Newspaper clipping tells of murder most foul

Many of our conversations today reference articles printed in magazines, newspapers or online articles for evidence to support our intellectual positions. We look to the media to make sense of events we don’t witness ourselves and provide us with meaningful information. The debate over what portion of this material is biased, inaccurate or inflammatory for political gain continues to rage.

Here is the beginning of one article, printed on Wednesday May 30, 1900, in the Anoka County Union. In its entirety, the article spanned nearly a full page with headlines spanning several inches in length, announcing “‘Twas a Hellish Tragedy!” that “FOUR SHOT DOWN IN COLD BLOOD” with “Terrible Wounds Inflicted By Bullets From a Forty Four Calibre Winchester Repeating Rifle” and “TWO CHARGES OF BUCKSHOT TAKE EFFECT.”

The article continues to draw readers into the salacious story with phrases set apart from one another for maximum visual impact:

“An Eight-Year-Old Boy Drops Dead, Pierced Through and Through By a Large Leaden Slug/His Father, Mother and Brother are Each One Mortally Wounded/MURDERER’S CERTAIN AIM/The Blaze From the Guns Continuous and Appalling/Two Daughters Escape and Succeed in Alarming the Neighbors./Physicians Summoned and the Injures are Carefully Dressed/Coroner’s lnquest Was Held Monday Afternoon at the House/A Clue to the Fiends and Arrests May Follow Very Soon.”

The text that follows reads more like a novel than a news article:

Murder most foul!

Anoka county was the scene of a murder Sunday night, that for the terribleness of it, the brutality, the premeditation and the means used, eclipses anything like it in the recorded of crimes in the great northwest.

A blot upon our county and upon our state.

Sunday evening was dark, and rain threatened. There was no moon, and the night was still. A family had gathered about their hearthstone to enjoy an hour or so in the quiet of the home. Outside, hidden by the dark, concealed from view from everyone, crept stealthily the form of a man. There was revenge in his soul, and that of the most revolting kind. He could see in the curtainless windows the happy family group, all of them unconscious of impending doom or danger, and deliberately he approached the porch, brought his rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the mother, who was back to him, and pressed the trigger. The bullet sped straight to the mark, and pierced the body of her whom the children clung to and called mamma. She fell from the chair and perhaps after she was down, a charge of shot shattered the left arm. As a tiger thirsts for blood when once it tastes, so this fiend incarnate was insatiate, and his next shot shattered the man’s shoulder and inflicted wounds in the back, face and neck. He fell forward on the table. Again the deadly [gun] spoke, and this time a leaden slug tore through the breast of the older son, and he fell and crawled for protection to his mother, who was in even a worse plight than he. The assassin capable of striking from behind and in the dark can have no heart, and a flash, a scream, and the poor, little, innocent, eight-year-old son lay dead upon the floor; shot through and through, with gaping wounds in his back and face. Two daughters could not be seen from the window, or else they too, would have been targets for the deadly aim of the man or men outside. Stealthily the criminals slunk away, and before help had been summoned ...

The story of this “frightful and sickening murder” is best told in narrative detail, in the words of the neighbors, the suspects and the attorneys, which is why the Anoka County Historical Society selected it for video production. To watch the first 10 minutes of this program, visit

AnokaCountyHistory.org. If you like what you see there, please purchase a ticket to find out “who done it” (and support local history!) online Sept. 19 at 7 p.m.

Rebecca Ebnet-Desens is the executive director of the Anoka County Historical Society.