On a spring day in 1874, a reporter for Harper's Weekly traveling with a surveying party on a wilderness road through a remote mountain valley in Colorado's San Juan mountains, wandered onto an abandoned campsite where he found the mutilated and rotting bodies of five men. Immediately a search began for Alfred Hammit (Packer), a hapless drifter and the sole survivor of the ill-fated prospecting expedition, suspected of murdering the five men and living off their bodies during the severe winter weather that had trapped them. Fascinated by the compelling details of this 120-year-old case, David Walton and his friend Jack Fuller team up to reinvestigate the mysterious events surrounding the prospectors' deaths and the two trials that led to Hammit's conviction. Before the end of what at first seems like an academic exercise, Walton and Fuller find themselves digging up graves, trailing a suspected drug dealer through the mountains and dealing with the murder of a local mine operator.