Anton Woode was at that awkward age – too old to set free, too young to hang.”
Who can put down a book that begins with that sentence, especially when the rest of “Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer” is equally gripping?
Historians know about young Anton Woode, and Gene Fowler wrote a highly embroidered account of the youthful killer in “Timber Line,” but until now, nobody has tackled an objective, full-scale treatment. Kreck is just the guy to do it. His highly acclaimed “Murder at the Brown Palace” established the Denver Post columnist as a legitimate historian with an understanding of human foibles. In fact, a local historian told Kreck, “If you like murder so much, you should look at this young man named Anton Woode, who shot and killed his hunting partner for his pocket watch.” Kreck delved into the subject and produced a book that is both history and social commentary, as compelling as a novel.
Anton was just 10 in 1892 when he ran into three duck-hunters near Brighton, near where he lived. The impoverished boy had only two pleasures – hunting and swilling his father’s beer. Living in a hovel with his German-Russian parents, the boy rarely attended school. It was a time when immigrants were considered morally and intellectually inferior. As proof, just look at their faces. A reporter wrote that the mother’s “features are twisted into a dark, commonplace homeliness,” while the father was “malevolent looking.” Little wonder that in a day when most people believed a tendency toward criminal behavior was genetic, they could accept a 10-year-old as a killer.
With his life of deprivation, Anton lusted after the gold watch carried by one of the hunters. The boy asked for the watch, but the man refused to give it up. So Anton shot him in the back and pocketed the treasure. “I’ve never had anything nice. I wanted it,” he explained to a deputy sheriff. (In a strange coincidence, the two deputy sheriffs who discovered the hunter’s body were accompanied by Arapahoe County Coroner John M. Chivington, the man responsible for the 1864 butchery at Sand Creek.)
Since there was no such thing in those days as a juvenile court, the boy was tried as an adult on a charge that could have brought the death penalty. Kreck paints a poignant picture of the child, not quite 5 feet tall, as he fidgeted during the trial, playing with the back of a chair or laying his head on the table. One observer thought the little boy should be given a severe spanking.
Jurors had to consider a far more solemn punishment, that is if they decided the boy knew good from evil, which was the crux of the trial. A first jury couldn’t make up its mind. The second found Anton guilty and, spared the gallows, the boy was sent to prison at Cañon City at age 11.
The information available a century later on the boy murderer is sparse. Anton grew up in prison, was taught art and music by other inmates and learned to speak several languages. He also learned to write obsequious letters to state officials begging for release. His appeals were put aside for a time after Anton took part in a prison break, although the young man apparently was forced to go along by hardened inmates who threatened to kill him if he didn’t.
Anton eventually was paroled and moved to New York, where he changed his name and married. For historians, that was the point at which the trail grew cold. But with dogged research, Kreck was able to trace the last days of the boy murderer.
“Anton Woode” is a chilling tale, and not just because it is about a cold-blooded murder. That a pre-pubescent boy could be thrown into prison with vicious adult inmates is appalling. More than a century later, we don’t know whether the boy was abused. There is evidence that some of his fellow prisoners looked out for the boy, tutoring him and giving him a far better education that he would have received at home. But being with such men, at the very least, would have been traumatic for a little kid.
Because of the scant material on Anton, Kreck fleshes out the book with digressions on such related subjects as Denver’s Judge Ben Lindsey, who pioneered the juvenile court system, and he sets the killing and the trial against a background of late-19th-century beliefs about criminals and the poor. If “Anton Woode” lacks the glitz and glamour of illicit love in high society that filled “Murder at the Brown Palace,” it is a moving social commentary about juvenile crime a century ago.
In fact, Anton Woode and his story are relevant today, as many Americans, fed up with teenage crime, want underage killers tried as adults. Kreck does two things. As an accomplished historian, he tells a compelling story about a murder. He also brings a poignant tale to today’s debate about punishment for young offenders.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist.
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Anton Woode
The Boy Murderer
By Dick Kreck
Fulcrum, 256 pages, $15.95, paperback
