When fortune hunter, Alfred Packer emerged from the snow-covered peaks of Colorado he claimed had been left behind by his five companions.

However, despite his grimy appearance he seemed suspiciously well-nourished after claiming he’d survived for two months by eating rosebouds. He was also found with a butcher’s knife in his belt and his friends’ money in his pockets.

Packer was arrested on suspicion of murder and eventually confessed to an even more horrifying act – cannibalism. He claimed that the group got lost in a blizzard while trying to cross the mountains in February 1874 and ran out of food.

When two men died of exhaustion, their desperate comrades ate them and abandoned their bodies before turning on each other.

Packer, then 31, insisted he only survived by killing his last companion, Shannon Bell, in “self-defence” after the larger man attacked him with a rifle butt. However, his story quickly fell apart as more evidence came to light.

The most damning was Packer’s confession that he had developed a taste for human flesh. Interrogators said he admitted it was “the sweetest meat I ever tasted” and he preferred it to civilised food.

Newspapers, convinced Packer killed all five men to eat them, labelled him “the human hyena”. But before his trial, he bribed his jailer and escaped.

Days later, his victims’ bodies were discovered in the western wilderness. They were dumped together, a rotting mess covered by blankets.

One body was found decapitated, while others had chunks of flesh missing, allegedly hacked off by Packer for consumption.

Harold Schechter, a professor of American culture at Queens College in New York, delved into the murders for his new book Man-Eater: The Saga Of Alfred G. Packer.

He said: “This was one of the most gruesome and ghoulish crimes in US history. The fact he murdered these men to survive made him a monster in many people’s eyes, like something in a modern horror film.

“There was so little government in the Wild West that these frontiersmen developed an ethos of trusting each other. For them Packer embodied the nightmare that your comrade may betray you in a crisis.”

He was accused of murdering his victims before eating them, rather than feasting on those who had died naturally. After evading the law, he managed to avoid capture for nine years until a fellow prospector recognised him in a Wyoming saloon.

Despite changing his name to John Schwartze, his two missing fingers – a result of a mining accident in the 1860s – gave him away and he was apprehended. Once his victims’ bodies were discovered, he altered his account of why they were piled together instead of scattered across the mountains, as he had previously claimed.

He then stated that he had been sent on a scouting mission by the group and returned to find Shannon Bell roasting a piece of human flesh on a campfire, surrounded by the bodies of their four comrades, their skulls crushed with a hatchet. Packer alleged that he shot Bell as he rose to attack, then attempted to escape the mountains but was trapped by heavy snowfall.

Consequently, he built a shelter and survived for 60 days on the flesh of his comrades. However, his story began to unravel during his trial in Lake City, Colorado, when a group of Ute Indians testified that they saw him camping happily by the Gunnison River in early spring.

When Packer noticed them, he quickly picked something up from the ground and threw it into the water. The tribe later found a human arm, largely stripped of its flesh, washed up on the river bank.

Packer, who was convicted of murder in April 1883 and initially sentenced to the gallows but then his sentence was reduced to 40 years behind bars.

However, opinions on Packer’s guilt were divided.

As a rough-and-tumble former soldier with a history of epileptic seizures, he was a pariah among the fortune-seekers of the Wild West. Therefore, some were predisposed to suspect him, eagerly testifying against him at trial.

Others criticized the haste and fairness of the jury’s decision. A Breckenridge Daily Journal writer slammed the proceedings as farcical, insinuating Packer’s inconsistent testimony was out of fear, not deceit, due to his harrowing emergence from the frigid mountains.

Denver Post journalist Polly Pry painted a more sympathetic picture of Packer as an epitome of frontier toughness and cunning. Thanks to her advocacy, he was released on parole in 1901.

Although intending to leverage his notoriety by opening a bar, he instead took a security job at Pry’s newspaper. By his death at age 65 in 1907, he had notably adopted vegetarianism.

Prof Schechter said: “Even though Packer was probably guilty his trial was a travesty. He should have been acquitted on the basis of reasonable doubt, as no one could prove what happened in the wild. But such was the public animo­sity towards him he couldn’t get a fair trial.”

Several scientists have attempted to ascertain Packer’s guilt. James Starrs, chairman of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, exhumed the bodies of Packer’s alleged victims in 1988 and discovered defensive wounds suggesting they had tried to fend off a hatchet attack.

Starrs argued this evidence confirmed Packer’s guilt. However, Professor David Bailey from the Museum of Western Colorado offered an alternative theory.

After examining a rusted Colt revolver found at the grave site, he discovered that the bullets matched gunshot residue on Shannon Bell’s clothing. This led him to conclude that Packer had told the truth, albeit belatedly, and that Bell had murdered the other four men before being shot by Packer.

Despite this, Prof Bailey failed to convince his peers, who maintained that just because Packer shot Bell, it didn’t necessarily mean he hadn’t killed the others with a hatchet.

Prof Schechter believes Packer was guilty but argues that history should not judge the Colorado cannibal too harshly.

“The most civilised man can be reduced to barbarity when facing starvation,” he said.