When state Rep. Jonathan Singer, a Longmont Democrat, entered the state Capitol Wednesday, he took a picture.

“My last official day at the Cap. I’m wearing the shoes that I wore during the 2013 Flood and that entire legislative session. The tread is worn and the leather is beaten. They remind me of what’s really important, and they’ll carry me at least one more day.”

It’s what was beneath his shoe – the crack on the first step of the marble staircase – that’s notable.

It may surprise you that with all the millions spent on renovation in the state Capitol in the last decade or so, that this one crack never got fixed. 

It may be because the crack has a story all its own, a story that doesn’t get told on Capitol tours.

According to a March 19, 1952, Denver Post article, a 52-year-old man, Benton Field Marshall, originally from St. Joseph, Missouri, leaped to his death from the third floor of the Capitol Rotunda and landed on the first floor. Given the location of the crack – the first step on the first floor staircase – it’s likely that this is where Marshall landed.

His suicide was witnessed by a Miss Evelyn Beste, a librarian at the Denver Public Library, who watched him climb over the rail and dive to the floor. 

There’s little information on Marshall, and Capitol M could not find any photos of him. During World War II, Marshall worked in the Missouri Ordinance Works, according to a search on Ancestry.com. The Post article said he was a steamfitter at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal at the time of his death and unmarried, and a check of ancestry.com records could not find any records of a marriage while he lived in Missouri.

The website findagrave.com mentions that his seven brothers were named for poets and philosophers and social activists, a potential clue to his family’s interest in literature and social issues.

Marshall left behind a somewhat cryptic suicide note stating he he “was thinking” about Baby Doe. The article quotes Marshall’s father, who said he didn’t know who “Baby Doe” was. 

To Colorado history buffs, however, that’s a very familiar name. Baby Doe Tabor was the wife of Horace Tabor, a Leadville silver king in the 1870s and 1880s, later postmaster general of Colorado and in 1880, a U.S. Senator. Baby Doe, whose real name was Elizabeth McCourt Doe, was Horace Tabor’s second wife, the woman he left his first wife for.

When the price of silver crashed in the 1890s, the Tabors were left with just one last working mine, the Matchless in Leadville, which is now a museum. Horace Tabor died in 1899, allegedly telling his Baby Doe to hang onto the Matchless as it would once again produce silver. Baby Doe became something of a character in Leadville, never remarried, and was found frozen to death in the mine’s office, where she lived, in 1935.

Why Baby Doe? There was a revival of interest in Baby Doe’s story in the 1950s. That revival began with the 1950 publication of “Silver Queen, the Fabulous Story of Baby Doe Tabor,” written by Denver Post reporter Caroline Bancroft. The book was a somewhat romanticized version of Baby Doe’s life and written in the first person as though told by Baby Doe, and Bancroft noted some passages were fictionalized.

Marshall’s death is the only suicide (and hopefully it stays that way) in the state Capitol, which has been rumored to be haunted by ghosts for decades.

The Post story ends with an order from statehouse superintendent James Merrick to the Capitol guards and other building employees: watch out in the future for people attempting to use the state Capitol as a “weapon of self-destruction.”

Many tips of the hat to Rep. Singer for starting this; to former state Sen. Greg Brophy for digging up the newspaper article; to former state Rep. Rob Witwer, who believed Capitol M should chronicle this for posterity; and to Colorado historian (and Capitol M daughter Jennifer Goodland) who knew about the 1950s revival and found Marshall’s draft card.