1918
On October 10th, 1918, two men working near a railroad siding north-west of Cloquet saw a passenger train pass and then saw fire burning through grass and wood piles; it could not be contained.
about 0:10:16The story
In May 1999 Katy Poirier was nineteen and living at Barnum, Minnesota, with her family near Little Hanging Horn Lake. She had just finished her first year at Fond du Lac Community College in Carlton and wanted to go into law enforcement, partly because she loved the television show The Profiler. She had been runner-up in the 1997 Miss Barnum contest, she water-skied, she was a Packers fan, and she had two golden retrievers, Goldie and Riley. She was engaged to Mark Johnson Jr, whom she had met at the college, and the two of them planned to become conservation officers or game wardens, perhaps in Montana or Wyoming once they had married and graduated. On the night of 26 May 1999 she was working alone on the late shift at DJ's Expressway, a small convenience store beside Interstate 35 on the outskirts of Moose Lake.
At 11.38 that night the store camera showed a man walking in, and then showed him walking Katy out from behind the counter with his hand on the back of her neck; investigators thought he might have had a cord round her throat, holding it like a lead. The man was white, about five feet eleven and 170 pounds, wearing a dark New York Yankees jersey with the number 23 on the back, Don Mattingly's number. Her checkbook and car keys were left behind. Shortly after midnight a passer-by called the police to say there was nobody in the store, with the lights on and the doors open, and within an hour officers had watched the tape.
Catherine Hannick, who had been working at the Subway sandwich shop next door, connected to the store by an internal door, told police that shortly before she closed at ten o'clock she had seen a man behaving strangely around the Subway, and that as she drove home towards downtown Moose Lake she found herself behind him as he left the convenience store property. He was driving a black Ford F150 extended cab pickup with white markings on the side, and she had got part of the plate: 557, and a final Y. She watched the truck weave, pull into the car park of a local cafe, and that was the last she saw of it. Katy's own car was still at the store.
The Poyer family were told at 2.30 in the morning; her fiancé came over, and by six the family were at Moose Lake searching. Within two days Governor Jesse Ventura had activated the National Guard, tracking dogs and helicopters were out, billboards asking where Katy was went up, a $25,000 reward was offered, and the case went on America's Most Wanted. None of it produced anything. On 6 June, ten days after the abduction, the search was called off. The family kept a headquarters going at the Moose Lake church, with maps and crosses on the wall, and the baseball player Paul Molitor recorded a public service announcement to keep the case in the public eye.
He owned a property twelve miles from the store. On 19 June police carried out a twelve-hour search there and found bone fragments and part of a jawbone in the fire pit, and a human tooth.
He said he had gone fishing that day, driven home to Richfield, then gone back to the Moose Lake property, stopping for liquor and a beer; that he had seen Katy working in the store, made a grab for her, chased her outside, forced her into his pickup and driven her to his trailer. He said he choked her from behind for about twenty minutes, then put her in a foetal position in the fire pit and burned her with wood and paper. He denied sexual assault, though he said he might have been thinking about it, and he accepted that the bones in the pit were Katy's. Forensic scientists found petrol residue in the pit.
Police had eliminated him after following some 300 leads.
The dental evidence was the heart of the state's case: two dentists testified about fillings in Katy's lower left second molar, tooth number 18, the second placed on 12 May 1999, two weeks before the abduction, using a 3M bonding product first shipped in March 1999, and forensic dentists testified that the recovered tooth was a number 18 with matching material.
In 2006 he wrote to a Bloomington police sergeant saying it was time to talk, and was moved closer to his family in exchange, but gave them nothing over three days. In 2007 the Minnesota Supreme Court denied his third petition for a new evidentiary hearing. He was held in Pennsylvania and transferred back to Minnesota in 2017, and is in his seventies.