I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last twenty five years writing about true crime.
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a twenty first century lens.
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
This is buried bones.
Hey, Kate, how's it going today?
It's going well, Paul, how's it going with you?
I'm doing pretty good. The weather's changing.
I know springtime?
Right?
Do you camp? And I asked this because haven't you and I both had reservations a little bit about camping, because of how many stories we've both been involved with involving people being murdered at camp side. I know they're going to be camp enthusiast who tell me to stop saying stuff like that, But that's the facts. That's what happens sometimes.
Yeah, you know, I've consulted on a fair number of cases that involve people who are out camping, you know, and of course a lot of bodies are recovered out discovered by campers, you know, as they're out and about doing their theme because it's in remote areas.
But you know, I wasn't a.
Big fan of camping, and then as I got into the off roading and watching some of these YouTube videos of these guys that will go on like you know, week long trips and they're just out in the most amazing places. They're isolated, gorgeous, you know, just nature and sitting around a campfire. You know, each one of them takes turns, you know, cooking up a meal and you know, having a drink here and there and swapping stories.
And it was just like, yeah, that's really cool.
So I spent, oh, I guess, the last year really building up my jeep for overlanding as well as acquiring camping equipment. And I got out twice last year, but I was doing so much travel, I wasn't able to do a lot of it. But I'm hoping, you know, now that the weather's changing, I'm hoping to you know, find a good group out here in Colorado and get out there and do some of this dispersed camping in addition to the off roading aspects.
Well, not to be negative here, but are you going to bring a weapon with you? Because I would absolutely weapon after everything.
Let's just say that I'll be well protected.
Okay, very good? And is Cora like camping? And does your wife like camping?
No?
And no, this is this is just me myself and I Okay, all right.
I did not grow up camping. I mean I grew up kind of on a farm. So I felt like I was sort of camping just because we were out in a rural area a lot, and we would stay out very late, and so I was sort of what do they call it now, like a sleep under you know, like when your kid goes out until one in the morning and you go pick them up and they don't want to spend the night, but they want to stay up really late with their friends. Yeah, so I would
sort of sleep under camp. We would just stay out by the river pitch black as late as possible, but we'd always sleep inside. So that's kind of my kind of camping. Okay, but I'm I'm definitely willing to you know, explore it a little bit more. But I do have to say I always feel nervous if I can't have a security system on an Airbnb or anywhere I am, or a door person or something just you know, because of the nature of the business that we're in.
Yeah, you know, with kind of the modern gadgets that are out there, you know, you can somewhat set up a perimeter, you know, around your campsite using you know, motion detecting lights and alarms and stuff like that in order to get at least you know, an alert that something is happening out if you're in your in your tent or like of course, the off road rigs often have you know, we have tools, we have recovery gear, you know, the cookwar stuff, and so there's a lot
of expense that goes into these supplies and they can be targets when you're out hiking or if I take my mountain bike out there, and so having some level of security is something that I most certainly will have, and so that that's something you may be unaware of, you know.
My biggest fear.
Is is the the big creatures, particularly if I'm going to be in an area with like a grizzly you know, because you hear about some some of these campers being attacked, because you know, in a lot of it is just knowing what to do with your food and your food waste and keeping it away from you know, where you are sleeping, you know, where you know your vehicles are.
There's strategies to try to minimize encountering that wildlife, but every now and then, maybe some things there's just something you can't avoid.
Yeah, I get it. I don't know if any amount of security is going to talk me into sleeping in a tent, even with the burliest of men in other tents around me, it still leaves me with a vulnerable feeling. But that's okay. You know, I'm also someone who has a dead bolt on the cottage here in my own backyard. You should well, my stepfather said, you know, you don't want to come home one day and find somebody living in your cottage. And I said, why would they do that?
And he said, because it's a house and it's unlocked. And I thought, okay, yeah, a point.
Yeah, no, that is a very real possibility.
Okay, Well, we're talking a little bit about security today. In our episode, we are going to be in nineteen twenties, North Dakota. We're back to the farm. Love it, love it, love a good farm story. But you know what comes with that we talk about that. What comes with that is there is sometimes a lack of security, with the exception of the gazillion guns that are around probably, but you know, you're isolated and they're vulnerable, and so you know,
we have a family that is under attack. So Paul, just before we get into the story, you know, we always like to give listeners and viewers a little bit of a warning. We are talking about the murders of children here as well as parents. So I just want everybody to be aware that there are some kids who end up being the victims of murder in our story. Let's go ahead and set the scene. So nineteen twenty
North Dakota. So we are kind of at the beginning of prohibition, but we're in sort of, you know, a very religious area of the country. We're on a farm. So the farm is led by a man named Jacob Wolf. He is the patriarch. He's forty one years old. He's married to a woman named Biata and she is thirty five years old. So they have a bunch of kids. They have six daughters. I don't know if this is a situation where Jacob really wanted a son and they
just kept going. But they're close together. The oldest is twelve and the youngest is eight months old. And there's a thirteen year old farm hand named Jacob and his last name is Hoper and he's related to missus Wolfe's side of the family. So this is April twenty fourth, it's a Saturday, and this is a tiny community called Turtle Lake, which is about sixty miles north of Bismarck. I've never been to North Dakota. I've heard it's beautiful. Have you been to North Dakota?
I have not actually never been.
Okay, So we're in Turtle Lake and the scene set here is that there is a couple named John and Jesse Kraft. They are driving south toward Turtle Lake. You know, it's in the morning, Saturday morning, and on their way toward this area, they passed by the Wolf's family farm. So they're friends, their neighbors of these people. They think
there's something odd happening. This is historical context. This is what's interesting, okay, And the reason they think something's wrong is John says he had done the same route the day before. It was a rainy day and a rainy night. So the day that he passed by, there was laundry hanging out on the lines that I presume missus Wolfe had put out. Then it started raining sometime after John had passed, and he thought she was going to go and collect the laundry, as anybody would. Nobody wants dry
laundry out getting rained on. When he passes by the family farm the next day with his wife, the laundry is still hanging there, and it had been soaked all day rain the day before, all night rain. So isn't that interesting? I mean, that was what was alarming to him was he thought, there's no way this is right. I don't know if that's a kin today that somebody having their windows on their car rolled down or I don't know what that would be, but that was a red flag for him.
Yeah, you know, that's interesting. I mean he's very observant, you know, So he's noticing it in one direction, and then the next day he noticed it's still up and he's putting two and two together. So obviously this is the era that you know we're talking about is that.
You know, for somebody like me, I wouldn't think.
About that, but they're living that that life, and they're recognizing that's not right. It's almost like today, if you see a window screen off of a front window of a house, you know most of us would go, that doesn't look right.
I think I probably told you this story before. I interviewed a forensic psychologist who did a lot of interviewing of a f suspects, victims and all of that, and you know, I was asking her a story. I was talking to her about a tenfold story where you know, there's a man who murders his family and he had been in the eighteen hundreds and he had been just
spouting off really negative things about the Catholics. They're gonna kill everybody, all this stuff, which sounded to her to be, you know, like schizophrenia or something, some sort of a mania. So when I went to a historian with the Catholic Church and I described what this man was saying, he said, everybody said that about the Catholics in the eighteen hundreds. That's not crazy, that's social context. That's exactly what happened.
So then when I talked to her again, the forensic psychologist. She said, that's why you have to know that what's crazy in one country. What you would think is, you know, when they're saying stuff, you're going, well, that person has to be insane, is not insane?
Yeah, you know, and I think that's one of the things that I've learned because, you know, working the older cases, part of developing an understanding of the cases is understanding the area where the crime occurred at the time the crime occurred, you know, forty years prior than today. But you know, the types of cases that you're talking about, we've had such dramatic changes in our society. You know, that's early on. You do such a good job of at least you know, when you say set the scene,
it's not just okay, this is where we're at. Well, this is what's going on in history, this is this you know world, And it helps me kind of start assessing as you start getting into details of the case. Okay, this is how they're thinking back in the day, just like you did with the laundry on the clothesline.
Yeah, and you know, we have done stories about people drowning in cisterns and wells we don't see a lot of those these days, so you see that as a murder weapon much more common. We've done a lot of acts murder stories. Everybody had an axe because that's what the wood was the fuel source for a lot of these communities. So it's interesting to see how crime sort
of moves in sync with wherever we are. You know, we know that an axe is available in everybody's household in the eighteen hundred, So if somebody wants to go and kill someone and wants to use a weapon there, Sure there are kitchen knives, but you probably know where to get an axe. So I don't know. I just I always want to point out things like that, Like, okay, so that's what made John very alarmed. Was this laundry hanging outside that was getting soaked that no country woman
would have thought would be a good idea. So let me tell you a little bit about the wolves. Jacob is a very successful farmer. Like I said, he's forty one, well liked in the community. No red flags with Jacob. He's known for taking immaculate care of his farm and he uses sort of the latest machinery. He is someone who seems to be a loving father and a loving husband. Sometimes we talk about these farmers who are jerks. They're abusive there, you know, and that does not seem like Jacob.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of negative with Jacob so far. But we'll see. John Craft, the neighbor, pulls up to the wolf's farmhouse and looks around the outside of the house. He hears pigs rooting around in the barn, and he goes to check it out. And when he gets to the barn, this is when this story really starts to unravel. He sees three bodies, partially uncovered by dirt and hay. The distribution of the bodies is interesting. So there is Jacob the dad, and he
is dead. Two of his daughters, the nine year old who is Maria, and the seven year old Edna, are with him. Of course, John is very, very alarmed. So if I were John, I would have then hopped in my car and took off. He does not do that, and I guess Jesse stays in the car his wife. He decides to despite I'm sure, feeling very He goes to the house and in the kitchen. When he walks in, the table is set for a meal, but the chairs are disturbed, and there's blood on the floor, and he
walks over. There's a trap door that goes to the cellar that is in the kitchen, and this was very common, right, I mean you could kind of like bring things easily in and out of a trap door through the kitchen, could store all your produce and everything. I will also remind you that I have done many stories about people being murdered and then shoved down a very similar trap door into the basement area. So I'm sure he's aware of there being some kind of a danger here.
Yeah.
Yeah, So there's blood on the floor in the kitchen, yep, chairs are disturbed, as if maybe there was a struggle in the kitchen.
But no body's in the kitchen, no, okay.
He walks over to the trap door that goes to the cellar and when he looks down, so it's open. He looks down and there are five more bodies. He does not seem to go down to the cellar just yet. He looks through the rest of the house. He goes to a bedroom and there's a crib. And remember they had an eight month old. She is there. Her name is Emma. She's alive, she is freezing. She is soaked.
I think they had the windows open, and of course it's been this cold rain, April rain, so she is soaked and she is soiled, and she is very weak, but she's alive. Police will later say they believe that she had been on her own for two days with no food, no nothing. So we've got five bodies. They are a family of eight plus a farm hand. So now the Crafts are terrified. Now they leave, They're done
exploring because I think they think everybody's accounted for. So the only survivor is in eight month old and we don't know why. Jesse Kraft, the wife, takes Emma. John takes them both to the house and he drives to the town of Turtle Lake where there's a phone. Because it's nineteen twenty, especially kind of in this area, would have been very surprising for anybody to have a phone residentially unless they had a lot of money at this point.
So he goes, he finds a phone, and he calls the sheriff's office in Washburn, North Dakota, which is about twenty two miles away. And this is a good reminder of the time period because there is, like I said, almost no phones around, and then the closest law enforcement is more than twenty miles away, so things are moving in slow motion. These people are all dead. It probably looked clear to John that they were all dead, and
they had been for a long time. But I mean, lord knows how long it took from him discovering the bodies for then law enforcement to come from Washburn to be able to report to this. And that just seems like, I mean, you know, nowadays, hopefully you have police responding within minutes in some cases, and this.
Is very different now, you know, And I'm even thinking within that sheriff's office. It's not like back in the nineteen twenties they had a dispatch center. Yes, so you're reliant upon probably an employee of the sheriff's office actually being in the office and answering the phone, and then they somehow have to communicate, you know, to the officers
the information, and now the officers have to respond. You know, I don't know if the sheriff's office had you know, beats spread across the county or not, or are they all just centralized up there in Washburn and now they're having to drive all the way from Washburn down to the Turtle Lake area.
I don't know. I mean, I think we do have quite a few officers responding, so there must have been, you know, other places, but last twenty two miles is the closest that tells you how isolated Turtle Lake was. So we have a sheriff and I'm gonna say his name once because this is one of those names. It's Scandinavian, so it's Ula Steath and Rude. So he is actually with the state's attorney for the county and they have been traveling together to Bismarck, you know, on a case.
So when the sheriff gets the message, the state's attorneys goes with him and they go to Turtle Lake. And when the sheriff gets to the farmhouse, we know what happens. Boy, I mean, I could say it's the media, but it's not. The neighbors are everywhere. They're swarming this place, so it's contamination city, you could tell, all over the place, and they're there to help. But John says, it's okay. The bodies are exactly where they were when I found them.
Nobody's touched the bodies, but people are trying to be helpful, which doesn't surprise me. But you know therein was the issue that we have is there's no coordinating off this crime scene. I don't actually think that that ever does happen, So you know already you have a little bit of a danger of course, that things are going to get ruined and not be able to use in court if they can even track down who did this.
You know, my initial thoughts are because it's common to have to deal with a level of crime scene contamination just because of you know, family friends discovering let's say the deceased in a residence, possibly moving the body or checking bidles, first responders, officers, paramedics coming. You know, paramedics can make a suicide look like a homicide just because
of their life saving measures. So it's normal to have to When I first would arrive at a crime scene, I'm asking, so what all has happened since the crime scene was discovered, so I can take into account those activities. But at a certain point, like in this case, where you have multiple neighbors wandering around, you know, from my perspective, it's really going to be the trampling of critical evidence
that could be interpreted to help understand what happened. As well as in this day and age, evidence that potentially could be used to solve the case that you know, they've just completely obliterated, But it doesn't negate the possibility of getting still good information, you know, from from the crime scene.
And you're talking about two different crime scenes, I'm assuming because we've got the kitchen the seller, you know, together, and then we've got the barn. So somehow these three people, these two little girls and their dad were in the barn and then the rest of the family is in the kitchen. So there's so much opportunity for condamnation.
Right, I wouldn't necessarily call it two different crime scenes, you know, because I would I would be establishing a crime scene perimeter that would encompass that entire you know, at least residential aspects and the outlying grounds around where these two you know, the barn and the family house
is at. But yes, within that perimeter you have where the bodies are, but we don't know what's transpired yet, you know, so you could have evidence anywhere within that perimeter, so it really is one big crime scene.
Well, the sheriff immediately starts interviewing neighbors, figuring out when was the last time they saw the wolves. That's where they come up with the idea that Emma had been by herself crying for two days. That was the last time two days earlier, when I'm presuming Missus Wolf put up that laundry. There was you know, the day when it was raining, and then the next day when they were discovered. So you know, she's alive and she's being
taken care of by Missus Kraft. But the sheriff and the coroner put together a corner's jury, and we know these are generally lay people who come in. Their job is to try to establish cause of death. Right, Is that kind of the simplified way of explaining it.
Yeah, you know, the coroner's jury or grand jury. This is where now the corners puts on the findings and lays out not only cause of death, but are looking to the jurors to determined manner of death. You know, are you dealing with you know, homicide, accidental, natural, et cetera.
Well, the corner's jury, you know, comes together and they're gathering information, they're being updated. Let me tell you a little bit about what the sheriff thinks, and then we need to talk about how they died, and what the sheriff thinks the sequencing is This sheriff immediately wonders if this is a murder suicide, which was not going to
be unheard of in this time period certainly. I mean, I have read so many accounts of murder suicides, a husband's killing families or you know, killing their wives in the nineteen twenties especially and then closer to the thirties, as we're approaching the Great Depression, in the middle of the Great Depression. So I understand that way of thinking. Everybody died of gunshots. Everybody had been shot except the three year old Martha. She had been hit with the
blunt end of a hatchet. So Martha was not with dad. She was one of the people who was down in the cellar, and everybody else had been shot. And I can kind of give you more details about that, but I can say that Jacob Hoefer is the fifth body. That's the farm hand, and then there's the mom and three girls. So there's the three girls in the basement with the mom in the farm hand, and then the two girls in the barn with the dad. And then the survivor is the sixth daughter, the baby Okay, so
what do you think so far? I mean, that's a lot of people.
Yeah, you know, right now, I really don't have enough to be able to even.
Start thinking about what occurred. You know, you've got.
Of the eight homicide victims, seven are shot.
Right now.
I don't know is it just one gun that was used or if we have multiple guns being used.
You have a three year old girl that's.
Being bludgeoned, and the bodies are distributed. You know, there's two clusters. You have the father and two girls out in the barn, and then you have the mother, the
farm hand, and three girls down in the basement. Because we have these two separate clusters of victims, does that indicate that these victims were let's say the father and the two girls were out in the barn doing their normal farming aspects, whatever that would have been out in the barn at whatever particular time of day that this the homicide occurred.
And then everybody else is inside the house. Is everybody rounded up? You know?
And it sounds like there was some disturbance in the kitchen, and is maybe the mother or the farm hand Jacob, who's the oldest and is the male of this cluster, you know, is their resistance by these two larger victims, you know, and the offender or offenders had to now you know, inflict some sort of control mechanism causing bleeding in the kitchen before they're forced downstairs. Right now, I'm assuming they're killed downstairs, but that is just an assumption
until I get more information. But it seems likely at this point in time that the distribution of the bodies possibly is an indication of the time of day in which the homicide occurred, just because these people were doing their normal, you know, routine, and that's when the offender or the offenders attacked.
Well, I have two choices for you to go.
And the multiple choice it is it's which.
Door do you want? Do you want to hear about the weapon and the fatal shots with all of these people, or do you want to see a photo of the kitchen? And I think an okay shot of the trap door that shows some of the blood, a real photo.
You know, I love photos. Let me see the photo.
Okay, here we go. God, I thought you were gonna I thought you usually liked to go right to the autopsies, but see you should. This is where I get surprised. You surprise me. Okay, now I've already kind of blown it up, but if you want me to blow it up more, I can.
Can you see it so, you know, one of the things that that's kind of jumping out at me. And I see where the trap door is, which is, you know, towards the back of this photo, and it appears that there's a doorway of some sort beyond where the trap door is located. The two chairs that likely have been pulled away from the table, most likely during crime scene processing.
That there appears to be a saw, the handle of a saw on one of the chairs, and my suspicion is is that that that may be something that individuals involved in investigating the case used in order to be able to gain greater access downstairs. They possibly saw through
some wood aspect of the door itself. But of note in the foreground on the floor, now that I can zoom in on the on the staining on the floor, you know, of course, because it's black and white, I can't say, you know, if this is like red staining consistent with blood, but it has all the appearances of being stains that are are on this floor. And one of the stains is a long linear smear. Something is being drug, most likely a body is being drug along
this floor towards the trap door. You know, like there's a minor, you know, small pool of blood and it might be like an area rug that's right on the floor, right next to the kitchen table.
It's like burlap almost to me.
Yeah, you know, I would say it's it's it's a fabric of some sort and there appears to be a
pool on it. There's some nondescript white clumps, which all I can say is my speculation, considering that we have a bludgeoning victim, the three year old girl, that those white clumps could be brain matter, unfortunately, but I can't say that for sure in this photo, but there's a fair number of what appeared to be large drops drip patterns, as well as maybe some contact transfers of some sort of bloody objects, you know, touching the top of this. So there is you know, if I'm right, and that's
that's brain matter that's on the floor there. Than the three year old was hit with the hatchet upstairs and then you know, taken downstairs. It appears that the trap door has been removed, and I don't know if that door was hinged in any capacity.
Or if it just literally lifted up.
But there is what appears to be a large dark stain on the side that is facing the camera, you know, and if that's if that's a blood stain, that would be consistent with a blood pool, which would indicate that somebody laid on that location after bleeding for a period of time.
But it's disrupted.
It's right at the edge, and I can't see where it matches up.
If there's any.
Stained area on the floor that would indicate that maybe a bleeding victim was laying motionless for a period of time. But yeah, there's definitely some bleeding that's occurring up here, possibly indicative of either somebody was killed or severely incapacitated before being taken downstairs.
And it's interesting, you.
Know, you got five bodies inside the residence, and all five bodies are taken downstairs. So the offender took the time in essence to hide the bodies. That may be merely just to delay the discovery, even though the blood staining would be alarming by anybody walking into this location.
Yeah, but he didn't put the door back on the trap door because John Kraft said, when he walked in, you know, he went over right over to the trap door because it was open.
Yeah, you know, and that's that's significant.
And you know, I don't know if this basement has another exit where he doesn't have to come back up into the residence, or you know, he's you know, taking the bodies downstairs. Maybe something disturbs him. And I'm just using the heat pronoun and singular just as a matter of convenience. But if the offender is taking the time to hide the bodies downstairs, it is inconsistent to leave the trap door up like that, for sure.
Yeah. Well, I thought he just maybe dumped them, like from the he killed all these people and then pushed their bodies, dragged them and pushed them down into it, rather than placing them down. But what do you think about that.
I'd have to see the distribution of the bodies. But if that's what he's doing, it's still effort, right, It's still time. You've got five bodies that he's purposely putting down into this this hole in the floor in essence, So why do the effort to do that and not make further effort to cover up that may be where you know, he he henks up something outside, there's a noise outside, and he's going, got no shit, I got
to get out of here. Or his internal clock is thinking this is taking too long, and he just he bails.
You know. So the photo itself is pretty high quality.
This is something I'd be able to throw into photoshop, enhance it and probably be able to you know, get more information out of it.
Yeah, it always surprises me, hows the photos can be, you know, I mean American Sherlock. My book took place between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty three, and Oscar Heinrich loved photography and he loved crime scene photography and it just saved my bacon. Man, there's no better writing than
to be able to do it off of photographs. You have all that description, and he had so much detail, and he knew how to blow it up and present it to you know, he would take pieces of sand and blow them up so they almost look like boulders and print them out and or you know, develop them and take them to jury so that they could understand geology. So photography is more advancing we think in this time period.
Now, for sure, it always is, you know, and they were using very large format cameras and those you know, the larger the format, you know, basically the higher the resolution. You know, when you're dealing with this film based film is amazing. You know, my entire crime scene career, all I did was shoot film, whether it be thirty five millimeter or I was doing you know, four x.
Five sheet film.
And you know, digital cameras even today, with the high resolutions that you see, the high number of megapixels, they can't touch what film can do because you're talking about capturing light at the molecular level in film.
Well, I have one crappy photo for you, but I don't think you're not going to need it to be good. So look at the next one in that document that I sent you, and it's the house. It's super isolated. It just looks like dirt everywhere.
Yeah, so you know this is a photo.
It says it's outside of the Wolf House on the day of the funeral, and there's a lot of people wearing black, you know, kind of congregating in the foreground.
And the house itself.
It appears, at least the main part of the house appears to be two storied. A main floor and then maybe an attic that has a window in it, you know, with the pitched roof kind of I've been inside old houses like this.
You can go up into the.
Attic and you have to kind of duck down, and the angle of the inside of the roof, you know, the ceiling is angled with the angle of the roof and then attached on the right hand side in the photograph appears to be a small It almost looks like an add on to this house single story. I don't know if that would just be a single room or if it's subdivided. It appears there might be a chimney to that, so maybe a living space, a living area. And then you know, right where these two structures join,
there's an entry way of some sort. It looks like you walk in through a door. And this may be like a little little foyer, sort of like a wet room if you live in Colorado where I'm at, where you can take your winter clothes off without bringing you know, bringing all the you know, the snow and mud into the inside of the house. But the surrounding area, for sure, at least with what can be seen in this photograph, just looks, you know, flat and dirt.
Flat and dirt. Now I have a theory about those two rooms that you're talking about, because when I saw this photo, this looked an awful lot like my grandparents who were in Missouri had a root cellar. It wasn't attached to their house, but the entryway looked very similar. Where you walk in and it's above ground. You open the door, and my grandmother, my granny was what I called her, would line the shelves with empty cans and empty glass bottles, but then you went underground and that's
where everything was. So I wonder if this is the kitchen on the right hand side, okay, and the cellar and the cellar entry attached, because that would kind of make sense. I don't know if the kitchen would be in the main part of the house, but I don't know. It's hard to tell from any of these photos.
It looks like there's a chimney on both the main house as well as this secondary structure, you know, and there was that what appeared to be that wood burning oven. So those chimneys would indicate where that oven is located at. But yeah, I wouldn't dispute your thought on that at all.
It almost appears the main house. Those windows on the first floor, there's a lot of distance between the bottom of those windows and the ground, and so that might be indicative of beneath theirs, where there's a the basement, but I couldn't say that for sure.
Yeah, and I was going to go back up and look, you can see windows in the kitchen area. It's just hard to tell with this. I mean, it's you know, we need many more photos. But the next photo is a cutie Patuti baby baby Emma, who I will tie in love looking at baby photos, even though to be honest, you know, I am not a baby person. I mean, I loved my own kids, but the older that my kids got and the more self sufficient there were, the
more I seem to really appreciate them. But she's so cute and she recovers and she ends up having a very long, good life. But this is you know, this is her. This is a photo looks like she's got like a little rattle or something.
Yep.
So this next one is the last one I want you to look at. And I am showing you this image because number one, I think it is really interestingly composed and it's clear, and it's startling to me, So why don't you give me your impressions what you see here?
Well, you know, this is a photo.
It's showing eight caskets and then a large group of people, you know, dressed mostly in dark except for appears there's a few babies that are are.
In white, and then a building in.
The background to some sort you know, the caskets. What you know kind of strikes me first is the two caskets on either end are dark, and then the caskets in the middle are all light assuming white or very light colored. And then the two caskets towards the right, the two white caskets towards the right next to the
large dark one are They're small. Obviously these are little children, you know, so it's interesting they had to take the time to display the caskets like this and then get this group to pose for a photograph, and then have a cameraman using film based photography to sit there and
probably take multiple photos of this. I'm not sure it seems like an unusual photo to take, but you know, I think the number of caskets, the size of the caskets, it just indicates, you know, you know, this is a whole family basically.
Yeah, and I think that this is a town of immigrants, both like German and Russian, and so this is I think, a very tight knit community. I don't know if I've ever shown you any of the death photos that I've used, the death ones, you know, where they take photographs of people after they've died in they're in their caskets. I'm actually surprised we didn't get any of those with this, but that was such a tradition. Yeah, I think this
image is startling. I mean it shows the impact when you look at all of these caskets and you just think, of my god, somebody killed all of these people, right, it's very sad and to see the tiny caskets. But I've never actually seen male female designated caskets before. I think that's what you're saying. It's a little odd, but.
Okay, you know, and I was even thinking, could that be uh, you know, Jacob and his wife, you know, the adults, the patriarch and matriarch at the family and the dark caskets and then their kids. And I'm assuming would the farm hand be in this? Would Jacob the farmhand be part of this?
How many do we have we have eight people totaled, you have eight caskets.
Yeah, so I think he's also included. And he's he's a relative on the mother's side, if I remember you right, say so, Yeah, so he's he's he's included as part of the family.
Well, let's get out of the photograph area here, let's get back to the story. So, you know, we don't often get photographs, so I'm always grateful when we have them.
I am too.
Yeah, so the sheriff wonders if this is somehow, some way murder suicide, and then we start getting information back from the corner. So this was a shotgun and here's who had which injuries. Jacob the dad, the forty one year old. He was shot once with a shotgun at close range from behind and to the side, and that he was shot in the head, so kind of behind and to the side. He had also been shot once from a distance in the back. So I can just tell you all of these, or you can comment on
each one. So one kind of the back of the head, close range, one very far back but in the back.
Right, So this is this is Jacob, you know. And of course when you start thinking about murder suicide, you know, the most likely perpetrator of that within a family is going to be the husband father. However, the location of his shots, once in the back and towards the back of his head, kind of to the back side of his head, those locations suggest that somebody else shot him, and so at this point in time, I don't believe it's possible to conclude that Jacob shot himself with a shotgun.
And I'm assuming that the shotgun is a standard laying shotgun, not you know, some super sowd off variant. You know, that he would be able to potentially wield like a handgun, So that's interesting, you know, I think that's one thing I can conclude from that information is Jacob is a victim and he is not the killer.
Yeah, and oftentimes we do have the patriarch of the family as the killer, and it takes a while to sort that out. So injuries in the barn, Maria who's nine, has been shot in the back of the head at close range. This was an interesting detail. Her hair was singed so very close range.
Is that right?
Or does that matter? I mean, doesn't the shotgun singe everything in sight? Is that the point?
You know, it's when you start talking about hair being singed. The shotgun is close enough to which the hot gases that come out of the end of the barrel. It's not just the rounds. Whatever type of ammunition was used, whether it be a bird shot, which is more like your bebes, right, you have a whole bunch of little bebes, or you have like what law enforcement uses, your double ott buck, which is like nine marble sized rounds that
come out. And then sometimes we'll have a slug being used, which is this very if it's like a twelve gage, it's this very large single round, so that comes out. But then you also have the gases that occur during the combustion of the gunpowder. That's what forces you know, the rounds out. Also you have unburnt gunpowder, and that's what caused what you call stippling, how you see gunpowder.
Embedded in the skin.
And different guns at different distances will leave evidence of the distance that they were from their target based on whatever is present. A shotgun, of course, is going to you know, project its hot gases out further than a handgun, but not that much further, you know, So this is telling me that this is a fairly close range shot. I'm talking about within several feet again not knowing that you know, the gauge of the shotgun and the rounds.
But shotguns are devastating weapons. So if you have a reasonably close shot to somebody's head with a shotgun, these heads are not in good shape, you know. So this is a very ugly scene in all likelihood.
Okay, so now we know we've got Jacob who's been shot with the shotgun at close range from behind back of the head. And then we've got Maria and ednae year old and the seven year old who were apparently with him, shot in the back of the head at close range. And then you know, we have more people that we have to talk about.
Yeah, you know, so we got Jacob and the two girls who are executed out in the barn. Very curious to know, you know, what happened to the victims that are found inside the house down in the basement.
I think this is such a big story that we're going to need to address that in the next episode.
Okay, so you're going to make me wait a week then.
On an autopsy. I don't know if I've ever done that before, able to tell you what happens next. But yeah, this is a really intense story and with so many victims, is one of the probably the largest number that we've had, so I just want to make sure we take our time, so I will talk to you about it more next week.
Okay, Well, I'm looking forward to it.
This has been an exactly right Pa production.
For our sources and show notes go to exactly Wrightmedia dot com slash Buried Bones sources.
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Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin, and Kate Winkler Dawson.
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Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available
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