Alienation of Affection

Alienation of Affection retells what Denver newspapers once treated as the city's Trial of the Century. Robert Hardaway built the book around a killing at Richthofen Castle in 1911 and the courtroom fight that followed. The description we hold promises a true story so strange that a reader may doubt it is not made up.

At the center is Gertrude Patterson. The description says she lived with a rich man in a relationship that was strictly platonic, and that her abusive husband later tried to use her for his own ends. Those two men, and the woman caught between them, drive the book from its first pages to the verdict.

One thing worth knowing before you buy: libraries and readers file this book two ways. Open Library lists Fiction among its subjects, along with Married women, Widows and Murder trials, while Goodreads shelves it as historical fiction based on the real case. Read it as a dramatic account built on a documented event, not as a court transcript. It runs 272 pages and first appeared in 2003 from Western Reflections.

This book suits readers who like true crime set in the American West, Denver history buffs, and anyone curious about the days when a single trial could grip a whole city. It also fits book clubs that enjoy arguing over where a dramatized account ends and the record begins. People who live near Montclair and have driven past the castle may want to know what happened inside its gates. If you want a footnoted legal study, look elsewhere, because this is storytelling.

Robert Hardaway is a professor of law at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, and before that he served in the Navy JAG Corps and worked as a prosecutor and a public defender. That courtroom background shows in how this trial is told. He has four books with us, from this one in 2003 to a novel in 2010. His author page covers his career and the other three.

More about Robert Hardaway →

Richthofen Castle stands in Denver's Montclair neighborhood. The Denver Gazette says Prussian entrepreneur Baron Walter von Richthofen built it in the 1880s, and that it later became a tuberculosis treatment facility. Edwin Beard Hendrie bought it in 1903 and had the medieval look rebuilt. Today it is a private home, closed to tours.

In 1911 the castle grounds became a crime scene. Waymarking records that on May 5, 1911, Gertrude Gibson Patterson shot her husband, Charles Patterson. Her lawyer, O.N. Hilton, argued self-defense, and an all-male jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of self-defense. Both accounts say she had earlier been supported by a Chicago businessman, Emil Strouss.

The case drew national attention, and newspapers called her the most beautiful woman in America. The Gazette adds that a single corroborating statement from a stranger helped clear her, and that her later whereabouts are unclear.

Source: Denver Gazette on Richthofen Castle