The Murdered Family by Vernon Keel

Author:Vernon Keel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-934690-38-3
Publisher: Itasca Books
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * * *

During the next five days—starting Sunday afternoon—the four investigators spent almost all of their time interviewing the other eighteen people on their list.

Meanwhile, the two outside investigators retained by Langer’s office arrived on Monday to help out. One was E.F. Hezner, assistant manager of the Thiel Detective Agency in St. Paul. The other was George McDowell, a special agent for the Northern Pacific Railway.

It was decided early on that these men would explore the few leads they had involving other possible suspects, including the possibility that the murderers were from outside the area. One new lead was a rumor that authorities in Minot had arrested a minister and his son, and that they might be implicated in the murders. One possibility was that these were the two men who had accosted the Reichling boy just west of Turtle Lake the afternoon before the funeral. The outside investigators would follow up on all this.

Based on the many statements taken during the past week, one thing that the officials established was that most of the Wolfs’ neighbors were working in their fields, either plowing or seeding, on the Thursday of the killings. A couple of them said they might have heard gunshots sometime during the day but couldn’t be sure. When you’re walking behind your horses and turning sod or drilling seed, it’s a lot easier to see what’s going on around you than to hear it, they explained.

A number of neighbors testified to the fact that Jacob Wolf didn’t get along well with everyone in the area, that he seemed to have had particular difficulties with two of his neighbors, and that these problems went back at least a couple of years. One particularly good friend of Wolfs’, and who went to the same church, told how he had visited with Wolf on a number of occasions recently when Wolf had told him about those problems.

“He mentioned—as near as I can recall—the names of two of them,” the neighbor explained in his affidavit. “One was Will Brokofsky, and the other was Henry Layer.”

The man explained that Wolf said that he didn’t want anything to do with either of them, and that he never had anything to say to them except “How do you do” when he happened to meet them somewhere.

The last time this man talked to Jacob Wolf was a couple of weeks before the murders. Wolf told him about a brief encounter with Layer during a meeting at the nearby schoolhouse. Apparently, Layer told Wolf that if he didn’t let his neighbor’s cattle feed on his hay, they would starve. Then Wolf told Layer: “I don’t want your cows to starve. You can let them over on my land if you behave yourself.”

Chief Martinson reminded the other men about a conversation they had with another neighbor during the sheriff’s auction at the Wolf farm on Thursday of that week. This man told them how Layer showed him and his son-in-law around the Wolf farm after they arrived there about four o’clock on the day the bodies were found.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.