7

What Did Mr. Peers Know?

Paul Knowles Peers came into the world on July 18, 1887. The son of Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Peers, Paul grew up on a farm in Harris and went on to serve in France during World War I. He later worked for the Chisago County Highway Department and the Amber Milling Company in Rush City before retiring in 1952. When he was only eighteen, Peers made his way north. Perhaps he was looking for a bit of excitement or an opportunity to work in the logging camps. In any case, he spent about three years in Saskatchewan, Canada, before returning home to Rush City. Given his experience in Canada, it’s no surprise that the authorities tapped Peers to be part of the Albin Johnson search party north of the border. Exactly what he saw or heard up there went with Peers to his grave when he died in 1963. But rumor has it he encountered Big Albin up north, contrary to conventional wisdom that Johnson was never seen or heard from again after the fire.

Years ago, Hult spoke to Peers’s daughter about the incident. As the daughter remembered it, the elder Peers swore “up and down that when they went to Canada they saw Albin,” Hult said. “And I said, ‘That’s not possible, because they went up there to get him [and would have arrested him]. Why would they not get him?’”

Greg Strom, who grew up near Fish Lake, did a report on the Johnson tragedy for a school project in the early 1970s. As part of his research, young Mr. Strom interviewed Peers’s daughter. “She was pretty sure her dad saw Albin. But he didn’t bring him back because he didn’t have jurisdiction in Canada,” said Strom, whose grandfather, Albert Strom, ran the general store in Harris for many years. Or perhaps he was afraid to bring Johnson to justice out of concern for his family. Everyone knew that Albin and his brothers were big, rough men, and some say they were prone to violent outbursts. “Maybe when Albin was in Canada, he threatened the family,” Strom speculated. “Albin was physically intimidating and his brothers were physically intimidating. When his brothers were still around, people were afraid to talk about it—and afraid of pursuing Albin.” Strom theorizes it’s highly possible that folks who may have had information years ago were intimidated into keeping quiet. Even eight decades later, many old-timers are loath to talk about it. Strom didn’t hear a word about the Johnson tragedy for decades after doing that initial school report. And he was rebuffed in his efforts to mine old-timers for information. After approaching one elderly resident who remembered the fire, Strom was firmly told to “drop it.”

Even in 1933, people were more than happy to let it go and get on with their lives. With nobody talking and few solid leads, the story went cold again and the newspaper reports dried up for a few months. It wasn’t until October, nearly six months after the fire, that the next big development in the Johnson saga took place. On October 3, 1933, the case went before a grand jury, presided over by Judge Alfred P. Stolberg, a well-known Chisago County resident.

Stolberg was an imposing, stern-looking character with round spectacles and a receding hairline. He had the look of a man who relished the chance to mete out justice. No stranger to the bench, Stolberg was a second-generation judge in East Central Minnesota. Born on December 4, 1876, he was the son of the Honorable Peter Stolberg, a Chisago County judge, and the former Sarah Larson. The family settled in Harris, according to his obituary. Following in his father’s footsteps, the younger Stolberg graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter and went on to earn his law degree at the University of Minnesota. After a stint in the office of the register of deeds, he served in the Chisago County Attorney’s Office and then accepted a judgeship in the Nineteenth Judicial Court District, which is where his path crossed with the ghost of Albin Johnson.

Official records of the grand jury proceedings, assuming they still exist, have never been released, despite efforts from researchers to pry them loose. (In the fall of 2018, a records clerk for the Chisago County Court Administration wrote to the author that an archives search of the grand jury proceedings came up empty.) But enough evidence was presented to the court to satisfy Stolberg that Johnson hadn’t died in the fire—and that he very likely had blood on his hands.

In the fall of 1933, a grand jury indicted Albin Johnson in absentia for first-degree murder. On October 3, “when the grand jury met” in Chisago County, “the Johnson case was laid before the jurors,” the St. Paul Dispatch reported that month. “The [secret] indictment, it was reported, was returned at that time,” though Johnson’s relatives “steadfastly maintained that he, too, died in the fire,” the newspaper reported.

With that, the husky farmer from Harris, Minnesota, was officially a murder suspect—at least in the eyes of the grand jury.

But Albin Johnson was never brought to justice. The unsolved mystery begs a host of questions. If Albin Johnson had been apprehended, would he have been convicted of killing his wife and seven children? Was there enough evidence to convince a jury of his peers that he committed the crime? The evidence suggests that a crime had taken place, given the position of the bodies at the time they were found and the fact that Johnson was the only one who escaped the vengeance of the flames, according to the authorities. Certainly the odds would have been against Johnson, who didn’t have the means to hire a seasoned attorney. And it would have been easy for the prosecutor to find sympathetic ears on the jury after presenting gruesome evidence of a young mother and seven children dying under suspicious circumstances.

Moreover, his rights were limited. In 1933, the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t yet ruled that an accused individual has a right to counsel, said David Shultz, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul and a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. That wasn’t settled by the high court until later in the 1930s, he said. “It’s possible, if he couldn’t afford it, he might not have had an attorney right off the bat.…And not until later, in the 1960s [with the Miranda ruling] does the court say you have to be advised of that right.…So it’s very possible that he could have been arrested, interrogated, not told about his right to counsel. Maybe he confesses, maybe he’s put on trial and he may not have an attorney to represent him,” Schultz said. “It’s possible that in a high-profile case like that the court might have found someone to volunteer [to represent him], but those are a couple of scenarios.”

What about evidence? To the extent that forensic evidence was available in 1933, what could the prosecutors have presented to the jury? Naturally, DNA evidence didn’t exist back then and the science of fingerprinting was a work in progress, so it’s questionable what could have been brought into the courtroom, Schultz said. “Certainly the stuff we see on CSI—none of that would have existed at that point,” he said.

On the other hand, a heap of other evidence would have been fair game. Defendants had “limited protections in terms of the exclusionary rule,” to the point where police “could bring in almost any evidence,” including that which was illegally obtained, Schultz said. Chances are, judge and jury would have rendered a guilty verdict, and the fugitive farmer would have faced life behind bars. (If he had been captured and convicted, Johnson would have escaped the gallows. Minnesota abolished capital punishment in 1911 after a botched hanging.)

Albin Johnson would not have been the first person desperate enough to kill his family. Such crimes happen more often than may be expected. And sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources.

Standing just over six feet tall and weighing 180 pounds, William Bradford Bishop Jr. spoke five languages—English, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish. As of 1976, the Pasadena, California native worked as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. He liked to drink scotch and wine, and he had a taste for spicy foods. A true outdoorsman, Bishop liked to fish, swim, golf, play tennis, ski and ride motorcycles. He loved to read. He was educated at Yale and received a master’s degree in Italian from Middlebury College in Vermont. But he also battled depression, was self-absorbed and prone to violent outbursts. And the feds are convinced he became a family annihilator.

The above biographical information is from Bishop’s wanted poster. He was added to the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list on April 10, 2014—precisely eighty-one years after the Harris fire. He was removed from the list in June 2018 without ever having been captured, according to the Wall Street Journal. His story is eerily similar to that of Albin Johnson. On March 1, 1976, in Bethesda, Maryland, Bishop allegedly killed his mother, his thirtyseven-year-old wife and three sons, ages five, ten and fourteen, with a blunt instrument. He then allegedly transported the remains to Columbia, North Carolina, “where he buried the bodies in a shallow grave and lit them on fire,” according to his wanted poster. In a 2014 press release, the FBI said that Bishop was last seen one day after the murders at a sporting goods store in Jacksonville, North Carolina. He bought a pair of sneakers there.

“Nothing has changed since March 2, 1976, when Bishop was last seen except the passage of time,” Steve Vogt, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore Division, said in the 2014 press release. According to the release, investigators extensively searched the area where the bodies were discovered and found no sign of Bishop. “When Bishop took off in 1976, there was no social media, no twenty-four-hour news cycle,” Vogt said. “There was no sustained way to get his face out there like there is today. And the only way to catch this guy is through the public.” Vogt added, “If Bishop is living with a new identity, he’s got to be somebody’s next-door neighbor….Don’t forget that five people were murdered. Bishop needs to be held accountable for that.”

Thirteen years before the Harris fire, reporters jumped on another odd case involving a mysterious fire and a missing man. In that case, E.J. “Ed” Sailstad of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was believed to have died on August 27, 1920, in a fire at his cottage. Call it the “Is Ed Dead?” mystery.

Unlike the Albin Johnson case, the narrative surrounding Sailstad, a father of two young children, reads more like a soap opera script than a real-life murder mystery. Citing a “web of circumstantial evidence,” the Minneapolis Star reported in October 1920 that Sailstad allegedly staged his death and then ran off with his stenographer, Dorothy Anderson. Evidence to that effect included testimony from a Duluth taxi driver who claimed he had driven Sailstad and his mistress from Lake Nebagamon to Duluth after the events of August 27, the newspaper reported. Adding a salacious detail to the story, a hotel worker in Superior claimed that the alleged lovebirds spent the night together at the hotel on the night of the presumed deadly blaze.

Sailstad’s wife, identified only as “Mrs. E.J. Sailstad,” wasn’t buying it. Foreshadowing a claim that would be made years later by Albin Johnson’s defenders, she was convinced that her husband had indeed died in the fire. “I won’t believe that Ed is alive and did not burn to death in that cottage until they bring him to me, or prove he is a prisoner,” Mrs. Sailstad said, as quoted in the October 16, 1920 edition of the Minneapolis Star.

Unlike Ed Sailstad, Albin Johnson didn’t have a stenographer—or a mistress, at least as far as anyone knows. But like Bishop, he may well have been depressed and prone to violent outbursts. He certainly had reason to be in a bad state of mind. Given his dire situation—evicted from his home by his father with little or no hope for gainful employment during the Great Depression—he may very well have been driven to madness.

Despite the circumstantial evidence against him, Johnson had his supporters. The most vocal was Harry A. Galpin, his faithful brother-in-law.