Imagine a true story about the mass murder of a farm family!

Then imagine a hasty investigation, an ambitious police chief, some
nervous politicians, a suspect’s confession, and a desperate effort
to change his plea to finally get the trial he has been denied.
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 Over 100 years later, doubt still remains about

Who killed the Wolf family?

April 22, 2020, marked the 100th anniversary of the Wolf family murders. After all these years, and despite the signed confession from a neighbor farmer, questions still remain about who really committed this horrific crime.
 
The Murdered Family, published in 2010, tells the story of this tragedy in its considerable detail from information contained in the extensive
​legal and historical record.
 
With this website, we have provided a summary update to advance this story with information about the confession, why the neighbor signed it, and parts in it that seem questionable or don’t hold up well to further scrutiny.
 
Click here for the Anniversary Update

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​​The Murdered Family:
Mystery of the Wolf Family Murders

​When seven members of a North Dakota farm family and their hired boy are brutally murdered in April of 1920 during an intense statewide election campaign, eager investigators encouraged by nervous politicians get a signed confession from a man who argues immediately that he was forced to sign it.

Exactly three weeks after Jacob Wolf, an immigrant German from Russia, is found murdered along with his wife, Beata, five of their six daughters and the hired boy, one of the prime suspects in the case, also German Russian, signs a confession to all eight murders and is immediately sentenced to life in prison.

From the very beginning, though, he denies his guilt and says that his confession was obtained "under duress, intimidation and fear." He argues that he had been beaten by the officers who interrogated him, that he had been forced to stare at pictures of the victims, and that the investigating officers had told him that an angry mob outside the jailhouse was waiting to lynch him if he was released. He claims that he was told then that the safest place for him until this thing died down was in the state penitentiary where he could file a change of plea in order to receive a jury trial.

In November of that year his lawyers file a motion in district court in Bismarck asking that his plea of guilty be withdrawn and in lieu thereof a plea of not guilty be entered, and for a trial upon the merits. Their motion is strengthened when some new evidence is discovered on the Wolf family farm only days before the motion is filed.

More than a hundred years later, people in the area still recall the words the convicted man was supposed to have said: “My eyes have seen, but my hands are clean.”
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           Original art for the book's cover
​

THE COVER DESIGN for the
book and the original art
are the creations of
Denver artist Robert Fletcher.


The art provides an impressionistic
representation of
the Wolf family
gravesite.

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A Video Introduction

Click here for a brief video introduction to the story about the Wolf family murders.

Chronology of Events

​Click here for a listing of important dates in the mystery of the Wolf family murders.
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Links to More Info

​     About the Funeral Photograph
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
Bismarck Tribune story on the novel
Hymn likely sung at the burial
"My eyes have seen, but my hands are clean"

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​About the Author

Vernon Keel began a long career in journalism on his hometown newspaper just three miles from where the Wolf family was murdered twenty years before he was born. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota where he developed skills in legal and historical research. For more than thirty years, he taught media law and headed journalism and communication schools at several Midwestern universities.

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​The Book's Title

​THE TITLE of this novel, THE MURDERED FAMILY, is the English translation of the German inscription -- "Die ermordete Familie" -- that appears on the front of the Wolf family tombstone in the Turtle Lake (ND) town cemetery. 

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Notice Regarding Commercial Use or Commercial Redistribution
Use of any photos. images or text from this website for commercial use or commercial redistribution in any form
requires permission from the web administrator at:  themurderedfamily@comcast.net

Copyright  2010-2022 by Vernon Keel  

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