November 11, 2025
In sepia, the image sears into my thunderstruck brain. The man staring up at me from Ancestry.com has my high forehead and deep, penetrating eyes, the same long jaw and a head too large for his shoulders. His mouth is narrow and unsmiling, his hands on hips in a pose of defiance. Look at it casually and you’d probably think it’s me as a young man. But the baggy button-down shirt, newsboy cap, and suspenders place him in the early 20th century. His name is John, a third cousin once removed, unknown to me until now. And a murderer.
Naturally, I don’t want to believe what I see. Emotions aside, it’s hard to fathom that we look so alike when our blood ties are distant. John was born in 1894, sixty years before me; our common ancestor fought in the Revolution. Both our families moved west from upstate New York, his side settling in Ft. Morgan, Colorado, where the awful events unfolded.
On the night of September 30, 1916, John and another man brought a load of bootleg whiskey and beer to the dry town. When the marshal, 60-year-old Charles Eyser, demanded to search them and their room in a boardinghouse, John reportedly yelled, “Hands up!” and started shooting with a pistol. According to an account compiled from court records and newspapers, “Eight shots were fired, one of them struck Eyser above the heart. Two bullets grazed Swan across the stomach.” A stray round hit the house’s owner in the forehead as she watched the gunfight through a peephole, killing her. After John and his partner were captured, he was heard to say, “I got my man but he got me twice.”
John was convicted and sentenced to life in prison but while the verdict was on appeal he broke out of the “somewhat porous” county jail and, “was never apprehended or heard of again.” He changed his name, joined the Navy, married, and lived the life of a free man in New England until his death at 80. His obituary noted that he was a Mason, a member of the Elks and several other clubs, not acting like a fugitive who feared being unmasked.
I’ve been doing genealogy for a long time and have found other nasty surprises lurking in faded photos and records. When I met John, I already knew my family included slavers, Tories, and the accusers in a witch trial. Still, reading about a forefather’s crimes is one thing: seeing a cop-killer with my face is something else altogether. If you think I’m exaggerating, just look below.
The Ft. Morgan police still remember Marshal Eyser in their “end of watch” tributes to fallen officers. For very different reasons, I’ll never get that picture out of my mind but I won’t stop my research either. At a time when the president is whitewashing and rewriting our nation’s history, I believe it’s critical to fully understand my own, even if it leads me down another painful path. For all of us, truth matters more than vanity.