The Ballad of Ray and Rose

There's an old journalism adage, usually uttered by editors who haven't had their butts out of a comfy leather newsroom chair in years, which goes: “You know… the news just doesn't walk in the door.”

But sometimes, it does.

One day, Stan Heffner walked into the paper looking for his family.

You have the people who walk in to do business. To place a classified for their garage sale. To bring in a write-up of their sixth grade daughter's basketball team. You have those who are angry about something already printed. An error in a story. A missing phone number in an ad. And you have those who want to swim in the newsprint sea that is the bound archives of past issues.

Those people usually start the conversation with a date, a time, but always, there is a story.

Heffner and his wife had lived most of their lives in Denver. Now, they planned to move to a farm they had bought in South Dakota, and before they left, he wanted to tie up a loose end. Or more accurately, see if he could find the beginning of the string. Heffner said he had never met his grandparents, Ray and Rose Gordon. Their son, his father, said only that “they died in an accident when I was a baby.”

Then, several years ago, at a family reunion, his aunt told him a different tale.

Ray had shot Rose then turned the gun on himself, the aunt said. It happened on Christmas Eve. In 1915. In a town just an hour's drive north of Denver. A town called Johnstown.

And there, bobbing in the wood-pulp waves, it sits. On the front page of the Dec. 30, 1915, issue of The Johnstown Breeze: RAY GORDON KILLS WIFE AND SELF, the headline shouts in all caps. “Town Shocked By Tragedy on Christmas Eve -- No Motive Known.”

Calling it “the most revolting crime ever committed in this part of the state,” the story goes on to say Gordon showed up at about 6:30 in the evening at the home of his in-laws, the Haffners, where his wife was staying with their infant son.

“Just what proceeded the shooting is known only to the members of the family,” the story states. Today, the 24/7 maw of the News Beast would demand more. But given the journalistic sensibilities of the time, and the small town nature of journalism even today, it went no further in explanation.

The Haffner Family took the baby and raised him themselves. Two weeks after the shooting they had already adopted the child and changed his name. His father had had no contact with the Gordon side of the family, Heffner said. When he asked his aged father about what the aunt had told him, his dad would only say again that he was a baby and remembered nothing.

“But my mom said later that he (my dad) was so affected by this that he changed his name by usage from Haffner to Heffner sometime in the 1930s and went the rest of his life as Heffner,” he said.

Almost the entire patriarchal branch of his family tree had been ripped off and carried away in the hurricane of emotion that followed the shootings, Stan Heffner said. While the small news story answered some questions, it only created others. He left his name and number, “in case you find out something else.”

Several months later, a letter came in the mail.

“I'm currently researching our family's history and hope that you can help me to find some details regarding a ‘skeleton in the closet,'” the writer began.

The writer misspelled Rose Gordon's maiden name, but the story was the same … but from the other perspective. The woman, who lived in Juneau, Alaska, said she had spent hours listening to her husband's grandmother talk about her brother, Ray, who had died in a town named Johnstown, in Colorado, when he shot his wife and then killed himself. Worse yet, she said, it had happened on Christmas Eve. And there was a baby, she said, a toddler, who the Gordon family had never seen nor gotten to know. 

“I have my fingers crossed…” the woman concluded.

I called Stan Heffner. Was he interested in talking to the woman? Of course he was, he said. And together, they began to put together the familial pieces that had been shattered by two cracks of a pistol nearly a century ago.

The story of Ray and Rose Gordon stretches back to the literal beginnings of Johnstown. Rose, who was born in Russia of German descent, came to the community with her family as a 12-year-old in 1904, making them among the first families to settle here.

Ray, born in 1886, hailed from Missouri. The story goes his family came to Virginia in the 1760s, a husband, wife and son. The father went back to Ireland and never returned. The mother and son eventually moved to North Carolina and then on to Missouri. Along the way, once, a bolt of lightning struck a house where family was living, killing two people. At another point, "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng Bunker lived in the home.

It's unknown how Ray and Rose met. Ray came to the area in 1910, most likely looking for work as a laborer -- the “Go West Young Man” mantra still rattling around the brains of young men following the lure of open land and new opportunity.

Ray would have been about six years older than her. Family members have a postcard written by Rose, but never sent, that talks about her, “Having my picture taken with Ray Gordon's Kodak,” and a promise to send one when she got it. They also have one of Ray sitting on a motorcycle.

In another picture, date unknown, the couple pose together. Rose is sitting on Ray's lap, his hand holding her right shoulder tightly. Both are smiling broadly. It's unusual, people remark, to see two people even smiling in photographs from that era, much less sitting on each other's lap.

They were married in Victor, Colorado, on Sept. 6, 1914. Their son, Stan's father, was born just a bit more than a month later. Supposition is that they had moved out of the Johnstown area, all the way into the mountains, to prevent people from knowing about the out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Then, about a year later, just before Christmas, Rose showed back up in Johnstown with the baby. On Christmas Eve, there were reports of Ray being seen around town drinking during the day. One rumor is that he found out his wife was having an affair. In another, he simply saw her speaking to another man on the street and became enraged.

He showed up at Rose's parent's house early that evening. At first, her father wouldn't let him in, but then relented. While the baby was in the other room with one of Rose's sisters, the two were, it is imagined, left alone to talk.

What they talked about, and what happened next, either was buried within days with the both of them, or if there were any witnesses within the house, the story got held tight and has probably also gone to its final rest. One sister of Rose's, it is said, was so affected by the tragedy that pictures found later would have her scratched from the image. Another story that is whispered is that she worked in the Weld County Courthouse at one time, and long ago had all the records regarding the case destroyed.

Stan Heffner and I stand in Johnstown Cemetery and try and get our bearings. We follow the notes from the records at Town Hall and find Rose's grave. Somewhere out here, in a still unmarked grave, also lies his grandfather. Stan says he heard that Ray's family showed up days after the shooting from Missouri, quickly buried him, and left. He doesn't know if they were able to see the baby.

I hang back, giving Stan some time alone. He takes a picture. He stands and he stares at the headstone. Finally, he looks around and I feel like it's okay to again intrude.

“I literally found an entire side of my family,” Heffner says quietly. “I went from not knowing anything about my grandfather, from not even knowing what he looked like, to seeing pictures of him and being able to talk to people who could tell me about him. That happened because I walked in the door of your office.”

“No, it happened because it happened,” I said. “The newspaper is just the place where the first rough draft of history sits. It's where people come to look. I'm glad we were able to help.”

Later, after the earnest handshake and departure of Stan Heffner, I sit in the office alone thinking about him and his family. I get up and go to the back room and pull the 1915 archive volume off the shelf. Flipping pages, I again find the boldface BIG NEWS in the small town paper leaping from the grey point-typed page. Drunken shouted words. Maybe a moment of tender connection, a pleading, a searching attempt at reconnection and reconciliation. Another harsh flash of angry denouncement. The embarrassment in the small community. The coming holiday tomorrow. The cold December night wind that carried two sharp cracks and then cries.

I look at a picture of Ray and Rose I have on the wall by my computer that I put there when I was writing their story, trying to conjure some sort of connection by being able to stare into their eyes. “You're writing about people,” I always tell reporters when they start here. “It may be just another story to you, but it's their lives.” It's a happy picture. The one where she's sitting on his lap with that smile, and he sits with his arm around her, a strong-jawed Son of the Soil and his beautiful frontier bride.

Nobody really knows what goes on in a relationship. What happens when it's nobody but the two of you alone. Something obviously went wrong for Ray and Rose. But on this day, in this picture, they are in love. That's the way I want to remember them. Not on that December night, Ray drunkenly pleading for his family back. Not now out under the sky and the earth at the cemetery. Not even necessarily as Stan Heffner's grandparents.

But rather as they are in that picture. Young and laughing, a prairie version of Sid and Nancy. On that motorcycle of Ray's -- Rose's arms wrapped around his waist in a tight hug as they go through the jog in the intersection just a bit too fast at night -- Ray's tires skidding for a moment before he regains control. The jolt of adrenaline from the moment of fear making both of them feel a bit more alive and more in love, as Rose squeezes Ray tighter, burying her face in his broad back and smiling, as he rolls into the throttle and they head out of town toward the lights of the saloons in Milliken.