The case of the manacled skeleton

I could not learn the details of its discovery, but it was found at the bottom of a mineshaft near Murphys, Calaveras County, late in the year 1890 — the skeleton of a man, with the wrist bones encased in rusty handcuffs and the cuffs themselves linked by a rusty connecting chain and a bullet hole in the skull.

This gruesome discovery caused a great deal of excitement in the little hamlet of Murphys, and, for that matter, all across the country. Who had the man been? Who had murdered him and pushed his corpse into the shaft? Why? When? These were the questions that the puzzled citizens of Murphys turned over in their minds. But the questions remained unanswered. No one knew a thing.

The case remained in this state for five or six weeks. Then a man entered The Chronicle office. He had seen, he said, the story of the handcuffed skeleton. He was one of three persons alive who were acquainted with every detail of the case. There was a fourth, a woman, who knew some of the details and perhaps suspected others. But of the four he alone would speak — of this he was sure. He told the reporter certain facts, and the reporter noted them down, and all the public ever learned of the handcuffed skeleton was in the reporter’s account of the interview in the next day’s paper. This is what the informer said:

In 1865 a man and his wife, wealthy and well placed in society, bought a handsome house on Santa Clara Street, San Jose. Next door lived a policeman, with whom they became friendly. The man’s business took him frequently to San Francisco. The lives of the couple were seemingly above reproach and they appeared very happy.

One Monday morning the man left home for San Francisco. Shortly after his departure, the policeman looked over the backyard fence and to his surprise saw the wife in conversation at the rear gate with a person whom the policeman recognized as a well-known gambler. Tuesday night, when the husband returned home, his wife was gone. There was a note saying she had left him.

Shaken and distraught, the husband confided in the policeman, who, as a result of a quiet investigation in San Jose, learned that the gambler had hired a horse and buggy for “a several days’ trip to the mountains.” The next day the husband, the policeman, the wife’s brother and a “trusted friend” rode out of San Jose in hot pursuit of the runaways.

They headed for the Livermore valley, and at Livermore were told that a man and a boy riding in a buggy had passed through a few days before. The trail led them to the San Joaquin river ferry, to Farmington and from there to Angels Camp. There they discovered the pair in the buggy had left only an hour before their arrival. Hiring fresh horses, they galloped out the stage road that led to Calaveras Big Trees.

Twilight was falling over the hills and the horse and buggy were proceeding up the slight grade near Murphys when the four riders bore down with drawn pistols. It was as they had suspected — the “boy” was the runaway wife.

“Get down!” the husband said coldly to his wife’s lover. The gambler stepped to the road. The policeman handcuffed him. Then the wife’s brother got into the buggy beside his sister. The policeman took the horses by the reins and led them back down the road toward Angels Camp, with the buggy slowing following. For the moment the husband, his trusted friend and the manacled gambler remained there, in the road.

“In about an hour,” said the informer, “the husband and his friend returned. No one asked what they had done to the gambler.”

A few days later they all returned to San Jose, and a few days after that the husband left his wife and went east. There, in less than a year, he died.

Two years after that, the informer said, the widow was courted by an ex-Governor of the State of California, whom she rejected. “Later on,” he said, “she married a wealthy banker of San Francisco. Now she is one of the most attractive and respected women of her age in the city.”

And with this his story ended.

The vagueness of the informer’s account and the impelling necessity (under the circumstances) for the vagueness, and questions arising as to his motives in telling half the truth rather than the whole truth or none at all, may lead you to suspect his explanation as another California legend, hung out to air by some enterprising crackpot on the peg supplied by the macabre discovery of the bones.

Nevertheless, some element in it invited you to believe it — to wonder in what scented closet on Nob Hill or Pacific Heights rattles a skeleton that was once found at the bottom of a Mother Lode mining shaft, with rusty handcuffs on its writes and a bullet hole in its skull.

When the husband returned home, his wife was gone. There was a note saying she had left him.