by Amy Stonestrom
It was Memorial Day weekend and I was tending to my grandparents’ graves with my mom and young son at a Lutheran church cemetery in rural Minnesota. The exact year eludes me. I would guess my son was ten or twelve which would make it sometime between 2013 and 2015. I remember my son’s pre-teen outline standing in the grass next to my mom’s car, not the six foot frame he has today. This last bit—my son’s age—is the thing my memory gets hung up on, it’s the thing I can’t reconcile.
The cemetery lies behind my grandparent’s country church which my great, great, grandfather helped to build in the 1870s. Surrounded by corn fields to the south and west, it looks like a country church and graveyard should look except for the fact it doesn’t have the pointed part of its steeple which was lost to lightning decades ago. It was not practical to replace it and, here, practically is first and foremost. This place is, in a strange way, like home. I feel much more connected to the cemetery than I do the church itself since one-hundred-and-fifty years worth of my ancestor’s bones lie beneath the carefully manicured lawn.
I had wandered away from my son and mom when I came across five flat grave markers encrusted with orange lichen. Some of the names were barely visible. A 36-year-old mother named Bertha, and her four children, Else, Wilhelm, Albert and Martha, had all died on the same day—February 4th, 1910. Across from them there was another grave marker for little Frieda who had died almost exactly six years before her siblings.
As I walked to the end of the row of grave markers, I guessed what happened to this mother and her children and settled on the flu or a fire. The last headstone belonged to the husband and father, William, who had not succumbed to whichever fate his family had. William lived until 1944, surviving to the age of 73. It appeared that he never remarried.
Since I have been visiting this cemetery since my childhood, it seemed impossible I had not stumbled upon these grave markers before. This could have been because my ancestors occupy the far western part of the cemetery and this family lies smack dab in the middle of it. Still, smack dab in the middle is hard to miss in a cemetery so small. Especially when five people died on the same day. Based on their last name, some of their relatives had married my distant relatives.
Not long after my discovery, my great-aunt, Verna, pulled up in her sedan and I went over to say hello and to see if she knew anything about this family who perished in 1910. I had not seen her in some time and she immediately commented on how much my son looked like me now that he was older. This part sticks like Bit O’ Honey in my memory because she was only the second person to ever tell me this. No one had ever said my son resembled me until he was in fourth or fifth grade which would mean this interaction occurred in 2012 or later. After Verna and I chatted for a while, I finally burst out and asked her if she knew what happened to the mother and children under the lichen-covered stones. When I saw the look on her face, it was clear I asked the thing everyone had already agreed not to.
Her expression was somber when she told me William had murdered his wife and their children—aged two, four, eight and ten—because he had a severe mental illness that no one knew about until it was too late. “And what could have they done if they did know? They would never have thought he would have done this,” she said as she tilted her head toward their graves.
My grandfather was born exactly six months after the murders, in August of 1910. His mother, my great-grandmother Alvina, would have surely known Bertha. Given the minuscule size of this church and that it served as, not just a place to worship, but also as a school and the main gathering spot for this budding farming community, Alvina would have known Bertha quite well. She would have also known William and the children. Their farms were only a mile or so apart.
I didn’t ask my mom about it during the car ride home because I didn’t want my son to hear about it. My dad was reading at the kitchen table when we got back to my parents’ house. When I asked him what happened to this family in 1910 he looked up from his paper, grimaced and sucked in his breath loudly and shook his head back and forth. He looked around the kitchen to double check we were alone and leaned in as he put his elbows on the table, “He did it with an axe.”
I let out a high pitched shriek followed by an oh my god. Verna had failed to mention this. I was still wincing when Mom walked into the kitchen and I asked her if this was something that was discussed often through the years, given what a devastating loss it must have been to such a small community. She paused for a long while, while saying “ummmm” as if she going through long discarded manilla folders in her mind and reluctantly said, “Yes. My Grandma Alvina used to mention it sometimes when I was young, but very seldom.” When I pressed further and asked where it happened she said,“You’ve been to the farm where it happened. We picked up your confirmation cake there.”
And why not. You can’t have a confirmation without a cake and apparently the woman who made mine and everyone else’s in town lived on the same farm, but in a different house, where the murders occurred. I leaned back in my chair and struggled to absorb what my parents would have never told me if I wouldn’t have asked.
The family was murdered just a few miles from my grandparent’s farm which I now own with my mom, my husband and other family members. Everyone knows Lizzie Borden’s name and she either killed, or didn’t kill, two people 1,500 miles away in 1892. How had I not heard of an axe murder that took five lives where I grew up? It made sense my parents didn’t want to terrify me, but it was shocking it had slipped by every one of my peers who loved to tell scary stories. It seemed this story was all but buried by the community when it buried the victims. Was it simply too true to tell?
In 2018, I went to the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul to find out more. From a dozen or so newspapers on microfilm, I learned the event had put an international gaze on my small hometown in the most horrific way possible. The story traveled as far as Asia. The headline of the Duluth Evening Herald on the night of February 5, 1910 read in part: “Farmer Murders Wife and Four Children While Suffering from Religious Mania—Thinks he is saving family from the wrath of the Almighty.”
When his father found William on his front step in the bitter cold that February morning, his pocket knife was sticking out of his chest and his clothes were soaked with blood. He calmly explained that he had attempted to join his family in death but had failed miserably in doing so. After killing his family and before attempting suicide, he took more lives. Not far away, four young steers lay crudely slaughtered in the middle of the snowy yard.
From either a hospital bed, or a jail cell, he told a reporter why he had done it. Voices in William’s head, including the voice of God, had told him his family was in terrible danger. He believed the voices when they said the congregation from their church was going to drag his family behind horses if he and his family didn’t dig, with their bare hands, each body from the frozen cemetery before Easter. He went on to tell the press he “saved” his wife and children from the fate of the horses with the blade of his axe. He spent the next three and a half decades in lockdown at the St. Peter Mental Hospital in southern Minnesota.
I wasn’t prepared for the level of goreand detail a newspaper in 1910 was willing to print. Now, I knew much more than I wanted to. I knew that the children had been killed in their sleep and that several were beheaded. I knew that Bertha’s arms had been mutilated as she tried to shield her head. I knew that William said he had planned to kill his family with his axe at 3 a.m. but he had overslept until 6 a.m.
My interest in Bertha and her children disturbed my mom somewhat but she still suggested people I could interview to learn more about them. I was able to talk to a few of her cousins who were also related to Bertha and William. However, I’ve never contacted the couple who lives in the house even though I have the husband’s name and phone number. I can’t quite picture how that interview would go. “Sir, would you please tell me what it’s like to sleep in the same room where your great aunt was heinously murdered by your great uncle?” One can only assume a certain level of practical denial would be needed to reside there and they didn’t need my unwelcome questions breaking through the protection that denial and the passage of time provides.
I resorted to noninvasive stalking instead. One Saturday late in the fall, Mom drove me through the remote countryside past the farm site where the murders occurred. We went slow, but not too slow, because we didn’t want to be disrespectful. “This was always a show place when I was growing up,” she said. Which meant the yard was just so—every blade of grass and each flower worked in concert for the fullest effect. No machinery sat out in the open and the fences and buildings were all immaculately painted. It comforts me to know Bertha lived there. She did not always reside under the lichen covered grave stone. She once raised her children in a beautiful craftsman house long ago when it was still brand new.
Years later, I still have many questions but there is no way to find the answers even if I did gather the courage to talk to the couple who now occupies the house. Did the fact that William heard voices indicate he had untreated schizophrenia? Did anyone close to him see the signs of mental illness prior to the murders? Were Bertha and the children victims of ongoing domestic violence? How did Bertha’s parents and siblings and William’s parents and siblings co-exist in such a tight-knit community after February 4, 1910? How was it possible to move forward?
The night of February 3rd, William attended a meeting of some sort for church. The other attendees said he seemed fine. Bertha and William were apparently envied by other members in the congregation. He would kiss her on the cheek and make a modest show when he swooped her down from the horse-pulled wagon before church. Someone told me this a few years ago, but now I can’t remember who.
Which brings me back to my memory which is typically a source of pride for me. Several years ago I brought up the day when I discovered the headstones to Aunt Verna’s daughters saying our conversation occurred between 2013 and 2015. They looked confused and shook her heads. “Well that couldn’t be,” the youngest daughter said, “She died in 2008.” I must have looked confused too. “Do you mean 2013?” I asked. They assured me they did not.
At this point, there is no way to uncover more of Bertha’s history, no one living now would have ever met her. Hillary Mantel wrote, “you search for history it in the same way you sift through a landfill, for evidence of what people want to bury.” Given the international attention, it’s not so surprising everyone collectively forgot about the spotlight on the community as well as the horrific event itself. Stoic to the core, Midwestern Lutherans are known for their quiet and unassuming manner—their unobtrusive faith. It made sense they were ashamed that one of their own had committed such an atrocity and that mental illness, so stigmatized at the time, had elbowed itself so violently into their community.
I’ve asked my mom and son if they remember who I talked to if it wasn’t Verna in the cemetery and they don’t remember that particular visit. If I was asked to testify in a courtroom as a witness to that day, I would still say I talked to my great-aunt Verna at the cemetery on Memorial Day weekend between 2013 and 2015. I remember her voice, her glasses, her face, her hair, her kind manner and exactly where we stood near Bertha’s grave. I would consider the possibility that I spoke to Verna’s ghost, if I were inclined to believe that a ghost could drive a car. Which I’m certainly not—except for those rare occasions when, maybe, I am.
Amy Stonestrom's essays have appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, Superstition Review, Defunkt, Storm Cellar Quarterly and elsewhere. She has received awards from The Tucson Festival of Books, Streetlight Magazine and the Keats Soul Making Prize. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University. Find her at amystonestrom.com
IG: @amystonestrom
Twitter: @amystonestrom
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