Murder in the Cathedral

In the early morning of February 23, 1908, parishioners gathered at the Church of St. Elizabeth, which now stands on the Auraria Campus. At about 6:30 a.m., Franciscan Priest Father Leo Heinrichs finished consecrating the host while attendees approached the altar and kneeled at the railing. 

Amongst those awaiting communion was a Sicilian anarchist named Giuseppe Alia. A moment after Father Leo placed the host on Alia’s tongue, Alia pulled out a revolver. An altar boy called out to the priest, but in an instant, a bullet was fired into Father Heinrichs’ chest. According to the account in the next day’s Denver Post, Heinrichs tried to put down the ciborium holding the remaining hosts to prevent them from touching the ground, but almost immediately fell to the ground himself, dead from a severed aorta. 

Father Heinrich’s last words were, “Call Father Eusebius.” Eusebius was immediately summoned to take charge of the remaining congregants. As Alia attempted to flee the church, he was followed out by Daniel Cronin, a Denver police officer. Cronin wrested the gun from Alia and brought him to the police station. Local authorities wisely removed the assassin from Denver to Colorado Springs in order to avoid mob violence. Only 15 years earlier, another Italian had been broken out of the jail and lynched by a mob of thousands. Southern and Eastern Europeans were already looked upon with suspicion and the murder of a priest would only serve to ignite those pre-existing prejudices. 

Besides political affiliations, the climate continued to grow hostile to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. According to the March 6, 1908, Denver Post, people were even becoming hostile to Italian nuns. The Missionary Society of the Sacred Heart would often go through the neighborhood, asking residents for alms. After the murder, the nuns were turned away. The order claimed that one nun, Sister Anastasia, was struck dead by a broken heart after being denied aid and told, “An Italian has killed a priest.” It should be noted that the official cause of death was pneumonia, but prejudice was certainly on the rise against various ethnic groups. Such momentum continued to build and become more explicit with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Scare in the 1920s. 

As tensions rose across the country, having Father Heinrichs’ assassin in custody did little to clarify the full scope of the plot. At first, Alia claimed that, back in Sicily, his wife had left him after being denounced for his anarchism by a priest he thought to have been Heinrichs. When Alia was told Heinrichs had never been to Italy, he began screaming about having killed the wrong man and told a somewhat different story of what happened in Italy. Alia claimed to have been part of a violent Easter protest in Avola, Italy, 12 years prior, to have been decried by the community, and to have fled eventually to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where other members of his small cohort had already gone. Supposedly, the group in Buenos Aires then sent him to New York in order to track down and kill the priest that had targeted anarchists and socialists back in Sicily. 

Alia further claimed that, by the time he reached Denver he had largely lost any sense of mission, but his anger was inflamed on the morning of February 23, 1908, after hearing the church bells ringing. While deeply upset about killing the wrong priest, he said he felt no guilt about having murdered a priest more generally. Importantly, he said he was not part of any group since reaching Denver. This is relevant since law enforcement across the country was trying to tie him to violent plots in places as far-flung as Wakefield, Massachusetts, and Chicago, Illinois. An interview with Alia covered in the February 28, 1908, Rocky Mountain News, conveyed yet a new story from the man facing trial for murder.

The jurors were all men, none were Catholic, and, perhaps surprisingly for the time, many did not have a church affiliation. The newspapers published the jurors' photos, brief biographies, and home addresses. The trial included experts testifying to Alia’s sanity, altar boys reenacting the murder, and other witness testimony by parishioners. 

On March 12, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Two days later, Alia slashed the neck of a county jail trustee with a straight razor in a failed escape attempt. His cellmate, Michael Brunetti, was accused of providing Alia with the razor, and rumors began to fly regarding a larger organized plot by “reds.” Five days later, the jail accused Alia of being in possession of a blade removed from a pair of scissors. That same day, Alia’s lawyer filed a motion for a new trial.