Event

The Italian Murders: Crime and Punishment in the Reconstruction West

In the fall of 1875, a policeman discovered the bodies of four Italian immigrants hidden in the cellar of a ramshackle house in Denver. In this lecture, Megan Kate Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the 2024–2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow, draws from her current book project and explores the subsequent investigation.
Lectures

The pursuit of the suspects spanned over 200 miles, leading to the ringleader’s confession and a series of murder trials.

While “The Italian Murders” (as they came to be known) appeared to shore up popular views of frontier towns as inherently violent, Nelson shows how they revealed much more about politics, urbanization, and immigration in the American West during Reconstruction.

Pencil drawing of two men in hats pointing guns at another two people outside of a barn.

Alexander Phimister Proctor, Arrest of Gallotti and one of his pals at Taos, N. M., by Smith and Arizona Bill, 1897, in Hands Up, or, Thirty-Five Years of Detective Life in the Mountains and on the Plains, Reminiscences by General D. J. Cook, Chief of the Rocky Mountains Detective Association, page 77, compiled by John W. Cook, The W. F. Robinson Printing Co., 1897.

Pencil drawing of a bunch of people fighting and killing inside a room.

Alexander Phimister Proctor, The Italian Murder, 1897, in Hands Up, or, Thirty-Five Years of Detective Life in the Mountains and on the Plains, Reminiscences by General D. J. Cook, Chief of the Rocky Mountains Detective Association, page 59, compiled by John W. Cook, The W. F. Robinson Printing Co., 1897.

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Pencil drawing of two men in hats pointing guns at another two people outside of a barn.
Pencil drawing of a bunch of people fighting and killing inside a room.