Her Adopted Son Died at 3. It Took 22 Years for Anyone to Look Again
April 11th, 1965, Ramsay County, Minnesota had an autopsy.
It had a coroner who looked at the body himself and believed he was seeing a battered child.
It had a police report, and within a month, it had a juvenile court that removed the dead 3-year-old’s older brother from the house.
Then, the coroner filled out the death certificate.
In box number 20, where he was supposed to write natural accident or homicide, he wrote one word, deferred.
It would stay that way for 21 years.
The coroner meant it as a pause.
He was waiting for the police to tell him more.
The boy’s name was Dennis.
He was 3 and 1/2 years old.
He had lived in that house for 2 years and 4 months since the winter his adoptive parents brought him home just after his first birthday.
All that time, the word sat in a county file.
Nobody crossed it out.
Nobody finished the sentence it started.
And because no death in that house had ever been ruled a homicide, the woman he lived with had never been charged with anything.
Her surviving son would later be sent back to her.
And that fact would persuade an adoption agency to give her four more children.
When a case worker finally read the whole sealed file and urged officials to look again, that word was still there.
And she says nobody answered.
It lasted until a woman who had been 17 when she gave birth to him walked into a suburban police station and asked to see the paperwork.
This is not a story about who killed Dennis Jurgens.
The people who mattered suspected that within a day.
It is a story about how one word on a government form held for 22 years and about the people it took to change it.
To understand how that word lasted so long, you have to start with the boy it was written about and with the 17-year-old girl who had to give him up.
This is her cold case where we go back through the cases she hid for years and find out what finally caught her.
If one word on a form holding for two decades already bothers you, subscribe.
It gets harder before it gets better.
Now, Dennis Craig Pucket was born on December 6th, 1961 in Sock Center, Minnesota.
His mother was Jerry Pucket.
She was 17, a ward of the state, living at the Minnesota Home School for Girls, a state reform school.
His father was her teenage boyfriend, a young man named Dennis McIntyre.
Jerry wanted to keep him.
She later told People magazine what welfare officials told her instead, that she was underage and a ward of the state and they could take him whether she signed the papers or not.
They also told her that if she gave him up, he would have a good home and every advantage she could never give him.
The last time she saw him, he was about 6 months old at the Scott County Courthouse.
She was given 15 minutes.
Before he left her, one more thing happened that would matter.
Jerry was planning to convert to Catholicism.
So, she had her son baptized by a priest.
She never did convert, but the baptism stayed with him and it shaped where he went because the couple who would eventually take him wanted a Catholic child.
And according to the reporter who later reconstructed the case, they would not have accepted any other.
A year after Dennis was born, Jerry married his father.
They had four more children together, three daughters and then a son.
She named the son Dennis Craig.
Same first name, same middle name.
Years later, she told People magazine, “I always thought I’d see him again”.
In December 1962, just after his first birthday, Dennis was placed for adoption with a couple in White Bear Lake, a lakeside suburb about 10 mi north of St.
Paul.
Harold Jurgens was an electrician.
Lois Jurgens kept the house.
They lived at 2148 South Gardenettinet Drive on a street full of young families.
They already had one son, Robert, adopted privately as an infant.
Robert was about 2 and a half.
The Ramsay County welfare case worker who handled the placement later testified that Harold was very enthusiastic about adopting Dennis.
Lois had concerns.
She worried about how Dennis would get along with Robert, about his age, and about the fact that he was bigger than Robert.
Years later, a social worker named Carol Felix reviewed that adoption file.
She found the case worker had noted Lois’s rigid manner and her need for perfection and had been persuaded anyway because Lois seemed desperate to make the adoption work.
Two women on Gardenette Drive had recommended the couple to the welfare department.
They were church-going Catholics with a steady income and a carefully kept house.
On paper, it was exactly the kind of home the system was looking for.
and Dennis himself.
The relatives who saw him at the big family gatherings on Sundays described him the same way over and over decades later to police and to the reporter Barry Seagull.
A bubbly, sturdy boy, happy and outgoing.
Where Robert was quiet and obedient and turned down the cookies relatives offered, Dennis took the cookies.
Robert, who would grow up to become a police officer, remembered being really happy when Dennis came into the house.
Before Dennis, he said the house had been very quiet and he had felt lonely.
Dennis was full of energy.
Dennis, he said, was not afraid.
The neighborhood children remembered the two Jurgens boys, too, mostly for how little they saw of them.
One girl who lived on the street recalled going over and trying to get them to come out and play.
They couldn’t.
Another neighbor remembered that the two brothers weren’t allowed to play with the other kids at all.
They were very quiet.
The first neighbor said it was a time when there was barely a language for what could happen inside a house like that one.
On July 7th, 1962, 5 months before Dennis arrived on Gardenet Drive, a team led by Dr. C.
Henry Kemp at the University of Colorado published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association called the battered child syndrome.
It warned that doctors found it hard to believe parents could injure their own children and that this reluctance was itself part of the problem.
The paper would eventually change medicine across the country.
The change came slowly.
Minnesota had required doctors to report injuries from the beating of children since 1963, but the broader malreatment of minors act would not pass until 1975.
In January 1965, Lois’s sister Barbara died of a brain tumor.
She was 36.
At the visitation at Lake Mortuary, 3-year-old Dennis recited the rosary.
He was wearing sunglasses.
That spring, White Bear Lake had news to celebrate.
The National Municipal League and Look Magazine had named it an allameric city, and the town was celebrating that very week.
On the evening of Friday, April 9th, 1965, Harold Jurgens drove to northern Wisconsin to do some electrical work for friends.
Lois stayed home with the two boys.
If you’re thinking about Jerry right now, 17, and promised that her baby would have every advantage she couldn’t give him, hit like.
It helps more people find Dennis’s story.
And the next part is the weekend those promises ran out.
Back on Gardenet Drive, here is what the record shows about that weekend.
Harold was in Wisconsin from Friday evening until about 9 or 9:30 on Saturday night, April 10th.
Lois later told White Bear Lake police that she had called him on Saturday to tell him Dennis was sick and that Harold came home and was up with the boy most of the night.
Years later, a family friend would testify to a different version of that phone call.
One, she said Harold told her himself sitting at her kitchen table.
We will get to it.
Sometime in the night, 5-year-old Robert woke up and heard his father and Dennis talking in the bathroom.
The next morning was Palm Sunday.
At about 9:30, according to what Lois told police, she found Dennis gasping in his crib.
Harold called the family doctor, Dr. Roy Peterson, who lived on the southeast shore of the lake.
Peterson remembered the call years later.
Harold had told him, “I think my son is dying”.
Peterson drove over.
The boy was already dead.
He was pronounced dead at about 10:00.
A patrolman named Robert Vanderwist had arrived.
He asked the doctor the obvious question.
What was the cause of death? Peterson’s answer, as the journalist Barry Seagull later reconstructed it from interviews, was this.
I can’t say at this time.
Peterson would explain many years afterward that the death did not look natural to him and that he could see there was going to be trouble.
Before Vanderwist left, he asked Lois whether he should call her brother.
Her brother was Jerome Zurwas, a lieutenant on the White Bear Lake Police Force, the second ranking officer in the department.
Lois said no.
If her brother were told, she said, there would be 50 people at the house.
Vanderwist backed out of the driveway at 11:48 in the morning.
The neighbors had watched it all from behind their curtains.
The squad car parked at an angle, the doctor’s big blue convertible, then the hearse.
By afternoon, the word had gone from house to house.
The younger Jurgens’s boy had died.
He had fallen down the basement stairs.
Some of those neighbors already knew more than they had ever said out loud.
Two women on the street, Dorothy Enker and Glattis Demars, had watched Dennis change over two summers.
They had talked about it with each other, aware that they were the ones who had recommended the Jurgenses to the welfare case worker.
According to Seagull, they felt it was none of their business and wondered who would listen.
across the street.
As Seagull reported, Donna Neely wondered how a child could fall down steps and die when her own children had fallen down steps and lived.
That was the explanation Lois gave both the police and the doctor.
Dennis had fallen the day before, she said, and he had a cold and a fever.
At 2:00 that afternoon, a pathologist, Dr. Robert Woodburn, performed the autopsy.
He found a perforation of the small bowel which had caused peritonitis, an infection of the abdominal cavity.
He found no internal cause for the perforation.
In his opinion, it had been made by an external force comparable to the force generated in a train wreck.
He counted between 50 and 100 bruises.
The county coroner, Dr. Thomas Votel, viewed the body himself.
He believed Dennis was a battered child, but he was told the White Bear Lake police were investigating.
So on the death certificate in box number 20, the box for the mode of death, he wrote the word that would stay there for the next two decades, deferred.
He was waiting, he would later testify, for the investigation to tell him more.
The body went to Lake Mortuary, where the funeral director was a man named Jim Hansa.
Hansa imbalmed Dennis with an unusually strong solution, and instead of placing the internal organs in the usual muslin bag, he sealed them in plastic.
This seemed small at the time.
Hans’s daughter remembers what her father told her mother when he came home that day.
That little boy did not die from falling down the stairs.
Someone killed him.
The next day, April 12th, a short newspaper item reported the death.
The boy had died of peritonitis due to a ruptured bowel.
The body bore multiple injuries and bruises.
The coroner and the police were investigating.
Dennis was buried in St.
ary cemetery.
About a month later, a juvenile court held a hearing about the Jurgens’s household.
More than 50 witnesses testified.
At the end of it, the court ordered 5-year-old Robert removed from the home.
So, in the spring of 1965, the evidence had pointed clearly enough at that house to take a living child out of it.
It had not been enough to bring a single charge against anyone in the death of the other one.
If you’re wondering how a court could take one child out of that house and leave the boy who died without an answer, subscribe.
The next part is about what that unfinished word made possible, including four more children.
Now, about her.
Lois Germaine Josephine Zurwas was born on August 12th, 1925 in St.
Paul.
She was one of 16 children.
One of her brothers, Jerome, joined the police force in the town where Lois would make her home.
The Zurwas family was clanish as Seagull described it and many of the siblings gathered on Sundays at their parents’ house with husbands, wives, and grandchildren.
In April 1965, she was 39.
She married Harold Jurgens, an electrician.
They could not have children.
A social worker’s later review of the family’s history, which became part of the court record, stated that Lois became emotionally disturbed over their infertility and received treatment, including shock therapy in 1955.
About 5 years later, the couple bypassed the state licensed agencies and adopted Robert privately.
Sometime after that, Ramsay County accepted them as adoptive parents.
On Gardenet Drive, she kept to herself.
Neighbors later described the Jurgenses as reclusive.
a couple nobody seemed to really know.
When one neighbor’s mother died, Lois sent a sympathy card.
In August 1963, 8 months after Dennis arrived, he was hospitalized with severe burns.
Lois told the doctor it happened while she was washing him in the sink, that he had turned on the hot water himself.
The doctor who treated him later testified that the area of the burn was unusual.
That was August 1963.
Dennis would live another 20 months.
In 1987, a long line of witnesses, many of them members of Lois’s own family, testified about what they had seen during the time Dennis lived with her.
They described repeated physical abuse and restraint.
They said he was frequently bruised, often had black eyes, and wore sunglasses, apparently to hide them.
They said he became steadily thinner and more withdrawn.
Some relatives told Seagull they had urged her, if she disliked him so much, to give him back.
Her answer, as they remembered it, was that she couldn’t because then they would never let her adopt another child.
And after the 1965 hearing, two families who had testified against her later told police that for weeks afterward, she had called them late at night, driven past their homes, and threatened to burn their houses.
To the case worker, she was a woman who seemed desperate to make an adoption work.
To the relatives around the table on Sundays, she was the reason a three-year-old wore sunglasses.
All of that was known to someone in 1965.
The bruises had been counted.
The hearing had more than 50 witnesses.
The coroner believed it was abuse.
So why did none of it reach a courtroom? Start with the box.
Deferred was supposed to be temporary.
Dr. Votel was waiting on the police.
But when detectives finally reopened the police file in 1986, Seagull reported it was missing pieces.
Robert Vanderweist, by then retired and seriously ill, told the younger detectives that a lot of reports were gone, including all of their interviews with the relatives.
There was also the question of the lieutenant.
In 1988, the Minnesota Court of Appeals wrote that there was evidence Jerome Zurwas had interfered in the 1965 investigation of his nephew’s death.
Zurwas denied it.
He told People magazine he removed himself immediately because of the family connection.
It wasn’t right for me to get involved, he said.
The police chief in 1987 said he doubted Zurwas had the authority to block an investigation at all.
Zurwas was never charged with anything, and he maintained until his death in 1997 that he did not interfere.
Then there was the hearing.
More than 50 witnesses testified, but not everyone who knew the most told the truth.
One of Lois’s sisters later told police, Seagull reported, that she had not testified truthfully in 1965 because she felt the family should stick together and their father had told them to.
And when the hearing was over, its record was sealed the way juvenile files are.
As Barry Seagull later wrote, the decisions that followed were made by people who had never seen the photographs of Dennis’s body.
The first of those decisions came in 1969.
By then, the Jurgens had moved to rural Stillwater, hired a new lawyer, and agreed to psychiatric evaluations.
According to Seagull, doctors on both sides found Lois fit.
A Ramsay County social worker, Marian Dina Nord, opposed giving Robert back, convinced that Dennis had been killed.
She later told police she had been discouraged by her supervisors and that an assistant county attorney had told her Dennis’s file was missing.
With the prosecutor and the welfare department no longer opposed, the judge, Archie Gingold, returned Robert, just turning 10, to the Urganses.
I was left helpless at that point, Gingold told Seagull.
Then came 1972, and this is the part of the record that is hardest to read.
Four siblings in Kentucky, three brothers and a sister, needed a home together.
Kentucky wanted them off welfare and placed in a Catholic family.
Lutheran Social Services processed the Jurgens’s application.
They had a supportive letter from their pastor, Father Bernard Riser.
All of their psychological evaluations were favorable.
According to Seagull, they now earned $16,000 a year and had hired a lawyer to press their case.
Some social workers objected because they knew a child had died in that home.
Their supervisors overruled them.
The reasoning, as Seagull reconstructed it from the files, came down to one fact.
Yes, a child had died in their home, but the Jurgenses had never been charged criminally.
They had never been charged because the death had never been ruled a homicide.
It had never been ruled a homicide because the coroner never finished the certificate.
And the certificate was never finished because of one word, still sitting in box number 20, deferred.
3 years later in 1975, the two oldest Kentucky children ran away and told police what life inside that house was like.
One of the boys, Grant, later told Seagull it was so crazy that it almost seemed normal.
A Washington County case worker, Carol Felix, was assigned to investigate.
She was allowed to read and copy something most people had long since lost sight of, the sealed 1965 file.
She became convinced Dennis’s death had been mishandled.
She wrote to officials in both counties urging them to look at it again.
She says she received no answers.
They all dropped the ball, she said later.
A judge removed all four Kentucky children.
And in 1976, the couple consented to the termination of their parental rights.
So why did a coroner who believed it was abuse, a hearing with 50 witnesses, and a case worker holding the entire file never add up to a charge? The county attorney who finally brought one answered that himself in 1987.
Tom Foley said, “Back in 1965, nobody believed child abuse could happen in a white suburban middle-class family.
Four more children had paid for that belief.
And in St.
Paul, a woman who had never stopped thinking about the baby she gave up still had no idea that he was gone”.
Jerry’s own life had never been easy.
Her mother left the family before she was old enough to remember her.
She was raised by her father, a truck driver, and a stepmother, and she was a rebellious teenager.
When she became pregnant at 17, she was sent to the reform school.
She later told people that in those days, if you skipped school, ran away from home, or got pregnant, they labeled you encourageable and locked you up.
After Dennis, she raised four children, much of the time on her own, managing apartment buildings and sometimes relying on welfare.
In 1980, Jerry, by then Jerry Sherwood, after a second marriage, decided to look for her son.
He would have been 18.
She told People magazine she thought he might not want to see her, but that if he knew he had three sisters and a brother, he might want to see them.
She contacted the Ramsay County Welfare Department.
An official there broke the news.
Her son had died on April 11th, 1965.
She said it was 3 days before she stopped crying.
Then she visited his grave at St.
Mary’s and stopped afterward at a nearby mortuary.
Kept with his records.
There was a clipping, that short newspaper item from April 12th, 1965.
She told people her first thought reading it was that he had been beaten to death.
In early 1981, she found a phone number for Lois Jurgens and called it.
Lois answered.
Jerry remembered a pleasant sounding woman who said she had thought Jerry was told about the death long ago.
Lois said Dennis had been a good, happy little boy.
She said that when he was found, he had black blotches all over his body and they didn’t know where they had come from.
Jerry asked for a picture of him.
Lois promised to mail one along with a sweater from his baptism.
Jerry gave her name, number, and address and waited.
6 weeks passed.
Nothing came.
When Jerry called again, the number had been changed.
It was unlisted.
Then came 6 years of silence.
Jerry was getting by partly on welfare.
And as she later told Seagull, she was afraid of the system she depended on.
In September 1986, she told the whole story to a friend who was so angry she shouted at Jerry to forget her legal rights and think about her moral right to know.
Jerry sent her daughter Rhonda to the courthouse for a copy of Dennis’s death certificate.
When Jerry looked at it, something seemed strange.
In box number 20, the coroner had never written natural or accident or homicide.
He had written deferred.
The certificate, she realized, had never been completed.
On September 11th, 1986, Jerry Sherwood walked into the White Bear Lake Police Department and said her son had been beaten to death.
Lieutenant Clarence Harvey pulled the 21-year-old file and began to read it aloud.
Rhonda later described her mother growing whiter and whiter as he went through where the bruises were, shaking as she listened.
Harvey said afterward that he began to wonder why there had never been a prosecution.
It had taken a phone call, a promise that never came in the mail, 6 years of being afraid, and one photocopy of a form.
Harvey carried her questions to the Ramsay County Medical Examiner.
If you’re holding your breath for Jerry right now, hit like because the next part is what happened when a forensic pathologist finally read a file that had been waiting 21 years for him.
Now, according to Seagull, in 1965, the Ramsay County Coroner had been a part-time general practitioner.
By 1986, the office belonged to Dr. Michael McGee, an experienced full-time forensic pathologist.
McGee read the death certificate, the 1965 autopsy report, the old police file, and the photographs.
He later told People magazine, “It isn’t some medical mystery.
I looked at the autopsy report and said, “Child abuse”.
On October 5th, 1986, according to Seagull, McGee called Dr. Tom Votel, the coroner who had written that word in 1965 and was now in private practice in St.
Paul.
He told Votel he was about to change one of his old death certificates.
Vautell said he remembered the boy and had never forgotten the case.
2 days later, McGee warned county attorney Tom Foley that a letter was coming by Courier.
That October, McGee changed the certificate.
Mode of death, homicide.
Cause of death, peritonitis from the perforation due to traumatic injuries consistent with battered child syndrome.
21 and a half years after it was written, box number 20 finally had an answer.
But McGee would later concede under oath the one fact the defense would build its case around.
He made that change before any new examination.
He had no evidence other than what had been available in 1965.
The case went to two assistant county attorneys, Melinda Ellledge and Clayton Robinson Jr.
, and to two White Bear Lake detectives, Greg Kindle and Ron Mian.
Melinda Ell reported, was adopted herself, and her own son was exactly the age Dennis had been when he died.
The missing interviews hardly mattered.
This time, as Seagull reported, the relatives called the detectives, and there was one witness nobody had questioned in 1965.
Robert Jurgens was 26 now, married with a three-year-old son of his own, living in Krookton in northern Minnesota.
He was a police officer.
Lois had already called him, frightened, Seagull reported, asking whether they were going to come and take her away.
In later calls, he told Seagull his parents urged him to say nothing to anyone because they had hired a very good attorney.
He decided to cooperate anyway.
On October 17th, 1986, Kindle and Mi flew to Krookton.
Worried about how he would take it, they showed him the 1965 photographs of his brother.
As Seagull told it, Robert shrugged.
Dennis always looked like that.
In January 1987, McGee exumed Dennis’s body from St.
Mary’s Cemetery.
An exumation is the legal removal of a burial so that a pathologist can examine the body again.
What survives after two decades depends largely on the imbalming and on how the organs were stored.
McGee’s question was narrow.
Was there a hole in the small bowel? And could anything other than a blow have made it? This is where Jim Hansa’s choice came back.
The strong solution, the plastic instead of muslin.
Hansa had told investigators the body would be in good condition even after 22 years.
It was.
Dennis was dressed as he had been buried in turquoise shorts with a matching vest, a long-sleeved white dress shirt, and a bow tie.
A crown of flowers placed there by Hansa in 1965 lay withered on his head.
Seagull later wrote that it was as if the funeral director had foreseen a day when someone would come looking.
McGee found the perforation.
He would testify that it came from blunt trauma 8 to 48 hours before death and that it could not have been caused by a fall downstairs or onto a floor unless the fall was from a height of at least 6 ft onto a fixed protruding object.
Harold Jurgens was given immunity to compel his testimony before the grand jury.
He was never charged and the appeals court later found virtually no evidence of significant abuse by him.
On January 30th, 1987, Lois Jurgens walked past the television cameras into a Ramsey County courtroom, indicted on one count of seconddegree murder and two counts of thirdderee murder and pleaded not guilty.
It had been 21 years, 9 months, and 19 days since Palm Sunday.
Jerry Sherwood was in the room.
The trial almost began without one of its most important documents.
According to Seagull, the prosecutors had spent months searching for the transcript of the 1965 juvenile hearing, sending subpoenas across four states before concluding it no longer existed.
Then, on the day before the last juror was to be picked, a clerk called from the Washington County Courthouse in Stillwater.
They had been cleaning out old evidence lockers.
Years earlier, trying to get Robert back, the Jurgenses had filed a petition there and attached the entire 1965 record as an exhibit, 700 pages.
Ellled and Robinson drove to Stillwater, skimmed it, and danced together in the courthouse parking lot.
The trial opened on May 12th, 1987 in Ramsey County District Court in St.
Paul before Judge David Marsden.
Eligen Robinson prosecuted for county attorney Tom Foley.
Lois Jurgens was defended by Douglas Thompson.
United Press International reported it as the oldest murder prosecution ever to come to trial in Minnesota.
Three pieces of testimony carried the state’s case.
The first was medical.
Dr. Woodburn told the jury about the bruises and the train wreck force.
Dr. McGee and a pediatric forensic pathologist named Dr. William Sterner both testified that the bowel injury came from external blunt trauma in the last 1 to2 days of Dennis’s life and that it could not have been caused by the falls the parents described.
The second was June Bowl who had known the Jurgenses since 1947 and had later taken four of their adopted children into her home.
She testified about that conversation at her kitchen table in the early 1970s when Harold stopped by after work.
Harold told her, she said, that he had been out of town doing electrical work when Dennis died.
And then, in her words on the stand, Lois called and said she and Dennis had been at it, and I knew what that meant.
The third was Robert.
He testified about what he saw in the basement in the days before Dennis died and about the night his brother died.
Then, on cross-examination, according to Seagull’s account, Thompson asked him a question the prosecutors were not allowed to ask.
You think your mother caused Dennis’s death, don’t you? The courtroom was silent.
Robert answered softly.
Yes.
Earlier in his testimony describing a recent visit back to the old house on Gardinette Drive and walking into Dennis’s room, Robert had broken down and Judge Marsden called a 10-minute recess.
When the photographs of Dennis were enlarged and shown in the courtroom, Seagull reported Jerry Sherwood had to leave the room and several jurors wiped their eyes.
Thompson’s defense deserves to be stated fairly because part of it was true.
He conceded that Dennis had been abused, but contested how badly and asked that the jury be allowed to consider manslaughter.
The judge refused.
In a separate phase, he argued Lois had been mentally ill and belonged in a hospital, not a prison.
And in his closing, he went after the death certificate itself.
The entire case, he said in Seagull’s account, rested on the decision of one man.
On October 7th of last year, nothing nothing changed.
No new evidence, no scientific advance.
He was right, and Dr. McGee had admitted as much.
But as Barry Seagull wrote afterward, that was precisely the point.
Dennis’s death should have been called a homicide in 1965 for the same reasons it was called one in 1986.
On Friday, May 29th, 1987, after a few hours of deliberation, the jury found Lois Jurgens not guilty of seconddegree murder and guilty of thirdderee murder.
Under the law in 1965, that meant causing a death without intending to kill in the course of a felony assault.
The courtroom erupted.
The prosecutors hugged.
As Seagull reported it, Lois turned to her husband.
“Harold,” she said.
Harold, come here.
Jerry Sherwood, her face streaked with tears, told United Press International that bringing the case had been the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.
The following week, the same jury rejected her insanity defense.
On June 5th, Judge Marsden sentenced her under 1965 law to an indeterminate term of up to 25 years with her release left to the state’s corrections commissioner.
He said the evidence showed cruelty of barbaric proportions and recommended she serve more than 15 years.
One conviction, one child.
No other death was ever charged to her.
Out in the hallway, as Seagull recounted, Tom Foley told reporters the verdict was a tremendous victory for the system.
In a corner near the elevators, Robert Jurgens stood alone crying.
The conviction held.
On May 3rd, 1988, the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed it, and that July, the State Supreme Court declined to review it.
The opinion did contain a complication worth saying plainly.
The court found that letting June Bull repeat Harold’s words to the jury was an error under the hearsay rules.
It ruled the error harmless given the physical evidence.
The same opinion held that evidence of battered child syndrome together with medical testimony and evidence of recent abuse was enough to support a conviction and courts in other states including Kansas and Pennsylvania later cited it on that point.
Lois Jurgens served 8 years at the women’s prison in Shakipi and was parrolled in 1995.
Harold who had visited her regularly died in 2000.
There was talk that she had poisoned him.
An autopsy showed that was not true.
Jerome Zurwas had died 3 years earlier.
Jim Hansa, the funeral director, later died of cancer.
His widow, told the local paper he had been relieved that someone was finally charged.
They had children the same age as Dennis, she said, and it hit him hard.
Lois lived out her life as a widow in Stillwater and died on May 7th, 2013.
She was 87.
She had pleaded not guilty and there is no confession in the record.
On September 1st, 1987, according to Seagull, Robert came to a small courtroom in White Bear Lake and presented the two prosecutors and the two detectives with a plaque of his own.
Months after the trial, talking with Seagull, Robert asked himself why it had happened.
He said he thought nobody wanted to step on toes.
They just did not want to walk through that white picket fence.
In 1988, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the case called No One Saved Dennis.
Seagull’s book about the town, A Death in White Bear Lake, came out in 1990 and was a finalist for the Edgar Award.
Jerry Sherwood’s story became a television movie in 1992.
She has since died.
Of all the doctors, neighbors, relatives, case workers, lawyers, and police who saw something between 1963 and 1975, exactly one person was ever held to account.
But this was never only a story about the people who failed him.
Go back to the box.
In April 1965, Ramsay County had an autopsy, a coroner who believed what he saw, a police report, and a hearing with more than 50 witnesses.
In October 1986, when the word in box number 20 was finally changed, it was changed on the strength of the same autopsy, the same photographs, and the same report.
Nothing new had been found.
Barry Seagull, who spent months in White Bear Lake talking to the people who had been there, put it this way years later.
Nothing was suddenly discovered.
He said it was that something was acknowledged.
That is what deferred turned out to mean.
Not a ruling, not a mistake waiting for better science, a postponement.
The record sat in a county file and waited for 21 years for someone to read it and say out loud what it had always said.
It was a girl who had been told to sign him away, grown up and still afraid of the system, who finally made it say so.
Strip the case away and here is what remains.
He was born in Sock Center in December 1961.
His mother had him baptized by a priest and held him one last time for 15 minutes.
He took the cookies when his brother wouldn’t.
When he came to Gardenet Drive, his older brother was glad because the house had been so quiet.
And Robert would remember him as full of energy.
And somewhere in St.
Paul, a young mother gave a later son the very same name because she always thought she would see her first boy again.
Dennis Craig lived 3 years, 4 months, and 5 days.
He deserves to be remembered as a child who was loved, not as a file that was deferred.
If you want Dennis remembered as more than one word in a box, subscribe and share this with someone who still believes the paperwork always tells the whole story.
This has been her cold case.
Thank you for staying with him until the end.
