“He’s in here…I can feel him”: The Murder of Philip Peters and the Case of the Denver Spider Man
by thethreepennyguignol
When Helen Peters returned home after a hospital stay in early November, 1941, it was to a far emptier house than the one she had left. At least, that’s what she thought.
Because the house at 3335 West Moncrieff Place in Denver, Colorado was one that, until recent events, she had shared with her husband Philip – until he had been found brutally bludgeoned to death on the evening of October 17th, while Helen had been recuperating in hospital following a hip injury. Helen and Philip Peters had purchased the house shortly after their marriage in the late 1800s, allowing Philip easy access to his work with the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad; the pair had several adult children who had since moved out, leaving the two seventy-somethings to live out their retirement in the city where they had raised their family. Even outside the confines of their home, Philip and Helen had been involved with the wider Denver community, taking part in the Denver Guitar Club, where the two would occasionally offer lessons and meetings for those interested in the guitar and mandolin.
Which rendered Philip’s sudden and violent death even more of a shock. After Helen had taken a fall that led to a broken hip and a hospital stay, several neighbours had offered Philip a place at their dining tables, ensuring the seventy-three-year-old would eat well and enjoy good company till his wife’s return. It had, in fact, been a concerned neighbour who had raised the alarm about Philip’s fate, after he had failed to appear for dinner with the family on October 17th. Attending the house, the neighbour, Mrs Berke, found the doors and windows locked, and was unable to rouse a response from Philip. Her young daughter, Doris, was small enough to squeeze past a shutter, and let Mrs Berke inside. Upon calling the police, it was soon discovered that Philip was, indeed, still in the home – but that he had been attacked by an unknown assailant, who had bludgeoned him to death with an iron stove shaker taken from his own fireplace. Covered in blood and half-undressed, Philip had more than a dozen wounds on his skull when he was found in the doorway of his own kitchen.
The community was shaken by the vicious murder of such a well-liked neighbour – with Helen and Philip having lived in Moncrieff Place for so long, they had become something like grandparental figures to many of the neighborhood children, who mourned his loss like family. But, perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that there seemed to be no explanation for his murder. Some money was found alongside Philip’s watch at the scene of the crime, indicating that it had not been a robbery. The house showed no signs of forced entry, with the chain still on the door, and there seemed nowhere that the potential killer could have hidden out in wait for Philip, aside from a small trapdoor hidden in a closet leading to the attic that, police deduced, would have been too small for any person to reasonably fit through at a mere fourteen or so inches across. Police kept an eye on the house as Helen Peters moved back home, accompanied by a maid who was helping to take care of her during her recuperation, but, for all intents and purposes, it seemed as though Philip Peters’ killer had managed to get away with the murder.
However, as winter drew in, Helen Philips and the maid began to have strange experiences in the house at Moncrieff Place. Food went missing, and both women heard strange sounds from the attic at the top of the house – neighbours called the police after noticing something that resembled a flickering candle in the window. When detectives questioned the maid who had been living with Helen, she confessed that she believed that there was someone in the house with them – and that she suspected the intruder to be the man who had murdered Philip. “He’s in here…I can feel him,” she told an attending officer; once again, the house was searched and observed for a period of time, but no indication of any untoward visitors was found.
Still, the maid thought better of remaining in the home, and swiftly resigned from her position with Philips, claiming that she believed the house was haunted and refusing to stay any longer. Not long afterwards, perhaps partly due to the brutal winter that Denver had suffered since her husband’s passing, Helen left the home at Moncrieff Place to live with her son in Grand Junction to continue her recuperation. With nobody living in the home, utilities were cut off, and, by the beginning of 1942, the once-busy Philips abode was left in silence for the first time in more than three decades.
But, over the coming months, neighbours would report other strange incidences that seemed to point in the direction of the house’s continued occupancy. Between the slats of the roof, a strange, glowing light could be made out by passers-by at night, and unpleasant odours emanated from the house as the warmer months drew in. In the mornings, coffee could sometimes be smelled drifting from the kitchen. Children, who began using the abandoned yard as a place to gather and test their mettle, reported to their parents hearing odd noises from underneath the eaves, though this was brushed off as nothing more than a flight of fancy due to the macabre happenings that had by then made the house infamous.
However, police were still keeping intermittent watch on the house in the hopes of making sense of the Peters murder the year before, and, one night in July 1942, nearly nine months after the attack which took Philip’s life, the phantom of Moncrieff Place become distinctly corporeal. Bernie Bernstein, a Denver native who was working as a rookie officer at the time of the incident, recalled a stakeout outside the house after a neighbour had reported hearing a knocking at the front door only to find nobody there. Two days later, and someone approached the house again – but this time, when police gave chase, the figure fled back to the Peters house. Pursued by two officers, he nearly made his escape, but one spotted him diving in the closet that led to the attic. The attending officer managed to catch one leg before it vanished through the trapdoor, and, at last, the intruder was apprehended.
While, at first, the man gave his name as Matthew Cornish, he would soon confirm his identity as Theodore Edward Coneys. Coneys had, since September the following year, been living in the attic of the Peters’ home – and was responsible for not just the rumours of a haunting in the home, but the brutal murder of Philip Peters too.
Theodore Edward Coneys was born in Illinois on November 10, 1882, and, since birth, suffered from serious health problems. The specifics are not well-detailed, but they had such an impact on Coneys’ life that he believed he would not live to see eighteen years old, and so dropped out of high school, seeing little point in pursuing an education given how short his life would surely turn out to be. However, in the years and decades that followed, Coneys found himself very much alive – and forced to make some kind of living for himself. He took up what work he could and moved with his mother to Denver, Colorado in 1899 after the death of her husband, his father.
And it was there that he first encountered the man who would go on to become his murder victim. Coneys attended several meetings of the mandolin club that Philip Peters ran from his home; the exact dates aren’t clear, but it seems that he came to know Peters around 1907-08. Helen Philips later recalled that her husband and his eventual killer “knew each other very well”, with the two playing duets together on their mandolins on some evenings, and Coneys occasionally joining the newlyweds for dinner.
But, soon enough, the death of Coneys’ mother in 1919 would leave him without fixed abode or the emotional support he had come to rely on over the years. “As far as I was concerned,” he said of her death later, “that was just about signing my own death certificate, too…the only one who had understood me, who had cared if I lived or died, was gone.” In the wake of her passing, Coneys took to the life of a drifter. How he spent the twenty or so years between his mother’s death and his eventually-fatal encounter with Philip Peters isn’t exactly clear – reports mentioned him spending time in Kansas City, Missouri, and Tonawanda, New York, as he lived on whatever charity he could find, picking up odd jobs selling radios and other good where he was able. Still struggling with ill health and now approaching his sixtieth year, Coneys returned to Denver, Colorado in 1941, where his and Philip’s paths would soon cross once more.
According to Coneys, he recalled his time with the Philips from more than three decades before, recalling their kindness and generosity – hoping that they might be willing to furnish him with some resources, he went to their house in September 1941. He witnessed Philip leaving the house with a friend, and he was too ashamed to approach Philip for fear of embarrassing him in front of his companion due to his desolate state. Desperate for food and shelter, Coneys broke in to the house, and discovered the small trapdoor that led to the attic in the back of the closet. At a lanky six foot, Coneys was able to drag himself up into the attic – less than three feet high and the size of a single bed – and resolved to make it his home for the forseeable future, eager to avoid the incoming chill of the Colorado winter.
And that was where he remained for the following five weeks, as Peter Philips went about his life completely oblivious to the man living in his attic. What exactly drove Coneys to choose this approach instead of outright asking the Philips for help as he originally intended to isn’t clear, though he later acknowledged that, as a self-described “failure of a man”, he was far from a good prospect to offer charity or money too; with his lack of job and ill health, it would have been hard to believe, at least in Coneys’ mind, that he would be able to return such a kindness. Whatever his reasoning, he made what would later be described as a “nest” in the spiderweb-draped attic of Moncrieff Place, removing the bottom of his shoes so that they would not make too much noise on the attic floor. He subsided on jellies and tinned fruit that he could steal from the larder, rationing out a box of soda pops to last as long as possible. At night, he would emerge from the attic to forage for supplies, sometimes standing by the bed of the sleeping Philip to ensure that he would not be disturbed. He found the parts for a radio, which he constructed to keep up with news of the outside world, tracking incoming missives about World War II, and stole newspapers from the house to keep himself occupied with reading material.
And, for just over a month, he managed to get away with it. Philip seemed to suspect nothing out of the ordinary going on in the house at the time, making no mention of the missing food to neighbours. If it had not been for a chance encounter at the icebox, he might never have discovered that he had been sharing his home with an unknown occupant. But, on October 17th, 1941, Coneys, driven by hunger, slipped out of the attic to search for something to eat. Hoping for something more substantial than the fruit and pop he had been living on, he went to the icebox (an early version of a refrigerator), only to be interrupted by a stunned Philip Peters.
We only have Coneys’ word on the confrontation that followed – according to him, the seventy-three-year-old Philips lashed out at him with a cane he walked with, and Coneys attempted to strike him wit an unloaded gun he was carrying, only for the gun to break into pieces. In a panic, knowing that Philip would be able to identify him if he let him live, Coneys grabbed for the nearby iron stove shaker, and beat Philip to death where he stood in his kitchen before he fled back to the attic.
In the hours that followed, he heard a commotion downstairs, and assumed that Philip’s body had been discovered – certain that he would be rightly fingered for the crime if he were to reveal himself, he remained concealed. And the attic would become his makeshift home for the following nine months, at first shared with Helen Peters and her maid, and then abandoned entirely to Coneys by the beginning of 1942.
With no utilities and dwindling food supplies, that winter proved brutal for Coneys. He remained in the attic for most of the rest of his time at the house, his only source of heat a small toaster that he had managed to run off stolen electrics. Over the colder months, he watched flesh slough off his frozen feet, forced to make his way around on his hands and knees and unable to go downstairs for supplies for days on end. The foul stench that had been smelled coming off the house at certain times was due to Coneys using the rainspouts as a toilet, and, come the summer, the attic was permeated with a terrible smell as Coneys’ unwashed clothes and body began to bake in the cramped space. He claimed that he was too “numb” to return to the scene of his crime more directly, his only emotion “horror at what [he] had done”.
When the officer dragged Coneys out of the attic, he was fifty-nine years old, barefoot, and weighed just 75lbs, speaking to the extreme conditions he had been living under. He was taken into custody, where he soon confessed to the murder of Philip Peters and the unauthorized inhabitation of the property on Moncrieff Place. One detective compared his lair to that of a spider, and soon, the name caught on – Coneys would be dubbed the “Spider Man” of Denver, Colorado in a flurry of sensationalist newspaper reports that followed his apprehension. In an interview with a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News, he discussed his relationship with the Peters, as well as his regret for the murder of Philip Peters. “The Peters had just been married,” he said of their initial encounter. “And she was so pretty and they looked so happy. I used to say to them when we were having a bite of dinner together after a rehearsal: “I guess you are the happiest people in the world”. And they would giggle and nod their heads.”
Despite the abject discomfort of his time in the attic, Coneys described the guilt as the most profoundly difficult part of his experience, telling the reporter “you ask me, son, about suffering from the heat and cold in that attic. You ask me about the filth and cramped quarters. Well, anyone can take that. But the mental hell a person goes through when they are living as I did – in the very house of the murder, thinking, thinking, thinking – that’s the terrible thing. The mental hell I suffered acted, I guess, as an anaesthetic for the rest of the suffering.”
His lawyer initially tried to have his sentence lightened due to mental instability, but this was dismissed, and Coneys faced trial for his crimes in October 1942, just over a year since the fatal attack on Peters. He was soon found guilty, and, though Coneys himself had expected the death penalty, he was sentenced to life in prison, which he carried out in Colorado State Penitentiary. He became the prison librarian, spending his days surrounded by books until his death in 1967, at the age of 84.
The story of the Denver Spider Man would live on as part of Colorado’s history, and, if you grew up in the are and heard of this case, I would be fascinated to hear about it – please let me know in the comments. If you’d like to check them out, here are a few more of my historical true crime articles:
The Impossible Case of the Pimlico Poisoning
The Myth, the Murders, and the Matter of the Bloody Countess Báthory
Sources
Contemporary news articles: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9
The Cutprice Guignol 