Town note
The area was heavily populated with Sioux Indians when French fur traders arrived in the late 18th century.
about 0:06:44The story
His father beat him regularly and his mother, a determinedly midwestern woman, carried on in the kitchen as if nothing were happening. He taught himself piano in the basement and by his twenties was making a living as a travelling lounge singer, playing Motown and Frank Sinatra standards in hotel lounges across Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Wisconsin Dells. A booker in Eau Claire said his voice was smooth as bourbon. Women liked him too, until he turned strange.
In 1969, touring the northeast with a soul band, he suffered what everyone later called his first clear psychotic break. In a Howard Johnson's in Hartford, Connecticut, a switched-off television began talking to him, warning that men in the bar meant to kill him. On the bus he became convinced his bandmates were plotting his death, and at the motel he barricaded himself in the bathroom, saying the voices came through broadcast frequencies. He took a Greyhound home to Milwaukee convinced that most of the other passengers were FBI agents monitoring his thoughts through the overhead lights. In 1970 he was admitted to the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex with acute paranoid schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations, treated with Thorazine then discharged when his insurance stopped paying.
Through the 1970s he sang, drifted and discovered cocaine, which he said quietened the voices. By 1978 he was selling it as well, buying in Chicago and moving it through small Wisconsin towns. In 1980, at the Tombstone Tap in Medford, a three-month undercover operation ended with two ounces of cocaine in his Buick LeSabre and four more in his room at the Starlight Inn.
A bartender at the Lamp Lighter said he was still charming and still had the voice, but sometimes stopped mid-song and stared at nothing, as though listening to something nobody else could hear. He based himself in Eau Claire, renting cheap rooms and playing a circuit that ran from the Twin Cities to Madison.
In November 1984 he met Robert Williams, a 38-year-old computer systems installer, at Charlie's West Side Bar. Williams, recently divorced and lonely, had requested 'Fly Me to the Moon'. The two men became friends. On 18 March 1985 he wrote that the television had confirmed Williams was a demon operative and that elimination was authorised by divine frequency. On 15 July 1985 Williams drove over with a twelve-pack of Miller High Life. They sat on the back porch drinking while Williams talked about computer code. He excused himself, fetched a .357 Magnum from his dresser and shot Williams above the right ear, then in the torso, then in the head again to make sure the demon was expelled. He had spent three days digging a grave six feet deep and four feet wide behind the house, and had bought fifty pounds of quicklime at Hansen's Farm Supply claiming it was for pest control. He dragged the body by the ankles, cleaned the blood with bleach, poured in the lime, filled the hole and planted tomatoes. Williams's ex-wife reported him missing on 20 July; police decided he had simply walked away.
On 21 May he knocked on Severson's door with a six-pack. They drank and watched a Brewers game while Severson ate a Banquet chicken dinner. The blade snapped off in the muscle. He stripped off his bloody clothes, walked back to his own flat in Severson's bathrobe, returned with bleach, towels and clean clothes and spent three hours cleaning. Then he drove to Minneapolis and played a three-night engagement at the Marriott Lounge. Severson was found on 24 May and the death was ruled suicide or misadventure.
In June 1986 Sheldon Cleeman, 59, owner of the Palace Theater in Spooner, was found stabbed to death near the entrance to one of the screening rooms.
For a week he was a model tenant. Then the voices came through the television, and by the third week he was convinced Lundgren was poisoning him through the air conditioning. He complained about frequencies, about electrical interference from the restaurant, and dismantled a telephone because it was recording everything. On 20 November Lundgren gave him a week to leave. At 5.15 a.m. on 30 November Lundgren was walking the property with his coffee. He put the body in Lundgren's own 1983 Chevrolet Cavalier, drove it to a culvert on a rural road near Jackson, put it in neutral and pushed it down the embankment. He walked two miles to his hidden car and was gone by seven. Lundgren was found at 6.30 a.m. and died the next day; the death was recorded as severe head trauma from a motor vehicle accident.
A 23-year-old maintenance worker and part-time desk clerk named Paul Zwick was covering the night shift. At 11.30 p.m. a call came from room 7 about a broken heater. The first swing glanced off Zwick's head, the second put a hole in the wall. Zwick eventually punched him unconscious, ran to his 1978 Camaro and drove himself to hospital. When the nurses called the police he said he had been jumped and did not know by whom. He was due to report to the Navy on 5 January and did not want courts or trials; he told investigators years later that he just wanted to get out of Wisconsin.
They had met on a production of 'Peace Child'. By March he believed Hayden had been replaced by an alien duplicate. On 17 March he borrowed a .22 revolver and a box of shells from a man in Wisconsin Dells. At 5 a.m. on 26 March Hayden came home from his shift, showered, made coffee and sat studying corporate finance. He waited twenty minutes for the alien to emerge from the body. When nothing happened he realised he had killed a person. He returned the borrowed revolver the next day. Hayden's friends found him on 28 March.
He told detectives about Williams, and on 6 and 7 April searchers found Williams's remains in the Springbrook grave, preserved well enough by the lime for identification. Then he told them about Severson; the old case was reopened and the blood patterns did not fit suicide. Three .38 bullets were found in his skull. The death certificate was changed to homicide.
Three psychiatric evaluations found severe paranoid schizophrenia with command hallucinations; he believed he was doing God's work and could not assist in his own defence. He has been there ever since, through attacks on staff, a hunger strike and forced medication. Release bids failed in 2013, 2016 and 2022. In 2025, aged 78 and wheelchair-bound, he had another petition pending. Dorothy Hayden, Tim's mother, now 91, has attended every hearing. She said he took her baby and does not get to be free.