The Swanson Motel Murders

In November 1981 Priscilla Dinkel was 52 years old. She had been born in Minnesota in 1928, married Frank Dinkel in 1949 and raised nine children, two sons and seven daughters, mostly in Crystal, North Dakota, where Frank worked the oil fields. In the summer of 1981 the couple moved to Dickinson so that Priscilla could manage the Swanson Motel, an old single-storey place on the main drag whose rooms were let by the week or month to transient oil workers. Their daughter Melody had moved to Dickinson a few years earlier, and Priscilla often looked after Melody's seven-year-old daughter Danielle, sleeping in the manager's quarters at the motel with the child.

On November 16th, 1981, Priscilla cooked dinner at the motel for about twelve people, workers and locals. Two rooms were vacant that night. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Melody found him spooky; he would invite Danielle onto his lap and put his hand on her leg, and a few nights before the murders Danielle asked her mother not to let him babysit her again. this part of the story is covered for now

In the early morning of November 17th an oil worker staying at the motel came into the office for his usual cup of coffee before work and found Priscilla face down on the floor, bound and gagged with an electrical cord around her wrists and neck, her nightgown pulled down. She had splinters of wood in her hair and her skull was crushed; she had been strangled with the cord and beaten about the head. The police were called. details of the account remain covered until revealed About half an hour later, as school was starting, Melody's car screamed up to the motel and she ran towards the door screaming "my baby, my baby". Only then did an investigator look in the back bedroom and lift the bedclothes to find Danielle, her skull fractured and her body pummelled with a blunt object, covered over with the blankets. Both had been sexually assaulted; the girl had been tied up at some point. The cash box was about a hundred dollars short, but the room was not ransacked and there was no sign of a struggle.

The investigation struggled. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it They sent a single unexplained fingerprint to the FBI at Quantico and waited two months to learn that it belonged to an investigator who had not worn gloves. They turned to hypnosis and to psychics. In 1988 or so the Swanson Motel was torn down. By 1991 the police commissioner was pressing the new chief to look at the case again, and the FBI produced a profile, written up by John Douglas in Journey into Darkness: an offender who knew the victims and the area, who improvised with cords from lamps and a vacuum cleaner, who drank heavily, who was a loner with no luck with women, and who had almost certainly killed before.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now He said he had gone to the motel to talk about Melody, Priscilla refused him, and he "went berserk". He also admitted the murder of Della T. Harding, a 77-year-old woman found in June 1988 thrown from a bridge into a dry river bed in Batesville, bound, beaten, strangled and raped.

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now DNA evidence that might have been used later had already been destroyed when a lab freezer malfunctioned.