Saturday, February 13th, 2016, a quarter 9 in the morning, Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, 4 miles out on the ice, Gordy Lindall, a retired man from Roso, lowers an underwater camera through the hole in the floor of his fish house.
On the little screen, there is gray mud, then a straight edge, too straight for a rock.
He turns the cable a few inches, and the edge becomes the roof of a vehicle.
He lets the camera slide down the back of it until the screen fills with a license plate.
Minnesota. That plate was in a bulletin from January of 2013. A young married couple from Morehead, Kelsey and Matt Hagen, had come up to this lake for the Martin Luther King weekend and never driven home.
3 years and three weeks, 17 days of searching, 40 people, a helicopter, divers, sonar under the ice.
The official answer was that their car went through open water 2 mi east of the resort road.
In the summer of 2014, a court declared them both dead. They searched for 17 days, 2 miles from here.
The car was sitting right beside the road and there was one person inside it.
The whole case turned on a plastic st about 4t tall that stood in the wrong place that night.
Where was the woman from the passenger seat if her window was rolled all the way down?
Who left that stake standing on the ice? And why 5 hours before the car went under had someone at the resort put out a warning that ended with four words, “Do not go straight.”
3 weeks after Gordy Lindall looked at that screen, police officers would knock on the door of a cabin in Canada, and a woman who had been legally dead for a year and a half would ask them for one thing.
This is a dramatized story. The people in it are not real, but the places are, and so are the dangers.
For 20 years, Matt Hagen’s father spent the Martin Luther King weekend in the same place.
Friday after work, he loaded the truck, drove 4 and a half hours north from Morehead, and parked on the southshore of Lake of the Woods, where the rainy river runs into the big lake.
From there, a resort plowed a road straight out across the ice, and at the end of it stood a little wooden house with bunks, a heater, and holes cut in the floor.
Three days of walleye, and almost no talking. When Matt was nine, he started going, too.
In the spring of 2011, Matt’s father died. In June of that same year, Matt married Kelsey Angstrom.
They had met in 2008 at a friend’s backyard party in Morehead, a small city on the Minnesota side of the Red River.
Across the bridge is Fargo, North Dakota. Matt was a lineman for an electric cooperative.
When ice storms brought the wires down, he was the one climbing the poles at 30 below.
Kelsey worked across the river in Fargo in the claims department of an insurance company.
Her job was paying people when something terrible happened and making sure every dollar was owed.
From the statement of her mother, Sharon Angstrom. Kelsey read everything. Warranties, the back of the serial box, she said that is where they hide the part that matters.
January of 2013 was the second Martin Luther King weekend without Matt’s father. This time he asked Kelsey to come.
She had never slept on a frozen lake. She said yes. Thursday, January 17th, 2013.
They drove north and checked in at the Sumac Bay Resort, a family business run by Deb Nordquist, 51.
The Hagens rented a sleeper house at mile 6 of the resort’s Ice Road, paid through Monday.
From Deb Nordquist’s statement. She sat at my counter and read the whole rental agreement, both pages.
I told her, “Nobody reads that.” She said, “I do. It’s my job.” That small habit, reading to the last line and knowing what a piece of paper really means, will come back in this story, and it will not come back as a good thing.
The ice road started at the shore and ran north into Big Traverse Bay. It was a strip of lake plowed flat, wide enough for two vehicles.
And every tenth of a mile, the resort pushed an orange reflective stake into the snow beside it.
In daylight, the stakes looked like a dotted line drawn to the horizon. At night, they did something else.
Your headlights caught one, then the next, then the next, and the whole road appeared one stake at a time out of the dark.
On the drive out on Thursday, Matt told Kelsey the rule his father had told him.
Years later, Kelsey Hagen would repeat it word for word. Stay with the stakes. The ice knows them.
It is a good rule. Lake ice is not the same everywhere. Ice that holds a truck in one place will not hold a dog 50 yard away and cracks open overnight with a sound like a rifle shot.
The resort checked its road every day, and when the lake changed, the road moved, and the stakes moved with it.
Thursday and Friday, they fished. Kelsey caught the first walleye of her life and took a picture of it on the floor of the fish house next to Matt’s boots.
The next time her phone found a signal, she sent it to her mother. Saturday, January 19th.
At some point that afternoon, the lake changed. A new crack opened across the road near mile 4, and that part of the road was moved.
Nobody knocked on the door of the Hagen’s fish house to tell them. There was no reason to.
The new stakes were already standing. At about 10 6 in the evening, Matt and Kelsey drove off the ice to have dinner in Baudet, 12 m from the resort.
They followed the stakes in past mile 4 and onto the shore. That was the last evening anyone would be sure of where they were.
Phone records later showed that at 10:30 that night, Kelsey’s phone touched a cell tower near Baudet for the last time.
After that, nothing. By then, the wind had come up. The temperature was falling toward 25 below zero, and the snow on the ice had started to move.
Out there, they call it a ground blizzard. The sky is clear. You can see the stars, but at the height of a windshield, the world is a moving white sheet.
The only thing that stays still is the next steak. Sunday, January 20th, a little after 8 in the morning.
Deb Nordquist’s son drove out to Mile 6 with a bucket of minnows for the sleeper houses.
The Hagen’s door was closed. The heater was running low. Their bunks were made, their rods were in the corner, and their vehicle was gone.
From Deb Nordquist’s statement, paid through Monday, gone on Sunday. That happens every weekend. Somebody gets cold.
Somebody gets a call from work. We don’t chase people for leaving early. And so for almost two days, nobody in the world knew that anything was wrong.
On Tuesday morning, Kelsey did not come to her desk in Fargo. Matt did not show up for his shift at the cooperative.
Both phones went straight to voicemail. Sharon Angstrom called the resort. Deb told her the kids had left on Sunday.
From Sharon Angstrom’s statement. I said, “Left for where?” She didn’t know. Nobody knew. That was the first time I was really afraid.
On Wednesday, January 23rd, Sharon walked into the police department in Morehead and filed a missing person’s report.
The last confirmed place was a frozen lake 245 mi north. So, the case went to the Lake of the Woods County Sheriff’s Office in Baet.
The vehicle was not in Baet. It was not at the resort. It was not on any highway between the lake and Morehead.
Two people and a full-size vehicle had disappeared somewhere on 12 miles of road and 6 miles of ice.
Thursday, January 24th. At first light, a state patrol helicopter flew low over Big Traverse Bay.
About 2 m east of the resort road, the crew saw what everyone was afraid of.
A patch of open water, fresh, skimmed with new ice. Around its edges, broken plates of ice pushed up like something heavy had gone through.
Everyone who stood on the shore that morning came to the same conclusion. That was the place.
Under that open water, there was nothing. Where the car really was, a fisherman’s camera would show 3 years later.
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And tell us, would you have assumed the guests just went home early? For the next 17 days, the search lived around that patch of open water.
Chief Deputy Mike Oldm of the Lake of the Woods County Sheriff’s Office ran it from a heated trailer on the shore.
Around 40 people worked the bay. Deputies, volunteers on snowmobiles, men from the resorts who knew the ice better than anyone in uniform.
Divers went down on ropes into black water at 34°. A sonar unit was lowered through the ice and swept the bottom in long lines.
From Chief Deputy Old’s notes on the second day, fresh opening, broken ice, right distance from the resort, vehicle is there.
We just have to find the exact spot. Every winter, vehicles go through the ice on this lake.
When one disappears and a hole appears in the right place, why would anyone look anywhere else?
On the third day, a deputy took a statement from Deb Nordquist. One line in it was about the road from Deb Nordquist’s statement.
There was a crack at mile 4 on Saturday. My road guy moved the road around it before dark.
He told me he ran that line all night and it was fine. The deputy wrote it down.
He did not write down the road guy’s name because nobody asked for it. At the resort, they called him Lou.
He plowed at night. He was paid in cash. Nobody from the sheriff’s office ever spoke to him.
One man on that lake knew exactly where the Hagens went down. Nobody asked for his last name.
There was one more thing on the ice that week. On the fourth day, a volunteer on a snowmobile came across a single sled track north of the resort road heading away from the American shore toward the islands on the Canadian side of the lake.
In the search log, it got one line. Snowmobile track northbound, probably an angller crossing to Canada.
In winter, people crossed that ice all the time. The divers found nothing. The sonar found nothing.
Not a door panel, not a glove, not a single thing the Hagens had carried.
On Saturday, February 9th, 2013, the search on the ice was called off. In Morehead, Sharon Angstrom did something she never explained to anyone at the time.
Every month, she paid the bill for her daughter’s phone. The phone was somewhere at the bottom of a lake, but the number still worked.
If you called it, you heard Kelsey’s voice asking you to leave a message. From Sharon Angstrom’s statement.
I called it every night for the first year, then every Sunday. I just needed it to keep ringing.
In early June, when the ice was gone, the dive team came back with a boat and sidescan sonar.
Monday, June 3rd, 2013, they spent the whole day sweeping the bottom where the open water had been, a mile in every direction.
Mud and rocks, nothing else. The case went quiet. A year passed for Matt’s mother, Marlene Hagen.
Quiet was not possible. Her son had a house with a mortgage, a truck loan, and a life insurance policy through the cooperative.
None of it could be settled while Matt was only missing. In Minnesota, a person who disappears is presumed dead after 4 years.
But the law allows a court to decide sooner when the person was exposed to a specific danger of death and a careful search was made.
A car going through the ice of a lake in January is about as specific as danger gets.
Thursday, August 14th, 2014. The district court in Klay County in Morehead heard Marlene Hagen’s petition.
The judge read the search records, the dive reports, the log of the open water 2 miles east.
He entered an order. Matt Hagen and Kelsey Hagen died on January 20th, 2013 on Lake of the Woods.
Kelsey had life insurance, too, through her work in Fargo. $150,000. The first name on the policy was Matt’s.
If Matt was gone, the money went to the second name. That name was Sharon Angstrom.
What Sharon did with that policy, nobody outside her family understood until 2016. Remember it.
It is the most important decision anyone makes in this story. Then came three winters of nothing.
Saturday, February 13th, 2016. Gordy Lindall was 64, a retired man from Roso, and he had fished this bay for most of his life.
That winter, he set his fish house about 160 yards east of the resort road at mile 4.3 over mud at 27 ft.
That morning, he lowered his underwater camera to check the bottom before he set his lines.
The roof, the back window, the license plate. Then when he swung the camera along the right side, an open space where a window should have been, the passenger window was rolled all the way down.
From Gordy Lindal’s statement. I sat there a long time before I called. I knew what was in there.
I just didn’t want to be the one to say it. He called the sheriff’s office at 9:50.
By afternoon, the plate number had come back. Kelsey and Matt Hagen, missing since January of 2013.
On Tuesday, February 16th, the dive team cut a long opening in the ice next to Gord’s house.
A tow truck from Baudet ran a cable down to them. The vehicle came up through the hole nose first, full of gray water and mud.
Matt Hagen [music] was behind the wheel. His seat belt was still buckled. The driver’s door was jammed.
The frame bent where the door met the roof. The passenger seat was empty. The passenger seat belt was unbuckled.
The passenger window was down. Kelsey Hagen was not in the vehicle. On Friday, February 19th, the medical examiner confirmed through dental records that the man behind the wheel was Matt Hagen.
That same day, investigator Renee Sanvic of the Lake of the Woods County Sheriff’s Office spread two maps across her desk.
On one, the search zone from 2013, 2 miles east of the road. On the other, the point where the vehicle came out of the lake.
The two places did not touch. The vehicle had been sitting less than 200 yards from the road the whole time.
How do you miss a car next to a road you search for 17 days?
So, she went back to the night itself. She asked the resort for anything they still had from Saturday, January 19th, 2013.
Every evening, the resort posted an Ice Road report on its own page online. The page was still there.
At 5:40 that evening, a new report had gone up. Crack opened at mile 4.
Road rerouted west around it. Follow the new stakes. Do not go straight. It was signed with three letters.
Lou. The sheriff’s office already had a version of what happened, and it was not a bad one.
The vehicle went through the ice. Matt was trapped behind a jammed door. Kelsey got out through her window, climbed onto the ice, and tried to walk for help.
In a ground blizzard at 25 below, wet to the skin, a person lasts minutes, not hours.
Somewhere out on that bay, she lay down in the snow, and by spring, the lake had taken her.
It happens. People who have worked that lake for 30 years have seen it happen.
The report was ready to be written that way. Investigator Renee Sanvic asked for one more week.
She was 38, 9 years with the sheriff’s office and before that a dispatcher in Baudet.
She had not worked the 2013 search. So she did what nobody had done in 3 years.
She read the whole file from the first page as if the case had come in that morning.
Then she drove out to mile 4 with a measuring wheel and a printed map.
The resort road that winter ran close to where it had run in 2013. Sanvic marked the spot where the vehicle came up.
Then she marked the old road the way it ran before 540 on January 19th before the crack.
The vehicle was not beside the old road. It was on it dead center on the straight line north about 300 yd past the place where the new road bent west.
Matt Hagen had not wandered off the road in a white out. He had driven straight down a road that was no longer there.
That raised a hard question. The warning was clear. Do not go straight. The new road was staked.
On the way to dinner, the Hagens had driven it correctly. So why 4 hours later did Matt Hagen drive straight ahead into the dark as if something out there still told him that was the way from investigator Sanvic’s case notes.
Driver followed the old line. Need to know what was standing on the old line that night.
Only person who would know road guy Lou. On Saturday, February 20th, she sat down at the counter of the Sumac Bay Resort with Deb Nordquist.
From Deb Nordquist’s statement, Lou plowed for me eight winters cash on Friday. He never told me his last name, and I never pushed.
He came across the ice from the north every evening and went back before light.
He said he had a place on the Canadian side. He was the best roadman I ever had.
Eight winters. Every night of every winter, a man had driven past the spot where the heagens lay at the bottom and plowed snow around it.
And then Deb said something else. Lou had not come to work since Tuesday night.
Tuesday, February 16th, the day the vehicle came up through the ice and the news of it went out on the radio in Baudet.
In eight winters, it was the first shift he had ever missed. So, who was Lou?
Deb had no address, no phone number that worked, no picture, but she had the resort’s plow truck, which nobody else drove, and a red fuel can he filled every night.
On Saturday afternoon, a crime scene technician from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension lifted fingerprints from the steering wheel, the gear shift, and the handle of the can.
On Wednesday, February 24th, the National Fingerprint System returned a match. Lel Brandt, born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1964.
In 2006, Lel Brandt worked for the county driving a snowplow. One night in March of that year, he drove his own pickup drunk through a red light in Grand Forks and killed a 31-year-old man on his way home from work.
He was charged. He was released on bond and 3 weeks before his sentencing, he disappeared.
North Dakota had a warrant out for him for 10 years. The road guy who had told the resort that the line at mile 4 was fine was a fugitive.
Of course, he never spoke to a deputy. He could not afford to. Sanvic went back to the 2013 search log to a line nobody had looked at twice.
Fourth day, snowmobile track northbound. Probably an angller crossing to Canada. Lake of the Woods sits on the border.
On the water, it is a line on a map. In winter, it is a line on the ice that nobody can see.
By law, anyone who crosses it, even on a snowmobile, even to fish, has to report to Canadian border officers going in and to American officers coming back.
There is no gate. There is no booth out on the bay. At night, there is nobody at all.
For eight winters, a wanted man had crossed an international border twice a day, and nobody had ever stopped him.
The case was no longer a county case. A wanted man, a possible kidnapping, an island in another country.
Special agent Paul Drestler of the FBI’s resident agency in Baiji joined Sanvic on Thursday.
The same day, they called the Ontario Provincial Police in Canora. Sergeant Craig Moffett of the Canora Marine and Trails Unit had spent most of his career on that lake.
He knew the islands on the Canadian side the way Deb Nordquist knew her road.
From Sergeant Moffett’s report, thousands of islands, most of them with nothing on them. A few with old cabins nobody has used in years.
If a man wanted to live out there with no name, it would not be hard.
Tuesday, March 1st. A clear, cold morning. An OP aircraft flew a grid over the Canadian islands northeast of Big Traverse Bay.
Moffett sat behind the pilot with a camera and a print out of the route lol Brandt would have taken from the resort.
About 17 miles from mile 4, over a small island with no name on any map, he saw smoke, a thin line of it straight up in the still air from a stove pipe.
Under the smoke, a cabin built of rough boards half buried in snow. A snowmobile track ran from its door down to the shore and from the shore south across the ice toward the United States.
Moffett took 11 photographs. Back in Canora, he and Sanvic went through them one at a time on a screen.
On the seventh photograph, along the side of the cabin, a clothes line was strung between two poles.
On the line, frozen stiff in the cold, hung two men’s work shirts, and between them, a woman’s knitted sweater.
Here is what the investigators knew on the morning of Saturday, March 5th, 2016. Matt Hagen died behind the wheel on the old line of the road.
The man who moved that road was a fugitive named Lel Brandt. And on an island in Canada, 17 miles from mile 4, a woman’s sweater was hanging on his clothesline.
They went in at first light. Three snowmobiles left the Canadian shore at a quarter to 9.
Sergeant Craig Moffett and two officers of the Ontario Provincial Police [music] with investigator Renee Sanvic and Special Agent Paul Drestler riding behind them.
On Canadian ICE, the arrest belonged to the Canadians. The Americans were there to identify a man and maybe a woman.
At 10:30, they came around the point of the island. Lol Brandt was sitting on an overturned bucket on the ice 60 yard below the cabin, jigging a line through a hole.
He was 52 years old. His beard came down to his chest and had gone almost white.
He heard the engines. He stood up and he did not run. There was nowhere on that ice to run to.
From Sergeant Moffett’s report. Subject was told he was under arrest. He asked one question.
He asked if we had come from the American side. I said yes. He nodded and put his hands out.
Moffett and one officer stayed with him. Sanvic and Drestler walked up the path to the cabin.
Smoke was coming from the stovepipe. The door was shut. Sanvic knocked and said her name and that she was with the police.
The door opened. A woman stood on the threshold in a man’s flannel shirt and wool socks.
Her hair was long and pulled back, darker than in the missing poster, but it was the same face.
One hand was on the door frame, the other was on her stomach. She was very visibly pregnant, months along, not weeks.
Sanvic said her name as a question. What the woman said next is written in investigator Sanvik’s report, word for word.
And Sanvic later told the court that she wrote it down in the snowmobile 10 minutes later because she was afraid she would remember it wrong.
Please don’t tell my mom. She’d have to pay it back. Not help me. Not where is my husband.
Not what year is it. Kelsey Hagen had been missing for 3 years and 6 weeks.
She had been declared dead by a court in Minnesota. And the first thing she asked the police was to protect her mother from a debt.
Standing next to the door, leaning against the boards, was a plastic stake, orange, about 4 feet tall, with a strip of reflective tape near the top.
Drestler noticed it because it was the only bright thing on the island. At that moment, nobody thought about it again.
By noon, Kelsey Hagen was in a hospital in Canora. The doctors there estimated that she was about 33 weeks pregnant in her eighth month.
She was thin. She was anemic. And two toes on her left foot showed old frostbite scars, the kind that come from a night spent outside at 20 below.
By evening, with the help of officers on both sides of the border, she was flown home to a hospital in Fargo.
All afternoon, she answered questions calmly. She knew the date. She knew her own birthday.
She knew that Matt was dead. And she explained [music] the thing about her mother the way she would explain it to a client at her old job.
Slowly and in order from investigator Sanvik’s interview notes, she says her mother collected 150,000 on her life policy after the court declared her dead.
She says that if the insured person turns out to be alive, the insurer demands the money back and if the beneficiary signed a claim, it can be treated as fraud.
She says she processed those letters herself. She says she stayed on the island so her mother would not be charged.
Kelsey was not guessing. That was her job. Payments made because someone was believed dead when they were not get reclaimed.
She had only one fact wrong. And she had never been in a position to check it.
Sunday morning, March 6th. Before anyone told Sharon Angstrom that her daughter was alive, Sanvic drove to her house in Morehead.
She sat at the kitchen table and asked one question first. What had Sharon done about Kelsey’s life insurance from Sharon Angstrom’s statement?
I said, “Nothing. I never filed it. The company sent me papers twice. I put them in a drawer.”
Why would I file for my daughter’s death? She wasn’t dead. I knew she wasn’t dead.
I just couldn’t prove it. Not one dollar had been paid on Kelsey Hagen’s policy.
There was no claim, no signature, no money, and no fraud. The insurance company confirmed it the next day in writing.
No claim had ever been made. Kelsey had stayed silent on that island to protect her mother from a debt that did not exist.
And the reason it did not exist was the same reason her mother had paid for a dead woman’s phone every month for 3 years.
Sharon had never believed she was gone. Then Sanvic told her from Sharon Angstrom’s statement.
She said, “Kelsey is alive. She’s at the hospital in Fargo.” I didn’t stand up.
I couldn’t. I just asked if she was cold. I don’t know why. That’s what came out.
An hour later, Sharon walked into the room in Fargo. Investigator Sanvic was there. In her report, she wrote down only what the mother said first before anything else.
I didn’t take it, honey. I never took it. Kelsey Hagen started to cry for the first time since the police knocked on her door.
Three years, three summers of open water and four winters of ice. All of it built on a single lie about a piece of paper.
Which raises a question nobody could answer yet. How did a man living on an island with no name know anything at all about Kelsey Hagen’s insurance?
The answer came that evening from Canada. The OP searched the cabin on Sunday. Under the lower bunk, Sergeant Moffett found a coffee can with a plastic lid.
Inside was a newspaper clipping from August of 2014. The headline said a Morehead couple had been declared legally dead and that the ruling cleared the way for their estates and insurance.
The word insurance was circled in pencil twice. And in the margin next to it, in a heavy hand, someone had written a number, 150,000.
Everything in this chapter comes from two sources. What Kelsey Hagen told investigators in the spring of 2016 and later repeated under oath and the notes of Dr.
Ingred Soulheim, the clinical psychologist in Fargo who worked with her from the first week.
Kelsey did not remember that night in order. Dr. Soulheim explained why. Severe cold and a blow to the head can tear holes in memory and what is left comes back in pieces out of sequence, sometimes years later.
So, what follows is what Kelsey was sure of. Where she was not sure, she said so.
They left the restaurant in Baette a little before 10:30. On the shore, it was calm.
Out on the bay, the wind was moving the snow, and by the time they passed the first miles of stakes, the road was a white river under the headlights.
From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony, Matt drove slow. He kept saying it out loud like his dad used to.
Stay with the stakes. Every time one came out of the snow, he said, “There’s one.”
She remembered the moment the stakes [music] seemed to stop. For a few seconds, there was nothing ahead but moving white.
Then, straight ahead, low and bright in the headlights, one more orange steak. From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony, he said, “There’s one.”
[music] And he went to it. On the way out to dinner, they had made the bend west at mile 4 in the last of the daylight.
Coming back in a ground blizzard, nobody saw the new stakes curving off to the left in the dark.
What they saw was one stake standing exactly where the road had always been. The sound, she said, came from under the floor.
A crack like a board breaking. The front of the vehicle dropped. The headlights went down into the water and lit it up green.
From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony, the water came in so fast it was at my knees.
Then my waist. Matt reached across me. He pushed the button on my seat belt and he held down the button for my window.
I remember his hand on that button. That is the last thing I remember of him inside the car.
The driver’s door did not open. The frame had bent when the front went down.
The passenger window, his hand still on the button, came down all the way. She did not remember climbing out.
She remembered the edge of the ice. It was sharp and it was slick and her hands would not close.
Every time she got an elbow on it, the edge broke. In water that cold, a person has a few minutes of real strength.
Then the hands stop working. And then a light, not headlights, one light, high and white, moving across the ice toward her.
From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony, I thought it was Matt. I thought he got out and he was coming with a flashlight.
Then something hit the water next to me, a strap. A man said, “Wrap it around your arm.
Don’t let go.” He pulled her out on her stomach across the ice. She did not remember the ride.
17 miles at night in a ground blizzard at 25 below, wet to the skin.
Dr. Soulheim told the court later that by any normal measure, she should have died on that sled.
The first days in the cabin were fever, a stove, and a ceiling of rough boards.
She asked for Matt again and again. Each time she got the same answer from Kelsey Hagen’s testimony, he said, “Matt’s gone.
The car went down with him. Everybody thinks you’re dead, too.” When she could stand, she asked for the police.
He told her she was in Canada now on an island with no passport and no identification carried across a border nobody had reported.
He told her there would be questions on both sides. He told her to wait for spring.
Then for winter the ice came. He did not take her. So why not simply walk away?
She tried once. Tuesday, February 11th, 2014. Just after midnight, when he was out plowing the resort road, Kelsey put on everything she had and walked south across the ice toward the lights on the American shore.
It was 20 below. The lights looked close. They were 17 miles away. He found her about 2 hours later.
He had seen her footprints in the snow on his way home. She could no longer feel her feet.
From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony. He put me on the sled and said, “That’s twice I saved your life.”
And he was right. That’s the worst part. He was right. I would have died out there.
She lost the feeling in two toes for good. After that night, she did not try again.
Dr. Soulheim had a name for what happened to her that night. When the only person who keeps you alive is also the person keeping you prisoner, the mind starts to treat him as the shelter and the outside world as the danger.
And then in August of 2014 came the piece of paper. He brought a newspaper clipping home from Baudet.
A court in Morehead had declared Kelsey and Matt Hagen legally dead and the ruling cleared the way for their estates and insurance.
From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony. He put it on the table and put his finger on the word insurance.
He said, “Your mom got paid 150,000. You go back now, they take it all back and she’s the one who signed.
You know what they call that?” I said, “Fraud.” I said it before he did.
And who was he saying this to? Kelsey Hagen worked in a claims department. She had written the letters that ask a family to return money paid on a death that turned out not to be a death.
She knew the wording. A man with no education in any of it had handed her a lie, and her own expertise did the rest.
From Dr. Soulheim’s notes, she did not stay because she believed him. She stayed because she believed herself.
The lie used her own professional knowledge to lock the door. From that day, she stopped asking to leave.
When she heard an engine on the ice, she went inside as he told her and stayed away from the window.
She was protecting her mother. In the spring of 2016, in a small room in Fargo, investigator Sanvic went through the night of January 19th with her one more time.
She asked Kelsey whether the man who pulled her out had said anything that first night, anything at all, in front of the stove.
Kelsey thought about it for a long time. Then she said she remembered one sentence.
He said it while he was hanging her wet clothes over the stove, more to himself than to her.
I saw your lights go down. Sanvic put down her pen. To see the headlights go down, a man had to be out there at that minute close on the road at mile 4 in the middle of the night.
The man who moved the road that evening. The man whose job was the stakes.
Here is where the case stood in the spring of 2016. Kelsey Hagen was alive and home.
Her husband had died on the old line of a road that had been moved that evening, and the man who moved it had pulled her out of the water, carried her across a border, and kept her for 3 years.
So, who was Lel Brandt? He grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota. For most of his working life, he drove a snowplow for the county night shifts.
The kind of man who knew every road by the feel of it under the blade.
In March of 2006, after an evening in a bar, he drove his own pickup through a red light and killed a 31-year-old man on his way home from work.
Lol Brandt was charged, released on bond, and told to come back for sentencing. 3 weeks before that date, he emptied his bank account and disappeared.
He told investigators the rest himself in an interview with special agent Drestler after Canada handed him over to the United States.
He said the first winter he lived in his truck. In the spring of 2007, he took a boat across Lake of the Woods into Canada and found an island with an old trappers cabin that nobody had used in decades.
He patched the roof. He cut his own wood. In the winter of 2008, he walked into the Sumac Bay Resort and asked Deb Nordquist if she needed a man to plow at night.
He said his name was Lou. For eight winters, he was the best roadman on that shore.
Now, the evening of January 19th, 2013, from his own words and from the report he posted, the crack opened in the afternoon near mile 4.
At dusk, Lel Brandt plowed a new stretch of road bending west around it, and set new stakes along it.
Then he started pulling the old stakes, [music] the ones that led straight ahead toward the crack.
The wind was coming up. The light was going. He pulled them one by one, walking north until he was close to the crack itself.
From Lel Brandt’s interview, there was one left by the crack. It was dark. I figured I’d get it in the morning.
The new line was staked. The report was up. Anybody with eyes would go west.
At 5:40, he posted [music] the warning, “Do not go straight.” Then he went to work plowing the rest of the road.
At about 10:50 that night, he was on the new road near mile 4 when he saw headlights out on the old line going straight toward the last stake.
Then he saw them drop. So why did he not call for help? There was a phone at the resort and a radio in the plow truck.
A call from Lou would bring deputies, divers, and questions. Who moved the road? Who left that stake?
What is your real name? Somewhere in a computer in North Dakota, there was a warrant with his face on it.
In that moment, he told Dressler, he did the one thing he thought would keep everyone alive, including himself.
He got the woman out and he kept her quiet. The next night, [music] he went back to mile 4, pulled the last steak out of the snow, and took it home.
For 3 years, it leaned against the wall next to his door. When Special Agent Drestler examined it, the evidence was simple.
Under the reflective tape was a strip of marking tape with two letters written in black marker, SB.
Every stake on the Sumac Bay Resort Road had the same two letters. It was not a stake like the one the Hagens followed.
It was the one. Now the other side. What were those three years like for Kelsey?
The island was perhaps 200 yard long. In winter, [music] the lake around it froze solid and the cold went to 30 below.
In summer, the ice was gone and 17 mi of open water lay between her and the nearest road.
The snowmobile was his. The boat was his. When he left, he took the keys and the spark plugs with him.
From Kelsey Hagen’s testimony, I knew the season by what I couldn’t do. In winter, I couldn’t walk far enough.
In summer, I couldn’t swim far enough. There was a rule in that cabin. When she heard an engine on the ice or on the water, she went inside and stayed away from the window.
Planes, boats, sleds, she kept that rule for 3 years. She told Dr. Soulheim that she kept it partly because he told her to and partly because she believed that if anyone saw her, her mother would lose everything.
From Dr. Soulheim’s notes, most locks are on the door. Hers was on her mother.
Every time she thought about leaving, she thought about what leaving would cost someone she loved.
During those years, Kelsey became pregnant. That fact became one of the criminal charges against Lol Brandt in Ontario.
Nothing more about it belongs in this story. There is one more person in this chapter.
His name is Leon Fairley. Fairley was 66, a retired man from Canora with a summer cottage on the Canadian side of the lake.
On Saturday, July 25th, 2015, he was out in his boat trolling past the islands northeast of the bay.
He came around a point he had passed a hundred times and for the first time he saw smoke from the old trappers cabin.
A man was on the dock. Behind the cabin, a woman was hanging laundry on a line.
A trolling motor is quiet. By the time anyone on the island heard it, Fairley was already there.
He throttled down and called out to ask if they needed anything. The man walked to the end of the dock.
From Leon Fairley’s statement. He said, “My wife, she’s not well. We keep to ourselves.”
I said, “Fair enough. Out here, lots of folks keep to themselves.” He had never seen her face on a poster.
He lived in another country and the posters had been on the American side. He had no reason to think anything was wrong.
Except for one small thing he mentioned to Sergeant Moffett in March of 2016 after he saw the news from Leon Fairley’s statement.
She waved at me. I waved back. Figured it wasn’t my business. Canada held Lel Brandt for 15 months.
Under the treaty [music] between the two countries, a person can be handed over only for something that is a crime in both places and the lawyers argued about that for most of a year.
On Thursday, June 8th, 2017, Canadian officers walked him to the border and gave him to United States Marshalss.
The trial began on Monday, April 9th, 2018, in the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, a small city in farm country, 3 and a half hours south of the lake.
Lel Brandt was 54. He sat at the defense table in a borrowed jacket, his beard cut short, and for most of the trial, he looked at his hands.
The charge was kidnapping under federal law. Kelsey Hagen had been taken from the American side of the lake to the Canadian side across an international border, and that is what made it a federal case.
The penalty could be any number of years up to life. The prosecutor was assistant United States Attorney Kristen Mayor.
In her opening statement, she gave the jury one sentence to hold on to. From the trial transcript, Kristen Mayor, “The rescue lasted one night.
The kidnapping lasted 3 years. Then she built it witness by witness.” Gordy Lindall told the jury about the screen in his fish house and the window that [music] was rolled down.
Dead. Nordquist told them about Lou, the cash on Fridays, the last name she never asked for, and the shift he missed on the day the car came up.
She cried on the stand when the prosecutor showed her the post from 5:40 that evening.
Investigator Renee Sanvic walked the jury through her two maps, the search zone 2 mi east, the vehicle on the old line.
Then the prosecutor carried a plastic stake into the courtroom, orange, 4 feet tall, and Sanvic pointed to the two letters under the reflective tape, SB.
She told the jury where she had first seen it, leaning against the wall beside a cabin door.
Then came the newspaper clipping with the word insurance circled twice and the number in the margin.
And then Sharon Angstrom from the trial transcript. Sharon Angstrom. I never filed the claim.
Not $1. My daughter was on that island because of money I never took. The defense attorney was Neil Ostrski, a federal public defender.
He did not deny that Kelsey Hagen had lived on that island for 3 years.
He argued about what to call it. From the trial transcript, Neil Ostrski. Without Lel Brandt, Kelsey Hagen would have died in that water on January 19th.
Every person who looked for her looked in the wrong place. He is the only one who came.
And every winter, for three winters, there was solid ice from that island to the American shore.
She knew the way. She walked it once. There was no lock on that door.
He went further. A man had come by in a boat, he said, in the summer of 2015.
A stranger who called out and asked if they needed anything. She could have said one word.
So the prosecution called Leon fairly from the trial transcript. Leon fairly. She was at the clos line.
She looked at me for a long time. Then she waved. I waved back and went on fishing.
If she’d said something, I’d have done something. She didn’t say anything. Was a wave a call for help.
Or was it what it looked like, a woman being polite to a passing boat?
Nobody in that courtroom could answer that for her. So, the prosecution called the only person who could.
Kelsey Hagen testified on the fourth day. She was 31. She spoke slowly and looked at the jury, not at the defense table.
She told them about the stakes, about Matt’s hand on the window button, about the strap and the light.
She told them about the night in February of 2014 when she walked south until she could not feel her feet.
And she told them about the wave. From the trial transcript, Kelsey Hagen. I waved because I wanted him to remember me.
That’s all I could do. If I said anything, my mother would lose her house.
That’s what I believed. I knew exactly how those letters are written. I wrote them.
Then Dr. Ingred Soulheim explained to the jury why she could have left was the wrong question.
The law, she reminded them, was not her field, but the mind was. From the trial transcript, Dr.
Ingred Soulheim, a door can be locked with a key or with a belief. If you take away her money, her papers, her transport, and her husband, and then you give her a reason to believe that leaving will destroy her mother, you do not need a key.
Federal kidnapping law has an old word for exactly this. It covers a person who is seized or confined and also a person who is invagled, held by trickery or a lie.
The prosecution put the clipping on the screen one more time with the circle and the number in the margin.
On the eighth day, Lel Brandt chose to testify in his own defense. His lawyer advised against it.
He did it anyway. He told the jury about the crack, the new road, the stake he meant to pull in the morning.
He said he saw the lights go down, left the plow truck, took his snowmobile as close as he dared, and crawled the last of the way on his stomach with a tow strap.
He said he did not go back for Matt because by then the car was gone.
Kristen Mayer cross-examined him for less than 20 minutes. She asked him why he never called anyone.
She asked him why he took the steak home. She asked him why he wrote the number [music] 150,000 on the margin of a newspaper when he knew that no one had ever been paid.
He did not answer that one. Then she asked him if there was anything he wanted the jury to understand.
He looked up from his hands for the first time that day from the trial transcript.
Lol Brandt. I pulled her out of that water. Nobody else was coming. On Thursday afternoon, April 19th, the judge gave the jury its instructions.
12 people from the farm towns of western Minnesota went into a room to decide what a rescue becomes when it does not end.
The jury was out for less than a day. On Friday, April 20th, 2018, a little before 11 in the morning, the fourperson read the verdict in the courtroom in Fergus Falls.
Guilty. Lol Brandt did not move. Sharon Angstrom in the second row took her daughter’s hand and held it with both of hers.
Sentencing came four months later on Thursday, August 16th. The judge, Thomas Renick, gave Kelsey Hagen the chance to speak first.
She read from a single sheet of paper. From the sentencing transcript, Kelsey Hagen, he saved my life on January 19th.
I have thought about that every day and I will not pretend it didn’t happen.
But he let my husband’s car sit 200 yard from the road for 3 years.
He let my mother pay for a phone nobody answered. And he took one fact, a fact about my own job and he used it to keep me.
He didn’t need a key. He had a newspaper. When the judge asked Lol Brandt if he wished to say anything, he stood up and said two words.
No, sir. The sentence was life in federal prison. In the federal system, there is no parole.
The warrant from North Dakota for the death of a 31-year-old man in Grand Forks stayed open.
In Ontario, the charges of sexual assault and unlawful confinement filed in Canora stayed open, too, waiting in case he ever walks out of an American prison.
He was 54. Now, the rest of them. 2 years before the verdict, on Saturday, April 23rd, 2016, 7 weeks after the police knocked on that cabin door, Kelsey Hagen gave birth to a daughter in a hospital in Fargo.
Her mother was in the room. Kelsey named the baby Ellie. That is all this story will say about her.
Matt Hagen was buried in Morehead in May of 2016 next to his father. Kelsey chose the date.
It was the first weekend the ice was off the lake. Kelsey went back to the same insurance company in Fargo that fall.
She asked not to return to claims. Her manager moved her to another department without a single question.
She told Dr. Soulheim she had written her last letter asking a family to give money back.
Investigator Renee Sandvvic still works for the Lake of the Woods County Sheriff’s Office. Since 2016, every missing person file that crosses her desk gets read the way she read the Hagen file from the first page as if it came in that morning.
Deb Nordquist sold the Sumac Bay Resort in the spring of 2017. She told the court she could not plow that road again without thinking about who used to plow it.
Gordy Lindal still fishes Big Traverse Bay. He no longer sets his house at mile 4.
Leon Fairley was never charged with anything. In Ontario, as in most places, a private citizen has no legal duty to report what he sees.
He testified for the prosecution and went back to his cottage. He has said nothing in public since.
Sharon Angstrom still pays for that phone. She no longer needs the recording. When she calls that number now, her daughter answers.
Today, Kelsey Hagen is 40. She lives in Morehead with her mother and her daughter a few miles from where she grew up on the Minnesota side of the river.
Lel Brandt is 62 and serving a life sentence in a federal prison. The 2013 search did nothing wrong by its own rules.
It found open water and searched it. It wrote down a snowmobile track and moved on.
It took the word of a resort owner about a road man it never [music] met.
Every one of those decisions was reasonable. Together they put the search 2 miles from the car for 3 years.
But there is one person in this story about whom people still argue. Leon Fairley broke no law.
He saw a woman at a clothesline on an island where nobody had lived for decades.
A man told him she was unwell. She looked at him for a long time and waved.
He waved back and went on fishing. Seven months later, she was found. Should a man like that answer for anything?
Or is a wave from a stranger on a far away island really not your business?
Tell us in the comments what you would have done. Every winter, when the ice on Lake of the Woods is thick enough, the resorts on the Southshore plow their roads north into Big Traverse Bay.
Every tenth of a mile, someone pushes an orange stake into the snow. At night, the headlights catch them one at a time, and the whole road appears out of the dark, stake by stake, the way it did for Matt and Kelsey Hagen.
At mile 4.3, there is no stake.
