Long before the NHL came to Utah, local businessman Dan Meyer showed that pro hockey could not only survive in Mormon country but thrive. Decades later, his sudden death remains shrouded in mystery. Was it suicide or was it homicide?

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 Salt Lake City Murder Mystery? - Jan. 27, 2025 – Vol. 78, Issue 07 - Randy Boswell

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON of Jan. 25, 1972, the NHL was just hours away from its annual All-Star Game when Dan Meyer took a break from a meeting between NHL and minor-league executives and went up to his suite on the 19th floor of the Radisson South hotel in Bloomington, Minn. Next door, Paul Henderson of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Pit Martin of the Chicago Black Hawks were reminiscing about their days as Detroit Red Wings linemates in the 1960s when they heard the sound of shattering glass. They looked out the window and saw the unthinkable: a man stepping through the broken window, straddling a metal bar.

Henderson started to shake and become nauseous as the horrific nature of what was unfolding suddenly became clear. “We were up there talking about old times and that kind of stuff,” Henderson said. “And then we heard this crash – ‘What the hell is that?’ I was sitting on the window ledge inside my room, and Pit was sitting on the bed. So we look out, and I see this guy. He climbs out, and then, there’s like a railing there, and he grabs that. Then he swings off of it and went right down and landed with just a thud. Oh, my God.”

More than 50 years before billionaire Ryan Smith lured the NHL to Utah this season, it was Dan Meyer who first brought pro hockey to the Beehive State in the late 1960s. The Salt Lake Golden Eagles were a successful franchise that filled seats with a solid fan base and won three Central League and two International League championships in the 1970s and ’80s. Their success helped pave the way for the city to become home to the American Basketball Association’s Utah Stars in 1970, the NBA’s Utah Jazz in 1979 and the IHL’s Utah Grizzlies in 1995, as well as the host of the 2002 Winter Olympics – and now an NHL metropolis.

A corporate lawyer and mining executive, Meyer surprised just about everyone in 1968 when he landed the rights to launch a Utah franchise in the old Western League for 1969-70. The now-defunct WHL was once a high-level minor-league circuit that, along with the CHL, was instrumental in pushing the NHL into its landmark 1967 expansion. The doubling of the old Original Six to a 12-team NHL that year was partly aimed at fending off a possible WHL-CHL merger and a pro-league rivalry with the NHL to establish a presence in California and other U.S. states eager to embrace the sport.

Meyer’s founding of the Golden Eagles a year later came at a time of rapid growth for pro hockey in the U.S. It put him squarely in the public spotlight in Utah, until then a backwater in American pro sports. The team debuted in the 1969-70 WHL season in a newly built, 10,725-seat arena, the Salt Palace, which also served as a convention center and concert venue. It was a state-of-the-art hub of both economic and cultural development for the state capital. “Hockey was new to a lot of people, and it was very exciting,” said Golden Eagles historian Dave Soutter. “Dan Meyer was an incredibly enthusiastic and driven team owner.”

For Meyer, playing the role of sports mogul was a major departure from a career spent immersed in corporate law and negotiating deals in the resource-extraction industry.

Born in Milwaukee in 1926, Daniel H. Meyer moved with his family to San Diego as a child. He excelled as a student and became high-school president before serving his country in the Pacific theater in the Second World War, attaining the rank of captain. After the war, Meyer earned a law degree and worked for about 10 years with Standard Oil in California before moving to Utah in 1957 and becoming a consultant during the late stages of an oil-and-mining boom in the state. He also got involved in Republican Party politics, serving as campaign manager in former Utah governor J. Bracken Lee’s successful bid to become mayor of Salt Lake City in 1960 and again for his re-election in 1964.

So, when Meyer applied to become owner of a WHL franchise in 1968, he had friends in high places backing his bid. Lee secured a unanimous city council endorsement of Meyer’s proposal, a plan approved by WHL officials in June 1968. The timing was excellent. Salt Lake City was already in the midst of building the Salt Palace, and Meyer was able to influence the arena’s design to optimize the hockey-watching experience for spectators ahead of the Golden Eagles’ debut season.

Meyer soon earned kudos for his evangelical zeal in spreading excitement about pro hockey coming to Utah. Meyer frequently had 10 or more speaking engagements per week with business associations, community organizations and school groups to drum up support for the team and to share his vision of Salt Lake City as an emerging hub for elite sporting competition. “He really went out into the public,” Soutter said. “The guy had so much energy. He just spent day after day after day for two or three years talking hockey…And he built a pretty loyal following. He was very successful at that.”

Clarence Campbell, the all-powerful hockey czar who’d been running the NHL since 1946, wondered what all the fuss was about. He visited Salt Lake in March 1969 to meet with Meyer and tour the nearly completed Salt Palace. Campbell declared it “potentially the finest facility outside the NHL, if not in hockey,” for watching the game. With Campbell’s blessing, Meyer was held up as a model owner for new minor-pro hockey franchises.

When the Golden Eagles hit the ice for the first time on Oct. 10, 1969, the Deseret News called it “a new chapter in Utah’s sports history.” As the team’s founder, owner and president, Meyer was lauded for his commitment to hockey, the city and the state, which included pouring some $750,000 into his new business venture.

Despite compiling a mediocre record over the team’s first two seasons, the Golden Eagles signed some impressive players, including future Boston Bruins stalwarts Bobby Schmautz and Gregg Sheppard. The team built a devoted fan base and was proving financially successful heading into 1971-72. By then, with the upstart WHA posing the greatest threat to the future of the NHL, the WHL and CHL had become key Campbell allies. The NHL president began working to establish closer ties with the two minor leagues, encouraging them to merge into a bigger, stronger farm system for the NHL and offering the eventual elevation of some of the leagues’ franchises into the NHL.

I IMMEDIATELY WONDERED IF THERE HAD BEEN A HELL OF A FIGHT GOING ON IN THE ROOM– BOBBY HULL

Meyer was one of several WHL and CHL owners hoping to eventually convert their club into an NHL team. He was exploring that very possibility for Utah’s capital when he attended the joint NHL, WHL and CHL executive meetings held in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington in late January 1972 ahead of the NHL All-Star Game at the Metropolitan Sports Center, home of the Minnesota North Stars.

With the spotlight on NHL expansion and the league strengthening ties with its WHL and CHL partners, Meyer rubbed elbows with Campbell and dozens of fellow team presidents during meetings and social events ahead of the All-Star Game. Their meetings with NHL execs yielded plenty of good news for owners of WHL and CHL franchises. Campbell announced that an agreement had been reached to merge the WHL and CHL. Teams from the powerful new minor league were guaranteed at least four of the next eight NHL expansion franchises.

It was a strategic response to the threat posed by the fledgling WHA but also to the “almost insatiable” demand, as Campbell put it, for new pro-hockey clubs in major U.S. cities. To drive home the point, Campbell confirmed that day a new NHL divisional alignment and other details related to the recently announced addition of the New York Islanders and Atlanta Flames – the first NHL team in the U.S. South – for 1972-73. There would also be two clubs joining the league in 1974-75, setting the stage for that season’s entry of the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts into the NHL.

The pre-game gathering took place at the sparkling new Radisson South, a 22-story luxury suburban hotel and convention center built in 1970 and boasting “America’s largest indoor tropical court,” gourmet restaurants, “sunning facilities” and a dreamy tagline: “A World You’ll Never Want to Leave.”

Jim Wells, president of the WHL’s Phoenix Roadrunners, was with Meyer during the hotel meeting of executives when the Salt Lake owner excused himself to return to his room. Wells later told reporters that Meyer had seemed “in good spirits” when he left the meeting but added that he’d overheard the Golden Eagles president say to one of the other team owners: “I’m going up to my room to make a couple of phone calls…I’ve got a couple of things going on in mining. If they don’t work out, I’m bankrupt.”

Within 15 minutes, Meyer was dead.

That night, between periods of the All-Star Game, investigators took formal statements from Henderson and Martin, as well as Black Hawks’ superstar Bobby Hull and teammate Chico Maki, who were staying in the room directly below Meyer’s and also caught sight of his fall. Police questioned the four players about the circumstances surrounding Meyer’s death, including what they saw when they went to his suite after witnessing his horrifying drop onto the roof of the hotel swimming pool about 70 meters below.

Henderson was too shaken to join them, but news reports indicate that Martin, Hull and Maki noticed the key in the outside lock of Meyer’s room and let themselves in moments after his deadly fall and before police arrived. Hull told investigators and reporters they saw blood smears on a washcloth, the inside door handle and other places. There were broken eyeglasses and an empty wallet on the floor, an overturned lamp and an upside-down chair, which had presumably been used to break the room’s window so Meyer could gain access to the exterior metal beam. “I immediately wondered if there had been a hell of a fight going on in the room,” Hull told the Montreal Gazette at the time.

In the hours and days following Meyer’s death, speculation about the tragedy was rampant. To this day, the central question has never been resolved: was it suicide or homicide – a coerced jump, perhaps, with the victim’s wife and children under threat? A Minnesota grand jury eventually ruled that Meyer had killed himself, but Hennepin County coroner Dr. John Coe, the chief medical examiner in the case, wasn’t convinced. Why, he wondered, were there bloodstains and signs of a possible struggle in Meyer’s hotel room? “There are just enough things unusual that I’m going to leave it undetermined,” he said at the time.

Enough that he kept the case open. “There was no indication Meyer was depressed, despondent or contemplating suicide,” Coe said.

He also cited the discovery of two buttons on the floor of Meyer’s room that didn’t match any of his clothing. “These unusual factors caused us to handle this as a possible homicide, but we have found nothing else to support this,” Coe wrote. “We also have insufficient evidence to rule the death as a suicide.”

Al Rollins, the legendary former NHL goalie and Hart Trophy winner in 1954, had been hired by Meyer to coach the Golden Eagles at the start of 1971-72. He was adamant that the team’s owner wouldn’t have taken his own life unless somehow forced to do it. “He was in excellent spirits…happy and excited about what he was doing,” Rollins told the Deseret News three days after Meyer’s death. “I refuse to believe that a man in the happy frame of mind he appeared to be enjoying would turn around and purposely jump from a 19th-story hotel room.”

In Salt Lake hockey circles, suspicion that foul play was involved in Meyer’s death has persisted for more than 50 years. Now 66, Soutter was a Golden Eagles fan from Day 1 and held various positions with the team over the years, from scorekeeper to sales and marketing agent to videographer and even radio color commentator. He is currently writing a history of the Golden Eagles and said that few people connected to the team at the time of the Meyer tragedy believe he voluntarily leapt from the hotel’s heights to end his life. Soutter, a teenager in 1972 who vividly remembers hearing the news of Meyer’s death in a radio news bulletin, said the prevailing view in Salt Lake is that “someone came to his hotel room that day to collect the debt and forced him out onto that railing.”

Early 1972 should have been a heady time for Meyer. The Golden Eagles, by then formally affiliated with the NHL’s fledgling Buffalo Sabres, were in the midst of their winningest stretch of games in the team’s three-year history. The club was finally within reach of a playoff position at the same moment the NHL was aggressively expanding into minor-league markets in the U.S. – potentially including Salt Lake City, widely acknowledged to have one of the best hockey-watching venues in North America.

But there had been worrisome signs, as well, about Meyer’s financial situation. Only a few weeks after news broke in the summer of 1968 that he’d been granted rights to a WHL franchise, a report came out about a $2-million lawsuit filed over a Utah gold mine in which Meyer was sued for alleged shady business practices. Meyer and several fellow investors were accused of trying to extract payments from project partners, charging usurious interest rates and forging documents, purportedly wiping millions of dollars from the value of the mining operation.

In October 1970, Meyer gave a speech to a Utah business group that, in retrospect, reads like a red flag about his finances. He bluntly condemned the state’s banks and resource regulators for failing to adequately back Utah’s mining industry and making times tough for risk-takers like himself. “Utah banks, many of them founded upon mineral wealth, steadfastly refuse to make loans on good geological prospects,” Meyer said in his speech. “I could take the same prospect to the Republic National Bank of Dallas and get a loan just like that.”

Meyer was embroiled in other legal troubles between 1968 and 1972, little of which became public before his shocking death. There was, in fact, barely a hint of Meyer’s financial struggles in the flood of laudatory media coverage following his fatal fall. “Known as an extremely confident, warm person, Meyer’s personal credo was, ‘If you believe you can do something, you usually can; but if you do not believe you can, you never will,’” Salt Lake City’s Daily Recordeulogized shortly after his death. “He constantly believed in his hockey team. His personal record of business and professional successes and accomplishments was long and illustrious.”

An estimated 1,500 to 2,000 mourners attended Meyer’s public memorial at the Salt Palace, the incubator of his ambitions as a sports entrepreneur. Those attending the service wouldn’t have known about one disastrous business deal that had recently led to an $800,000 lawsuit judgment against Meyer, which a Maryland appeal court had decided – on Jan. 10, 1972, just two weeks before Meyer’s death – would not be overturned.

Nor could Meyer’s sorrow-stricken friends, family and hockey confreres have imagined that, at the time of his death, there was an ongoing Internal Revenue Service investigation into the Utah businessman’s chaotic financial dealings. The probe had been underway since 1970 and would lead to multiple stock-fraud charges in 1974 involving several of Meyer’s former business associates. Meyer himself was posthumously named in the alleged $3.5-million shell-game stock fraud in which promoters would buy the worthless stock of a defunct corporation, pump a few assets into it and then sell out as the price goes up, leaving other investors holding stocks that were worth nothing. IRS officials called it the largest federal criminal income-tax case in Utah’s history.

THERE WAS NO INDICATION MEYER WAS DEPRESSED, DESPONDENT OR CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE– DR. JOHN COE, CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER IN THE CASE

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Yet, the fresh light on the financial storm clouds that had gathered around Meyer in the final months of his life doesn’t solve the mystery of his death. Did his business woes drive him to suicide, or had they led to a violent confrontation in his hotel room and a homicidal act of coercion by an enraged investor or loan shark, possibly involving threats to Meyer’s wife and children?

Meyer’s widow, Juanita, insisted that her husband’s death could not possibly have been a suicide. In March 1975, she launched a lawsuit to collect on an unpaid insurance claim. She eventually secured a financial settlement from six life insurance companies that had initially refused a combined $1.87-million payment based on their contention that Meyer had killed himself.

Juanita Meyer’s lawyer, Arthur Nielsen, told reporters after the settlement deal that the payout sufficiently established that Dan Meyer’s death was not due to suicide.

Conscious of the intense interest in her husband’s death in Utah and throughout the pro hockey universe, Juanita Meyer sent a letter to the Deseret News following the belated settlement of her insurance claim.

“I would like to say that I had and still have a strong conviction that there was foul play involved in his death,” she wrote that March. “I believe we had a good case against the insurance companies, considering the fact that there were two types of blood found in the hotel room, according to the Hennepin County Crime Lab, and considering Dan’s personality. There were several important things to consider in my decision to discontinue the trial, including possible danger to my family.”

She added: “No amount of money could possibly compensate for the loss of a perfect husband and loving and exemplary father. I believe people will remember Dan for his great enthusiasm in his efforts to improve our state and community.”

The settlement came after the opening days of a civil trial that featured videotape testimony from Henderson and Martin. The two players repeated their eyewitness accounts of Meyer stepping through the broken window of his hotel room, with a “bewildered” look on his face, according to Martin, and dropping to his death. But the jury heard, as well, about the blood-smeared room, broken glasses and other signs of a possible struggle before Meyer’s fatal fall.

Now 81, Henderson’s memory of his taped testimony for the trial is “a little cloudy,” but he said everything he saw out the window of his own hotel room that day pointed to Meyer taking his own life. “I’m sure he committed suicide,” Henderson said. “I’m sure no one put him or threw him out there…He climbed out himself. Then he reached over and just let himself go. If he’d wanted to come back in, he could have…He could have got back in easy…All he had to do was turn around and go back in. He didn’t. He just got out and went over the side and then let go.

“I had no idea who he was. They told me later. What I heard is he went bankrupt and just couldn’t handle it, and that’s why he committed suicide. Now, whether that’s right or not, I have no idea…That’s a rumor I heard afterwards.”

I’M SURE HE COMMITTED SUICIDE. I’M SURE NO ONE PUT HIM OR THREW HIM OUT THERE…HE CLIMBED OUT HIMSELF– PAUL HENDERSON

Yet more evidence from the 1975 lawsuit speaks to Meyer being upbeat before reaching his room that day in January 1972. Jim McLeod was a 34-year-old WHL veteran who was having the time of his life in 1971-72 as a late-blooming NHL rookie goalie with the St. Louis Blues. He offered the court a previously unreported description of Meyer’s mood moments before his death.

McLeod said he ran into Meyer in the hotel hallway, where the two chatted briefly and then made plans to meet downstairs after Meyer’s phone call. “He was bubbling over,” McLeod told the court. “He was the same jovial self.”

That notion has lingered in Utah’s hockey community. When the NHL All-Star Game returned to Minnesota in 2004, Mike Runge, a former Golden Eagles GM and a Salt Lake City sports broadcaster who once served as Meyer’s stockbroker, told the Toronto Star, “My theory is that he was murdered. There is no way that this guy was going to commit suicide.”

And 1980s-era Golden Eagles owner Bill Acord, when interviewed by the Salt Lake Tribune earlier this year about Meyer’s business woes and unexplained death in 1972, summed up his suspicions the same way Soutter does: “He was borrowing from the wrong people.”

Meyer’s wife inherited the Golden Eagles following her husband’s death. She sold the team in May 1972, for a reported $500,000, to Charles Finley, then-owner of Major League Baseball’s Oakland A’s and the NHL’s California Golden Seals. “This is the way Dan would have wanted it,” she said at the time. “He had been in contact with California prior to his death.”

Three years later, in May 1975, the Golden Eagles, by then part of the CHL – which never did merge with the WHL – won the franchise’s first championship. Its players, including future NHLers Gary Holt, Fred Ahern, Brent Meeke, Lyle Bradley and Tom Price, circled the Salt Palace ice surface hoisting the Adams Cup. “Six years ago, a new game arrived in town: professional hockey,” read a celebratory editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune. “A minor league team called the Golden Eagles, organized by the late businessman and sports enthusiast Dan Meyer, started playing its games in Salt Lake County’s Salt Palace. Today, that team, that new game, occupies an ascendant place in the history of the state’s athletic events.”

Nearly 55 years after the Golden Eagles’ historic home-opener in October 1969, and with the NHL amid its first season in Utah, the mystery surrounding Meyer’s death endures.

>TRAGIC COINCIDENCE

Sadly, Dan Meyer wasn’t the only Golden Eagles owner to suffer a premature death

Less than 10 years after Dan Meyer’s death, tragedy struck the Golden Eagles’ ownership ranks again. On Feb. 27, 1980, team co-owner Thayne Acord, 67, and his wife, Lorraine, were killed in what police called a “vicious and senseless” double-murder during a robbery at their home in suburban Salt Lake City. Investigators concluded the couple had surprised two teenage burglars who’d broken into the home. While his wife was held hostage, Acord was forced to accompany one of the teenagers to a bank to withdraw an $800 ransom payment. But when they returned to the house, the couple were shot to death in a basement bedroom. “Acord is the second owner of the hockey team to die violently,” Provo, Utah’s Daily Herald reported. John Calhoun, 18, and a juvenile accomplice were arrested within a day. Calhoun was convicted of the killings.

Acord, a highly regarded community leader and philanthropist who owned several successful businesses, helped keep the Golden Eagles in Utah by purchasing the franchise in 1974 with co-owner Art Teece just hours before a planned announcement to say the team was folding. Acord’s sons, Bill and Dean, maintained the family’s ownership stake until 1985.

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