The Wolf Family Murder PT 1

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This is Andrea Gunning from Betrayal.

Are there two sides to every story?

Academy Award nominee Robin Wright stars in the girlfriend on Prime, a psychological thriller that will make you question everything.

Laura has the perfect life and a son she'd die for.

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Also starring Lori Davidson, The Girlfriend is a twisted game of cat and mouse where nothing is what it seems.

Don't miss the girlfriend, streaming now exclusively on Prime.

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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson.

I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holz, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved 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 21st-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 ask 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 campsites?

I know there are going to be camp enthusiasts 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 and discovered by campers, you know, as they're out and about doing their thing 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.

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 bring a weapon after everything.

Let's just say that I will be well protected.

Okay, very good.

And does Cora like camping?

And does your wife like camping?

No and no.

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.

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 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 um kind of with the modern gadgets that are out there you know you can somewhat set up a 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 uh 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 cookware 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's something you may be unaware of.

You know, my biggest fear is

the big creatures, particularly if I'm going to be be in an area with like a grizzly, you know,

because you hear about some of these campers being attacked.

And a lot of it is just knowing what to do with your food and your food waste and keeping it away from

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 deadbolt 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.

I mean, and I thought, okay, you have a point.

Yeah, no, that is a very real possibility.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, we're talking a little bit about security today in our episode.

We are going to be in 1920s, North Dakota.

We're back to the farm.

Love it.

Love it.

Love it.

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, I, 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, 1920, 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 Wolfe.

He is the patriarch.

He's 41 years old.

He's married to a woman named Beata,

and she is 35 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 12 and the youngest is eight months old.

And there's a 13-year-old farmhand named Jacob and his last name is Hofer and he's related to Mrs.

Wolfe's side of the family.

So this is April 24th.

It's a Saturday.

And this is a tiny community called Turtle Lake, which is about 60 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 setting 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 pass by the Wolf's family farm.

So they're friends, they're 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 Mrs.

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 akin today to 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 notices it's still up and he's putting two and two together so obviously this is the 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,

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 offenders, 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 there's a man who murders his family and he had been in the 1800s and he had been just spouting off really negative things about the Catholics.

They're going to 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 1800s.

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 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, 40 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 axe 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 1800s.

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, I don't know, I just, I always want to point out things like that.

Like, well, 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 41, 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, they're mean, they're, 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 Kraft, 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.

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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 fearful, 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 trapdoor 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 trapdoor through the kitchen.

You 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 bodies in the kitchen.

No.

Okay.

He walks over to the trapdoor 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 bedroom and there's a crib.

And remember, they had an eight-month-old.

She is there.

Her name's 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 farmhand.

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 an 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 is a phone because it's 1920, especially kind of in this area.

It 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 22 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 20 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.

No, you know, and I'm even thinking within that sheriff's office, it's not like back in the 1920s, they had a dispatch center.

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 gosh, 22 miles is the closest place.

That tells you how isolated Turtle Lake was.

So we have a sheriff, and I am going to say his name once because this is one of those names.

It's Scandinavian.

So it's Ule Stephen 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 can 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 lies the issue that we have: there's no cordoning off this crime scene.

I don't actually think 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 vitals, first responders, officers, paramedics coming.

You know, paramedics can make a...

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 they've just completely obliterated.

But it doesn't negate the possibility of getting still good information from the crime scene.

And you're talking about two different crime scenes, I'm assuming, because we've got the kitchen, the cellar, 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 contamination, 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 the 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.

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No kids, no stress.

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And it's all wrapped in the full Virgin Voyages experience.

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It's a celebration of thoughtful true crime storytelling, and we want you to join us.

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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 Mrs.

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 Mrs.

Kraft.

But the sheriff and the coroner put together a coroner's jury.

And we know these are generally lay people who come and and 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 coroners puts on the findings and lays out not only cause of death, but are looking to the jurors to determine manner of death.

You know, are you dealing with, you know, homicide, accidental, natural, et cetera?

Well, the coroner'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.

The 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, husbands killing families or killing their wives in the 1920s, especially, and then closer to the the 30s as we're approaching the Great Depression and 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 Hofer is the fifth body.

That's the farmhand.

And then there's the mom and three girls.

So there's the three girls in the basement with the mom and the farmhand.

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 if it's 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 farmhand, 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 farmhand, Jacob, who's the oldest and is the male of this cluster, you know, is there 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 routine, and that's when the offender or the offenders attacked.

Well, I have two choices for you to go.

It's a multiple choice test.

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 trapdoor 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 going to, I thought you usually like to go right to the autopsies, but you 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 you want me to blow it up more, I can.

Can you see it?

So, you know, one of the things that's kind of jumping out at me, and I see where the trapdoor 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 trapdoor is located.

The two chairs that likely have been pulled away from the table, most likely during crime scene processing, There appears to be a saw, the handle of a saw on one of the chairs.

And my suspicion is 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 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 on this floor.

And one of the stains is a long linear smear.

Something is being drugged, 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 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 appear to be large drops or 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, then the three-year-old was hit with the hatchet upstairs and then 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.

And

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 bloodstaining would be alarming by anybody walking into this location.

Yeah, but he didn't put the door back on the trapdoor because John Kraft said when he walked in, you know, he went over right over to the trapdoor because it was open.

Yeah, you know, and that's that's significant.

And, you know, I don't know if this basement has a 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 he 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 trapdoor 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 them, 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 purposefully putting down into 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 hinks up something outside, there's a noise outside, and he's going, oh shit, I got to get out of here.

Or his internal clock is thinking, this is taking too long.

And he just, he bails.

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

get more information out of it.

Yeah, it always surprises me how crisp the photos can be.

I mean, American Sherlock, my book, took place between 1920 and 1933.

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 juries so that they could understand geology So, photography is more advanced than we think in this time period.

No, for sure.

It always is.

And they were using very large format cameras.

And those,

the larger the format,

basically the higher the resolution.

You know, when you're dealing with this film-based film, it is amazing.

You know, my entire crime scene career, all I did was shoot film, whether it be 35-millimeter or I was doing four by 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 where you can go up into the attic and you have to kind of duck down 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 that 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, living area.

And then, you know, right where these two structures join, there's an entryway of some sort.

It looks like you walk in through a door.

And this may be like a 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 bring, you know, bringing all the, you know, the snow and mud into the inside of the house.

The surrounding area for sure, at least with what can be seen in this photograph, just looks, 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

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 there is 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 patootie baby, baby Emma, who I will tell you, I 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 I, the older my kids got and the more self-sufficient they were, the more I seemed to really appreciate them.

But she's so cute and she, 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 in white.

And then a building in the background of 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.

I'm 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 it, 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 and they're in their caskets.

I'm actually surprised we didn't get any of those with this.

Yeah.

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, 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, you know, Jacob and his wife, you know, the adults, the patriarch and matriarch of the family in the dark caskets, and then their kids.

And I'm assuming, would the farmhand be in this?

Would Jacob the farmhand be part of this?

How many do we have?

We have eight people total dead.

We have eight caskets.

Yeah, so I think he's also included.

And he's a relative on the mother's side, if I remember you saying.

So, yeah, so he's included as part of the family.

Well, let's get out of the photograph area here and let's get back to the story.

So, you know, we don't often 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 coroner.

So this was a shotgun.

And here's who had which injuries.

Jacob, the dad, the 41-year-old.

He was shot once with a shotgun at close range from behind and to the side.

And he was shot in the head.

So kind of behind and to the side.

He had also 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.

Right.

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 this shotgun is a standard length shotgun, not

some super sawed 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:

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 the shotgun singe everything in sight?

Is that the point?

No, 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 bird shot, which is more like your BBs, right?

You have a whole bunch of little BBs, 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 12 gauge 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 causes what we call stippling, where now 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 project its hot gases out further than a handgun, but not that much further.

So this is telling me that this is a fairly close-range shot.

I'm talking about within several feet.

Again, not knowing

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.

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 Edna, the nine-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.

Being able to tell you what happens next.

But yeah, this is a really intense story.

And with so many victims, this 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 Production.

For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Our senior producer is Alexis Emerosi.

Research by Maren McClashin, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Age Story of Murder and the Race to Deco the Criminal Mind, is available now.

And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.

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