CU-Boulder Division of Continuing Education and Professional Studies News Release
A petition to exhume the body of a man who died more than a hundred years ago will soon be filed in the District Court of Douglas County, Kansas, on behalf of CU-Boulder faculty members who plan to use forensic science to determine his identity and discover whether or not the Supreme Court invented an important legal rule for the wrong reasons.
The project was inspired by an investigation into the origins of a Supreme Court decision in the Mutual Life Insurance Company v. Hillmon case of 1892 by Professor Marianne Wesson who has taught at CU-Boulder聮s Law School for 30 years. The case is important to scholars of American evidence law as it invented one of the most important exceptions to the hearsay rule 聴 the 聯state of mind聰 exception.
The case began in 1879 when a ranch hand named John Hillmon set out from his home in Lawrence, Kan., in search of land. Shortly into the trip, his traveling companion John Brown appeared at a home on the outskirts of a town called Medicine Lodge reporting that he had accidentally shot Hillmon to death while unloading his gun from their wagon. An inquest by a local coroner聮s jury found that Hillmon聮s death was, indeed, accidental.
However, the companies that had underwritten life insurance policies for Hillmon prior to his departure were suspicious of fraud. They claimed that Hillmon and Brown had carried out a scheme to kill a third man and pass off the body as Hillmon聮s so that his wife, Sallie, could collect the insurance proceeds. Later, the companies located Miss Alvina Kasten of Ft. Madison, Iowa, who testified in a deposition that a letter marked 聯Wichita, March 1, 1879聰 was from her long-lost fianc茅, Fredrick Adolph Walters. The letter said that Walters planned to leave Wichita soon with a 聯man by the name of Hillmon聰 and confided that he had been 聯promised more wages than I could make at anything else.聰 Largely on the evidence of this letter, the insurance companies argued that the body belonged to Walters.
When the insurance companies refused to pay her claims, Sallie Hillmon filed a lawsuit 聴 a case that ended up being tried six times and decided by the U.S. Supreme Court twice. The first two trials resulted in hung juries. In the third trial, in 1888, the judge kept the 聯Dearest Alvina聰 letter from the jurors, ruling that it was 聯hearsay.聰 The jury voted unanimously in favor of Sallie Hillmon.
The insurance companies filed an immediate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the case reached the court, the justices created an exception to the hearsay rule (for statements describing the intentions of the speaker or writer) and said the letter should have been allowed as evidence because it met this description. The case was sent back to be retried.
The fourth and fifth trials again resulted in hung juries, but in the last trial, in 1899, the jury found in favor of Sallie Hillmon. Again, the insurance companies appealed and, again, the Supreme Court overturned her victory.
聯For many reasons, I think the man who died at that campground was John Hillmon after all,聰 says Wesson, who has researched the case extensively. 聯I also think that the insurance companies probably located Frederick Adolph Walters alive, got him to write, backdate and sign the 聭Dearest Alvina聮 letter and persuaded Kasten to lie about when she received it.聰
Wesson believes that only an examination of the remains, which are buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Lawrence, holds any promise of providing a definitive solution to the question of the corpse聮s identity. So, she recruited CU-Boulder Anthropology Professor Dennis Van Gerven to help her solve the mystery.
Van Gerven, who is widely known for his work exhuming more than 400 Nubian mummies in Sudan and bringing them back to the CU-Boulder campus where they are stored in a climate-controlled facility, will oversee the exhumation and conduct a series of tests to determine the corpse聮s identity at a lab on the University of Kansas campus.
聯If the skull is preserved, we聮ll be able to use digital photography to superimpose the image of the skull with photos we have of Hillmon and Walters.聰 says Van Gerven. 聯All faces are structured differently with the area right at the top of the bridge of the nose, between the eyes, being unique to each individual. So we know that the nose has to be in the right place to have a match.聰
In addition to looking for limb bones for use in estimating the stature of the body, Van Gerven hopes to find pelvic bone remains, which will help him estimate the age of the body at the time of death. Hillmon was seven years Walters senior, so this may prove to be an essential clue.
聯If all three 聴 facial structure, stature and age at time of death 聴 indicate a single identity, there is good cause to believe that we聮ll have a positive identification,聰 says Van Gerven. But he is also careful to point out that there is no way to predict how well the body will be preserved after being buried for more than 100 years in the Kansas climate. 聯We may open up the grave and find only fragments of wood from the coffin or splinters of bone,聰 he says, 聯in which case a positive identification may be difficult to make.聰
Once the petition to exhume is approved, Wesson and Van Gerven will arrange to travel to Kansas to conduct the exhumation. They will be accompanied by CU-Boulder Associate Professor of Film Studies Ernesto Acevedo-Mu帽oz, who will document the process and its outcomes.
The Hillmon Project is sponsored, in part, by the CU-Boulder Outreach Committee, whose mission is to provide support to projects that extend faculty expertise to communities throughout Colorado.
For more information, please contact Jill Conley at 303-761-2119.