Hidden History of Fort Collins by Barbara Fleming

Author:Barbara Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE TRIAL OF HARVEY MILLER

“But Mr. Sarchet, how can they prosecute me if I’m innocent?” Young Harvey Miller asked his attorney, Fancher Sarchet, this question every time Sarchet visited him in jail. Miller, charged with first-degree murder, awaited trial in Larimer County jail in the summer of 1923.

Sarchet tried to reassure his client: innocent people don’t get convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, he told the young man. But in his heart, he knew better. He had seen innocents convicted. He was worried.

The facts did not favor Miller. He and the victim, Monty Henderson, had been seen together outdoors shortly before Henderson was shot. An old pistol and a box of shells were found in the basement of the old schoolhouse where Miller, Henderson and their wives were living for the summer. One shell had been exploded. Ballistics tests showed that the spent bullet had come from the pistol found at the scene. The bullet had gone through the victim’s eye and lodged in his brain. At the trial, the prosecution brought doctors, the coroner and other witnesses to the stand.

They had means, they had opportunity, but did they have motive? Why would Miller have shot his friend?

Sarchet had developed a theory about the shooting—he believed that it was an accident, that the loaded pistol had been thrown or dropped onto the concrete floor, causing the weapon to discharge and, tragically, go into the fragile area around and in back of the eye. Following a lengthy, exhaustive and, he felt, telling cross-examination of the prosecution’s ballistics expert, Sarchet put George Wolfer, who had once seen an accidental shooting that fit Sarchet’s theory, on the stand.

Miller then spoke on his own behalf, telling his version of what had occurred: his friend and he had been in the yard chopping wood when Henderson went into the basement. Five minutes later, Miller came in and found him dead. Miller looked, says Sarchet in his book Murder and Mirth, pale and tense, his large brown eyes giving him the appearance of “a wounded deer.” Sarchet was arguing his case before a jury of strangers, since most of the other candidates had been excused because they knew one or both of the principals in the case.

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