Buried for more than a century, 1,400 gold coins have, since their unveiling almost two weeks ago, captivated people around the globe. Even more mysterious, the middle-aged California couple who discovered the eight decaying tin cans full of gold remain anonymous. Are they hucksters, pulling a “Jimmy Kimmel” on the numismatic world, or regular people with astounding luck? The tale grew even more curious as we discovered that $30,000 worth of similar gold coins had been stolen from the U.S. Mint in San Francisco in 1901.
Soon we were all playing a game of whodunit.
There are still many questions about these coins, which will likely sell for millions of dollars later this year. Are they stolen goods, or simply the contents of frontiersman's dirt? Are they connected to one of the most controversial robberies of the early 20th century? Can the U.S. government lay some claim to these gold eagle coins?
The answers to these questions are as hard to come by as 90 lbs of gold itself, but dig we must to unearth the truth, even if it doesn’t fit quite so neatly into our treasured narrative about a turn-of-the-century gold heist.

There is no telling whether former San Francisco Mint clerk Walter N. Dimmick stole six bags of gold coins in 1901 and buried them in the Northern California hills. But one thing is certain: This former mint employee was, by the prosecution’s own admission, convicted on wholly circumstantial evidence.
What does this have to do with the Saddle Ridge Hoard of 1,400 19th century gold coins that couple found in eight tin cans a year ago on their property? Probably not as much as I would've liked, but Dimmick's case and this gold do shed light on a particular time and place: a pre-industrial west not quite ready to trust institutions or people they didn't understand.
Researching the origins of the Saddle Ridge gold coins has ultimately been a lot like the case against Dimmick. Much of it seems eerily connected:
The face value of the coins found and those that Dimmick reportedly stole from the mint are virtually identical ($28,000 versus $30,000).
Nearly all the coins the couple dug up from their property were minted in San Francisco.
Even after Dimmick finished serving his sentence, he never moved far away from the area.
He had access to the coins in the mint, 1,500 of which did disappear and were never found.
Dimmick worked briefly at a cannery before going to work at the mint (those cans?).
He was smart, he liked to play chess and was certainly cool under pressure.
Dimmick was seen dragging behind him a “dress case” covered in newspaper, right around the time the coins went missing.

The problem with the leap to Dimmick’s conviction is the same: It’s all circumstantial at best. It’s true, Dimmick was convicted after a lengthy investigation by the U.S. Secret Service, but only after two hung juries. And when the conviction finally came through in April 1903, more than two years after Dimmick was first charged, U.S. District Attorney Marshall B. Woodworth described the conviction to the San Francisco Call as a triumph over an incredible lack of evidence:
This has been a cause celebre, one of the most remarkable cases of circumstantial evidence ever tried in this or any other court. The circumstantial evidence, while clearly indicating the guilt of the accused, were of such character that in the hands of a shrewd and plausible prevaricator as Dimmick has shown himself they could apparently be explained away to the satisfaction of a timid or weak-minded jury. In this case, fortunately, the jury was of vigorous, healthy intellect and had the courage of their convictions.
That evidence included the fact that Dimmick had access to the mint’s vault, and on the days in July 1901 when the coins disappeared, the cashier who replaced Dimmick, W. K. Cole, was out sick with bronchitis. Dimmick also, apparently, had kept the lock’s combination on his person at at least one point (though that may have been because the lock was halfway broken and Dimmick had to remove a black plate to change the combination for Cole as he was taking over the cashier job).

Almost from the day the coins were found missing, Dimmick was under suspicion (despite the fact that he reported the apparent theft). Always something of a cipher, Dimmick never seemed to mesh with his coworkers — not his boss, Superintendent Leach, or coworker Cole. During the trial, each man depicted the other as careless, though Leach never backed Dimmick’s accusations. News reports (hundreds of them in California's broadsheet newspapers, between 1901 and 1903) at the time seem to lean heavily in favor of the case against Dimmick.
In a San Francisco Call report written just a day after the gold coins were first reported missing, Cole’s character is described as “beyond reproach,” while the report notes that Dimmick “knows that he is being watched by secret service men, and has the air of a worried man.”
When Dimmick was officially charged on Aug. 13, 1901, he was described by the San Francisco Call as cool and self-possessed (until his hands started shaking). Secret Service Agent W. J. Burns, who pursued the case to its conclusion, was described almost like a character from a turn of the century novel.
“Mr. Burns of Washington. D.C., in a natty blue suit with low cut patent leather shoes and striped stockings, sat behind Dimmick and his eyes were burning holes in the back of the prisoner's head, asking [Where is the money?]”

Dimmick was married to Fanny Wright, though she’s only mentioned once during the trial, when Dimmick is finally convicted of the most serious charge (he had been convicted of a couple of smaller financial misdemeanors beforehand, which, along with an inability to post bond, kept him in jail throughout the trail). Dimmick was apparently unmoved, but Fanny was described as having a “graven image.” During the trial, Fanny did write letters about the case to a friend Kate Baker Busey and may have penned a manuscript about her husband’s “unjust” conviction. (The documents are in a collection at Illinois State University.)

In 1909, Dimmick was released from prison. He subsequently faded from view and died in 1930 in Berkeley, Calif., at the age of 76. The secret Service never found the coins, but maybe that couple living in Northern California finally did.
Except experts tell me probably not.
“It’s one of those moments where time slows down,” says Kagin’s numismatist David McCarthy, Ph.D., describing the moment when the anonymous couple, known only as “John and Mary,” revealed the 18 gold coins also had 1,382 siblings.
He knew the find was something special. “You know the value of what these people have, understand how important this is. The next decision you make is what defines you as a person. I said, I will behave as if this is my mom and tell them everything they can.”
McCarthy, an expert in pioneer-era gold coins, has been, by all accounts, true to his word. He kept their secret for almost a year and continues to help the couple maintain not only their anonymity, but has assiduously avoided pinpointing the exactly location where those tin cans full of double eagle gold coins were found.
As we spoke, McCarthy knows I'm trying to connect the dots between Dimmick and what’s now known as the Saddle Ridge Hoard. McCarthy has personally examined the cans and has seen the exact locations they were found.

Don’t get me wrong: McCarthy started as a skeptic. “I wanted to make sure there wasn’t some bizarre scam going on here.” In recent years, the coin market has been flooded with very convincing Chinese counterfeits. As soon as McCarthy examined the coins and their condition, however, “It was immediately apparently what they were ... There was no question, no chance that we were looking at something fake.”
McCarthy describes the coins as encrusted in dirt and silica; some even had some rust on them. Others were in near-perfect condition. He also got a look at the cans, closely examining four of them. They looked nothing like 20th century cans, and most were too far gone to offer any worthwhile origin information, Of the four McCarthy examined closely, only one had a word on it: “Golden.” There was a lively fruit canning business in and around San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, and Golden Gate Packing company was one of them. At this point, though, there's just no way of knowing if the can came from that factory.
Varying in dimensions from the size of paint can to as small as a baking soda container, the cans had been buried, according to McCarthy, in a rather dense 10x10-ft. plot of land on the couple’s property. They spent the better part of a year scouring the rest of their land for additional troves, but came up empty-handed.
And 1,400 $20 gold coins weigh approximately 90 lbs, so moving them all at once would have been difficult. That and the fact that the cans were buried at all different levels indicates to McCarthy that they were likely buried over time, not at once, as you might assume after a bank (or mint) heist.
McCarthy never saw the coins inside the cans. By the time they were presented to him, they were all in inventory bags, but those bags were numbered to indicate the original groupings, and the order in which they were retrieved from the cans.
At this point, maybe you're thinking what I was thinking: “This is Dimmick’s gold.” However, McCarthy doesn’t operate on pure circumstantial evidence, no matter how compelling it is.
As we all know by now, the coins ranged in mint date from 1855 to 1894. The majority were minted in San Francisco. One tin can, for example, contained a collection of coins from the 1870s and 1880s. Another was full of 1889 high-grade coins. In general, says McCarthy, coins minted in the late 1870s and 1880s did not sit in vaults. In order for a high-grade coin to exist, it essentially has to be put in the vault right after it’s minted and then not circulated.
The coins in Dimmick’s mint in 1901 were likely in $5,000 bags, and each bag would consist of coins featuring the same date and mint mark. Of all the coins found by John and Mary, only one group (out of roughly eight cans) matched that description. Everything else was a mixture of dates and conditions.
McCarthy is not ruling out the possibility that this collection is still somehow related to the Dimmick heist, but it’s the least likely explanation. “You can look at the makeup and ascertain it probably did not come from the U.S. Mint.”
So where did those coins come from? McCarthy thinks it’s just another businessperson in the late 1800s who made a lot of money and simply buried it over time for safekeeping.
Back then, many California banks were farther than a day’s ride. “This was the most straightforward way of maintaining wealth,” he explains.
All this leaves us with the tantalizing possibility that somewhere out there is probably another six bags of even more pristine gold coins just waiting to be found. McCarthy says, however, they could just as well have been melted down.
“There may be literally millions of dollars in face value buried all over California,” says McCarthy, though it’s likely just as well-hidden as the Saddle Ridge Hoard.
As for the $10 million worth (estimated value based on current market prices) of Saddle Ridge coins, they’ll go on sale in May.
While the experts, including McCarthy and the U.S. Mint (I contacted the Secret Service, but have yet to receive an answer), are fairly certain these coins are not the same ones stolen in 1901, the jury is still out on Dimmick. He was convicted, but never confessed or talked publicly about the trial after his release in 1909. His name does not appear again in California newspapers until his death. Dimmick’s daughter, Helen Dimmick, reportedly worked at San Jose’s Teacher’s College in San Jose (which has a scholarship named in her honor), but there’s no indication anyone was living a lavish lifestyle.
After the trial, Dimmick's lawyer, George Collins, raised charges of Jury tampering, but nothing ever came of them.

Would Dimmick have stolen the coins and then ignored them for 21 years? Maybe, especially if the Secret Service never stopped watching him. But there’s also the possibility that he never took the coins. Cole could have done it. Even Dimmick’s boss, Leach, could have made it happen.

No matter who did it, the fact that it happened isn’t so surprising when you consider how different mints were back then. Photos of the San Francisco mint from late 1800s depict a neat but rather simple place with rugged-looking refinery in the basement, and presses and bank-like desks upstairs. The vault doesn’t look that impressive, either. In addition, much of the testimony given throughout the trial illustrates a somewhat disorganized staff and a vault so overcrowded with coin trucks that the staff couldn’t properly count all of the coins.
In other words, it was nothing like modern day mints.

Still, there was not a stitch of physical evidence: not a single coin, not the dress case, not a piece of paper with the lock combination — nothing. Except for the belief by the Secret Service that they had their man; they were unwavering, even as jury after jury refused to be convinced.
Was justice served? Who knows?
For all the intensity of coverage during Dimmick's trials, public interest all but evaporated after he was convicted. There were a handful of articles about appeals, but they went nowhere. The Secret Service may have gone on looking for the coins, but if so, it was never reported and nothing was found. That very incompleteness is why we can't stop wondering.
A massive haul of unbelievably valuable gold coins is stumbled upon by two average folks. Why did this happen now and not, say, in the California boom years of 1920s? That we cannot tie a legendary theft to a now legendary find is an itch in the small of our backs that we just can't scratch, but we certainly have fun trying.