This week: Who really killed the Wolf family? Edited by: Arakun the twisted raccoon  
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Quote for the week: "Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families."
~George Henry Lewes |
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Investigation of criminal cases was especially difficult back in the days before DNA analysis and other modern forensic techniques were available. Without a confession or reliable witness reports, many older cases were never solved. Others that were supposedly solved do not seem to have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by modern standards.
One of the latter type is the case of the Wolf Family Murders which happened April 22, 1920 near the small farming community of Turtle Lake, North Dakota. On that day, a farmer named Jacob Wolf, his wife, Beata, five of their six children, and a hired farm worker were brutally murdered.
The bodies were not discovered until a couple of days later when a neighbor woman noticed that laundry had been left on the clothesline at the Wolf farm overnight in the rain. She told her husband that something must be wrong, because Beata Wolf would never leave her laundry out overnight in the rain.
When the neighbor couple drove to the Wolf farm, they found horses and other animals roaming around the yard unattended. When the man entered the barn, he found a gruesome sight. Jacob Wolf and two of his daughters lay dead on the barn floor covered in blood. Inside the house, things were even worse. They found the bodies of Mrs. Wolf, three of her daughters, and a 13 year old farm laborer in a cellar below the kitchen. All appeared to have been shot with a shotgun except for one of the girls who had been struck in the head with the broad end of a hatchet.
There was one survivor, but she could not testify because she was only eight months old. The Wolf's youngest child, Emma, was found in her crib, alive and apparently unharmed.
In a time before cell phones and internet, the investigative process was much slower and more cumbersome than it is today. The couple who found the bodies rushed to notify the police chief, a retired farmer who had no investigative experience. The chief contacted the sheriff's office in Washburn, thirty miles away. A deputy was sent to attempt to guard the crime scene, but the sheriff could not be located for several hours.
Since the sheriff was young and inexperienced, the state's attorney and the police chief of the capital city of Bismarck played a major part in the investigation. Due to public outcry and the fact that it was an election year and ambitious politicians wanted a quick solution, the investigators were under immense pressure to solve the crime.
In spite of the deputy's attempts to preserve the scene, much evidence was probably destroyed by neighbors who went to the farm to care for the animals. Nobody claimed to have seen or heard anything suspicious the day the crimes occurred, which seemed unusual since there were many close neighbors. A shotgun was found in a nearby slough, but any evidence had been washed away, and nobody recognized it.
The Wolfs were generally well liked, and the police had trouble finding anyone in the area with a strong motive for the murders. Eventually, they zeroed in on a neighbor named Henry Layer. Layer had apparently had several arguments with Jacob Wolf due to Wolf's dog chasing his cattle. He was also said to have "spread gossip" about Wolf in the past. Due to the past conflict between the two men and the lack of other suspects, Layer became the focus of the investigation.
After several weeks of intense grilling, Layer confessed to the murders, but the methods used to obtain the confession were highly questionable. As soon as Layer was arrested and taken to the state prison, he immediately asked to change his plea. He claimed that investigators beat him, refused to let him sleep, and forced him to stare at pictures of the victims for hours. He said that they told him an angry mob was waiting to lynch him, and that the only way he would be safe would be if he confessed. Actually there was no mob. News traveled slowly with no TV or internet, and few people knew Layer was being questioned. Layer claimed that he only confessed out of fear for his wife and children.
In spite of rumors that new evidence had been discovered, Layer was never allowed to change his plea and was never officially tried. He insisted that he was innocent until he died in prison in 1925. His wife changed her name back to her maiden name and moved out of the area. Baby Emma Wolf was adopted by a local family and lived in Turtle Lake her entire life, eventually getting married and having three children.
While many people in the area were relieved that the crime was apparently solved, others believed Layer was innocent. Some believed that whoever actually committed the crime may have forced him to confess by threatening to harm his family. The evidence against him was completely circumstantial. The argument over the cattle had actually happened several months before, and it didn't seem to be a strong enough motive to brutally murder the whole family. The written confession that Layer signed contained many inconsistencies, and people who knew him didn't believe he actually wrote it. Others didn't believe that the murders could have been carried out by one person.
Many people refused to consider that Layer was innocent because that would mean the killer was still out there. If Layer didn't do it, they asked, who did?
If you write a mystery story that takes place in the past, it helps to do research on true cases of the time such as this one. The book, "The Murdered Family" by Dr. Vernon Keel is an excellent source of information on the Wolf family murders.
https://www.themurderedfamily.com/index.html
Something to try: Write a mystery set in the past.
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| | The riddle (E)
Mystery concerning a will, a beneficiary and a riddle
#2177935 by Sumojo  |
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Mystery: July 27, 2022 Issue [#11481]
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