A SPECULATION. John W. Collins had nothing left. One of San Diego’s most beloved citizens and president of California National Bank, Collins lost his wife and two children in a boating accident in 1890. Eighteen months later, his partner, David Dare, embezzled $200,000 and ran off to Europe. The bank folded. Collins swore he was innocent. To show good faith, he gave his $85,000 life-insurance policy to help repay creditors. On March 3, 1892, thinking he was going to prison in Los Angeles, Collins sat on the bathroom floor of his hotel suite, put a .38 caliber muzzle in his mouth, pointed upward, and — could hell be worse? — pulled the trigger.

“Mr. Collins thought he was to have his preliminary hearing here,” hotel manager Ed O’Brien told reporters. “I think the sudden notification that he would have to go to Los Angeles…had a great deal to do with the rash act.

“The deputy marshal was with him at the time.” O’Brien added, “We are at a loss to know where he obtained the pistol. The room was searched carefully and I am certain no weapon was there.”

For over a century, two questions have haunted Collins’s suicide: 1) Where did he get the gun? 2) Was it loaded?

A rumor swept through San Diego that Collins had faked his death. Friends allegedly whisked him onto a boat so he could join up with Dare, his partner in crime, in Europe. U.S. Custom House records, some say, have a strange entry: Shortly after Collins was interred at Mt. Hope Cemetery, a “human-sized” box took a sea cruise.

And the body at the cemetery? “Just a dummy,” said Simon Manasse. Born in Old Town in 1874 (his father, Moses, ran a store across from the battlefield at San Pasqual), Manasse was interviewed in 1957. Collins, he said, “had to escape some way to get…money left in the bank, so they made a statue out of wax,” buried it, and he “went to Europe.” Collins tried to return 40 years later, says Manasse, “and I don’t know whether he got back or not.”

“History or folklore?” asks historian Jerry MacMullen. “How they took care of the legal paperwork on that one is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself.”

When Collins took his life at the Brewster Hotel, the clerk called Dr. Fred Baker to come at once. Baker found Collins on his back, in the bathroom of suite 39, a still-smoking revolver in his right hand. Blood oozed from Collins’s nose and mouth, covering his pallid forehead and forming a crimson splotch on the carpet. At least four other men, among them Judge T.K. Wilson and Deputy Marshal Rebling, watched Baker unbutton Collins’s black vest and feel for a pulse. Nothing.

“He is beyond all human aid,” the doctor said, “he is quite dead.”

Four men followed Collins’s casket to the San Diego Undertaking Company, at Fourth and F.

The next day coroner M.B. Kellar held an inquest on the cause of death. He and seven jurors went to view the body. Outside the parlor, an official swore them in. They entered a hushed room, flanked by somber drapes, where the slightest sound popped like gunfire. Collins lay in an open casket, hands crossed at his waist. His lips and nose were black as coal. The bullet, said the coroner, remained lodged in his brain. As the jurors walked single-file around him, one observed that the 43-year-old looked years older. “The face, which was wont to light with a smile for every one,” was empty. To verify the suicide, the coroner opened Collins’s mouth. Powder burns had also blackened the tongue.

The group returned to the courthouse. The coroner, two doctors, and the seven jurors testified that the cause of death was suicide.

John W. Collins was dead, indeed — doornail dead.

Given all he suffered, it’s difficult to see why he’d consider running away. He’d lost his family, business, reputation, wealth, friends (it hurt his “very sensitive nature,” wrote the Union, when no one would pay his $50,000 bail). Convinced he was headed to prison, Collins lost hope of redemption. Everywhere he turned, a door slammed with iron finality. In the end, he had but one means of escape.

Collins and David Dare resembled Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Collins, the churchgoing family man, had been a beacon for San Diegans after the land boom of the 1880s busted. And when his family died, the city embraced him even more. The shady, articulate Dare played on peoples’ hopes like a flim-flammer. When authorities identified him in Italy, Dare wrote his sister that he’d been ill for three months and that, as soon as he was well, he’d gladly return to San Diego and ’fess up. He never did.

But did Collins have his own, internal Mr. Hyde? After his death, along with the rumor that he’d faked it, reports of a dark side spun his reputation from sunlight to midnight. Judges, fellow bankers, and friends argued that Collins erred on the side of generosity, not fraud: the bank’s loans were far too liberal, and many transactions went unrecorded. But San Diegans rendered penniless by California National’s collapse damned to hell the man they once held high.

The witch hunt began the day after Collins died. The San Diego Union printed a story it had previously kept quiet, because “publication might have seriously interfered with the strenuous efforts being made toward the bank’s resumption.”

Collins was born and raised on a farm near Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania. M.E. Post, a family friend from Cheyenne, Wyoming, noted that the young man had a good business sense. In 1870 Post hired the 21-year-old as a clerk in his bank, the only one in Cheyenne. Collins soon earned high marks for industriousness and efficiency. He also became so popular with customers that Post promoted him to the prestigious position of cashier.

During this time Collins became friends with David Dare, a sign-painter who specialized in enlarged photographs in crayon. They worked on several projects together, and Collins loaned Dare the money to build a pretentious stone house, Dare Castle, on Cheyenne’s “Millionaire’s Row.”

In 1880, Post became Wyoming’s territorial delegate to Congress. He served four years. While Post was away, Collins became, in effect, the bank’s manager. When Post returned in 1884, he found his institution flourishing. As a reward, Collins demanded if not equal status with Post, then at least to be a shareholder.

Post said no. Collins had run things “in his own interests,” and Post would never promote him.

Collins quit. He vowed to not only start his own bank, but to ruin Post’s. Collins and Dare combined local backing with Eastern stockholders and built Cheyenne National. As the bank grew, someone — Collins? Dare? — started a rumor that Post’s verged on insolvency. Many of his patrons changed institutions, and the bank collapsed. Collins and his associates secured the transfer of patronage. Two years later, they came to San Diego and founded California National.

After Collins died, the Union’s inflammatory revelations gave San Diegans a much-needed scapegoat during the city’s first economic depression. The L.A. Times joined in: Collins’s “suicide will be taken as a confession of guilt.” Condemnation by the press closed the case in the public’s mind. Collins had been as two-faced as Dare all along.

And quite possibly insane. Two days after the suicide, the Sun interviewed Deputy Marshal Rebling. He guarded Collins at the Brewster and heard his story many times. “When the people understood the matter,” Collins told Rebling, “they would pity rather than blame” him. Collins was so adamant about his innocence that Rebling “questioned the soundness of his mind.”

We’ll never know what Collins would have said in court. A revolver silenced his testimony. The trail of the weapon, however, opens up other paths — and schemes.

Collins had matching ivory-handled pistols, his monogram engraved under the cylinders. For years he kept them in a polished wood box lined with red velvet. Since he was often out of town, he loaned one to the bank for protection. The other remained on his third-floor suite at the Brewster, where he’d lived since his family died.

When marshal George E. Gard arrested Collins, rather than put him in jail, where his life would be in danger, Gard confined him to the Brewster. Deputy Rebling often searched the rooms for guns and poison. Collins wouldn’t attempt an armed escape, both men were certain. But he might try to end his life.

Suite 39 had an elegantly furnished sitting room, a bedroom and bathroom, each separated by heavy portieres. In the bathroom, to the right of the washstand, was a 30-inch deep wardrobe where Collins hung his clothes above a strip of Brussels carpet. Rebling inspected the leather sofas, the odd bric-a-brac, the handsomely carved chiffonier. He frisked the clothes on hooks in the bathroom. “I searched every nook and corner in the rooms,” Rebling testified in court, “almost constantly.

“I haven’t the least idea how he secured that pistol. One thing I do know, it was not in any pocket of his clothes that hung in the rooms, unless it was placed there by some outside party just prior to the suicide.”

Rebling paused, then blurted, “We think we can put our hands on the man who knows more about how that pistol came in Mr. Collins’s pocket… than he cares to tell.”

The court didn’t pursue this lead.

At the trial, George O’Brien, former cashier at California National, said he feared Collins would kill himself. On the day before the suicide, O’Brien begged Collins to hand over the ivory-handled revolver. Collins did so, O’Brien said, “with reluctance.” O’Brien said he found “another old weapon” in the suite. He left with both.

But if Deputy Rebling checked the suite “almost constantly,” what were two pistols doing there? Or were they?

O’Brien had other worries. He’d been suspended from California National on suspicion of fraud. As cashier, O’Brien took orders from Collins, as did O’Brien’s brother, Harry, the head bookkeeper. Collins had been in San Francisco for most of October. On the 13th and 14th, O’Brien credited Collins with $20,000 and $25,000. When the bank suspended operations, on November 12, 1891, Collins had only $11,420.90 in his account. Somehow, along with the $200,000 that Dare had embezzled, for which Collins was held responsible, $33,029.10 had disappeared.

Did Collins steal the money for his own interests? Or was this an example of his “liberal” management, an under-the-table loan to a friend — to John C. Fisher, say, to complete his Opera House (which went into receivership shortly after Collins died)? If Dare hadn’t run off and the bank didn’t close, the loan would have been repaid, and no one would have been the wiser.

In the many court proceedings that followed, lawyers drew a blurry line between Collins’s “irregularities” and “frauds.” On some off-the-books loans, Collins had Harry O’Brien write “special” in red ink across the top of a blank certificate. In a court of law, these unwritten, gentlemanly agreements constitute embezzlement.

When Collins was away, George O’Brien ran things and, says a legal brief, “committed wrongful acts,” including false certificates of deposit and suspicious withdrawals totaling $45,000. Harry became a suspect as well.

Instead of worrying that Collins might attempt suicide, the O’Brien brothers may have prayed that he would — the three O’Brien brothers, Harry and George, who worked at the bank, and Ed, who ran the Brewster Hotel.

A speculative scenario: At 11:30 a.m., on March 3, Collins lunched at the Brewster with U.S. attorney general H.H. Hart, who’d come to investigate the case, and brigadier general E.J. Murray. Ed O’Brien and Deputy Rebling stood by as the trio shared Civil War stories. Collins, fascinated, draped one leg over the arm of his chair.

At 1:30, Marshal Gard entered. Sad troubles, he whispered to O’Brien: Collins must go to Los Angeles on the afternoon train. Gard escorted Collins to a first-floor parlor, sat him down, and broke the news. Gard neglected to say that the move was for protection, since death threats had increased. Assuming it meant prison, Collins turned white. He had an hour to pack and leave San Diego.

Gard returned to his office. Before Collins went upstairs, he urged Ed O’Brien to phone his brothers: have them raise bail money, and ask — no, beg! — Gard to delay the trip. Then Deputy Rebling led Collins back to his suite. Not long after, Collins downed a glass of whiskey, went into the bathroom, locked the door, and stopped the pain.

While Marshal Gard was at the Brewster, suite 39 was empty. That’s maybe five minutes, not much time to climb three flights of stairs, unseen, and place the revolver in a double panel under the bathroom washstand, where Collins kept other valuables. But since the plush Brewster had San Diego’s first hotel elevator, time was not a factor.

Who planted the gun? It could have been Ed O’Brien or Napoleon Lewis, the bellboy summoned to Collins’s room a few moments before the shooting for unnamed reasons — or Joseph Edwards, Collins’s valet, who claimed to have seen the gun in the wardrobe two days earlier.

The motives could range from desiring relief for a long-suffering friend to silencing a star witness — or both. Someone, possibly Ed, may have nodded to the shaken Collins, just before he went upstairs, that release was soon at hand.

George O’Brien returned with welcome news: Collins wouldn’t have to go to Los Angeles that day. But he was five minutes too late. Friends bemoaned the cursed timing. In hindsight, it may have been by design.

In the summer of 1892, Marshal Gard and Deputy Rebling arrested George and Harry O’Brien for signing “straw notes” while at California National. “Both brothers stood high in the regard of everybody,” writes Herbert Hensley, “and anything wrong in their department was generally felt to be only technical.”

Neither O’Brien went to prison. In fact, wrote the L.A. Times in 1895, “Out of the skullduggery and dishonesty there has not come a single criminal prosecution.”

QUOTATIONS:
1. Judge D.C. Collier: “The disaster is simply due to a liberal management which stopped at nothing for the benefit of San Diego.”

1. San Diego Union: Collins had “but two alternatives, the degradation of a prison cell [or] rest and quiet in the grave.”

2. San Diego Union: “How Mr. Collins secured possession of the revolver is yet a mystery.”

SOURCES:
Driese, Don, “Land Boom Palace,” San Diego Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 2, number 2, April 1956.

Hensley, Herbert, “Memoirs,” ms, vol. v, San Diego Historical Society archives.

MacMullen, Jerry, “High Finance in the 1890s,” Southwest Corner, San Diego, 1964.

San Diego Historical Society, Oral History Program: “An Interview with Simon Manasse,” Oct 1, 1957.

U.S. Supreme Court cases: “California National Bank v. Kennedy,” 167 US, 1897; “American Surety Co of New York v. Pauley,” 168 U.S., 1898; “Murray V. Pauley,” 963 U.S., 1898.

…articles in the San Diego Union, the San Diego Sun, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.

GO TO Unforgettable: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Dare Part 1

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