Louis Eytinge was a forger, swindler, liar and playboy, probably the most talented and cold-blooded con man early Arizona ever knew. His criminal resume included a murder that landed him in the chronic yard of the Yuma Territorial Prison in 1907. He suffered from tuberculosis, weighed 119 pounds, and doctors gave him two months to live.  If his life had followed the expected course, he would’ve died alone and unknown to history, another bankrupt soul in a rugged land struggling to emerge from its frontier past.

But Eytinge’s destiny didn’t include anonymity.

At his parole in 1922, he was celebrated around the country as an author and public speaker, a genius in direct mail advertising and an expert on prison reform.

Who was this strange man and how did he become Yuma’s most infamous inmate, besting luminaries like Tombstone shootist Buckskin Frank Leslie and the flamboyant stagecoach robber, Pearl Hart?