The Quarry Girls(2)
She was able to positively identify Notch, who served ten years of a forty-year sentence for the crime. He was accused of two more sexual assaults after his release. Despite the similarities between his crimes and the Reker murders, Herb Notch has also never been charged in connection with the latter. He died in 2017 without confessing.
JOSEPH TURE
In 1978, Joseph Ture broke into the rural Saint Cloud home of Alice Huling and shot and killed her and three of her children. A fourth child, Bill, survived by lying still inside his bedding after two bullets narrowly missed him. He had the presence of mind to run to a neighbor’s house when Ture left the scene. Sheriff’s deputies brought Ture in for questioning four days after the Huling murders. Though they didn’t know it at the time, their search of his car uncovered the weapon he’d bludgeoned Alice with as well as Bill’s toy Batmobile. Also found was a list of women’s names and phone numbers.
The deputies let him go despite having doubts about his truthfulness.
He went on to murder at least two more women, Marlys Wohlenhaus in 1979 and Diane Edwards in 1980. It wasn’t until 1981 that he was formally charged and found guilty of a crime—abducting and raping an eighteen-year-old and then a thirteen-year-old in separate incidents. Nineteen years later, thanks to impressive after-the-fact work done by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Cold Case Unit, he was finally charged with the Huling murders.
That’s two—and potentially three—serial killers operating in Saint Cloud in the ’70s.
It takes only the smallest amount of research to verify that these killers were unremarkable. They were single-track trains, men not strong enough to ask for the help they so clearly needed. The same assessment can largely be made of the initial investigative work around the murders.1 It took nearly thirty years to uncover Phyllis Peppin’s killer, and that came only as a result of his spontaneous prison confession, not detective work. No one has been charged in the Reker sisters’ murder,2 and Bill Huling didn’t see justice in his family’s 1978 slaying until 2000.
I was both surprised and relieved to learn that the killers didn’t merit attention. There was no sense to be made of their crimes, no feeling of safety to be gained by studying their motivation and behavior. They were simply broken creatures. To find meaning in this unsettling time, to locate people who were complex and compelling, I had to look to those whose lives were stolen, to the friends and family they left behind, and to the residents who fought to build a life in a community with so many active predators.
The women and children who were murdered were loved. Their family and friends are the only ones who can understand the depths of their grief, the life’s work of creating meaning in loss, of having their world shaped by violence they couldn’t see coming and did not deserve. I would not presume to tell their story. What I can do is share the experience of stepping outside an unsafe home into a town where multiple serial killers were on the loose.
I can also tell a story about the unexpected shapes of justice.
* * *
1 Season 1, episode 7 of the In the Dark podcast offers a well-researched dive into the missteps of the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office during this period and later.
2 Anyone with information about the Reker case is asked to call the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office at 320-251-4240 or the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Cold Case Unit at 651-793-7000 or 877-996-6222. Spotlight on Crime is offering a $50,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the suspect(s). More information about that program and the Reker case can be found here: https://dps.mn.gov/entity/soc/Documents/poster-spotlight-on-crime-mary-and-susan-reker-acc.pdf.
PROLOGUE
That summer, the summer of ’77, everything had edges.
Our laughter, the sideways glances we gave and got. Even the air was blade-sharp. I figured it was because we were growing up. The law might not recognize it, but fifteen’s a girl and sixteen a woman, and you get no map from one land to the next. They air-drop you in, booting a bag of Kissing Potion lip gloss and off-the-shoulder blouses after you. As you’re plummeting, trying to release your parachute and grab for that bag at the same time, they holler out you’re pretty, like they’re giving you some sort of gift, some vital key, but really, it’s meant to distract you from yanking your cord.
Girls who land broken are easy prey.
If you’re lucky enough to come down on your feet, your instincts scream to bolt straight for the trees. You drop your parachute, pluck that bag from the ground (surely it contains something you need), and run like hell, breath tight and blood pounding because boys-who-are-men are being air-dropped here, too. Lord only knows what got loaded into their bags, but it does not matter because they do terrible things in packs, boys-who-are-men, things they’d never have the hate to do alone.
I didn’t question any of it, not at the time. It was simply part of growing up a girl in the Midwest, and like I said, I thought at first that’s why everything felt so keen and dangerous: we were racing to survive the open-field sprint from girl to woman.
But it turns out the sharpness wasn’t because we were growing up.
Or, it wasn’t only that.
I know, because three of us didn’t get to grow up.
The year before, 1976, had felt like a living thing. America standing tall in a Superman pose, his cape a glorious red, white, and blue flag flapping behind him, fireworks exploding overhead and filling the world with the smell of burning punk and sulfur. Not only was anything possible, we were told, but our country had already done it. The grown-ups did a lot of congratulating themselves during the Bicentennial, it looked like. For what, we didn’t know. They were still living their same lives, going to their hamster-wheel jobs, hosting barbecues, grimacing over sweating cans of Hamm’s and hazy blue cigarette smoke. Did it drive them a little crazy, taking credit for something they hadn’t earned?