3

Flames in the Night, Smoldering Ruins and a Massive Manhunt

The farm place that Albin and Alvira Johnson called home was bordered roughly by Highway 61 to the west, 470^th Street to the north, the Government Road to the east and 460^th Street to the south. A big swamp and a prominent high ground, known as Chippewa Hill, lie just to the east. To the north is a large ravine, which separated the Albin Johnson place from “Booze” Hank Johnson’s residence. Or as the North Branch Review described it in 1933, the Johnson farm was “about four miles northeast of Harris, the home being about two miles east of the so-called five-mile curve.”

The hundred-acre Krantz farm was immediately to the south of Albin’s place on the other side of the narrow, gravelly road called 460^th Street. More than eight decades after the fire, cars motoring down that road still kick up dust as they whiz by the open spaces interspersed with stands of trees, grazing cattle and the occasional farmhouse, barn and silo. Ragnar Krantz lived in that neighboring farmhouse with his wife, Anna Marie Carlson Krantz, and their young children.

The Krantz family had deep roots in the community. Ragnar’s father, Pedro Johan Krantz, immigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1880. He and Maria bought three hundred acres of Harris-area farmland from the railroad and settled there. “He gave one hundred to my dad, one hundred to my uncle and a hundred to another uncle. We were all three in the same area,” said Ragnar and Anna’s daughter, Muriel Krantz Kennedy Cash.

Ragnar was an industrious man of many talents and an upstanding community member. When he wasn’t tending to his cattle, pigs and chickens, Mr. Krantz was a deacon at the First Lutheran Church in Harris. Pedro Johan helped establish the church in the early 1890s. Ragnar also served as a constable for Sunrise Township, a tiny Chisago County village on the shores of the Sunrise and St. Croix Rivers. “His main job was to keep the peace at the elections. Of course, there were never any big fights at Sunrise,” Muriel said with a smile. “But he would go early in the morning and stay all day. It was a big deal for him.”

During the early morning hours of April 11, 1933, Krantz was most likely sound asleep, along with twenty-one-month-old Muriel, five-yearold Willard and the rest of his family. Suddenly, flashing lights cut through the darkness. He woke up to discover a strange vehicle on his property and his neighbor’s home engulfed in flames. An April 15, 1933 Minneapolis Star report shed some light on the circumstances leading up to Krantz’s discovery of the flaming house. Fred Trippen, a local farmer, told the United Press that he saw the flames around 3:00 a.m. while driving by the Johnson place on Highway 1, the Star reported. Trippen then drove onto the Krantz property, “flashed headlights into the window” of the home and “directed Krantz’s attention to the flames,” the newspaper added. Krantz told the Tribune that he first noticed the fire around 3:30 a.m. His actions were heroic and he acted quickly, but it was too late to help anyone. “After giving the alarm, I drove over to the Johnson place as fast as I could get there, but the house by that time was almost totally destroyed. Only one corner remained standing, and after a short while that crumpled, too,” Krantz said as quoted in the April 12, 1933 edition of the Minneapolis Tribune. As if the Johnson family didn’t have enough bad luck, even the weather conspired against them. In its April 12 report on the conflagration, the Duluth Herald observed that “a stiff breeze” fanned the flames, which quickly “wiped out the home.”

Krantz offered at least one tantalizing clue that seemed to suggest the presence of a getaway car at the scene. The Pioneer Press reported on April 15 that Krantz had seen “automobile tracks leading from the Johnson driveway onto a highway that had been freshly dragged at dusk” on Monday, the day before the fire. But the clue, like Johnson himself, quickly vanished. According to the newspaper, the tracks were “obliterated and it was impossible to trace them” after “many other vehicles were driven in the farm yard.” The Minneapolis Star story rules out the possibility that Trippen’s vehicle could have been responsible for the tracks. After alerting Krantz, Trippen “drove on,” which “disposed of the possibility that Trippen’s automobile made the telltale tracks,” the newspaper reported.

Muriel was too young to remember that dreadful scene. But her now-deceased brother, Willard, took it all in. “My brother was about five. He used to say he remembered the reflection of the flames on the wall, but he was five years old. You don’t know,” Muriel said.

During the investigation, the sheriff and his cohorts used the Krantz place as a staging area because the family had a telephone. “They were coming in there to use the phone and to have coffee and to get warmed up,” said Lindgren, the local researcher, who spoke with Willard Krantz about the fire in the mid-2000s. The younger Krantz remembered the sheriff as “one big, tough-looking hombre. He will always remember those high laced-up boots that the sheriff wore and the big hat,” Lindgren said.

Willard Krantz went on to live a fruitful and successful life. After graduating from Rush City High School in the 1940s, he earned degrees at the University of Michigan and the University of Hawaii, where he eventually settled. Willard Krantz was a public information officer at Fort Shafter, Army Command for the Pacific. He and his wife, Junko, had a son and a daughter. During a career with the U.S. Army and Air Force, Ragnar’s son served on American military bases in places like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, a world away from the yawning countryside of East Central Minnesota. He died in 2010 at age eighty-two.

But even after all of those life experiences, Willard Krantz could never shake the eerie feeling of seeing his neighbor’s house burn. Decades later, Willard claimed to still have vivid memories of that terrible night. It was almost like he could still see the flames, feel the heat and inhale the suffocating smoke seventy-plus years afterward. He shared some of those dark recollections with Nan Hult, a local resident who has done extensive research on the fire and its aftermath.

“It’s something he said he will never forget,” Hult said at her home in North Branch. “He remembers waking up and seeing the fire on the wall. He said it looked like blood dripping down.…He saw the fire coming off the windows, and it looked like molten lava or something going down the window. On the bedroom wall, he said, it looked like it was flickering.”

Jeanette Johnson, Alvira’s niece, also remembers the fire, though her recollections aren’t quite so vivid or creepy. As of 2018, Jeanette is ninety-seven years old and living in a senior-care facility in Minneapolis. Her third-floor room is small and cozy—about the same size as Christine Lundeen’s dwelling at the former poor farm known as Green Acres. But the comparisons end there. While Mrs. Lundeen’s room was dull and drab, Jeanette’s has all the comforts of home with family photos, a quilt and artwork from her grandchildren on the walls. There’s a small table, a bed and an antique dresser topped with a framed photo of her beloved husband, Willard Johnson, looking dapper in his World War II army uniform. A large window overlooks a play area for the building, which also has a childcare center. Jeanette spends much of her time sitting near that window in a comfortable reclining chair. Her mind is still sharp. Though she has a TV for entertainment and a remote control within arm’s reach, she prefers to read. A bookshelf in the corner holds some favorite reading material, including selections in Swedish, her first language.

Jeanette was twelve years old when the Albin Johnson farmhouse went up in flames. Though some memories have faded, she recalls her mother’s and grandmother’s horror as they heard the terrible news. “Ragnar Krantz called right away. He saw the fire. They said the fire lit up the whole area there and he happened to see it. And he called [Christine Lundeen, Alvira’s mother] then right away,” Jeanette said as she leaned back in her favorite chair.

It was still pitch dark when young Jeanette woke up and heard the commotion. “[My mother was] talking on the phone and crying. It’s a morning I will always remember. I can even remember the place where I was sleeping. I was sleeping in the living room instead of my bedroom.…I don’t know why I was downstairs when I was awakened,” she said.

After Christine Lundeen heard the news, she called another daughter, Olga, who was living in Minneapolis. Olga “was shocked. And Bruce, her son, told me about that. When his mother answered the phone, she just fainted from the shock,” Jeanette said.

Frank Hanson, the chief of the Rush City Fire Department, rushed to the scene of the fire and arrived within twenty-five minutes, according to the Rush City Post. Not bad for a small-town fire operation in the 1930s, especially considering that the dirt roads leading to the farm had most likely turned to mud and slop in those early days of spring.

“You have to remember, there was fresh snow,” said Chisago County native Greg Strom, who has researched the tragedy. “There were no snowplows back in 1933.” Hanson probably didn’t drive a snowplow. But the eldest child of Danish immigrants Peter and Cleria Hanson was about four years into a thirteen-year run as the town’s top firefighter, and he wore many hats. Besides serving as fire chief, Hanson was an undertaker, grocer, restaurateur, Chisago County commissioner, Rush City postmaster and volunteer fireman in Rush City for nearly half a century, according to the Rush City Post.

Frank Hanson served as Rush City’s fire chief for thirteen years. North Chisago Historical Society.

Hanson, who had lived on his own since he was fourteen, had a daughter with his wife of nearly thirty years, the former Henrietta Dorothea Kloock. He resided in the area for nearly fifty years. Hanson “had identified himself with numerous civic enterprises, whereby he had gained for himself a very wide circle of friends,” the Rush City Post Review reported at the time of his death.

Hanson died on October 26, 1942, less than ten years after the calamitous fire. Though Hanson’s passing wasn’t as mysterious as that of Alvira and her seven children, it’s a story worth telling. Wearing his undertaker hat, Hanson was en route to St. Paul to pick up the remains of a newly deceased gentleman named John M. Kroeger and to return the body to Rush City for burial, according to an October 30, 1942 article in the Post Review. The Post Review picks up the story from there: “With Henry Hanson at the wheel of his hearse, death’s summons came as Frank slept at Henry’s side. Death occurred at approximately 5:57 p.m., his age at death being 67 years, 5 months and 19 days.”

Before he died riding shotgun in a hearse, Hanson was a go-to guy in the community, a source of advice and wise counsel. As the Rush City Post Review reported it, he was “such a willing public servant that it became commonplace for folks of the Rush City community to say, when some problem arose, ‘Let’s go and talk to Frank Hanson about it.’”

But the problem that rudely awoke Frank Hanson in the wee hours of the morning on April 11, 1933, was too great even for him to handle. Indeed, by the time he arrived on the scene, it was too late to rescue anyone. “At that time, the house was completely demolished, with the exception of one corner, and nothing could be done to save any portion of it,” the Rush City newspaper reported.

Hanson wasn’t the first to arrive. Four neighbors were already at the site of the disaster, helpless to do much of anything but stare at the terrible scene unfolding before their eyes.

Hanson went into action. As a civic leader and fire chief in a rural area where everybody knew everybody, he undoubtedly was aware that the farmhouse was home to a young family. Local newspapers reported that he searched the outbuildings, surrounding fields and woods for signs of any surviving family members.

At daybreak, Chief Hanson left seven or eight men to watch the premises and alerted the deputy coroner. He was probably happy to get away from the grisly scene. As the fire raged on, “one of the bodies could be seen in the burning embers,” the Rush City newspaper reported in graphic detail.

Within the ruins, searchers found the charred remains of Alvira Johnson and her seven children: ten-year-old Harold, nine-year-old Clifford, sevenyear-old Kenneth, five-year-old Dorothy, four-year-old Bernice, two-yearold Lester and the baby of the family, four-month-old James.

Albin Johnson, Alvira’s forty-three-year-old husband and the father of the children, was nowhere to be found. It was as if the rural farmland had gobbled up the big man.

Naturally, the story was huge news in the local paper. And there was a strong hint of mystery even in that very first article. Under a bold front-page, all-caps headline that read, “FAMILY OF EIGHT PERISH IN FLAMES,” the Rush City paper reported there was “no trace of ” Albin Johnson. The newspaper, in an understatement, described it as “one of the greatest tragedies that has occurred in this vicinity for several years.” Other media outlets, from St. Paul to Saskatchewan, from Brainerd to Bismarck, picked up on the news. Some reports, perhaps in their haste to get the story, got a number of facts wrong.

An April 11 Associated Press story assumed that Albin was one of the victims. According to the AP report, “Nine persons, including an entire family of father, mother and seven children, were found burned to death today when fire destroyed their farm home.” (Albin’s defenders, such as brother-in-law Harry Galpin, would insist that Albin had, indeed, died in the fire. Galpin’s theories will be explored later.) The news service reported that the victims were Albin Johnson, “about 46,” as well as “Mrs. Albin Johnson” and seven children “from four months to 10 years.” (In fact, Albin was 43 at the time of the fire.)

Another AP story, which ran three days after the fire, presented an even more sinister narrative, in which the mother and children perished in the fire and the father was on the lam. Under the headline “MOTHER AND 7 CHILDREN DIE; MAN MISSING,” the story declared that Chisago County authorities had launched an investigation.

That’s where A.O. Stark came into the picture.

Born to early Chisago County pioneers on April 22, 1871, in nearby Fish Lake Township, Albert O. Stark may well have been called “Mr. Harris.” His father, Lars J. Stark, was a traveling companion of Oscar Roos, who was believed to be the first Swedish settler in Chisago County, perhaps all of Minnesota. Along with his wife, Adelaide, and three sons, A.O. Stark lived in Harris most of his life. To this day, the family’s imprint is omnipresent. Folks drive down Stark Road and watch kids play Little League baseball on Stark Field. There’s even an entire town named after the Stark clan.

Stark was a businessman, a community leader, a licensed mortician and an active member of the Harris Lutheran Church. In a career that stretched from 1893 to 1945, he dabbled in the lumber, banking, hardware and funeral businesses. Stark and two of his brothers owned the Harris Hardware Store, where they also sold lumber and agricultural machinery. The hardware store, a big, white building, doubled as a makeshift morgue and mortuary back in the day. Not content to peddle construction and farm equipment, he also owned twenty shares in the Harris State Bank—an investment that would later raise the hackles and suspicions of Harry Galpin, Albin Johnson’s tireless defender and devoted brother-in-law. Stark’s April 1961 death notice doesn’t list farming as an occupation. But it does mention that Stark was the “last living member of the first graduating class of the School of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota.”

In April 1933, Stark was called to serve the community in yet another capacity: deputy coroner of Chisago County. Leonard J. Lund, deputy state fire marshal, assisted. Lund, of Minneapolis, left for Harris about a week after the fire to “take charge of the hunt,” according to the April 18, 1933 edition of the Minneapolis Journal.

Stark was the first investigator to raise suspicions about Albin. The deputy coroner, who oversaw a search of the ruins, declared just a day after the fire that Albin’s body was not in the ashes of the home. “From all indications we have, Johnson was not in the house when it burned,” Stark said, as quoted in the Duluth Herald Tribune.

Stark met with County Attorney S.B. Wennerberg to discuss next steps. While Stark was sure from the start that Johnson was on the loose, Wennerberg was more cautious—at least in his early statements to the press. “Everything found so far indicates the fire was accidental,” he said, as quoted in an April 12 Associated Press story. “If we cannot find Johnson’s body by tonight we probably will proceed on the theory he disappeared from home before the fire.”

A longtime resident of Center City, S. Bernard Wennerberg was born in 1894 to August and Anna Wennerberg. The younger Wennerberg was a law-and-order guy, and he didn’t back down from a challenge. Though he was far from the big gangster hangouts like Chicago and New York, he wasn’t afraid to call out mobsters and folks in high places. While former New York governor Thomas Dewey made a name for himself as a gangbuster, a reputation that almost took him to the White House, Wennerberg verbally went after the mob in a December 1933 interview on WCCO radio. As reported by the Minneapolis Star, Wennerberg claimed in his interview that an “army” of 400,000 criminals was responsible for 12,000 deaths in 1932. He blasted “men in high office” who have “condoned mob violence,” the newspaper noted. Albin’s pursuer was about eighty years ahead of his time when he called for “strict supervision over manufacture and sale of firearms” and “arousing a public heretofore content to forget about election times.” Wennerberg himself was seen as a rising star in politics. In April 1934, a year after the fire, he was the keynote speaker at the GOP endorsing convention at the Minneapolis Auditorium, where he “bitterly attacked” the rival Farmer Labor Party and declared that the Farmer Laborites had “become drunk with power,” the Minneapolis Tribune reported at the time.

Years earlier, he attended Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, where his activities included a stint on the school’s speech team. A March 1913 article in the Manitou Messenger notes that Wennerberg took part in the annual contest of the “Inter-Collegiate Oratorical Association of Minnesota” at Central Presbyterian Church in St. Paul. Other college speakers waxed eloquent on themes such as “American Ideals,” the “rather threadbare topic” of “Law Enforcement in the United States” and the “Commercialization of the Press,” the Messenger reported. In that last topic, speaker Gustave A. Stenerson insisted that the “press of today is the slave of ‘Big Business’ and to the advertiser. He set forth the office of the press as the molder of public opinion and pleaded for the true use of this great influence.” But Wennerberg led his Gusties to victory with a speech titled “The Appeal of Labor.” Wennerberg’s choice of topics implies a strong interest in fighting on behalf of the little guy, like the humble farmhand who made his living by the sweat of his brow. In his speech, a “strong appeal for justice to the toiler was made,” the newspaper reported. “Mr. Wennerberg had a very pleasing appearance and delivery and delivered his message with ease and earnestness.”

The speaking skills Wennerberg honed at Gustavus served him well in later years. During the Albin Johnson investigation, he was the name, face and voice of the team to a great extent.

In 1933, Wennerberg’s definition of justice was tracking down the alleged family annihilator, Albin Johnson. His quest for justice may well have been earnest, but it certainly wasn’t easy.

The investigators confirmed early on that Emil Johnson, Albin’s father, owned the farm and that the younger Johnson and his family had packed their belongings and had plans to move. County officials didn’t disclose the family’s destination or the reason for the move.

Investigators did reveal that the bodies of the mother and one child were found together. Five others were in a separate group, and one was discovered in the basement, presumably landing there after the floor gave way to the flames. They were sleeping on makeshift beds, which is understandable because their regular beds were likely stacked up with other furniture on the wagon outside the house. Presumably, the child who slept with Alvira was James, the baby.

On April 13, the Chisago County Press reported that the “party of searchers under the direction of Coroner A.O. Stark of Harris, after having rummaged through the ashes and debris of the burned farm house, extended their hunt to places about the premises with no result,” the newspaper reported. “Charred bones, all that remained of the other members of the family, were found and it was learned that the remains of the mother and seven children had all been accounted for. A small lake near the place was searched as was the adjoining timber land for the missing father,” the Press article continues.

Venzel Lindholm, an old-time Harris-area resident who was five at the time of the fire, recalled over a cup of coffee at the Stuga in 2017 that some of the searchers were armed with an unusual tool. “There were guys… poking into the hay with pitchforks, figuring maybe he had been hiding underneath the hay,” Lindholm said between sips of hot coffee.

Lindholm’s father, Francis, accurately predicted it would be tough sledding. The elder Lindholm had a sense early on that searchers wouldn’t have much luck finding the AWOL farmer, with or without pitchforks. “I remember my dad saying, ‘That little investigator, that little short guy chewing on a cigar…he won’t ever find him.’ But that was my dad,” Lindholm said with a verbal shrug.

While the short guy chomping on the stogie and the other searchers combed the countryside in vain for traces of the man with a fifty-dollar price on his head, the wheels were starting to turn on the criminal justice side. The authorities didn’t speculate on a motive for the alleged killings. Perhaps they knew more than they were letting on. If they had information, they were keeping it close to the vest. But more details began to emerge at the inquest, which was held in mid-April. At the inquest, a coroner’s jury voted an “open verdict” in the case, which meant in essence that the deaths were of “unknown cause”—an important classification that didn’t rule out murder.

Hank Johnson, Albin’s brother, testified at the inquest that he had loaned twenty dollars to Albin on the Saturday before the fire to use for the first month’s rent on a new home on a farm near Rush City, though it was “brought out” that the rent was never paid, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported at the time. Johnson also mentioned that Albin had expressed a desire to return to Canada, where he had worked in 1917. “Henry Johnson had talked about a trip they had taken to Canada a few years ago, and that he [Albin] remarked on the desirability of being there now,” the Pioneer Press reported.

A Red Cross worker named Mrs. A. Hunnecke testified that she had visited the Albin Johnson home recently and that the family was “not in want,” and Ragnar Krantz mentioned those mysterious tire tracks heading from the Johnson place to the highway on the night of the fire, the newspaper reported.

Also at the inquest, Emil Johnson came clean on the fact that he had kicked Albin and family off the farm. The elder Johnson testified that he had “asked his son to vacate for non-payment of rent and that his son had transferred all his personal property to him” on the Saturday before the fire, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported on April 15.

On that same day, a Minneapolis Tribune story offered additional details about Emil Johnson’s decision to evict the family. Put simply, Albin was quite the deadbeat tenant if Emil’s testimony was true. The elder Johnson ordered Albin to “move from the farm for failing to pay rent over four and a half years,” the newspaper reported.

Furthermore, the story strongly implies that the borrowed rent money was about to go up in smoke, so to speak. “Albin arranged to rent a Rush City house for $12 a month, and borrowed $20 from two brothers, but failed to pay the rent,” the Star story continues. “The farmer spent several hours in Rush City Monday [the day before the fire], making three separate purchases of tobacco, totaling eight sacks.”

In a cryptic postscript, the newspaper reported that Albin appeared in Harris the day before the fire and asked “what time the next bus went north, but did not stay to meet it. He saw his father and deeded over cattle and farm equipment so the father would assume a joint $800 note.”

The Minneapolis Star also reported some graphic details about the coroner’s jury proceedings. According to the newspaper, “A casket containing the remains of the eight victims was wheeled onto the town hall stage at the inquest. Later, for members of the coroner’s jury, the casket was opened on two occasions.” After the casket was opened the second time, a “buttermaker” named N.A. Neilson “voiced a belief that the ashes of an adult other than Mrs. Johnson” might have been discovered, the newspaper reported. Neilson, who assisted with the search for the missing farmer, thus implied that Albin was among the dead. The coroner’s jury disagreed. “While Neilson and the jurors crowded around, the casket lid was raised, but a few minutes later the verdict accounting for only Mrs. Johnson and the children was read,” the Star reported.

In a sense, the inquest raised more questions than answers. Who was driving the vehicle that left tracks on the Johnson property? Where was it headed? And why had Albin expressed a desire to get out of Dodge before the events of April 11, 1933?

Dick Lindgren, the local researcher, recalls what Willard Krantz remembered about the mysterious tracks. “Willard Krantz said that when they woke up and were in the process of reporting the fire, a car drove in the dirt road in front of their place and drove into the Johnson driveway, which I suppose was nothing but a big mud hole that time of year,” Lindgren said. He speculates that the driver was spooked by the flurry of activity in the early morning hours. The vehicle “turned around and drove into the Krantzes’ yard, and they could see that there were people up,” Lindgren continued. “I imagine there was commotion of all sorts, so this car just left again. It never stopped. They never talked to anybody. He [Willard] assumed it was either that they realized that the fire had been reported or that they had somewhere they had to be at a certain time, or they just plain didn’t want to get involved.”

As for the children, the Minneapolis Star article implies that they had been well taken care of, despite the family’s hardship. The newspaper reported that the family had been receiving Red Cross assistance, though the Johnsons were “the least destitute of any that were visited by relief workers.”

One piece of potentially incriminating evidence that may or may not have been brought up at the inquest suggested the use of an accelerant at the crime scene, according to local resident Floyd Pinotti. Pinotti knew a thing or two about chasing down bad guys. He spent thirty years in law enforcement, including a stint as Chisago County sheriff. Shortly after he became a deputy sheriff in 1965, the newbie noticed something unusual. “In our evidence locker, which was really a hallway, there was a kerosene can,” Pinotti said in a 2018 interview. “I asked what the kerosene can was about. They explained to me that the can was thought to be filled in town with kerosene and brought to the Johnson residence, several hours or several days before the fire.” Rumor has it the kerosene can is still collecting dust in an evidence locker somewhere in the county.

Wennerberg didn’t mention the kerosene can when he gave an extended statement to the press shortly after the fire. In his remarks, he left no room for doubt that Johnson was still alive and on the run. “We searched every inch of the ruins and we know absolutely Mr. Johnson did not die in the fire,” Wennerberg said as quoted in the Minneapolis Journal.

Exactly what else might have been learned at the inquest remains a mystery because those records have disappeared. But there must have been enough evidence to convince the authorities that Albin Johnson wasn’t just an innocent missing man.

That’s because Albin Johnson of Harris, Minnesota, was later charged with first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of his wife and children.