From Tim Scully:

The second Denver lab was in a suburban neighborhood where people had large lawns and rode around in lawn mowers. The houses were new, including the one we had rented for the lab. Unbeknownst to us the owner of the house that we had rented was developing more houses in the same neighborhood and visited there from time to time. But we were keenly aware of the fact that people in the neighborhood were lawn proud and did our best to maintain the lawn, at least while I was there. None of the houses in the neighborhood were connected to city water or sewer and they all had their own septic tanks and individual wells. The house we rented had a well which was located in the basement, right smack in the middle of the place where we set up the lab.

Ruth Pahkala and Rory Condon were working with me in the lab as my assistants.

In late May or early June I left the lab in Ruth and Rory’s hands when I left to go to San Francisco to organize the tableting of the first batch of LSD we’d made there and to go on to England to pick up some lysergic acid. As a result I was gone for several weeks which turned out to be a major blunder.

I hadn’t been gone for a long when the well’s water pump broke down. Instead of moving heaven and earth to figure out how to repair the pump without getting the lab busted, Ruth and Rory decided to fly back to San Francisco for a vacation in spite of the fact that it was high summer and the lawn was rapidly turning brown from not being watered. Also, a bottle of methylamine had somehow gotten broken in one of the lab rooms leaving a nasty odor to slowly waft out one of the basement windows.

I got back from my travels and made arrangements to meet Ruth and Rory in Berkeley at Bob Hamilton’s house. This was complicated by the fact that I was breaking up with my relationship with Ruth. I had just written to her to let her know that and we were going to meet to figure out how to pack up her stuff so that she could move back to California. But Ruth and Rory told me about the water pump, which horrified me. I couldn’t believe that they had abandoned the lab with the water pump broken and the lawn turning brown. I told them they had to return to the lab immediately on the next plane to fix the pump and meanwhile to be there in case of trouble with the landlord. I thought they agreed. I was going to go to Chicago to try to get some parts for the tablet machine.

They didn’t return to Denver immediately, they waited a few days and then flew back. During that time the lab was busted because the landlord was in the neighborhood, saw the brown lawn on June 23, 1968. He knocked on all the doors but no one was home. He tried to turn the water on and found that there was no water coming out of the taps. He walked around the outside of the house and smelled a really foul smell coming from one of the basement windows which reminded him of the smell of dead bodies he remembered from his service in Korea so he called the police. The police tried to use his key but the locks had been changed so they broke in and found the lab. Fortunately for us they didn’t bother to get a search warrant and that eventually overturned the case after years of litigation.

Here’s a link to an article in Westword including photos and more details:

Westword: https://tinyurl.com/2nd-Denver-lab

Warmly,

Tim