The Disturbing History Of New Mexico's Oldest Cold Case

Green flies buzzed around the front door of the Taos, New Mexico mansion of Arthur Rochford Manby, an Englishman by birth and a mine operator and swindler by profession. It was late morning on July 3, 1929, and one of Manby's associates, George Ferguson, stood with several others outside the door. "Manby is dead," Ferguson told them (via The San Francisco Examiner). "I can tell by those flies." Soon, sheriff's deputies arrived and kicked in the door. What they found inside was horrific.

Manby's decomposing body lay on a cot with a sheet covering the body. They found the 69-year-old's battered head in the next room. His neighbor, a physician, examined the body and decided he'd died of natural causes. The doctor concluded Manby's Alsatian guard dog, Lobo, ravenous with hunger, had ripped the head off. The deputies summarily executed both Lobo and another of Manby's dogs. But the dogs, as it turned out, had been framed. It wasn't long before all the evidence pointed to murder. A murder that even today, more than 90 years later, remains unsolved, making it the oldest cold case in the state.

Arthur Manby was born in 1860 in Lancashire, England, and was one of nine children of a reverend and his wife, an artist. He arrived in Taos in 1883, age 24, and quickly became a fixture with his stocky build, barrel chest, thick neck, and gruff disposition. Manby was a mystery to the residents of Taos, but before long, he revealed his true nature. He was a con man who cheated locals out of their property rights and bilked international investors.

At the same time, Manby also donated land for a large public park and got the ball rolling on the city's first hospital. By 1895, he and two other men had control of the Mystic gold mine, and it made him a very wealthy man with a few powerful friends — but even more enemies. Three years later, he began building a sprawling mansion in Taos that eventually included 19 rooms. It was here that he met his gruesome end.

After the sheriff's deputies found Arthur Manby's corpse and the doctor made his off-base assessment that the dog had chewed the head off, a coroner's jury ruled the death as natural. Manby was quickly buried, but he didn't stay buried for long — two of his brothers pushed New Mexico Governor Richard Dillon to reopen the case. The local district attorney had the body exhumed and Manby's corpse autopsied.

Come to find out, the dogs had nothing to do with their owner's death. Someone had blasted Manby with a shotgun, gashed his chest, and sawed off his head. Investigators at the scene found bloody towels that had been laundered, a shotgun pellet, and several holes in the baseboard. Sante Fe detective H.C. Martin, who had been digging into the case, wrote to the governor naming the suspects and the motive — an attempt to gain Manby's property. The investigators not only had to figure out who killed him, but exactly how the murderer or murderers had gotten into the room that was barred by six separate locks.

The local district attorney continued to stall the Arthur Manby murder case. Three men were questioned but let go without charges. The governor asked his attorney general to step in, but that ended with the same result: nada. The AG went so far as to claim there was no evidence someone had murdered Manby. Eventually, the British consulate and U.S. Justice Department got involved. Like the other investigations into the murder, the federal inquiry stalled as well.

It seemed that no one with any power was interested in solving the case or bringing the murderer or murderers to justice. In the vacuum of information or evidence, the residents of Taos entertained wild rumors and speculation. There was talk that Manby had become haunted by the belief that someone was trying to kill him, leading him to secure his home, fire his servant, and begin to sleep with a loaded gun nearby. There were supposedly secret passages in and out of the mansion as well, which, if true, could have been how the killer or killers got in and out without being seen.

The stories about Arthur Manby only got stranger. It was said that in the decade before his death, he'd created a secret society called the United States Secret and Civil Service Society, Self Supporting Branch — Grand House Service Number 10. The organization had an unknown agenda. According to "The Lore of New Mexico," writer Frank Waters said Manby was often seen on the roof of his home flashing secret signals using a flag.

While some believed the organization was just another of Manby's various scams used to convince members to part with their money, many Taos residents bought into a more nefarious version of the secret society. They believed it was a criminal gang that included murder in its many dark dealings. After Manby's death, Det. H.C. Martin discovered seven bodies — several of which had been decapitated — that someone had buried in shallow graves in and near Manby's Mystic gold mine. All of them were known to have had dealings with Manby.

For years afterward, rumors swirled that the body found at Arthur Manby's adobe mansion that day in 1929 wasn't his and that he'd faked his own death in order to escape his pursuers and mounting financial troubles. At the time of his reported death, Manby was deeply in debt with not much more than the mansion to his name. "Who but Manby would want to bury Manby?," one of his associates, A. A. Cummings, told the American Weekly in April 1930. "He had everything to gain by disappearing and everything to lose by staying." Cummings believed Manby had used the body of one of his victims in his place. Manby was allegedly seen in Mexico and Italy after he had supposedly been killed. Still, his dentist positively identified his body through dental records.

A former girlfriend, Terecita Ferguson, inherited Manby's estate. She stripped the mansion bare. His were reburied not far from the grave of Kit Carson, the famous explorer and guide who died in 1868 from an aneurysm. The investigation into Manby's murder quietly ended in 1930. It was perhaps the last vestige of the many bizarre unsolved mysteries of the Wild West. Manby's mansion is now owned by the Taos Center for the Arts.