December 1925: A Midnight Murder at West Portal of the Moffat Tunnel
Heavy snow and deeper uncertainty made December 1925 the month when West Portal realized danger didn’t always come from the mountain.
Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago
December 1925 unfolded with a mix of anticipation and restraint, as if the year itself were holding its breath while Colorado looked toward the approaching breakthrough. Newspapers across the northwest interpreted the tunnel not simply as a piece of engineering work but as the instrument that would finally unlock the region’s potential. The Craig Empire captured this hope in its December 30th issue, insisting that “all Northwestern Colorado ever needed was transportation… with the building of the Western railroad and completion of the Moffat Tunnel, it will have transportation. Its farms will be reclaimed, its mines and oil fields opened, new enterprises of all kinds started, for transportation will open it to the markets of the world.” Communities were beginning to treat the tunnel’s impending completion as a turning point that would reorganize regional economics the moment trains could pass through the Continental Divide.
Yet the month’s actual progress figures did not match the scale of those expectations. East Portal entered the final days of December under heavy water flow—about 150 gallons per minute pouring into the pilot and railroad headings—requiring four pumps to operate around the clock. The water came from seams in the rock, but despite the volume, crews noted one saving grace: no timbering had been needed. The relative stability fit a broader truth about the east side of James Peak. There were fewer surface depressions, more pitch to the mountain, and fast snowmelt runoff, meaning fewer pockets where water could accumulate and percolate downward.
The west side behaved in the opposite manner. Engineers explained that every time the heading passed beneath a swamp or stream, soft ground followed. With more and deeper surface depressions, the West Portal became a collector of moisture, forcing the tunnel to contend with poor rock in zone after zone. Recent trouble was attributed by some to seepage from Fawn Creek, which may have been feeding downward along the slope. The last major obstacle still lay ahead: a branch of Ranch Creek—lying east of the Fawn Creek zone along the line of advance yet still part of the same west-side hydrologic regime—half a mile forward and 1,500 feet above the bore. The difficulty was serious enough that the contractors—Hitchcock and Tinkler—along with General Manager Lewis and Superintendent Kauffman, spent nearly all their time in the headings during December, guiding crews through what papers simply described as “treacherous ground.”
As the year closed, one newspaper offered a year-end snapshot of progress: the water tunnel stood at 14,220 feet from the east and 10,980 from the west, a total of 25,200 feet, reported as “seventy-eight percent completed”; the main headings were 14,200 feet east and 10,950 west, a total of roughly 25,150 feet, listed as “seventy-seven and nine-tenths percent completed”; and the railroad tunnel measured 11,600 feet east and 4,680 west, a combined 16,280 feet, said to be “fifty-one percent completed.”
While the numbers stalled, life around the portals continued in rhythms shaped by the season. Men left the camps in the days leading up to Christmas, thinning both portals as workers sought a brief return to their families. Some stories reflected the long arc of labor: Frank Beck, who had suffered a broken leg months earlier at the tunnel, had spent several months recuperating at home in Steamboat Springs. He returned to West Portal in early December, then left again to spend Christmas with his family before going straight back to work the following Sunday. Others captured the quieter continuity of community: on Christmas morning, Ernest Eugene Leist was born to Mr. and Mrs. William Leist, his father employed at East Portal; and on December 23, a marriage license was issued to Lawrence Pastorius and Marie Chidester, both of West Portal (they later divorced in 1938). Federal attention to the tunnel towns continued as well. In Christmas week, the U.S. Senate confirmed Vernet A. Kauffman to a four-year term as postmaster of West Portal, signaling that the settlement, however temporary it might appear on maps, mattered enough to receive formal civic appointments.
Not every December headline tied to the tunnel community was hopeful. In Denver, twelve-year-old Earl Frink was killed when a small tunnel in the backyard of the Tuckaway home at 1147 West Mississippi Avenue in Denver collapsed. Earl’s father worked at East Portal. Although the boy’s death was unrelated to the Moffat Tunnel project, the story landed with a particular ache because the circumstances suggest he may have been attempting to imitate the kind of work he saw shaping his father’s daily life—a tragic echo of the larger excavation unfolding under James Peak.
The month also brought movement on the political and economic architecture that would govern the tunnel once completed. The Moffat Tunnel Commission fixed rental values at two-thirds of the project’s total cost for the railroad tunnel and one-third for the water tunnel. The Denver & Salt Lake Railroad was the only applicant, though exclusivity was forbidden by law, guaranteeing eventual access to any other road that sought rights. At the same time, Denver continued its fight to control the water bore, armed with an Interior Department ruling that declared it more important to provide Denver with an adequate supply than to furnish water to the Fraser Sources Irrigation and Power Company. The ruling sharpened the stakes surrounding the water tunnel precisely because Denver’s own water use was immense—averaging 55,830,000 gallons per day in 1925, with a peak of 100,850,000 gallons on August 2, 1924, spread across 781 miles of mains and nearly four thousand hydrants. The water tunnel was increasingly understood as a future lifeline for a city already straining its existing system.
Gerald Hughes told the Denver Real Estate Exchange that the railroad would be fully reorganized and ready to run trains through the tunnel on the very first day the bore was completed. That confidence, however, glossed over the substantial operational, financial, and physical hurdles that still stood between aspiration and reality; the statement revealed more about the desire to project readiness than about the project’s actual condition.
It was in the midst of this combination of progress, pressure, and early-winter storms that West Portal—normally a predictable, work-worn settlement—was jolted by a crime so sudden and intimate that it briefly overshadowed the tunnel’s advance.
On a cold winter night in late December 1925, in a settlement carved out of snowdrifts and railroad ambitions, Fred Sperandio opened his back-room door to someone he seemed to know. A flicker of matchlight flashed against the cold timber. A single shot cracked through the dark. And by sunrise, the quiet community of West Portal—perched at the western mouth of the not-yet-completed Moffat Tunnel—had become the epicenter of a killing that baffled investigators, stirred fears among tunnel workers, and left a lasting mystery in the high country.
Newspaper accounts from Denver, Leadville, Fraser, and Colorado Springs scrambled to tell the story of the Italian immigrant who managed the recreation hall at West Portal and was struck down in the very room he lived in. Their coverage, uneven but earnest, paints a portrait of a man whose life was equal parts courage and conflict, and a crime scene that raised more questions than the bloodhounds, posses, or railroad guards could answer.
A LIFE LIVED IN THE HIGH COUNTRY
Fred Sperandio’s story begins far from Colorado. Born in Tyrol, Italy in 1887, he grew up “in the shadow of the Alps,” served in the Austrian army, and emigrated to the United States with his brother James in 1911. He worked mines in Trinidad, then Leadville, managing the Big Four mine with A. Seppi before moving to West Portal in 1921. There, he purchased a half interest in the recreation hall, a soft-drink and pool establishment that doubled as a social hub for tunnel workers.
Friends remembered him as adventurous, bold, faithful to those he trusted—yet also “reckless,” competitive, and adept enough at gambling to make money at it. Some said he was well liked and had no enemies. Others insisted he had collected a few. Both views were true. Sperandio could be generous and warm, but his fearlessness, his success at cards, and his habit of keeping cash on hand created undercurrents that did not always surface in polite company.
By December 1925, Sperandio lived in a small room at the back of the recreation hall, where he kept substantial sums from nightly receipts and private winnings hidden in secret caches. He knew the risks, but he had weathered worse in Europe’s mountains and Colorado’s mines. Confidence served him well—until the night it didn’t.
A KNOCK IN THE NIGHT
On Saturday, December 19th, Sperandio closed the hall near midnight and went to bed. Sometime after, a noise came from the alley door. Every version of the story agrees on the crucial detail: Sperandio rose, dressed at least enough to answer the door, struck a match to light his way, and opened the door to someone he recognized. Whether that visitor spoke to him or merely stepped forward is lost to history. What is not lost is the bullet, fired from a .45-caliber Colt automatic, that passed through his heart almost immediately. He died where he fell.
By morning, Edward Evans—the recreation hall’s day manager—arrived to open the place and found him on the floor. The room had been torn apart. Mattresses were slashed open. One showed signs of burning, as did parts of Sperandio’s clothing. The bed itself had been set alight. Someone had tried to burn the room or the body or both. The cash register had been emptied of roughly $125, but the real target had been the hidden money in Sperandio’s room, an amount somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800*. It was gone. (*In 2025 dollars, that amount translates to approximately $28,000–$33,000.)
CONFLICTING CLUES AND EARLY THEORIES
Grand County Sheriff Mark E. Fletcher and Deputy Sheriff James Quinn arrived from Hot Sulphur Springs, but the facts refused to resolve cleanly. Early reports floated the idea of two killers—one who hid inside the hall before closing and another who waited outside the sleeping quarters. Within forty-eight hours, however, Fletcher stated flatly that he now believed one man committed the murder, and that “clues unearthed” supported the theory that the killer was an acquaintance of Sperandio.
The sheriff’s reconstructed version of events—echoed by multiple Denver papers—held that Sperandio had been awakened by a noise at the rear door, had gotten up and dressed, and had stepped forward with a match in hand when the concealed robber fired. This version better matched the tight confines of the room, the single point of entry, and the precise shot. More importantly, it aligned with the inference that Sperandio would only open that door after midnight for someone he trusted.
The conflicting press portrayals of Fred’s personal life now took on new meaning. Some newspapers quoted locals saying he had “no enemies.” Others, relying on Leadville sources who had known him for years, admitted he had made a few. When weighed against the intimate nature of the killing and the deliberate effort to destroy evidence afterward, the latter assessment seems more convincing. The murderer did not stumble onto opportunity; he acted with knowledge—of Sperandio, of his routines, and of his hidden money.
SNOWBOUND MOUNTAINS AND A RACE AGAINST DISAPPEARING TRACKS
Snow had buried West Portal that week. Every report emphasizes the same reality: all roads were impassable, blanketed by gigantic drifts. Fletcher declared that escape by road was impossible, and he deployed men to watch the mountain passes in case the killer attempted to flee on snowshoes. The only viable escape route was the railroad.
Trains on the Moffat Road were carefully guarded. Passenger lists were checked. In one striking detail from a Denver story, officers discovered that a man who had boarded at West Portal was missing when the train reached Denver. No follow-up ever clarified who he was.
Recognizing the urgency, Fletcher summoned bloodhounds from the Quillen kennels in Colorado Springs. Their arrival on December 22nd produced the most tantalizing, if inconclusive, movement in the case. Released at the scene, the dogs ran directly toward the railroad, circling the depot and moaning when they lost the scent. Another paper reported that the dogs followed a trail from West Portal to Fraser, five miles away, before similarly losing it near the tracks.
Whether the dogs followed the same trail or different ones is impossible to know from surviving accounts. What is clear is that their work reinforced the sheriff’s belief that the killer moved toward the railroad—with or without boarding a train—and that his trace dissolved at or near the rail line.
Meanwhile, Sperandio’s brothers James and Charles arrived to assist. James returned to Denver with the body that evening; Charles remained to help the sheriff for several days.
A CRIME WITHOUT AN ENDING
By December 23rd, Fletcher stated publicly that an arrest was “entirely probable within the next few days.” Yet by the time the long obituary was printed in Leadville, no suspect had been named, no arrest had occurred, and no clear trail remained.
What survived was a portrait of a man whose life had been shaped by mountains in two portions of the globe; whose courage, charm, and intensity had won him both friends and enemies; and whose final moments were marked by trust, surprise, and violence.
It also left behind a mystery: whether his killer fled over snow, vanished onto a train, or simply blended back into the ranks of workers, gamblers, and itinerants who passed through West Portal that winter.
The newspapers closed the matter with a line as stark as tracks vanishing into blowing snow: “No trace of the murderer has been found.”
A century later, that remains the last official word.
Fred was unmarried and a member of the American Federation of Human Rights, an international co-Masonic lodge. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Leadville, Colorado, in the IOOF section, a calm resting place that offers a measure of closure the investigation never found. His death appears on our list of Moffat Tunnel-era fatalities because it occurred within the West Portal settlement and arose directly from the conditions and community created by the tunnel project itself.
Set side by side, the two December narratives, the crews driving steadily through rock and water and the midnight violence that caught West Portal off guard, revealed a deeper truth about life at the portals in the winter of 1925. Men pushed toward breakthrough under the Divide, pumps fought the constant inflow, and Colorado’s optimism climbed with every foot gained, yet the same camp that kept the project alive carried risks that had nothing to do with geology. December 1925 was not simply another month of headings advanced; it underscored that the Moffat Tunnel was shaped by people who lived close to danger in all its forms. Workers, immigrants, gamblers, and wanderers shared a narrow world carved out of snow and timber, a world where the ground could shift in an instant, and in the shadow of James Peak the communities built to support a great ambition proved as unpredictable as the mountain itself. So the month closed with a peculiar duality. On paper, progress slowed to a crawl, held back by wet rock and the peculiar geology of the mountain, while in the public imagination the tunnel loomed larger than ever, an unfinished promise expected to reorganize markets, revive farms, open mines and oil fields, and bind Northwestern Colorado to the outside world in a way the region had waited on for decades. And as the year ended with only modest gains, the quiet that settled over the portals carried an unmistakable sense that the work waiting in 1926 would be anything but easy.
Image Caption #1: Fred Sperandio rests in Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery, far from the snowbound doorway at West Portal where a single shot through the heart ended his life. The match he struck faded in seconds; the mystery of his 1925 murder has stayed cold for a century.
Image Caption #2: Published in newspapers in December 1925, this photograph survives today as an original print held by Preserve Rollins Pass from the Moffat Tunnel Commission archive. Of particular interest, the box positioned to the right of the mine cart tracks bears the label “POWDER.”
B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | December 9, 2025
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