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this is Larry Hedrick for Mysteries of Superstition Mountains
where we bring the past into the present for our future viewers
today we have another great story by Jack San Felice
this is a really fascinating story it's got some real strange twists to it
but the real true story and it's called
murder at the San Mateo the name of this ranch was found in the 1800s in the
superstitions it's it's gone for years by the name of
San Mateo but the actual name of the ranch was the
Castro ranch Castro Ruiz r-u-i-z
and they were partners in a ranch off peralta road but it's
and actually the way you have to go in is el camino
viejo where it's now a development out there
there's a dirt road that goes back through and takes you
oh it's a horrible road now a horrible horrible road
but this story is about Trapper Wellborn his name was Howard trapper Welborn
he had lived there at the San Mateo and right next to where he was living
was a very famous spring called the San Mateo Spring and the
spring had an actual claim on it it was a water right that the
Castro's and Ruiz family had for me since the turn of the century in fact
they also had a mining claim there because um Antonio Castro
in in as a Cow hand or rather as a rancher he also
was a prospector thought he would always find some
mineral that was worth something so we filed a mining claim a load claim
a load claim means you can dig underneath the ground go down and mine
shafts and so we must have had found something
that gave him some indication that maybe he should
file claim or he filed the claim in order to keep
the property to keep that property so that claim and has been in a family
well since the 1800s in here we are 20 20.
and as of a few years ago I was going back
uh to where the Castro Ruiz family would have their
their uh family reunion at the San Mateo and there were several when i
first went out there there were several buildings
now this was about 2 000 when I was back in there I heard the story of San
Mateo and I wanted to get back in there and and get the story of what happened
because I knew the story of Trapper Wellborn
and he was murdered and is murdered by a barber
we go back into the uh archives and I find these newspaper articles
on how Howard Trapper was his nickname Wellborn
he was 78 years old and in 1991 he was murdered by his partner he had
a partner in a mining claim at the San Mateo
ranch in the superstition mountains in the
southern foothills the barber had been a barber for 29 years had four children
I won't leave his name I won't discuss his name
but I will discuss trapper well they had fallen out and the falling out
was over the mining claim either that Trapper didn't want to mine it didn't
believe it or the barber thought maybe Trapper had
found some gold was hiding it from them Trapper's son
named Hal, Hal Welborn he hadn't seen his father in 30 years
because he when he was a child the mother divorced the father and took the
children and moved to another state and in an interview earlier on
during the times that people come in to talk to
to Trapper Wellborn that they asked did you have a family said at once I did but
they a long time ago but they moved out of state
and I could never find them and I moved Arizona
so hal comes to to meet his father that morning and he
hadn't heard from for a couple days and he had just met up
with him two or three weeks before after 30 years
after 30 years of not being his father and they were reconnecting
this is one of the sad parts of this story
he don't hear from him so he goes to the the building where he's making his
residence on the San Mateo which is just a stone's throw from where
the uh the san mateo spring was and it had a
knob on it you get water it had like a faucet and
also there was cisterns uh built there in the early 1900s that would hold water
for the dry periods and it came right out of a spring in the
hills their fact there were they had filed claims on
three springs there hal comes in he finds his father dead
laid down he thought he died of a heart attack
no then he sees the blood then he sees the bullet holes
and then he's he he sees the dog his dog blue Trapper had a a
Australian blue healer and he called him blue
and whoever did the murder had killed the dog blue also in this old
cabin at the San Mateo ranch in 1991.
so hal calls the sheriff's department and they do an investigation
and talking to the old ranchers out there and the people in Apache Junction
he found out that he had a partner named uh
so and so and he was a barber that was a that was almost shut and dry right from
there right from the get-go and being a policeman 30 years i'm
saying my god you got all this evidence already and the and so they started
talking to the guy and they found out he was weird
and that he had gone off the deep end so they take it
they they they charged him with first degree murder
but the court appoints a psychiatrist and his family gets a psychiatrist they
find out that he's he'd gone off the deep end he's really
insane now so he he judged by the courts to be
criminally insane as he put in an insane asylum for the
criminally insane which means you gotta you probably stay there the rest of your
life so I don't know that he ever got out and
I followed up on the story I never saw any
subsequent stories where the barber ever got back out of jail or
out of the insane asylum that happens they will release murders
but they got to be there a long time so if he's already been a barber for 29
years trapper's 78 I figured the barber's got
to be around 65. so he had probably said 15 or 20 years
probably probably passed away there so I'm going to go back out and find out
what's going on with the ranch and now i'm doing the history of it
working on now a story for my cowboy book
I'm trying to get my cowboy book all of the stories of the early cowboys
what better what better to find out is to meet
the Castros and meet the Ruiz's well I did I got to meet
them at a family reunion I got their stories my Cowboy book has got
all these photos of them I have photos of the ranch the BLM or
state trust land one or two it's like splits
it up and they made them tear down to build
all the buildings out there except for one
so there was only one building left the last time I was out there
the spring still had water and when I first went there the water was fantastic
they said that a holy woman had got there
went out there and blessed the water and that it could have
certain cures well I don't know about that that's a story I didn't follow up
on I did meet a person that had uh the property rights
her name was Andrade a-n-d-r-a-d-e and she was related to the Castros or
Ruiz and they there were just tons of cowboys
out there all this was open range in the 1800s
no fences and they had great big roundups
so I learned about the ranch the cowboy the history of the cowboys
they bury trapper in a in Superior cemetery
and at this in the Superior cemetery he's buried
no trees it's it is super hot and I think he might even have a cement
covering over his grave he's got a headstone
now blue the dog was buried now in 1999... 2000 rather when I first
found it blue and buried in a grave right next to the old ironwood
tree where he used to lay in the shade and it wasn't too far maybe
a hundred feet or so from where uh Trapper was during the day
when Trapper of beyond his things he'd go with them
he was a great dog for Trapper and the people I talked to and from the
family the Castros and the Ruiz family they
knew Trapper they loved Trapper he was there he was their caretaker I go
to visit blue's grave and the indian grind holes are out there at
all the springs when I was out there they
only talked about three springs but when I started searching there was six
springs one of the Castro boys told me oh yeah
you can find those indian grind holes everywhere
I said for the water I said well great I said well I'm gonna start doing a
little searching and I got Jack Carlson I said Jack
you and I are going to try to find the mystery of where
this mine where was their claim and let's find out about the ranch they
had a dispute the talk was that he had dispute
over the mining claim and one or the other thought there was
gold the other thought there was nothing and that's the way it usually goes you
get disgusted if you don't find something well Jack Carlson and I
climbed those hills climbed that area we found a copy of the
mining claim that we're at the right place we don't
know so I find the Castros and I get them to show me where the
mining claim was he comes out there with us he lives in
Florence and I had met him before and said we go
out there where it was okay and then he left he followed us
Jack Carlson and I spent a whole day in that area of my now mining claim
is it's a long ways it's 20 acres so we tromped around that 20 acres one
day came back a few days later did it again
a few days later we come back and looked again
if a man kills a man over a mining claim there's got to be
something it's got to be either azurite crystal or malachite or white quartz or
evidence that there's red dirt something that would give us a clue what
was there red dirt you can sometimes find is
sometimes associated with iron iron ore and sometimes there's gold associated
with iron ore also there's mercury associated with red
dirt red and gray dirt we couldn't find any
of that we saw some similar to red and now there
were some signs up on the hill someone had painted them there on this one
hill on the mining claim it was old old old but they had painted
we couldn't make out what they were I had no clue they were up on a bench
like and someone I guess maybe would part of the family put something maybe
was a picnic area for them one time they told me that where the old original
cabin was they had a log cabin there stone and
then logs okay they pointed out where that was
pointed out the mine site pointed out where the springs were point
out where the grind holes were so where this this mystery is kind of
coming to a head here there's no gold but the one time I'm
saying we go back and we drove up to the ironwood tree and
some nitwit i'll call him nitwit or idiot
had shot up blue's headstone made out of a big rock
busted it all to hell and back so I called the
um family the the Castro boy that I knew boy he's 40 years old right
okay I called him I said you know someone had but
that's really terrible he said yeah we would take we always took care of his
grave and so uh Jack Carlson and I
was there and our photo I think I have a photo of
the headstone blue died november 3rd 1991 and that's about
the same time all those crazy people were out at the Ward's cabin and they
were living in ward's cabin and Ward was still
he died about 1991. a guy named um 45 bob that liked to shoot his gun a
lot and some of those others like to shoot
their big guns they why would it unless they got drunk
and shot it up I said there's nothing so anyhow the
next time Jack Carlson and I go out there
we take Bob Stoneback a friend of mine who's a photographer
so he can get some shots he went he went with me quite a bit in the early
days of the hiking Bob was younger than me
so that's good too and uh so the three of us are out there we go
out there and low and behold somebody somebody has replaced the
broken stone with a
a metal headstone and it's 3/4 inch plate steel and
it's it's marked blue here lies blue november 3rd 1991
and it we can't move it it's it's buried in there with cement
concrete you can see pieces of concrete have been laid around there
there were two bullet holes in it two bullets
they didn't go through it they were in it but whoever put it in there
made it so that the ricochet would ricochet back
so I only saw two I kind of think maybe they were going to shoot a third and I
thought about and maybe the ricochet got them
or almost got them but after that I never saw any more holes in
that plate steel so what's the mystery here
when it was cut and dry about blue was killed by
the barber he killed Trapper the mystery of this story lies
why did the barber kill
Trapper over nothing over a claim
but then again he was judged insane was there ever any gold out there no one
has ever the best of my experience found gold we
never found any evidence of silver or copper
where was the and where was the dig hole where was the prospect
we never found a prospect hole so the mystery of the San Mateo
lies in why why was Trapper a good old guy murdered
why was he murdered for something that wasn't even there
that no gold was ever to the best of my knowledge or precious metals
was found there but but maybe just maybe in the barber's mind
he went off the deep end after all the years of searching for gold
couldn't find it and Trapper wanted to give up the claim
and maybe he didn't want to give it up that's the only
reasonable thing I can understand so that's part of
the mystery of the superstition mountain and the murder on the San Mateo thank
you for watching this episode of Mysteries of the Superstition
Mountains
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you