1886
The town grew up in 1886 when the railroad was laid through the area, and it was nicknamed the Magic City because it seemed to spring up overnight.
about 0:07:14The story
Minot sits in Ward County in north-central North Dakota, close to the Canadian border and about four hours and twenty minutes from Fargo. James introduces it as a plains town of wide open spaces, home to an Air Force base, with a population of 47,423. It grew up in 1886 when the railroad came through and was nicknamed the Magic City because it appeared so quickly. For its first fifty years it was a rough railroad town, called the crime capital of North Dakota, and during Prohibition it became a smuggling hub known as Little Chicago.
The story belongs to Angela Wilder. He joined the Air Force without telling her, and the family was stationed in Minot, where Angela worked part-time jobs and began studying nursing. They had a son together and joined a local LDS church.
The marriage turned abusive. He choked her, held her against walls and once told her he could kill her with a shovel and two bags of lime. In December, on a date James places in about 2009 or 2011, Angela came home to find him saying 'I love you' on a second phone. The messages were with Sarah, a woman he had dated before her in Alabama, and he claimed the affair was a revenge plot.
The divorce became final in May 2012, with week-on-week-off custody and exchanges on Sundays at one o'clock.
Angela reunited with an old high school sweetheart, Christopher Jackson, and he moved to Minot; by the end of 2013 they were engaged and had a baby son.
In October 2015 Angela discovered she was pregnant again, after a miscarriage earlier in the year, and she gave up work to protect the pregnancy while continuing nursing classes at Minot State University. On the evening of 12 November she served Christopher spaghetti and meatballs in bed and he left for his overnight shift at Walmart at ten o'clock. A few hours later she messaged him that she was scared, hearing noises outside the front door. He told her it was probably an animal. He took his lunch at two in the morning, missed a call from her, and assumed she had fallen asleep.
When Angela did not collect him at seven the next morning, Christopher took a cab home. He found the back door kicked in and called 911, then waited outside as the dispatcher told him to. Police went in and found Angela on the bedroom floor in a pool of blood, with forty-four stab wounds concentrated on her head, neck and upper left chest, defensive cuts on her fingers and her jugular punctured. Her two-year-old son was asleep and unharmed in the next room; her unborn baby did not survive. Detectives were immediately suspicious of Christopher, who had not gone inside, was messaging another woman, and had recently discussed splitting from Angela. He answered their questions, gave a consistent account, handed over his devices and passed a polygraph.
Her sister Linda said he had beaten her, that nobody had believed her, and that now she was dead. He had also been fired for shoving an elderly patient against a wall.
He also said Christopher had threatened to kill his wife and child.
The story collapsed.
The defence argued that Christopher had been involved somehow, though it accepted he was at work.
Her sister Abby moved in to help with the children. Walters called Minot police, became confidential informant CI 17001 and agreed to have his car wired. She said she would have cut off Angela's fingers and burned the house down.
The prosecutor and defence both asked for ten years.