In March 1902, fourteen-year-old Clyde Felt admitted cutting Samuel Collins’s throat inside a cave above Salt Lake City. Collins had spent years cultivating relationships with neighborhood boys, giving them gifts, paying them, inviting them to spend the night, and asking them to perform sexual acts and violent “operations.”
Clyde said Collins repeatedly begged him to kill him and “could make me do things I didn’t want to do.” After the body was discovered, Salt Lake City police insisted Collins had killed himself, despite two physicians saying the wound could never have been self-inflicted. Clyde gave several conflicting accounts, falsely accused his closest friend, and eventually confessed.
The investigation revealed that Collins had sexually abused and paid boys in the neighborhood for at least two years. He had also asked them to castrate him, coached Clyde on what to say after his death, and instructed him to destroy and hide his body.
Clyde came from a prominent Mormon family with pioneer, polygamous, church, and newspaper connections. Officers hesitated to charge him. Members of the community praised him in jail. Church president Joseph F. Smith used the case to warn Mormon children about dime novels.
The murder charge was dismissed without a trial. Clyde spent time in reform school, served a Mormon mission, married in the Salt Lake Temple, and returned to respectable society. Samuel Collins was buried in a plain pine coffin at county expense.
Jess and Hannah reconstruct the case of Samuel Collins and Clyde Felt, the 1902 Hell’s Hollow killing, and the community that had to decide whether Clyde was a murderer, a victim, or both.
Every source we used for this episode – including 100+ newspaper reports – can be found in our receipt archive on Patreon.
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