collections at the nearby Littleton Museum.
That’s how she knows the spot — and “pretty popular,” she says. Visitors might leave a rock or a coin or some other token.
“It’s the Halloween season,” Hankinson says, “so you never know who’s gonna put a chicken leg or something over there.”
Not that she’s ever seen the bones from someone’s dinner. That’s just what she’s heard, that the scraps occasionally show up — more left-behind tokens most fitting for the grave of one of the most notorious characters in Colorado history. Here lies Alfred Packer the cannibal.
Hankinson has heard something else.
She has heard, like many historians, that the cannibal is innocent.
Yes, 150 years after the events that brought Packer to our collective nightmare, his true legacy remains a debate.
> Read the full story at the Denver Gazette.
