Colorado's Man-Eater: The 1970s Cannibalism Case Beyond Packer
Long before Alferd Packer, another Colorado cannibalism case shocked the nation—the little-known story of weird history hiding in plain sight.
The Legend That Wouldn’t Stay Buried
Every state has its dark folklore, but Colorado’s most infamous cannibalism case has a strange afterlife most people never hear about. The crime itself—Alferd Packer’s 1874 winter in the San Juan Mountains, and the deaths of five men he was traveling with—has been told and retold so many times that the documented court record and the campfire legend have become almost impossible to separate. That’s the real story here: not a new case, but how one 19th-century tragedy in a remote mining county became a piece of American folklore, complete with an apocryphal courtroom quote that historians still can’t verify ever happened.
To understand how the “Colorado Man-Eater” legend metastasized, you have to go back to Hinsdale County, the coroner’s inquest that started it all, and the newspapers that turned a frontier survival horror into a national sensation.
Lake City, 1874: What the Record Actually Shows
Alferd Packer arrived at the Los Pinos Indian Agency in April 1874, the sole survivor of a party of six prospectors who had set out that winter to cross the San Juan Mountains. His companions—Israel Swan, George Noon, Frank Miller, James Humphrey, and Shannon Wilson Bell—never came out of the mountains. Packer gave shifting accounts of what happened, eventually admitting that he had eaten portions of his companions’ remains to survive, though he claimed the men had died before he resorted to it, and that he killed Bell in self-defense after Bell attacked him.
The physical evidence came later that summer. Prospector John Randolph, guiding a Harper’s Weekly illustrator through the area near Lake City, discovered the remains of the five men. A coroner’s inquest was convened in Hinsdale County to examine the bodies, which showed clear signs of dismemberment. That inquest, along with Packer’s own inconsistent statements, formed the foundation of the criminal case against him—not embellished legend, but documented forensic and testimonial evidence entered into the county record.
Packer escaped custody shortly after and wasn’t recaptured until 1883, nearly a decade later, in Wyoming.
Two Trials and a Legal Technicality
This is where the case gets genuinely strange from a legal-history standpoint, and where most retellings skip the interesting part. Packer was tried in 1883 in Hinsdale County and convicted of murder, sentenced to hang. But the Colorado Supreme Court overturned that conviction on appeal, ruling that the statute under which he’d been sentenced hadn’t existed at the time of the killings in 1874—an ex post facto problem. It’s a detail that rarely makes it into the ghost-story version of events, but it’s a matter of actual Colorado legal record: Packer’s death sentence was voided not because of doubt about what happened in the mountains, but because of the timing of Colorado’s criminal code.
He was retried in 1886, this time convicted of five counts of manslaughter, and sentenced to 40 years in the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City.
The Quote That Almost Certainly Never Happened
No telling of the Packer case is complete without the infamous sentencing line supposedly delivered by the judge—something to the effect of there being only a handful of Democrats in Hinsdale County and Packer having eaten most of them. It’s one of the most quoted lines in Colorado frontier lore, endlessly reprinted in books, articles, and bar trivia nights.
There is no verified court transcript containing this line. Historians researching the Hinsdale County trial records have found no documentary basis for it—it appears to be a piece of journalistic invention or oral embellishment that took hold sometime after the trial and calcified into “fact” through repetition. This is arguably the clearest example of how the Packer case evolved from a documented legal proceeding into a piece of self-perpetuating folklore: a colorful, quotable line that “feels” true enough that newspapers and storytellers kept it alive for well over a century, regardless of whether it ever left a judge’s mouth in Lake City.
How the Press Built a Monster
Nineteenth-century Colorado newspapers didn’t need much encouragement to sensationalize a story like this, and they didn’t hold back. Coverage in outlets including the Denver Republican and various Gunnison-area papers leaned hard into lurid detail, feeding a public appetite that turned Packer into a kind of dark celebrity even before his second trial. The nickname “the Colorado Cannibal” and phrases like “Man-Eater of the San Juans” spread through wire reports and were picked up nationally, well beyond Colorado’s borders.
This is a pattern paranormal and true-crime researchers see again and again in frontier-era stories: a real, documented crime becomes a template that regional newspapers embellish for circulation, and those embellishments—rather than the court record—become what the public remembers. By the time Packer was paroled in 1901, following a public campaign that included support from the Denver Post, the “cannibal” persona had long since outgrown the man himself.
The Legend Outlives the Man
Packer died in 1907, but his story kept working its way into Colorado culture for decades afterward. Perhaps the strangest artifact of this is entirely real and well documented: in 1968, the University of Colorado Boulder named its student union cafeteria the “Alferd Packer Grill,” and the campus has held an annual “Alferd Packer Day” tradition since. It’s a darkly comic, thoroughly modern example of how 19th-century true crime gets absorbed into local identity—turned into merchandise, jokes, and campus lore, several generations removed from the actual inquest testimony in Hinsdale County.
The case also drew renewed scientific attention in 1989, when forensic investigators exhumed the remains of Packer’s five companions near Lake City for modern forensic analysis—an effort to test, more than a century later, what the bones could still tell us about how those men died. It’s a rare case where the folklore of the American West and actual forensic science intersect directly on the ground where the crime occurred.
Fact, Folklore, and the Space Between
What makes the Packer case such a compelling piece of Colorado weird history isn’t just the crime itself—it’s the way the story split into two parallel tracks almost immediately: one preserved in coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and Colorado Supreme Court rulings, and another built by newspapermen, campus pranksters, and generations of retellers who couldn’t resist a good line, verified or not.
The real Hinsdale County record is stranger and more legally fascinating than most people realize—a death sentence overturned on a technicality, a decade-long manhunt, a public parole campaign, and a 20th-century forensic reexamination. You don’t need an invented judge’s quip to make it memorable. The documented history alone is proof that Colorado’s frontier past holds plenty of genuine mystery, without any need for embellishment.