To properly understand the interest which was taken in the tragedy at the ranch it should be known that rumor had wagged a busy tongue in the neighborhood in which Mrs. Newton resided. It was alleged that Bonacina was not the brother of the woman, but a clandestine lover, and some asserted that his intimacy with Mrs. Friedenthal, or Mrs. Newton, had been the cause of the separation between her and her husband. One supposition, when the story of the murder was first told, was that Friedenthal had been in some way responsible for the crime. Another theory was that the murderer had sought to establish intimate relations with the woman himself, and that Bonacina had stepped in the way of his desires. These were some of the surmises which filled the air, and which rapidly grew into reports which professed to be accurate.
Mrs. Newton brought the first account of the tragedy into Denver herself. She arrived in the city about 11 o'clock on Friday, the 11th of August, 1871, and was conveyed to the Tremont house, standing then as now on Twelfth street, at the intersection of Blake.
A physician was at first sent for. He dressed the ugly wounds which the poor woman bore. As many as seven buckshot were ascertained to have been planted squarely in her breast, near the heart, four of them passing entirely through the body and the others lodging under the skin in the back. None of the balls had touched the heart, but it hardly seemed possible that so many pieces of lead should have plowed their way through a human body without producing a fatal result. Her physician told her that she did not have one chance in a hundred. But Mrs. Newton was a woman of nerve, and she replied that whether she lived or not she wanted the murderer of her brother brought to justice.
Sending for Gen. Cook, who was then sheriff of Arapahoe county, she told him the story of the shooting so far as she was able. She lay on a bed in her room as she related the circumstances. Her face was as white as death from loss of blood, and her voice sank to a mere whisper as she attempted to make the patient officer understand sufficiently well to pursue the murderer with some certainty of capturing him. Her talk was a series of moans and groans, interspersed with words painfully drawn out.