In 2017, Welch was sentenced to and began serving a forty-eight-year sentence after confessing to the killing of the Lyon girls more than forty years after the fact. He has never been charged with the Reker sisters’ murders.
Local teen and contemporary Herb Notch worked at the Zayre shopping center the girls visited the day they disappeared. Two years after their bodies were discovered in the quarries, Notch and an accomplice robbed the Saint Cloud Dairy Bar and kidnapped the fourteen-year-old girl working the counter. They drove her to a gravel pit outside of Saint Cloud, sliced off her clothes the same way Mary’s clothes had been removed, sexually assaulted her, stabbed her, covered her with brush, and drove off. This heroic girl played dead until Notch and his accomplice left, then managed to walk half a mile through the darkness to find the nearest home.
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.
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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