There is this from Time, which went to print at the time:
National Affairs: Murder in Pinecliffe
Emily Griffith was a kind of schoolmarm saint. All Denver revered her as founder and longtime head of far-famed Opportunity School, where, since 1916, the city has provided adults with free "second-chance" classes in everything from welding to hat-making (TIME, July.
Little, red-haired Emily retired in 1934. On Denver's standard $50-a-month teacher's pension—all that Emily would accept —she settled down in a pine-slab mountain cabin at Pinecliffe, 35 miles northwest of town, with her invalid sister, Florence.
"People This Old." Their cabin had been built for them by a onetime teacher at Opportunity School named Fred Wright Lundy. He had built himself a shack in Pinecliffe and the shack he put up for Emily was only about a mile away. He ran errands for the sisters, fetched their firewood, helped with the chores, ate most of his meals at Emily's.
A few weeks ago 60-year-old Mr. Lundy began acting a little odd. He told some neighbors: "When people get this old, they ought to be shot." Emily said: "He's not well, but we can help him."
"When I Die." One day last week Mr. Lundy left the grocery store, headed for the Griffiths'. Next day the people of Pinecliffe began to wonder why they had seen no signs of Emily. Finally somebody broke into the shack. The dining table, near a window overlooking a creek, was set for three. On the living room floor lay Florence Griffith, in a puddle of blood. On the bedroom floor lay Emily. Each had been shot through the head with a .38-caliber revolver.
Fred Lundy's 1941 Nash sedan was found on a highway a mile up the canyon. On the front seat was his briefcase. In it were $350 in cash and a note: "If and when I die, please ship my body to Roscoe, Ill. . . . Thank you." Signed: Fred Lundy. At week's end police were still looking for Fred.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 11,00.html
There is a book about it, which may be somewhat difficult to obtain. But can marginally be found on Amazon. Perhaps I can get my dad to dig it up somewhere in Denver.
There is this to be found at the now dead Rocky Mountain News:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2 ... ous-death/
And this at "Haunted Colorado":
Beloved educator Emily Griffith was found dead in her Pinecliffe cabin on the morning of June 19, 1947. She was slain execution-style, as
was her older sister. The murders defied logic, offended decency, and shocked the nation.
The case remains unsolved.
By founding one of the first schools in the world to offer free public education to adults, Emily Griffith empowered people of all ethnicities,
backgrounds, and circumstances.
Explore the mystery of Griffith's bizarre death as historian Debra Faulkner takes you step-by-step through the crime investigation and
ensuing manhunt, and proposes an alternative theory of whodunit.
Presented by the Colorado Historical Society
But most bizarrely is this page at wikipedia which has no entry for her. Her school has an entry and it is an indeed a well known Denver institution. But as for her?
This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.
* 02:24, 3 March 2010 Alexf (talk | contribs) deleted "Emily Griffith" (A7: Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject)
I don't get it and I guess I just have to scare up the book somehow. There just isn't a lot on the web about it. $350 in cash in a briefcase in an abandoned car on a mountain road, a missing suspect, and a dead school teacher who created an institution. $350 would be quite the pretty penny in 1947.
I just don't get why the wiki entry for the woman herself was deleted recently. She has quite an awesome backstory of giving to the poor and educating not only children but their parents as well so whole families could learn to read and understand say, the contracts they signed with businessmen and such.
Anyways, a mystery I'd never heard of on a cold October night for ya. . .
