In a small Denver apartment, a long and notorious story came to a quiet end. Joseph Corbett, Jr., an 80-year-old male, was found dead on August 24, 2009, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His final years were spent in near seclusion, a stark contrast to the national spotlight that once pursued him. Shortly before his death, he had been diagnosed with cancer, and his health had been rapidly declining, adding a final chapter of suffering to a life defined by violence and flight.
Decades
earlier, Corbett was the subject of a massive FBI manhunt, his name etched onto the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. This nationwide notoriety stemmed from the 1960 kidnapping and murder of Adolph Coors III, the 45-year-old heir to the Coors beer fortune. Coors was abducted on his way to work, and his abandoned station wagon was found on a bridge near Morrison, Colorado. A ransom note was sent, but the trail went cold for months until Coors's remains were discovered in a remote wooded area, showing he had been shot twice in the back. The investigation led to Corbett, an escaped murderer who had been living in Denver under an alias.
The ensuing search for Corbett spanned the continent, from New Jersey to Canada. He was ultimately arrested in Vancouver, British Columbia, in October 1960 after being recognized. Extradited to Colorado, he faced trial for the murder of Adolph Coors III. In March 1961, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison. This was not his first murder conviction; in 1951, he had killed an Air Force sergeant, a crime for which he was imprisoned before his escape in 1955.
After serving nearly two decades for the Coors murder, Corbett, who was considered a model prisoner, was released on parole in 1980. He settled into a quiet, anonymous life in Denver, driving a truck for the Salvation Army and living in the same apartment where he would one day take his own life. He rarely spoke of his past and, in a rare interview, maintained his innocence in the Coors case but expressed no interest in trying to prove it, wishing only to be left alone. His death by his own hand drew a final, solitary curtain on a life marked by one of Colorado's most infamous crimes.
