8

Albin Johnson’s Biggest Defender

Harry A. Galpin was born in Rochester, Minnesota, on January 4, 1884—exactly six years and one day before his future brother-in-law came into the world. He married Olga Johnson, one of Albin’s three sisters, on September 15, 1912. Galpin’s death certificate lists his occupation as a salesman. It’s not clear if he had any legal training, but in the years after the fire, Galpin took it upon himself to be Albin’s informal legal advocate—at least in the court of public opinion. Albin would have been hard-pressed to find a more loyal brother-in-law.

Three years after the fire, Galpin fired off a scathing affidavit in which he defended Johnson’s honor and blasted the authorities’ handling of the Harris fire investigation. From the judge on down, no one escaped his wrath. He accused Deputy Coroner A.O. Stark, Sheriff James A. Smith and County Attorney S. Bernard Wennerberg of making “not less than 31 errors” ranging from destruction of evidence to negligence. Specifically, Galpin alleged that Stark had “cast [Albin] Johnson’s remains” outside the foundation of the fire-ravaged home, where the remains were “trampled under foot by spectators.” He intimated that the judge, the Honorable Alfred P. Stolberg, was part of an old-boys club that cared little for the truth and was only interested in self-promotion. As Galpin saw it, the whole lot was incompetent and the search for Johnson was a waste of taxpayer money.

Galpin’s affidavit rambled on for a dozen pages, and much of it is conspiratorial in tone and content. Still, he made some good points. Noting that Albin had only a sixth-grade education, for example, Galpin reasoned that the missing man wasn’t smart enough to pull off a crime and disappearing act that even a seasoned criminal would have been hard-pressed to commit. Galpin opens his October 1936 affidavit by declaring, quite accurately, that the “fatal Albin Johnson fire” is “still an unsolved mystery.” He claimed that the grand jury indictment of Johnson was based “on pure speculation.” Galpin wrote, “Three and a half years have passed since the night of the fire, yet not a single trace of Johnson has been found, not a particle of evidence he has ever been alive since the fire. Even the strange automobile tracks leading in and out of the farm gate have been satisfactorily explained away.” Galpin didn’t elaborate on the last point, so it’s hard for the reader to judge if, indeed, there was a satisfactory explanation for the tire tracks.

He went on to defend Johnson as a man with an “enviable reputation among his neighbors” and a “giant of a man,” a characterization that many would dispute. Johnson had no money or experience in chicanery, Galpin notes. And yet, the authorities claimed that he “planned his crime so carefully that the state can find no motive that will stand up under cold, logical analysis.” They failed to prove that the fire was set intentionally or that Johnson was seen alive after the fire, he said. Galpin suggested that Johnson’s bones were in fact found in the ashes and debris of the farmhouse, despite assurances to the contrary from the powers that be.

On May 4, 1933, under a headline that read “NEW EVIDENCE FOUND IN FIRE,” the Associated Press reported that Galpin “brought back about 50 fragments of bones which he said he discovered at the scene of the fire.” The fragments were under the ruins of the pantry, about fifteen feet from the remains of other family members, he said. Galpin claimed he also found a piece of melted glass. Why was that significant? “Glass melts at 2500 degrees Fahrenheit,” Galpin told the Associated Press. “It simply demonstrated the terrific heat at the location at which these bones were found and may explain why larger remains were not disclosed.” Expanding on that story, Galpin said in the affidavit that a deputy sheriff and unidentified relatives uncovered the human bones “in a distant part of the fire ruins, six days too late to do Johnson any good.” Galpin turned the bones over to Dr. Erdmann, the University of Minnesota professor of anatomy and the state’s scientific expert in the case. He also notified Wennerberg, the county attorney. But the authorities were unconvinced.

Covering all his bases, Johnson’s biggest defender summarized a number of hypothetical explanations. For instance, Big Albin might have “stayed away from home that night” or “escaped with his clothing ablaze,” or perhaps he was somehow “prevented from being there that night,” Galpin wrote. Other scenarios: Albin “lost his mind, killed his family and fled,” or perhaps he was “so badly cremated his remains were unrecognized by the inexperienced volunteer searchers.” Galpin added, “Careful analysis shows that time and [searching] have eliminated all but the last possibility, for this sixth grader [sic] was not a brilliant man. He would have been picked up within 48 hours.”

Not content to stop there, Galpin also raised doubts about Erdmann’s scientific opinion that Albin had not died in the fire. In Galpin’s view, Erdmann had his blinders on when it came to investigating the case. He charged that Erdmann’s theories were based more on speculation than science. “At one time Dr. Erdmann…stated ‘he believed’ the unexplained bones found in a distant part of the ruins [Albin’s bones, in Galpin’s view] were those of the children,” Galpin wrote, continuing,

Mind you, he did not state that as a scientific fact but merely as his belief, founded on other presumptions he thought were facts….We found there were only four possible ways that children’s bones could have gotten where these bones were found. Each of these possibilities were explored and one by one rejected as absurd or impossible under the conditions known to have existed here–therefore they could not have been children’s bones. They must have been the remains of the father….We asked the doctor to give us a signed statement that he could not identify these bones, but he replied he “did not know what use we intended to make of such a statement, and besides, we had not hired him.”

Next, Galpin turned to the alleged errors in the investigation. “Cold, logical analysis shows that Albert O. Stark, deputy coroner, Harris, Minnesota, James A. Smith, sheriff, Lindstrom, and S. Bernard Wennerberg, county attorney, Center City, committed not less than thirty-one (31) errors in their handling of this one case.” Now Galpin really takes off the gloves, as he accuses nearly everyone involved in the case of being crooked, inept or untruthful:

These charges range from perjury and destruction of evidence to incompetence and negligence, and to railroading a murder indictment against a man known to be dead, to covering up the ghastly blunder of the deputy coroner who had cast Johnson’s remains outside the foundation where they were trampled underfoot by spectators....Cold, logical analysis also shows the state’s scientific witness (Erdmann) turned his back upon science and based his conclusions upon perjured testimony, and upon six (6) rebuttable presumptions of fact.

Galpin then took a shot at Stolberg, the district judge in Center City. In Galpin’s view, the judge “proved himself unfitted to fill his high and honorable position.” Judge Stolberg lived about four miles from the Johnson farm and was a stockholder and board member of the State Bank of Harris, Galpin noted. He was tight with Stark, also known in Galpin-speak as the “bungling deputy coroner.”

That’s where it gets interesting, at least in Galpin’s view. Stark was the president of the bank, and the judge’s brother, G.J. Stolberg, was a cashier at the bank (and the survivor of at least one robbery attempt, as previously noted). The late E.W. Stark, the coroner’s brother, served for a time as state treasurer.

Why were the judge’s ties to the bank important? “The judge was intimately acquainted with many of the prominent characters in this mystery, and as the so-called ‘murder case’ was the biggest ‘crime’ that had ever happened in Chisago County, it was to be expected the judge was deeply concerned with the lack of progress in the case,” Galpin wrote. “He had to know a great deal about it, since it might be necessary for him to approve expenditures of county funds in the so-called ‘search’ for Johnson.” Connecting the dots, Galpin saw it as a twisted conspiracy and a desire on the judge’s part to protect the deputy coroner “against loss to his reputation and to his many business connections.”

Galpin couldn’t resist the urge to taunt the authorities and ridicule them over their quixotic search for the missing man. Galpin similarly lambasted the Harris fire investigators. He said sarcastically that the private detective and deputy sheriff returned from their “four thousand mile joy ride” and “fake search” with “long noses and longer faces, but without a particle of new evidence.” In a more serious vein, Galpin wondered why the judge called a regular grand jury instead of a “special grand jury under a special prosecutor.” He noted the judge’s alleged unwillingness to hire an orthopedic surgeon to examine the bones to determine “if they were from a child or an adult.” Galpin wrote, “The judge is well aware of his own errors and must find it difficult to keep from laughing at himself while dealing out justice from the bench, but if we can prevail upon him to take his tongue out of his cheek long enough to answer these very puzzling questions, he will make us happy beyond words.” Referring to what he called the “deception and conspiracy” of authorities and investigators, Galpin opined that the coroner, sheriff and county attorney “developed an astonishing inability to think” and had their minds made up in advance. Those overseeing the case had “from the first come to believe a crime had been committed, and the amazing fact that there never has been any evidence of a crime mattered little to them,” Galpin charged.

At one point, Galpin tried in vain to get Minnesota governor Floyd B. Olson to clear Johnson’s name. He also tried to get the legislature involved. His end game was to have the murder indictment annulled and a burial certificate issued for Albin Johnson. Governor Olson didn’t want to have anything to do with the case, which comes as no surprise to David Schultz, the Hamline University and University of Minnesota law professor. One consideration: the fire had occurred only three years earlier, and it was quite possible that Johnson was still alive. Though the case had been cold for some time, it’s a good bet that Wennerberg and company still held out hope of tracking down the missing farmer and putting him on trial. “Rarely do governors want to step into proceedings like this, especially when they see no political benefit,” Schultz said in an interview. “A governor stepping into a murder trial like this might actually cause problems in terms of pretrial publicity, prejudicing the trial. So I think most of the time they stay out of it.”

After coming up empty, Galpin embarked on a new strategy: publicly ridicule the judge and Albin’s accusers until he was sued for libel, “when we could then bring out evidence into court.” That would eventually come back to bite him. Galpin’s affidavit described the inquest as a “farce” and the grand jury investigation as a “joke.” In an over-the-top closing statement, Galpin wrote:

The bloodiest of Kentucky’s mountain feuds were started with less provocation than this. A thorough investigation of this whole case under a judge unbiased by his personal opinions with witnesses examined under a lie-detector would seem to be the best solution….But that would be impossible because the only way you can ever get any of the county officials or the doctor there would be to bring them hand-cuffed and leg-ironed.

The complete story of the way the officials mishandled their duties… in this one case is the blackest chapter in the record of Minnesota jurisprudence. And if this railroaded murder indictment is not annulled, every proud, law-abiding citizen of Minnesota is made a party to it whether they like it or not.

Galpin put a lot of passion into his defense of Johnson, but he failed to explain why the investigators would railroad Albin Johnson, except for the unproven assertion that they were trying to protect the business interests of Stark and company. Simply put, they had no reason to conspire against a lowly farmer.

Unlike Johnson, Galpin himself was eventually brought to justice—not for murder, but for allegedly besmirching the good names of his adversaries. On October 14, 1939, Galpin was convicted of libel against Judge Stolberg and other county officials. He was sentenced to two six-month terms in jail. Pleading guilty, Galpin admitted to putting up posters in public places that accused Stolberg and other officials of being “ignorant, incompetent, negligent or crooked” and of hounding Johnson to cover up their own “ghastly blunders,” according to the Minneapolis Tribune.

Judge Joseph J. Moriarty of Shakopee ordered Albin’s beleaguered brother-in-law to spend three months at the Washington County Jail in Stillwater, with the remaining time to be suspended if he “has a record of good behavior,” the Tribune reported on October 15, 1939. The jail sentence must have been a bitter pill for Galpin to swallow, and it may well have hastened his death. On February 17, 1940, at the Bedford, Indiana home of a “Mrs. Garrett,” Harry Asa Galpin suffered a coronary thrombosis and died an hour later, according to his death certificate and obituary. He was far away from the bucolic countryside of Harris, Minnesota, and the elusive ghost of Albin Johnson.

S. Bernard Wennerberg, a favorite target of Galpin’s vitriol, outlived Galpin by nearly thirty-seven years. The onetime pursuer of Albin Johnson died in relative obscurity on January 9, 1977; this was twenty-five years to the day after the passing of his Swedish immigrant mother, Anna Anderson Wennerberg. He was eighty-seven. A paid obituary in the Minneapolis Star suffices to say that Wennerberg “passed away at the Parmly residence in Chisago City.” He was buried at Fairview Cemetery in Stillwater, Minnesota.

As a postscript to the news of Galpin’s sentencing, the Minneapolis Tribune reminded readers that Johnson was still a fugitive. “The six-year mystery of Johnson’s whereabouts remains unbroken,” the newspaper reported.