Also available as an eBook
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, a German Russian immigrant, 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 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In November of that year his lawyers file a motion in district court in Bismarck asking that his plea of guilty be withdrawn and in lieu thereof a plea of not guilty be entered, and for a trial upon the merits.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.
Some ninety years later, people in the area still recall the words that the convicted man was supposed to have said: “My eyes have seen, but my hands are clean.”
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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Some book clubs like to have questions to help focus the discussion of a book they are reading. Here are some discussion questions for The Murdered Family:
1) When you read about how the family was murdered (pp. 106-107), what kind of motive do you think could drive someone to such brutality?
2) Who were the key suspects in the case? What might have been their motives?
3) In the published confession, the neighbor farmer said he was upset because Wolf's dogs had attacked one of his cows. Does that make sense to you? Are there other parts of his confession that do or do not seem reasonable?
4) The neighbor denied his guilt from the beginning and said his confession was made under duress, intimidation and fear. Is there anything that you think supports his claim?
5) Do you think statewide politics were involved in the effort to try to solve the crime quickly?
6) Why was the police chief from Bismarck, which is in another county, so heavily involved in trying to solve the crime (he was given credit for playing the key role in getting the confession/conviction)?
7) Did the "new evidence" found on the farm in November of that year have anything to do with the crime? Was it planted? Why didn't the court consider it?
8) What did the confessed man mean when he reportedly said: "My eyes have seen but my hands are clean?"
9) Did the neighbor who signed the confession actually do the murders? What would be his motive? If he didn't commit the murders, then who else do you think might have done it?
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About the Book: THE MURDERED FAMILY is a 350-page novel that uses historical fiction to tell the true story about the Wolf family murders. In it, the author examines legal and historical records to tell a story that raises questions about the guilt of the man sentenced to life in prison for the crime less than three weeks after the murders were committed.
