The Headless Englishman: Arthur Rochford Manby

When someone is found beheaded and well-decomposed in his own home, most people react with horror, revulsion, and pity. But in the case of Arthur Rochford Manby, the residents of Taos reacted with glee and delight. His death was a liberation from his devilishness.

But questions began to circulate about whether the headless corpse shrouded in bluebottle flies was really the odious Manby or somebody else. And if it wasn’t Manby, well, then who was it? Did Manby murder somebody and leave the body to rot in his home? He had a trail of bodies in his wake, and more bodies found on his property after his death, most of them without their heads. 

This is one of the strangest New Mexico mysteries, from New Mexico’s lawless Wild West days. It’s the mystery of Arthur Rochford Manby.

Arthur Rochford Manby

Manby was a British immigrant who came to New Mexico with dollar signs in his eyes. The man’s dubious life and nefarious behavior was shrouded in mystery; his death was even more so. The mystery is especially compelling because it happened in 1929, some say 1926, and will probably never be solved. Whoever knew the truth is long dead. But we can still speculate and wonder just what happened all those years ago to this strange, strange man that so many people hated. 

Despite rumors that Manby had been cast out in England, the truth was that he just didn’t have many financial prospects there because all his family money went to his elder brother, Eardley. He came to America with two of his brothers in 1883, hoping to make it rich in ranching and then mining. Some think he was representing a shady company in Europe – nobody knows for sure. 

Manby carried him with his dashing mannerisms and sense of arrogance. Though he was charming, most people soon learned how conniving and hateful he was.

He came to New Mexico in 1883 and developed quite the bad reputation when he became embroiled in a land conflict over the Maxwell Land Grant near Raton, near the Colorado state line. He shot the man he was most conflicted with, Dan Griffin, whose land abutted his lot in the Maxwell Land Grant. Though he claimed self-defense and was acquitted, this soured his reputation. It didn’t help that his legal defense was funded by the shadowy Santa Fe Ring, a group of corrupt politicians, attorneys, and land speculators in New Mexico who controlled a lot of goings-on in the state at the time. The Santa Fe Ring was notorious for selling people land that was not actually owned by the sellers and then foreclosing on the land over one missed payment and reselling it. They featured prominently in the Lincoln County War. Manby’s association with those folks painted a grim picture of who he was as a person and what his intentions were for the land he purchased in the state. 

So after that debacle, he gave up ranching and moved to Taos, where he joined a syndicate of men interested in the Mystic Mine. The Mystic Mine is said to be cursed and has a pretty high body count associated with it, though that body count ultimately seemed to grow after Manby entered the picture. Manby was enchanted by Taos – who wouldn’t be? I found the area quite enchanting and so have many others. The area is enchantingly beautiful and home to mountains, meadows, and Taos Gorge. It’s also home to an unexplained hum that only some people can hear. But until I started researching Manby’s creepy story, I didn’t know just how much creepy and sordid stuff has happened there. Yikes! It is reportedly a very haunted place and I can see why now. 

According to Mike Hotchkiss, the area was still heavily occupied by a group called the “Los Hermanidad de Nuestro Padre Jesus, Los Hermanos de Luz, Los Hermanos Penitentes, or simply the Penitentes.” These were Spanish Catholic devotees who liked to reenact the crucifixion at Easter, that’s how devout they were. They had a sort of vigilante side, Los Gorras Blancos, who could be very violent. The Penitentes influenced local life and how things were done, which Manby knew nothing about; Los Gorras Blancos enforced it. They were especially intimidating and aggressive toward people like Manby. The Hispanic people of Taos had been there since the 1500s; the Pueblo people had been there for centuries before that. Manby didn’t care about their historical claims to the land and wanted that land and its mineral richness for himself. He didn’t make friends with the locals but instead treated them with icy disdain. He rode around on a black horse, carried many guns, and trained his dogs to bite to protect himself. He spoke Spanish fluently, but considered himself above the Hispanics in the area. 

At first, he had three partners in the Mystic Mine, which was dry of gold. His partners, Stone, Wilkerson/Wilkinson, and Ferguson, knew the mine was dry and that was a serious problem. When Stone balked at the idea of seeding it with gold from other nearby productive mines, like the Aztec Mine, he mysteriously vanished and then was found near the Mystic beheaded. Later on Wilkerson/Wilkinson (he went by both) would also vanish under mysterious circumstances in 1915 and no one knew what happened to him. Then the miner Severino Gutierrez vanished. So did many others. Manby took Stone’s place in the company and the dry Mystic began producing gold again like magic.

Manby also liked to bully and intimidate people into giving up their land. When that didn’t work, he would comb tax records to find out who was behind on their payments, and then file to acquire the land. His financial backing seemed to dry up as soon as British interests in the Taos area dried up. So Manby disappeared for over a year, supposedly to Mexico, and this was when the British were developed oil interests in Mexico. Though he never admitted it and even became a US citizen in 1899, he always seemed to closely follow British interests with his behavior and business practices. Some thought he was a British spy. He held membership to various British organizations and never seemed to embrace being American. He was always making mysterious business trips, supposedly to meet with his financiers.

Eventually, he gained control of the Martinez Land Grant in the Taos Valley, a huge tract of fertile land that Manby had always wanted. But Manby had no liquid assets of his own and he was bad with money. Despite his best attempts to cheat and borrow his way into keeping the land, he eventually lost it all and it was sold at auction to a mysterious “Watson Land Company” owned by a character in Chicago. Some people think that this company was actually part of the Santa Fe Ring, still active in New Mexico, just under different names. 

When Manby had first moved to Taos, he started sleeping with Ferguson’s daughter, his “Princesa” Terecita, when she was just fourteen. Terecita liked to read fortunes and make herbal potions and poisons. Though she and Manby never married, they remained close over the years. Terecita started to get jealous when Manby divorced his wife, yet refused to marry Terecita because he felt she was “tainted” and beneath him. She had children that were likely his but he didn’t support them or act like their father. She married a farmhand and he courted other women, like the wealthy Texan widow, Margaret Waddell. Manby tried to give Waddell a fake painting in exchange for a big loan, but Waddell was no fool. She had the painting appraised, and learning that it was fake, she slapped Manby with a $12000 lawsuit. He ignored the suit and didn’t pay her a dime. This was just another example of his terrible personality.

Then the missing Wilkerson showed up in 1921 after vanishing for years! He was rich, dressed like a true gentleman, and full of stories about how Manby had opened mines in Chihuahua, Mexico to launder ore stolen from Taos mines like the Aztec. He paid for this rumor with his life when Manby, Terecita, and Manby’s thug Carmen Duran shot him at a tawdry tourist camp that Terecita and her father owned. They then hid his body somewhere no one would find it. A maid witnessed the whole thing. Terecita’s father, Manby’s old mining partner George Ferguson, also apparently did because he began to scream to authorities about Wilkerson’s head. Terecita quietly shut him off from the outside world in a mental institution where he died shortly after, either from old age or his daughter’s poison, who knows?

Manby became quite paranoid after that, in the early 20s. He would lock and unlock and then re-lock the doors of his 20-room Spanish-style mansion multiple times a night and sleep in different rooms each night. He would only cook for himself and pour his own drinks, afraid that someone might poison him. He had many, many weapons. He raved about an Italian airship visiting him at night and he hung out on his roof, using colored flags to somehow signal to someone or something unknown. On the 1920 census, he lied about his age, occupation, and date of naturalization, as if he were trying to disguise who he was, when everyone in the area knew who he was. He didn’t even appear on the 1910 census, even though he was there in Taos that year too. In 1900, it is possible that he was gone in Mexico and may have missed the census.  

He decided to start a secret society, called the U. S. Secret and Civil Service Society, Self-Supporting Branch, a supposed branch of the US Secret Service. It’s not quite clear what this society supposedly did. It did play some role in bootlegging and swindling people out of money and property. Evidently, Manby told people to invest in his group and then they would get a return on their investment in the form of gold “million dollar certificates” which were obviously fake. He invited wealthy Taos residents to join, but the invitation wasn’t the type you could refuse apparently. Hotchkiss mentioned that part of the group’s purpose was to crack down on crime in Taos and to protect Manby from the gun battles that evidently raged at his property, unbeknownst to everyone else. Some think this group was created to protect Manby from threats by the Penitentes and that these gunbattles were real battles waged by angry Taos locals, not just paranoid delusions. There were rumors that the group was actually an organized crime syndicate and black magic was involved. The members of the group were mostly Anglos, except for Terecita, but the rituals used in the group were often Aztec, featuring rattlesnakes and skulls and crossbones. Manby talked a lot about beheading and how it tied in with the Aztec god Carmazotz. Some Masonic rituals appeared in the group’s ceremonies as well. A lot of the meetings took place in the Mystic Mine and were designed to intimidate the attendees.

As his life drew to a close, Manby got really involved with Dr. Victor Corse Thorne and began to try to sell him fake paintings, the same scam he had pulled on Margaret Waddell. The scam didn’t work on Thorne, either, but Thorne did begin to give Manby loans and demand collateral. This meant that Thorne owned a lot of Manby’s property by the time Manby died. 

Thorne did become involved in Manby’s scheme of turning the “Manby Hot Springs” into a radioactive hot springs resort. Manby had asked the actual owners to buy the land. The owners said no. They were not living in the area, so Manby started squatting on the land and built a bathhouse there without their permission. He claimed the land was his and approached Thorne about selling it and developing it. He enjoyed the warm mineral water and the Native patroglyphs on the rocks there. He convinced Thorne this place was an ancient Native American origin place and would make an excellent tourist attraction. This was how he got Thorne to fund him lots of money – though, again, Thorne was shrewd and always got collateral for his loans. 

On June 30, 1929 (some accounts claim 1926) Manby was last seen alive. Two days later, he was served with another suit by Waddell because she hadn’t seen any money for her previous lawsuit. She wasn’t giving up so easily. The man serving the papers couldn’t get him to answer the gate, and he was scared of Manby’s ill-tempered dog, so he fetched the sheriff. They returned to the house where Terecita and Carmen Duran and other locals already were swarming, having heard a rumor from Terecita’s nephew that Manby was dead. They entered the home and found him decpaitated, his head in a different room from his body. The head had been mauled by the dog and the body was in an advanced stage of decomposition.

At the urging of the Secret Society, there was no autopsy. People were glad this man was dead. His reign of terror was over. He was buried, his death was ruled an accident, and the case was closed – actually, there never even was a case to being with. So what’s the mystery here?

Manby’s brothers Alfred and Eardley both knew their brother feared for his life and predicted his murder from letters he wrote them. Through dogged persistence, they had him exhumed and a proper autopsy performed. The second coroner found that the body was riddled with shotgun bullets and the skull bore signs of blunt force trauma and had been removed cleanly; the head had not been chewed off by the dog as the first coroner had surmised. This made the whole thing an obvious murder, not an accident. Detective Bill Martin took on the case and began digging. 

Martin delved more into Manby’s affairs. He began to uncover the twisted and crooked things the Brit did. Martin learned about the Secret Society and discovered that it was just a big intimidation game to get Taos people to give Manby their property and money, which was what Manby had always wanted, all along. The other stuff, the black magic and the Aztec and Masonic sorcery, were just games to make people scared of Manby. The British spy stuff was unlikely, though Manby was probably acting in the interests of British business entities and maybe the government. Martin discovered Wilkerson’s decapitated remains somewhere on the property. He also found a graveyard on the property with the remains of at least seven men – all decapitated. Had someone done to Manby what he liked doing to others? 

Manby’s accounts were basically dry. He had promised Terecita fantastical sums (827 million to be exact) and a lavish property in Missouri – none of which existed. People talk of the existence of buried treasure somewhere with the money Manby raised from his scams and bootlegging and other nefarious activities. I am positive that treasure does not exist. I think Manby was like Anna Delvey, the fake socialite con artist: a money vacuum, scamming people to pay off other scams and keep up his lavish lifestyle at the expense of others. He made a lot of empty promises to people and owed powerful people money, including members of the Santa Fe Ring and unknown foreign business entities. He also had a thing for prostitutes and they usually aren’t cheap. So, no, I highly doubt there is any money at all. 

There was also a weird manifesto found among his papers, outlining plans to acquire various Taos properties through the Secret Society. After all, the Secret Society had basically been one big land extortion scheme. One such property was Manby’s mansion. This seems weird, considering the mansion was one of the few properties Manby actually still owned outright. Why would he write that in his manifesto then? This suggests that somebody else wrote this manifesto and therefore somebody else behind the Secret Society had an interest in Manby’s death – maybe Terecita. Terecita had never gotten much from Manby and she was present when he killed Wilkerson, showing her affinity for beheading. Maybe she was behind it all. 

Martin became convinced that Terecita was the true culprit. After all, she had plenty of motive. She stood to inherit a lot, or so she thought. She didn’t realize that Manby left nothing to her and almost all his property was owed to Dr. Thorne in the event of his death. She also had endured many years of jealousy, watching him take up with other women and prostitutes and even marry other women. Manby never married her, despite having many children with her and sleeping with her since she was only fourteen. Sicko. Plus, she had already replaced him with Carmen Duran. Duran was Manby’s righthand man and number one thug; Manby was heartbroken when he found out Duran and Terecita were sleeping together, even though he had a parade of women coming in and out of his bedroom the whole time he was with Terecita. That’s a really murderous combination – jealousy, resentment, filched love, greed. 

A theory by author James Peters is that Manby was actually dying of third-stage syphilis. This would explain his insanity. It would also make sense because he liked prostitutes and syphilis was widespread at the time in the area. Peters believes that Terecita thought she would inherent everything of Manby’s, and she felt bad for him suffering, so she hurried along his death with the belief that everyone would benefit.

After his death, Terecita went on to live until 1979 in New Mexico. She didn’t take a righteous path, though. She actually did six years in prison for several residential burglaries and arson of the studio apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Younghunter, who identified several of their belongings on her property. Later she got a full pardon for her crimes and settled in Taos, working as a bruja, or witch, and reading fortunes. This is when she got in trouble for “a curse-extortion scheme”, wherein she fraudulently got a Santa Fe couple to pay her money for removing a curse from them and finding treasure on their property. Every time she got in trouble, she always seemed to get out of it, suggesting she had friends in high places. Her son was a Taos sheriff for a time and this seemed to help out with her shenanigans. She spent most of her long life in Taos working as a bruja and a fortuneteller, because according to her, she was kidnapped by “gypsies” as a kid and taught fortunetelling. (Excuse me, but I’m not aware of too many bands of marauding gypsies in the US, even in the late nineteenth century. Hmmm.) She and Carmen Duran didn’t last apparently, but they also didn’t ever betray each other’s secrets, if they were indeed in on Manby’s death together. While I never met Terecita, just reading about her make me believe that she was quite possibly capable of murder. 

Another theory is that Manby was taken out by Dr. Thorne because of his financial interests. But there is no evidence of this. Thorne immensely benefited from his death, sure, but there is no evidence he was ever physically present in Taos at all. He met Manby at a Georgia resort called the Jekyll Island Club, of which he was a regular member. This club has a membership consisting mostly of the hoity toity until the 1930s when the Great Depression made membership drop by at least half, and it was even a site for where US banking law was changed forever by six men in 1910. Kind of scary that our entire nation’s banking law was in the hands of six men meeting on a mysterious island in Georgia, huh? Even more scary that this place gave Manby a membership in the same time period. But I digress. Dr. Thorne’s family was from India, from the highest caste of Hindu society, and very wealthy. He spent most of his life in New York City, from what I can tell. The two had a business relationship that seemed to be based on them conning each other. Dr. Thorne was a philanthropist. He died in 1948.

In 1929, Manby’s Mansion became Thorne House. Thorne never came to Taos directly, despite owning a lot of it after Manby’s death. So he sent a female secretary to handle the affairs. He did donate a lot of money to the community. People speculate he and Manby are one and the same. I don’t think so – Manby does not seem to be the type to donate money to any community, especially not Taos, which he always disdained and mistreated. Thorne House is now the Taos Center for the Arts, since the 1950s. And it’s apparently haunted by an odious ghost with a nature a lot like Arthur Rochford Manby. 

There are a lot of theories that Manby didn’t actually die and the corpse in the house was not his but rather the body of some other poor victim of his. This is supported by reported sightings of Manby in Ojinga, Chihuahua, Mexico, near his mines, and in England, where his family supposedly hid him. Yet others supposedly saw him in Italy, which is interesting, because Manby talked of receiving celestial visits at night from an airship from Italy called the “Garibaldi” before he died. Manby certainly had a lot of reasons to disappear, and as a conman, he would be the most likely to pull this off successfully. He was known to disappear for lengths of time before as he traveled the world on mysterious business trips, with no one really knowing where he went and who he met with. In fact, most of his life was a mystery. So it is entirely possible that he staged his death. Terecita, ever faithful lover, and Carmen Duran, his righthand man, and George Ferguson, Terecita’s nephew and partner in crime, all may have been in on it. Or maybe he wanted his staged death to be so genuine that he didn’t even let his closest comrades know. 

Either way, Manby didn’t appear to be of good health or sound mind by 1929. He was about 70 in 1929 by my calculations. So even if he didn’t die that day, I don’t believe he made it much longer. Given his ugly nature and poor money habits, I can’t see him creating a sustainable life somewhere else anyway, at least not for long. The world is a small place and things surely would have caught up to him. After all, he was spotted at least three times, if those sightings were in fact of him. Furthermore, even if he did survive for a while elsewhere under fake names, he surely died within the next decade or so. I suppose we’ll never really know, though I do think it would be interesting to exhume his remains a third time and run DNA test against his family in England and see if there’s a match. It would be nice to positively identify the remains at least and solve that part of this old, terrible mystery. 

Taos is an odd place. Some say it gives them the heebie jeebies. Others love it. I love Taos but it does give me some strong vibes that I can’t put my finger on. I do wonder what really happened to Arthur Rochford Manby and who the headless corpse really was. The man certainly was mysterious, but it seems that a lot of his mystery was really a ruse, meant to intimidate for the sake of greed. Maybe his death is the same and the truth is much simpler than people make it out to be. 

Sources

https://www.jekyllclub.com/about/jekyll-island-history/

Taos Is Allegedly One Of New Mexico’s Most Haunted Small Towns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Ring

https://strangeco.blogspot.com/2013/06/murder-and-mystic-mine.html

“Extortion and Intimidation – Manby, Now Dead Is Accused of Being Head Of Sub Rosa Society.” The Huntsville Daily Times, March 18 1930.

http://www.newspaperabstracts.com/link.php?action=detail&id=76337