Murder most foul

Published on Saturday 29 August 2009 01:46

WE'RE standing under a big, blue Wyoming sky, beside a modest log cabin by a creek cusped in the scrubby lower slopes of Casper Mountain, outside Casper, county town of Natrona County. In late spring, it's an idyllic spot, with the sound of running water, crickets and birdsong, a big bull snake slipping through the grass. But in 1920, this was the site of a brutal murder, widely reported at the time.

The victim was Jack Corbett, a prosperous and well-respected rancher – and great-uncle of my wife, Anne.

In this Year of Homecoming, we've been reversing the usual trend of Americans coming to Scotland or Ireland in search of their ancestors. Anne is Irish, from Nenagh, County Tipperary, but her mother's family were Corbetts from County Clare and her maternal great-grandparents, John Joseph – "John Jo" – and Kate Corbett, emigrated in the 1880s with their children, including the ill-fated Jack, from Dublin to the United States. They ended up ranching on this spot, taking advantage of the 1862 Homestead Act, which offered settlers freehold title to parcels of undeveloped land in the west, on the condition that they "proved up" or developed it.

Anne has spent the past two years researching her great-grandparents' eventful lives, particularly from her great-grandmother's point of view, and is in the process of self-publishing a semi-fictionalised account, In Pursuit of Kate Corbett.

We've been taken to this spot by a local rancher, Tad Knight, bouncing along rutted tracks in his pick-up. "It looks all right just now, but in winter I've seen the snow as high as the roof of this pick-up," says Knight, who explains the existing cabin was built by an older farmer who used it when tending his cattle in the summer. He died a couple of years ago, which is a pity, adds Knight. "He knew the story of the murder. He said he built this on the site of the old place."

Sometimes referred to as the Chicago of Wyoming, Casper is now a prosperous community, which still reflects its oil and cowboy culture. When the Corbetts arrived in 1886, however, it had yet to become even the rickle of huts and tents shown in photographs taken two years later.

After John Jo died in 1894, and the surviving family scattered elsewhere, the homestead, in the lonely east Elkhorn Valley area, was inherited by Jack Corbett, who, in January 1920, took on a young ranch hand by the name of Jesse Atkins. On 24 January, a neighbouring rancher, having not seen Corbett, a bachelor, for several days, rode over to his place, to find unfed cattle and horses protesting in the barn and no sign of their owner. He reported it to the Natrona County Sheriff's office, which dispatched a posse to the ranch, where they eventually discovered Jack Corbett's body in an outdoor storage cellar, the door of which had been nailed shut.

The Dublin-born rancher had been shot several times with a .25 to .35 calibre rifle and his body dragged into the cellar. Some 50 yards from the house, they found the carcase of one of his horses, also shot, which his starving dogs had started to eat. As the president of the Casper National bank offered a personal reward of $250 for the apprehension of the murderer and Corbett's outraged friends increased it to 1,500, the hunt started for the vanished Atkins.

These are unsavoury facts we've known for some time. Anne had listened to tales of her emigrant forebears since childhood, but her delvings into genealogical records and correspondence with newspapers and local authorities in Casper were increasingly substituting facts for family lore. Now, joined by her Massachusetts-based sister, Mairead, and her husband, Bob, we were at last making something between a family pilgrimage and a crime-scene visit. We also met Roddy Burwell, a local part-time genealogist who had assisted Anne's researches via e-mail, among other things locating the general vicinity of the ranch. Everyone we met was fascinated by the story, from barmaids to chambers of commerce. And in trying to locate the ancestral ranch site, Anne and Mairead's judicious inquiries at the local country club near Casper Mountain led them to bang on the door of a member of the McMurray family, a Casper business dynasty. We were directed to the nearby office of Eastgate Ranch, where an indulgent Robert McMurray listened, did a bit of Google Earth-ing then made a phone call. Next thing we were in his pick-up, en route for Tad Knight's place and east Elkhorn Creek.

Back in 1920, Corbett, who had probably caught his murderer in the act of ransacking the ranch house, had been robbed of several guns, a horse and other items. In a still lawless community where murder was all too common, his killing was described in one local newspaper headline as the "Vilest murder in history of county". Another newspaper reported: "While he lived a secluded life, (Corbett] was an approachable man who possessed the sterling traits of character and rugged honesty with which pioneers of the great West have been so richly endowed."

But as we stand beside the cabin recently erected on the spot – the original ranch house being long gone – we are mindful that Jack Corbett's murder wasn't the only heartbreak to visit this site and the Dublin family who made it their home.

But what of the "degenerate", as one report labelled him, who killed the man who had newly employed him? The hunt for Jesse Atkins, who also went under the names Livingston and Ritchie, went on for months, until, in October, Casper's Sheriff Pat Joyce received a cable from Railroad Police in Almagordo, New Mexico: "Have party in jail that fits description perfectly of R L Livingston alias Ritchie. He is your man without doubt."

Atkins was just 19 when he confessed to the murder. Although the authorities had promised a death sentence, he escaped with the debatably more lenient punishment of life imprisonment. He was under-age and could also have claimed insanity – his mother, the court heard, was confined in an asylum in Kalamazoo, while two brothers had already died in such institutions. Atkins's life had been blighted from the start.

In Casper's Highland Cemetery, the four of us stood by a handsome grey slate cross, its base carved with ferns, leaves and flowers and the legend: "In memory of J J Corbett. Born Dublin, Ireland, Nov 1871. Died Jan 1920. At Rest". A few days earlier, we had visited another cemetery, Mount Olivet, outside Denver, Colorado, where Anne's great-grandfather, John Jo, had died of cancer of the liver in St Joseph Hospital.

My wife's great-grandparents didn't fit the stereotype of poverty-stricken Irish emigrants, fleeing landlords and famine. They were members of an emerging, post-Catholic Emancipation Irish middle-class. Kate's family had a cabinet-making and upholstery business and John Jo, who had grown up in a family of substantial tenant farmers in County Clare, had worked in the civil service and had spent time in India, initially as a civil servant in the "Irish Raj" that you rarely hear of, but also in tea planting and, at one point, as a professional big game hunter.

In September 1884, they boarded ship for New York with their three youngest children, three older boys staying on with family until they finished their school year. But if their means prevented them from having to endure the often appalling conditions of crossing the Atlantic in steerage, it didn't insulate them from anguish. Both their daughters contracted diphtheria during the voyage, with seven-year-old Kath dying at sea and Edith, nine, succumbing shortly after arriving in America.

Kate Corbett suffered further heartbreak in 1887 when she dispatched her youngest son Vincent, aged only eight – literally with a label round his neck – from Wyoming back to Ireland, where he would be brought up by John Jo's brother and his wife, who had no children of their own, to inherit their farm.

As we wander about the cabin site, Tad warning us to watch out for rattlers in the scrub, Anne takes in the sunlit greenery and unfamiliar bird song. "This must have remained in Kate's mind's eye for the rest of her life," she muses. And from many thousands of miles away, for in 1897, once her remaining family were settled, the widowed Kate Corbett did what may seem inconceivable today: She returned to Ireland, and spent some time with Vincent before boarding a steamer to England and finding her way to the Dorset village of Stapehill where, at the age of 57, she entered Holy Cross Priory, passing her final years as a Cistercian nun.

Always a pious woman, Kate had long sought peace during her eventful and sometimes grief-stricken life. She died at Stapehill in 1910, spared the news of Jack's murder a decade later.

So what of Vincent, the boy who was sent back across the Atlantic at such a tender age? He became a widely respected farmer in west Clare, owner of one of the area's first motor cars. And when my wife took up a post as west Clare's first professional social worker in the early 1970s, she found herself endowed with a certain kudos, not because of her job, but because she was the granddaughter of Vincent Corbett, the boy who came back.

&#149 In Pursuit of Kate Corbett, by Anne Loughnane, is published next month by Grosvenor House. For details, contact [e-mail]