MURDERED: Mary & Susanne Reker
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Hi, Crime Junkies. Ashley Flowers here. And I know that we said that we were going to be off this week, and we are, but I wanted to drop something special in the feed for a special reason. So this Monday is Labor Day. Happy Labor Day, everyone. But it is also the day that 50 years ago, a family's life changed forever.

On September 2nd, 1974, 15-year-old Mary Raker and her 12-year-old sister, Suzanne, left their home for what was supposed to be a quick shopping errand. But little did anyone know that when the two sisters left for the store that Labor Day afternoon, their family would be saying goodbye to them forever.

Now, this story may sound familiar to some of you, and that's because we actually did a two-part episode on their case back in July of 2023 on my other weekly show, The Deck. But I know there are so many Crime Junkie listeners who haven't heard this story yet. And now, because it is the 50th anniversary of the crime and there are still no answers for the Raker family, I wanted to bring both parts of that story here for you today.

My hope is that one of my crime junkies out there has some kind of information or can share this episode with someone who does, and we can finally give answers to the girls and their family, a family that has long awaited justice and has had to go a half a century without it.

So this is the story of Mary and Suzanne Raker, the two of hearts from Minnesota. And if you enjoy this format, don't forget to go follow the deck wherever you get your podcasts. Our card this week is Mary and Suzanne Raker, the two of hearts from Minnesota.

On Labor Day of 1974, less than 24 hours before 15-year-old Mary was to start her sophomore year of high school, she told her parents she needed to make a quick shopping trip to pick up some last-minute school supplies and a winter coat. Her younger sister, 12-year-old Suzanne, tagged along, and they waved goodbye to their father, who was painting the exterior of the house when they left.

On a day so ordinary, it never crossed his mind that that would be the last time he'd see his two daughters alive. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Everything looks different in hindsight. Moments you want to rewind, pause, and do differently. Or moments that you just wish you'd paid more attention to because maybe they meant something. Maybe you could have seen something or prevented something.

87-year-old Rita Raker has spent almost 50 years now examining a few weeks of 1974 in hindsight. There was something bothering her 15-year-old daughter, Mary. But she couldn't get her to say what. And I don't know if you've tried talking to a 15-year-old lately, but it wasn't any easier back then. And with a house and a husband and five other kids to care for, the best Rita could do was continually remind Mary that she was there for her.

Things seemed to be looking up, though. It was Labor Day, and Mary seemed excited about leaving that evening to go back to high school roughly 45 minutes away from their St. Cloud home in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was returning for the second year, and she loved spending the week there, spreading her wings, having some independence, and then coming home to her family on the weekends.

Her carpool was going to pick her up at 4 p.m., so when Mary asked if she and her two sisters could go shopping for school supplies and a coat that morning, Rita was a little hesitant. She reminded Mary that she just went shopping a few days ago. Plus, she wanted the girls to help with some yard work before Mary left. But Mary seemed insistent, almost pleading and urgent. So Rita agreed.

At first, all three of the girls were planning on going shopping, and for some reason, our Betsy, who was between Mary and Sue, decided that she'd stay home. And she wasn't even sure why. She just kind of got the feeling that they'd rather go by themselves. And generally, our Betsy and Susie were the two who were always together, so that was kind of unusual that Susie happened to be with.

According to Robert M. Dudley's book, Cold Cases of Stearns County, Minnesota, the girls left just after 11 a.m. And Rita went about her day doing chores alongside her husband when at some point the family's home phone rang. On the other end was the person set to carpool Mary to school later. Something had come up and they were going to have to get going later than they had planned. They'd pick Mary up at 7 instead of 4.

Which was even better. That'd give Mary more than enough time to help out around the house before she left. Just as quickly as that call had come in, Rita forgot all about it. The day had zoomed by, and before she knew it, 3 o'clock had come and gone. Rita was watching the clock by this time. I mean, she had been clear with the girls about when they needed to be home. With every minute that ticked by, her motherly frustration grew.

But at a certain point, a new feeling washed over Rita. I just remember starting our evening meal and just being really concerned about it. And it wasn't until shortly before 5 o'clock. Somehow, at that point, I remembered that that phone call had come and the girls knew they had to be home.

In an instant, Rita stopped everything and sprang into action. She began calling neighbors and friends, anyone she could think of to see if people had seen her girls. But no one she reached out to had seen them recently. By now, the whole family was frantic. They knew something was terribly wrong. This wasn't like their girls, and they weren't about to just sit around and wait.

So while Rita stayed with the three of their kids, her husband Fred and their eldest son went down to the police department to report Mary and Susie missing. But right away, Fred and his son were met with an apathetic ear. I just remember my husband coming home and saying that whoever was at the desk just commented on two more runaway girls.

A report was taken, but police weren't out looking for the girls just yet. That was left up to their family and a few good friends who rallied around them in their time of need. Around 10 o'clock, a friend of ours who was a surgeon here in town called my husband and he said, I can't sleep either. He said, let's go out and look for them. So they drove around town and stopped at a number of places that were open and just asked if the girls had been seen anyplace.

But it was more of the same. No one had any idea where the girls were or who they could be with. It made for a long, sleepless night, not just for Fred and Rita, but for all four of their other kids, who even at their young ages understood the gravity of what was happening. I don't think we got hardly any sleep at all that night. Our whole family, in fact.

Our bedrooms are on the upper story of our house, and I remember we had one of these fold-out Davenports, and we set that up, and my husband and I slept on that, and the kids slept in sleeping bags all around us because we were just so scared. We didn't even want to go upstairs to our bedrooms. And by morning, all four of the other kids were in bed with us. It was

By morning, which would have been September 3rd, police were at least willing to send out a statewide broadcast to other departments about the missing girls.

They asked Rita and Fred for pictures of the girls, and they began asking around, even though feelings within the department were still mixed in the early days as to whether they might just show up on their own or whether there were even kids to look for. We were so traumatized during that time. We tried to get a search party going and just weren't able to do it because back then it was like you had to prove that you even had children.

As unbelievable as this seems, it was the world Rita was living in. Feeling like you got to prove you have a kid, prove they're worth looking for, and then we'll see what we can do. So she tried, over and over, all the while begging and pleading for them to understand how serious this was. For a brief moment that day, police thought they were right.

And Rita didn't care who was right. She just thought her babies might actually be safe because they had talked to a bus station attendant who looked at a photo of the girls and said, yeah, I sold them tickets to Little Falls. They were with a group of other girls. Now, remember, Little Falls is where Mary was going to school. So the place itself made enough sense, though why Mary would skip out on her carpool and take nothing with her except a sister who didn't go to that school wasn't adding up.

But this was seemingly all the proof police needed to call it quits. Theory confirmed. But it certainly wasn't enough for the Rakers. They immediately made the roughly 45-minute drive to Mary's school where they found the girls who bought the bus tickets from St. Cloud to Little Falls. But none of them were Mary or Susie.

They took this news back to police, but to their dismay, though maybe not to their surprise, they were still met with pretty much the same response. Rita and Fred felt completely alone. Sergeant Brian Bolig, who's been on the case since late 2016, says Rita's feelings are valid. I don't think it was treated as seriously as it should have been because I think at the time, law enforcement believed they were going to come home.

And then when they didn't return home, then people started getting bad feelings and some things were being done as far as, OK, maybe this isn't a runaway situation. So if they didn't run away, then what happened? How could two young girls just fall off the face of the earth without a trace? Over the coming weeks, police tried to answer that question by tracing the girls' last movements.

They learned that shortly before noon, the girls were seen at Shopko department store by the manager who was familiar with them. Now, the manager didn't interact with them or notice any strange behavior. And from all accounts, the girls were alone. Officers weren't sure exactly what time they left the Shopko, but they were able to place the girls at another local store called Zayer's sometime between 1 and 2.30 p.m.

The best comparison I can make to theirs is that it was kind of like 1974's Super Target. They had everything you'd expect from most department stores, but there was also a grocery section as well as like a little food court. And the food court is actually where one of the Rakers' neighbors was standing when he saw the girls come in the front door. It was this guy named Jacob Younger. Some old newspaper accounts say that he had a short interaction with the two as he stood in the food court area.

But Sergeant Bolig can't recall if this is accurate. He thinks they may have spoken, and Jacob might have even offered them a ride home. But if so, the girls clearly didn't take him up on it. Jacob said that the last he saw the girls, they were walking off in the direction of the grocery section. Even though that section was closed for Labor Day, it was the same direction you'd walk in to get to the section of the store that had winter coats, which was, after all, one of the reasons Mary said that she needed to go shopping.

Back in 77, the Minneapolis Star reported that Jacob was one of the people who helped Rita and Fred look for their daughters. He told the newspaper that he burned tank after tank of gas, driving all around looking for any sign of them. Jacob's sighting of the girls is one of the last that police would 100% confirm as legitimate. And maybe that haunted him.

But really, I think what haunted him more was what he heard Susie say just as the girls were walking away.

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Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend to North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. The exact words that Susie uttered to her older sister Mary have been lost to Jacob Younger's memory. But the sentiment of what he heard was burned into his brain immediately. According to the Minneapolis Star, Susie told her sister something to the effect of, I don't want to go with that man. I don't like him. Or let's not. I don't like that man.

Jacob went on to say that he remembered these details so clearly because he finished eating shortly after and when he left the store, he saw a quote-unquote nervous acting man in a blue Chevy Impala outside. To him, it seemed almost like this guy was waiting for someone. Maybe those someones were Mary and Susie. I mean, it made him so uneasy that he actually sat in his car just watching this guy.

After a while of him not doing much and the girls not coming out, Jacob took off. But that wasn't the last that police heard of this mystery man. Another Minneapolis Star article reported that two other witnesses put a similar man not only in the store, but in the same department as Mary at the same time.

Like Rita, I imagine Jacob is plagued by hindsight. What could have, would have been if he jumped up and followed the girls, asked Susie what she meant, made them go home with him, maybe called their parents or waited in his car just a little longer until they came out of the store. And Rita probably thought about that too as days agonizingly turned into weeks.

Even though the rest of the world seemed to be moving on, kids were going back to school, adults were going to work and mowing their lawns, time stood still for the Rakers. None of this made any sense to them. Why would this happen to their family? Was there somebody who hated us or hated the kids or somebody in the neighborhood or who would we even suspect? And we couldn't come up with anybody.

We were just a young family raising six kids and trying to educate them. So Rita was left to pick apart every last word and action in the time leading up to the girl's disappearance. And it was mostly Mary's actions that stuck out to her. Because Susie, or Sweet Sue as the family affectionately called her, was still just a little kid.

I know parents never know everything, but that summer, 12-year-old Susie was still into dolls. But Mary, something was going on with Mary. Mary was acting different that summer and the month prior to her disappearance. Something appeared to be bothering her, according to family. This shift in Mary happened over the summer while she was spending a great deal of time at her grandparents' house in Luxembourg.

Rita tried getting Mary to talk to her about what was going on, but she just wouldn't. Though it seemed like Mary might have been trying to reach out to other people in her life. In Robert M. Dudley's book, he says that Mary tried going to a teacher to talk about some problems she was having. It's not clear based on the information provided when exactly this happened. But what is clear is that Mary never got to connect with the teacher to tell them what was going on.

Same can be said for her friend Ann Kinney, the one Mary had gone shopping with a few days before Labor Day. She said that when they'd been out together, Mary was trying to say something about a thing that was bothering her, but either she hadn't gotten to it or Ann was so caught up in her own stuff that she didn't register it because she had no memory of what that thing was. But make no mistake, there was a thing.

And we know this because sometime in the weeks after the girls went missing, a page from Mary's diary was found. It was the last entry she ever made, written just a short time before Labor Day. And what was written on it was terrifying. I can't remember the exact quote, but I'll get real close.

Mary was talking about, I have reasons to fear for my life. I believe she said she'd give her stuffed animals to one of her sisters. And then, if I am killed, please find that justice is done. And that's obviously from a 15-year-old girl. It's not common. I would say that's not a common thing that a young girl would write. According to the Star Tribune, the exact quote is, Should I die, I ask that my stuffed animals go to my sister.

If I am murdered, find my killer and see that justice is done. I have a few reasons to fear for my life, and what I ask is important. You know, we have a life rule over on my other show, Crime Junkie. If you have a secret, tell someone. If you are scared enough to write an ominous statement like this, there has to be more context. And clearly, Mary was trying to give some context.

And I'm sure part of her at 15 thought she'd be silly for adding more context because when you're that age, you're invincible. And even if you're scared, somewhere in the back of your mind, you think that bad things can never happen to you. But they can. So clearly there was someone Mary feared. The question became, who? And was she going to meet that person on September 2nd?

Both the Raker family and later police developed a theory that, yes, the girls were going to meet up with someone that day, someone they knew. And when I say they, really, everyone thought it was Mary. She was older, into boys, and when her mom thought back on how insistent she was on going shopping, again, even though she had just done so a couple days before, well, now Rita thought she understood why.

Rita also came to learn from her other daughter, Betsy, that Mary had snuck out of the house before to meet someone, possibly two someones. But even Betsy didn't know who they were. And despite everyone in town talking about the case and rumors flying around right and left, no one came forward to say that they had been with the girls on Labor Day or any night before for a secret midnight rendezvous.

Which just made the Rakers all the more certain that whoever they were, they knew where Mary and Susie were. A week turned into 10 days, which turned into 14 and then 20. Rita says it was all a blur. They were trying their best, but there were no resources for parents of missing children back then.

I mean, they tried doing their own searches, tried contacting radio stations, tried anything they could, but so much of what they had to do was wait. Just wait for a knock on the door that by some miracle would be their daughter's returning home or someone with the worst news a parent can ever receive.

According to Robert M. Dudley's book, 26 days after Mary and Susie left their home, the knock the Rakers got on their door was the latter. Our pastor showed up at the back door and he was just, he looked so shaken up that he could hardly talk. And he told us that a body had been found and Susie had been found because she was left on top of the quarry. So that's how we found out.

The quarry where Susie was found was just west, right outside of St. Cloud. You can't get to the area now, but back in the 70s, quarries like this, even if they weren't technically public venues, were visited by locals and used as swimming holes. On this particular Saturday, what would have been September 28, 1974, two teenage boys were rock climbing when they came across the decomposing body of Susie Raker.

She was partially covered by surrounding brush, and according to the Minneapolis Star, aside from her glasses and her white cotton drill jacket, both of which were lying nearby, she was fully clothed. Sergeant Bolig theorizes that the boys would have likely had to either find a payphone or physically go down to the police station to report what they found. However, the police were alerted, law enforcement headed to the quarry and began taking in the scene.

Even with the severity of her decomposition, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that this was Susie Raker. The clothing she was wearing was exactly what she wore out of her house the morning of September 2nd. And there were only two missing young girls from St. Cloud at the moment that everyone was looking for. So you can imagine everyone's first thought once they knew this was Susie. Where's Mary? ♪

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When combing the scene around Susie's body, law enforcement noticed some clothing on the ledge of the quarry, kind of like leading into the waters below, almost as though someone had tried to toss them into the water.

It's a steep drop down, maybe 30, 40 feet, if I had to guess, based on an old black and white picture we have on the website. You can actually take a look for yourself at thedeckpodcast.com. But the clothing they were seeing wasn't Susie's, which to investigators could only mean one thing. And then that began the water search and then Mary was found 40 feet below the water in the quarry.

According to the Minneapolis Star, because of the near-freezing water, Mary Raker's preserved body stood in stark contrast to her younger sister's. Along with the items of hers that had been tossed into the water or caught on the cliffside were the mangled sweater that she was wearing, a single shoe on her foot, and the watch adorned around her wrist, which was quite literally frozen in time at 325 degrees.

a physical representation down to the second of when time stopped moving forward for the Raker family. Now, Sergeant Bolig is quick to clarify that they can't prove that the watch stopped at the time Mary went into the water. It's possible, but it is also possible that it stopped at 325 in the morning the day before or even months before. It might not have even been working when she put it on that day.

Though, in this situation, I wonder if Occam's razor might apply. When both girls were examined, it was found that they each died from multiple stab wounds. Mary was stabbed six times, while Susie had over twice that amount. That Minneapolis Star piece from September of 77 reported that neither girl showed any sign of defensive wounds. But that's a fact that Sergeant Bolig wouldn't comment on today.

But he would discuss the findings related to sexual assault, or really, lack thereof. We don't have any evidence to say that they were, and we also don't have any evidence to say that they weren't. Part of the issue of that is due to decomposition. So we can't rule it out. As far as other physical evidence went, it was quite literally a wash.

There was very little evidence, physical evidence recovered from the scene. And unfortunately, in my research, September of 1974 was a very wet and rainy month. So they were out in the elements for close to a whole month, which is not conducive to evidence preservation. Even if there was evidence found, who would be responsible for it?

That turned out to be a simple question with a very, very messy answer. Because the girls were reported missing within city limits, meaning that their case was with the St. Cloud PD. Well, the quarry wasn't within their limits. Their sheriff's office got involved when the bodies were discovered because the bodies were found outside city limits, which then turned into the sheriff's office jurisdiction.

And this is on top of the fact that things were already a hot mess before the jurisdictional issues. Back in 1974, the sheriff was dying of cancer when this happened. I was in the hospital dying of cancer when this occurred. And the St. Cloud police chief had recently either retired or quit or whatever and was out away at training. So I believe the highest ranking person at the St. Cloud police part of the time was possibly a captain that was in town.

And it was an election year for the sheriff's office, and the incumbent sheriff was obviously not going to be running because he was not healthy. To add even more convoluted mess to this, back then, when a new sheriff would get elected, people would get fired and his buddies would get hired type situation, which is not how it is now.

So in case you got a little lost in that, like I did the first couple of times through, you had St. Cloud PD where the girls went missing, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office who had jurisdiction over where the murders were likely committed and where the bodies were found. Then the Sheriff's Office reported to the Stearns County District Attorney who had its own investigator. And it wasn't long before the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was brought in to assist, making them the fourth agency to have an active hand in the case.

All of this is on top of a hospitalized sheriff, an election year which promised turnover, and a healthy amount of old man egos. If we're applying Occam's razor to the question of Mary's watch, then I think it's fair we apply Murphy's Law to how this case fell victim to circumstance and political agendas. Mary and Susie deserved better.

If there was a single face of the investigation early on, it was Lawrence Kritzik with the sheriff's office. He and his officers scour the quarry, meticulously looking for any evidence, particularly the murder weapon. Divers were even brought in early on to look in the water for the type of knife thought to have been used, but to no avail. Our officers never recovered a murder weapon.

While searches were being conducted, the girls' case got more and more coverage on the local news, and additional tips started pouring in. One I found very interesting was from a guy that was posted up at a local tavern on Labor Day. According to his recollection, around 2 p.m., this whole group of people piles into the bar. It's this older dude, and I say older, but only in comparison, because the guy's best guess was that this older dude was like 28.

But this 28-year-old dude was with a teenage boy and two young girls. So they walk in, and then this whole flock of almost a dozen teenagers comes in behind them. In 74, things were a little more loosey-goosey. So it seems like if you were underage, you could go into the bar, you just couldn't drink.

So anyway, this guy who's sitting at the bar says he sees this older guy who gets a beer. He's chatting up a girl that he thinks is one of the Raker sisters. And actually, he says he knows it was the Raker sisters because one of the girls was wearing an army jacket with their last name spelled out right on the front. He said the girl in the jacket was laughing and having a good time. But the other girl, the younger one, was not into it.

He went on to say that after they hung out for a bit at the bar, they went to play foosball in this other room with all of the other teenagers. And the next time he clocked that room, everyone was gone. Now, Mary was wearing a Raker Army jacket that Labor Day. But authorities, even today, don't know how much of this story could be true. For starters, the guy who came forward didn't know the Rakers personally. So all he had to go on was that jacket.

That didn't feel as concrete as, say, the neighbor who saw them in Zare's. But I imagine for at least the briefest of moments, if not a little longer, they wondered. I mean, say for argument's sake, this was Mary and Susie, and say they were with an older man and a teenage boy. Could this older man have been the same nervous-looking man that their neighbor saw waiting outside Zare's with the blue Chevy Impala?

And if they are one in the same, was that who Susie was talking about when she said that she didn't want to go with that man? This lead could have been promising if there had been more people to corroborate it, like any one of those dozen teenagers who was supposedly around them playing foosball in the same room as them. But in all of the years since, not a single one of those people have ever come forward.

Maybe in the 70s, they didn't want to admit to being in a bar. Maybe they were drinking. But they'd be adults now, parents of their own, maybe even grandparents. Surely that's not what's keeping them at bay. So maybe none of it's true. Other people came forward with sightings of the girls supposedly walking into the quarry at around 3 o'clock. Some said alone, some said they were with a man.

Some say they were coming in from the south side, but others say the north. But somehow they all say the same time, which we know isn't possible. And some didn't even get the right quarry at all, which has actually become an easy way for Sergeant Bolig to weed out legitimate tips from bogus ones. One lead they did seem to run at hard and fast was looking for the blue Chevy Impala man that was at Zares the same time as the girls.

Once they had a name of this guy, eyebrows raised when they learned that he allegedly had a record for some kind of sexual offense, though the details around that are unclear. But as quickly as they got excited about their best and only lead, it fizzled out. The man provided an alibi that they were able to verify, and he passed a polygraph, which was kind of the end-all be-all back then. So they moved on.

Our reporting team tried to ask if investigators today have circled back to this guy since polygraphs no longer carry the same weight that they did back then. But Sergeant Bolig didn't want to comment on this. It was hard not to become discouraged in the early days. But Lawrence Kritzik was front and center, reiterating to the public that they were going to keep giving it everything they had.

But all they had was coming up short. And the Rakers felt alone and in the dark as to why no progress was being made. 74 slipped by into 75 and then 76. And at the two-year mark, Fred Raker wasn't shy about his feelings. His words were recounted in Dudley's book, quote, "...two years, yet we know no more or very little more than we did when our girls were killed."

In hindsight, Fred's words are haunting because just weeks after making that statement, investigators would be starting fresh with a whole new investigation involving another teenage St. Cloud girl. ♪

They went in the store, kidnapped her, drove her out to a gravel pit near Luxembourg, stabbed her, covered her in brush, and left her for dead.

This second case marks the beginning of a new chapter in the Raker investigation, one that leads a winding path past a priest, a serial killer, a deathbed confession, and a local who may have been more closely intertwined with the Raker case than anyone today ever realized. All of that is next week on The Deck.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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When we left off last week, four agencies were two years into the homicide investigation with little to show for it. The question on everyone's mind was the same one that the lead investigator rhetorically posed to a St. Cloud Times reporter on the two-year anniversary of the crime. What really happened? I guess your guess is as good as mine.

But there was no more time for guessing. Because a little over three weeks after that article ran, another young girl from St. Cloud was attacked in an eerily similar fashion. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Death. On September 25th, 1976, the Thole family was startled when they got a knock at their door. It was late, past dark, and they weren't expecting anyone.

What they saw when they opened the door would stay with them for a lifetime. Standing on their porch was a bloodied young girl begging for help. According to an article from Fox 9, they gave her a space to lay down on their couch while they called for an ambulance. When she was transported to the hospital and stabilized, police learned she was 14-year-old Sue Dukowitz. And the story she went on to tell police was horrifying.

She said she was working at the front counter of her family's convenience store when two teenage boys came in and robbed her at gunpoint. They took money from her and then forced her to leave the store with them and get into their car, where at some point she was bound with tape. They drove off out of St. Cloud to the nearby and more rural town of Luxembourg. She said that the two drove her out of the city to a gravel pit where they pulled over and sexually assaulted her.

When the assault stopped, in a moment where I am sure she thought the worst was over, they took her out of the car and one of the boys pulled out a knife and began stabbing Sue. I don't know how she was able to do it, but she mustered up every ounce of courage and strength and through the violence pretended to be dead and the boys bought it.

They attempted to cover her body in the brush, and then they just left her there. When their headlights were long gone, Sue rose from the brush and walked toward any light she could see, slowly stumbling, making her way to the foal's door. Now, Sue's father had reported her missing from the store even before Sue escaped. She was able to give police a description of the young men who kidnapped her, along with the car that they were in, and police quickly tracked them down.

17-year-old Herb Notch Jr. and James Wagner were arrested and charged with six felony counts for robbery, kidnapping, sexual assault, and attempted murder. The case bore some eerily similarities to that of the Raker girls, which should have still been top of mind for everyone in St. Cloud when they heard about Sue Dukowitz's attack. But the strange thing is, it doesn't seem like the public noticed.

Maybe because Sue's case was resolved so quickly. That resulted in far less coverage, far less details about the crime being shared. I mean, not even the Rakers knew how close some of the ties were. Even though just the day after Sue Dukowitz was abducted, assaulted and stabbed, Fred went to visit her parents as a show of support. But even if the public didn't see it, investigators saw it.

Two years, no arrests, and damn near the anniversary of the girls' bodies being found, you're telling me another teenage girl is abducted and stabbed? They knew that they needed to look into Herb and James. Now, it turned out James didn't live in St. Cloud until the year after the murders, so it doesn't look like they really dug into him much. Though it's worth noting that there's no mention of where he lived before or if he had ties to the area that would have brought him there before the move.

Herb, though, he was around. He was a local from Luxembourg. You know, the town he drove Sue Dukowitz to. The same town that Mary's grandparents live, a.k.a. the same town she was staying the summer before she vanished, which was the same summer she started showing signs that something was wrong.

Herb would have been about a month shy of 16 when the Raker sisters were killed, the same age as Mary, though they didn't go to school together or anything. Herb went to an alternative school, and Rita said that Herb Natchi Jr. wasn't a name she ever heard from her daughter. But police wanted to check anyway.

After both Herb and James stood trial as adults and each pled guilty to two charges related to the kidnapping, police got to work polygraphing Herb and questioning him about Mary and Susie. Now, according to Dudley's book, there was no deception indicated. But Sergeant Bolig told us that his polygraphs were pretty much inconclusive. So this seems to be where Herbnatch kind of fell off the radar for a while.

Though it's not like they had other viable leads at the time. Things were still a mess between departments. They were each running in their own direction, none of them super great at sharing information. There was a new police chief who came into office in '76 and he was honestly pissed at how the case was being handled.

I mean, these were two young girls, for God's sake. They should be the only thing that mattered. Every decision should be based around what was best for them, not what was best politically for anyone involved. At one point, he, in all seriousness, proposed that all of the agencies get together, lock themselves in a room, and just figure it the f*** out. How were they going to move forward and catch the monster who did this?

Now, this was a nice idea, but it doesn't seem like anyone else was on board because this meeting never happened. A couple more years passed and the girls' case got less and less attention. Other unrelated murders were committed in the area. And so what little time and attention the Raker case was getting kept getting diverted. It was basically going to take something new to spark movement. And in December of 1978, new is what they got.

Investigators got word of a potential new suspect, someone who had never been on their radar, Michael Bartacheski. At the time, Michael, along with a buddy of his named Boyd Tarwater, were being arrested and charged with the murder of an eight-year-old girl from Colorado. The two had kind of been bouncing around, found themselves in Colorado, and got connected to a guy who needed some manual labor help. He even let them stay in the basement of his family home as part of the compensation.

But at some point, there was a dispute about what the rest of that compensation would be or whether it was getting paid out or who knows. But basically, Michael and Boyd felt ripped off. So Michael cooked up a plan to go steal from the guy. He said he got super drunk, went into the house, stole some guns that he knew the guy had in a closet. And then he doesn't really remember much else.

Well, conveniently, the part he doesn't remember is killing the man's eight-year-old daughter as she lay on the couch. It was a horrific crime involving a knife. And the reason it even got on the radar for law enforcement up in St. Cloud was because it turns out that Michael was from there and more than just from there.

And he had gotten into trouble with the law here in St. Cloud. And I think he had held a woman at knife point somewhere along the line. And he lived just a couple, I think, five or six blocks from us. We did not know him. But he lived nearby and he was young. The young thing was important because at some point in the investigation, the FBI was brought in to profile the girl's killer or killers.

And what we knew from the profilers in those days was that they were looking for somebody young. We don't know what else the profile said. It's never been fully released to the public. But this idea of Mary and Susie's killer being young started to become commonly accepted among law enforcement and those in the community. But aside from Michael's age seeming to fit the profile, the fact that he lived near the Rakers in 74...

and a few other things that could have just been coincidences, like the knife that he used to attack being similar to the one in the Raker killings, not much else was making him look like their suspect. Sure, the girl in Colorado was young, but his goal was robbery, and so much was so different. It just didn't add up. So as quickly as hopes raised around this potential new lead, they were dashed. For some, it felt like they were back at square one.

but maybe not for all, because unbeknownst to anyone else, Lawrence Krizik, who'd been off the case in an official capacity for years by this point, he had never quite given up. And he held on to a piece of evidence that he believed would lead him to the killer.

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Why Lawrence never shared this information with anyone else is a mystery. This is complete speculation on my part, but maybe it had to do with all that political nonsense I told you about. Maybe he just wanted to be the guy who solved the case. But either way, it came to light in 83 that he'd never stopped looking at the case. The only reason we know that is because he died that year.

And when they were cleaning out his desk, they found a bunch of files that had all this info about the Raker case and evidence. And I'm not saying info about evidence. They found an actual piece of evidence just in this dude's drawer. It was a pair of gold metal framed glasses with a prescription to correct for nearsightedness.

I don't know if there was documentation in Lawrence's file about these glasses or how they determined where they came from, but ultimately they decided that they were somehow connected to the murders. Though no one would say how. They're still pretty tight-lipped about these glasses today. Here's what Sergeant Bollig would tell us. I do know that when reading the file, there was extensive work done on those glasses as far as figuring out the prescription and things like that.

Okay, but you don't know if anything ever came of those glasses? Like if they ever connected them to anybody or anything? I guess I won't comment on that. Hmm. Anyone know a nearsighted person who lost a pair of Goldrim 70 style glasses on Labor Day of 1974? I actually don't even know if that's the right question since I don't know where or when the glasses were found. But it's specific enough of a detail that I think it's worth throwing out for people listening who were there back in the area at the time.

Anyway, even after these glasses and all those long-lost files were found at the bottom of a desk drawer, nothing in them materialized into an arrest, and more and more years slipped by with no movement. Just like the Rakers were left to do their own searches in the early days, sometimes they felt like they needed to find suspects too. In the 1990s, they pushed police to look at a local reverend, Father Richard Eckroth.

Obviously, I'm sure you're aware of the Catholic sex abuse scandal that had kind of erupted around that time. He was accused of that, of sexually abusing other children. He kind of came on the radar because there was a cabin near Little Falls that was owned by the church that there was some sexual misconduct allegations occurring at that cabin. Mary did attend that cabin. Whether Father Eckroff was there or not, I can't speak for that.

We have no evidence that she ever reported that she was sexually assaulted by Father Eckroth or any allegations of that either. But he was put on the radar related to possibly having contact with Mary at this church-owned cabin where basically I think they would do like retreats with youth up there.

There's no record of Mary having ever disclosed any abuse at the hands of Eckroth to anyone. And there was no evidence of him or any of the other reverends he was accused alongside of being violent. Everything they reportedly did was related to grooming, but it needed to be vetted all the same. He was polygraphed in 1995 by the BCA and passed that polygraph. We don't have any physical evidence connecting him to the crime.

Sergeant Bolig said that Eckroth willingly provided a DNA sample before his death in 2015, which they kept in evidence just in case. I think the thought was as technology improves, we can't go back in time. And it's tougher to get people's DNA, obviously, when they're deceased. And now we can go through like family trees and stuff, but it's still a lot more work. I think the thought was to grab his DNA and have it on file in case we do develop profiles or if we do have profiles to compare it to.

Sergeant Bolig is casting a wide net. But as far as persons of interest go... He's not my favorite person of interest in this investigation. However, it's tough to 100% clear anyone until the crime is solved, in my opinion. Bolig said Eckroth was fairly cooperative with the investigation, which, he added, is more than he could say for other persons of interest. But that was kind of the problem. They were working with the same names over and over.

Each one suspicious, but none of them suspicious enough to say for sure they did it. Maybe it would take another new set of eyes to look at the picture in front of them and make it fit after all of these years. And once again, it was Rita who stepped up to find the new set of eyes. It was 2004 by this point, and in the decades since her children's murder, Rita had become involved with a nonprofit organization called Parents of Murdered Children.

The organization offers a tremendous amount of resources to people who find themselves part of the worst club imaginable. It is truly an amazing organization that we are supporting in honor of Mary and Susie, and I highly recommend you check them out as well.

One of the things that they offer is an annual conference. That's actually one of the things we're sponsoring. And it's for the parents to come together. And they fill the conference with professional resources for these people in unthinkable positions. I was alone that year. I went out with another lady and this was in Cincinnati, I think. And two men from the BDOG Society gave one of the workshops there.

And after it, I went up to one of them and told him about our case. And he gave me the name of the guy who was the president in the Pittsburgh area that year. I wrote to him. I sent some newspaper articles and they agreed to hear our case. The VDOC Society shouldn't be new to anyone here. They review cold cases, even cover the expenses in doing so.

The catch is the organization must be invited in by law enforcement, and they can't go out and go rogue if they think they have it figured out. They just make recommendations for law enforcement to follow. But most of these people know what they're doing, and all these years later, Stearns County quite literally had nothing to lose. So after some back and forth, the Raker case was presented to the VDoc Society on May 19, 2005, Mary's birthday.

Rita never expected to spend any of Mary's birthdays like this. But here she was, continuing to give her the greatest gift a mother could by fighting for her and Susie. A St. Cloud Times article reported that after the VDoc Society reviewed all of the case materials, they agreed with the current investigators who apparently presented one or more persons of interest to them. They said they were on the right track, looking at the right people or person.

But who was that? In the years immediately following the consultation, law enforcement still wouldn't name an official suspect. They were holding, waiting. Maybe for technology, more evidence, a confession. There just wasn't enough. Even with new tips that came in, none of them brought a fresh perspective to the case. It was more of the same, rehashing old rumors or throwing around names that police had known about since the beginning.

Then, out of the complete blue, 40 years after the girls had been killed, a brand new name popped up. Lloyd Welch came on the radar sometime in 2014 to our office. The Lyons sisters murder, are you familiar with that case at all?

OMI ever. Back in 2019, I covered the Lyons sisters' murder on an episode of Crime Junkie. I have that linked out in the show notes if you're curious. It was one of the hardest cases I ever researched and wrote about. Sheila and Catherine Lyon were 12 and 10 when they disappeared from a shopping center outside of D.C. in 1975. The investigation into what happened to them unearthed a story so depraved it is hard to speak about again.

So I won't. I'll just tell you this. It took decades to get to the truth in that case. But at the end of the day, the perpetrator was in front of them all along. A man named Lloyd Lee Welch. He abducted the girls and took them back to his family property. He said his whole family was involved. They say it was just him. And there are some dark stories that came out of that household. So I don't know what to believe.

But there was some evidence found that connected at least one of the girls to the property. So even though their bodies were never recovered, there were answers as to what happened to them. So why was this coming up on Stearns County's radar in 2014? Well, two sisters, gone shopping, abducted and murdered, just one year apart.

And by the time Lloyd was arrested, he was already suspected in other crimes across the country. So it seems like it's worth taking a look, right? Well, that's not even the thing that got Stearns County's attention. When the Lyons sisters' story started breaking in the news, it garnered national attention. And along with Sheila and Catherine, Lloyd's picture was published online. It was that picture that caught the eye of a woman in Minnesota named Georgianne.

She spoke with Care 11 about the encounter she says she had with him. All the way back in 1974, according to her, just days before Mary and Susie were killed. She was new to town and eager to meet new people, so she was excited when a teenage boy rode up to her on his bike. They got to talking and she asked if he knew of any swimming spots and he suggested the quarry.

Though no reports ever specifically say what quarry or where at the quarry. Because remember, Sergeant Bolig said that a lot of people get that info wrong about where the girls were found. But anyway, this kid suggested a quarry and they biked off together and went up to this riverbank. While they were sitting there talking, Georgianne said that this guy pulled a knife on her and assaulted her.

She said all the while he talked about his fantasies, specifically a fascination with sisters. After the attack, a car pulled up and distracted him, which allowed her to run away. Georgianne showed Kara Levin a diary entry from that time where she recounted the attack. And she scribbled the man's name down in the entry. Lloyd. Lloyd, the carnival worker who was traveling with someone named Helen.

Now, Lloyd Lee Welch did work for the carnival. He did have a girlfriend named Helen that he traveled with. Was everyone wrong all these years? Was it truly the traveling psychopath that found his way to a town and committed the worst possible crime and then left as quickly as he'd shown up? Georgianne said that she went to police after the Raker murders and told them about her attack, even suggested that there might be a connection back then.

But she came forward again in 2014 when she was sure Lloyd was her attacker. She figured now, with a name and his story, maybe they'd take her seriously. Sergeant Bolig said he couldn't find any record of her attempt to contact law enforcement back in 1974. But he did seriously look at Lloyd when he was handed the case.

He's currently incarcerated in the state of Delaware. I went and interviewed Lloyd in prison. I was pleasantly surprised that he talked to me. I was told by prison staff that other investigators had flown out there to interview him and he wouldn't cooperate at all or talk to them at all. And he did talk with me. I questioned him about this case and he cooperated with pretty much anything that I asked. Did he deny involvement? He's always denied involvement with this case and he's denied being in Minnesota.

So our office has been unable to prove or disprove that he was in Minnesota. Back when our office in 2014 did try to locate Carnival records, they just don't exist from back then. But we can't say for sure one way or the other that he was in Minnesota or that he was not in Minnesota. There was Carnivals in Minnesota. I've reached out to some owners of those Carnivals, and I don't have enough information to confirm that he ever worked for them or did ever work for them. It's kind of going on people's memory because there was no records there.

The first follow-up question I asked felt like the obvious one. They preserved all of the evidence from the Raker crime. Is there anything preserved from Georgian's assault that could be tested now? I mean, if it's linked to Lloyd, it proves that he was there. But this is where things get a little hairy. Again, there's no record of Georgian's attack. Not just her coming forward about a connection to the Raker sisters, but like no report at all, which means no evidence at all.

According to Bolig, Georgian says she reported her attack and he did an extensive search in their records but was unable to find a report there at the sheriff's office. He's not saying it didn't happen and maybe she reported it to a different agency, but he said that they're the only agency in the area that keeps records that far back.

So fact of the matter is, there just is nothing we have that we could use almost 50 years later to put Lloyd in Minnesota with the Raker sisters. CARE 11 quoted a 2020 email from a law enforcement official that said, quote, the investigation of the Raker homicides points in a different direction than Mr. Welch, end quote. But Bolig didn't say that outright when we talked to him.

He just said kind of the same thing he did about Ekroth. No one's out until this thing is solved. And I believe that's really how he feels because a year or two after that email to KARE11, he actually went and spoke with Lloyd. So he's still taking all the investigative steps in all of the directions.

But for the Rakers in 2014, 15, 16, it was still feeling like those steps were all one forward and then two back. A new name. Great. No arrest. What the hell?

Well, two years after Lloyd's name made headlines, everyone, even the family, was about to find out why they kept taking so many steps backwards. Because maybe the answer to this enduring mystery had been right in front of them all along. ♪

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Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by On Deck or Celtic Bank. On Deck does not lend to North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Carl's Jr.'s Big Carl fans know nothing beats the layers and layers of flavor of a Big Carl. Nothing beats that charbroiled beef, American cheese, and tangy Carl's classic sauce. Nothing except getting a second Big Carl for just $1.

Big Carl just one-upped itself for just one buck. Then buy one Big Carl, get one for a buck deal. Only at Carl's Jr. Big Burger! Get burger. Available for a limited time at participating restaurants. Tax not included. Price may vary. Not valid with any other offer, discount, or combo. In 2016, a journalist for Fox 9 in Minneapolis came out with an explosive investigative piece on the Raker case. You see, up to this point, remember, nobody really knew about Sue Dukowitz.

I mean, they knew about her. You knew about her attack, even. But like I said before, it kind of seemed like no one was making any official connection to the Raker sisters. But Fox 9 did. Their article published a ton of never-before-known facts about both cases that drew some scary similarities. Like the fact that both Sue and Susie were hidden in brush after their attacks.

Like the fact that Mary had her sweater cut down the front and her bra had been cut off. Facts that weren't known before about the Raker case. And because Sue's case didn't get much media play back then, no one knew that the same thing happened to her. Fox 9 was able to find all of this out through a records request using Minnesota's open records law. They got tons of files that were never made public before, some of which brought Herb Notch Jr.'s name back into the spotlight.

Though I have no idea what tipped them off to do so in the first place. Whatever the reason, this was explosive and it made the idea of a connection even harder to ignore. It had just never been pointed out so loudly to me as when we watched that story and looking back, the sheriff's department should have had him at that time. What the sheriff's office did in relation to Herb Notch Jr. and the Raker case is a little fuzzy.

We don't have the case file in front of us that outlines every investigative step. But I'm confident that he's been looked at extensively over the years, even before the Fox 9 story. I mean, police always knew what the public didn't. And again, there were some scary similarities. But in 2016, when this news piece came out, the sheriff's office still wasn't willing to call Herb a suspect.

All the then sheriff could be quoted saying was, I can agree with you that there are similarities in both cases. That was from Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtel. Along with just the similarities between the two cases, there were other things that stood out. Strange coincidences, if that's what you want to call them. Like remember, Herb lived in Luxembourg, the town where Mary spent the summer before she was murdered.

Herb would have been just shy of 16 the time Mary was killed, which is young, like the FBI profile suggested. And here's another fun fact. Herb worked in the grocery department at Zare's department store back in the summer of 1974. That's the store that the girls were at when they were last seen alive by their neighbor. He saw them walking toward the grocery department, if you remember.

Now, the grocery department was closed for Labor Day, and it was in the same direction as the coats, which Mary said she needed. But again, strange coincidence, especially since the department was closed. So we know he would have likely had that day off work. Here's something else I find very interesting.

According to Dudley's book, after Herb was caught and confessed to attacking Sue Dukowitz, he, quote, told investigators he wanted counseling and acknowledged he had previously been in a mental hospital in 1974, the same year the Rager girls were stabbed to death, end quote. Now, we have zero details on this. And when we asked Bollig about this, he said he didn't recall that information.

He did say, though, that Herb would have been a minor at the time. So if he was committed anywhere, it would have been with the sign-off of his parents, not like forced in by any reason by police or something like that. I don't know if authorities ever collected his DNA like they did for Eckroth, you know, just in case. But I do know he was polygraphed at some point. But that didn't help one way or another. His polygraph examinations have been more inconclusive than anything.

With nothing to definitively rule him out and coincidences that just kept piling up and piling up, by the time Herb was on his deathbed in 2017, the Raker family was all but convinced of his guilt. Rita told the St. Cloud Times, quote, I honestly have hope in my lifetime that I will see it solved. I'm not sure why, but I do, end quote.

With Herb on his deathbed, dying of liver failure, Rita felt she finally had the chance to get answers. Now, Rita didn't really want to get into this part of the story when we interviewed her, but she talked about it with Fox 9 back in 2018.

She told them that with a blessing from law enforcement, she went to talk to Herb in his hospital room. Not to get justice, not to be vindicated, but just for answers. To hear him say what she believed for so long to be true. The conversation lasted just over 20 minutes and she told Fox 9, quote, He was totally in denial. I found him to be very angry, a very hard and bitter person. There was no sense of remorse at all.

During their short interaction, Herb maintained his innocence. But he did say two things that will stick with Rita for the rest of her days. He asked her, quote, Why can't you just put it all behind you? And then he said something some might interpret as a confession. I'm going to hell. Rita said she left that interaction feeling numb. But for her and the rest of the Raker family, what Herb said during those few short minutes was enough.

Marty Raker, one of the girl's older brothers, told the St. Cloud Times that he doesn't spend much time thinking about who. He believes he knows who. He just wants to know when police will be able to prove it. But if authorities agree on the who, they're not saying. Is Herb Notch Jr. a person of interest? Yes. But the sheriff's office isn't using the term suspect for anyone. Not even Herb, who died not long after Rita went to visit him.

But if he was involved, I'm not totally convinced all the answers died along with him. Even though Herb has passed away, Bolig is still working the case. He believes it's his duty to solve it. And not all the persons of interest we've talked about are gone. And here's the thing. You know there's always a thing with me when I get this deep into a case, so buckle up and put your speculation hats on with me for just one second.

Now, none of what I'm about to tell you is proven. It's just meant to make everyone think outside of the box a little. Because for 48 years, it has been the same names over and over. Usually, there is some truth to rumors that persist that long. There is a reason it's not solved. So what if we have a piece, but just not the whole truth in front of us? Or at least we hadn't. Hear me out.

So say for argument's sake only that Herbnacht Jr. was involved, I couldn't help but wonder how he could have pulled it off alone. If you remember from part one of the story last week, it was reported that the girls had no defensive wounds. Now, Bollig gave us a cool no comment on that, so there's a lot of wiggle room on whether this could be off or flat out inaccurate. But I'm going off what I have.

If they have no defensive wounds, how does a 15-year-old boy get control of two sisters long enough to stab them, to cut off Mary's top and her bra? I mean, the girls were 12 and 15. They aren't little kids. He could have had a gun like he and James used two years later when they abducted Sue Dukowitz. Sure, they reportedly used a gun to get her in the car and then still used a knife to stab her. But know what else he had with him when he abducted Sue? An accomplice.

And the more you look at Herb's other crimes around the time, even the petty ones, like some purse-snatching stuff that he was implicated in during, like, 1976, that all happened with an accomplice. Now, it doesn't seem like police looked into James at all for the Raker case. Again, he's the one who assaulted Sue with Herb, and it seems from the earlier reporting that he didn't live in the area in 1974.

Again, I have loads of questions about where he was. But there were probably reasons police never went down that road. He took a plea in the Sudukowitz case and was out within seven years. Fox 9 reported that James stayed totally out of trouble since. And at least as of 2016, he's kept his nose clean. So who else? I'm sure there were loads of people Herb had connections to at one time or another.

But there was one person who jumped out so hard at me that it hurt my eyes, like staring into the sun. And I can't get him out of my head. So here we go. I'm just going to lay out for you the pieces I'm putting together because I don't know how else to make it make sense or to get you where I'm at. In Dudley's book, there is a passage that reads, quote,

Now, I have other sources that say Herb worked in the grocery department at Zare's. And I know that he is from Luxembourg. So he's the Luxembourg one. So then we just have this friend of a boy Mary was acquainted with. Okay, cool. Someone who knows Mary, knows Herb, works with Herb.

Herb and the unnamed boy both worked at the place Mary and Susie were last seen. Great. Now, remember that Fox 9 article I mentioned earlier that was all about Rita confronting Herb on his deathbed? Well, it also included comments from James, Herb's accomplice in the Sue Dukowitz case. James said, basically, that Herb had no remorse. He was a scary dude. And there was one instance, back when they were in prison together, where, quote,

The guy was hissing like a snake and talking about he wants to kill everybody, end quote. The article goes on to say that there was someone else who heard this hissing thing that Herb did. And this is who I think is the unnamed boy. It says this happened right after the girls were killed. And the guy who had that encounter was a man that we'll call Roy. ♪

Roy and Herb went to the same alternative high school back in 1974, and they also worked together at Zare's. So they had every chance to know each other pretty well. The writer of the article claimed, quote,

One day, he, and he meaning Roy, said his gut told him to ask Notch about the Raker girls. I said, Herb, did you know about this or have anything to do with this? Roy said, I don't remember which way I worded it, but he went, hiss. And that was the only response I got out of him. End quote. The hissing thing is super weird, I'll give you that. But it's not what I get hung up on. Herb hangs out at the store on his days off.

Grocery was closed on Labor Day. That equals days off. Now, even before this, Roy said that he was suspicious of Herb. And after the hissing thing, he told police about it, and they confirmed that it happened. So based on those things, I'm pretty confident the unnamed boy is Roy. Roy knew Herb well. So...

me what the f***ing odds are that, by the way, Roy was one of the two boys who found Susie Raker's body in the quarry that, according to Sergeant Bolig, isn't super well known. Now, I pieced most of this together after our initial interview with Bolig, so we called him up for a follow-up to see if he had ever talked to Roy himself. Was Roy ever considered a person of interest as well?

But the answer is no. Sergeant Bolig told us there's more than a few strange coincidences in this case. And to him, it's not super alarming necessarily that Roy knew Herb. Sergeant Bolig said he can't say 100% either way.

But what he knows is that Roy has never once been uncooperative with him. And he's always seemed to be genuinely concerned about catching whoever did this. Sure, Roy's gotten in trouble with the law a few times for trespassing, DWI, etc. But nothing that would point toward him being capable of something like assisting in the murder of two young girls.

We triple confirmed with Bollig that Notch definitely was not the other boy with Roy who found the bodies. That boy has never done any interview or been named publicly, so Bollig wouldn't name him either. Now, none of this means Roy had anything to do with the Raker sisters' murders. And it certainly doesn't seem like Bollig thinks there's anything fishy there. And there very well might not be. But there's enough that I'd love to talk to him.

And he's not the only one, because if you remember, Dudley's book brings up a mutual acquaintance. Like this guy, the unnamed boy, who I'm assuming is Roy, had an acquaintance with Mary. Who's that? Maybe that's the person we should be talking to. We reached out to Roy via Facebook.

And he actually responded pretty quickly and said he was down to chat. But when we tried to set something up, he ghosted us. So our reporter, of course, followed up. Maybe he got busy, forgot, whatever. She sent a couple more messages and then she was blocked. So was Roy an accomplice of some sort? Or even if he wasn't, does he know something? I have no idea. The guy won't talk to me. There's nothing to prove he was.

I just know that he probably has information stored away in his head that I'd love to get at. But is there an accomplice in general? I'm almost certain of it. Rita did tell us that when she talked with Herb on his deathbed, he mentioned a name. Someone she thinks could be an accomplice. But when we asked her for the name, she couldn't remember. So we went back to Sergeant Brian Bolig one more time.

But he didn't want to comment on the name of the individual. In his earlier interview with us, the idea of multiple perpetrators did get brought up in kind of a less direct way. And here is what his thoughts were then. We can't say the case is still unsolved. So we can't say for certain if it was one person, two people or five people. I think the best way to look at it from my other experiences as being a law enforcement officer is it's always tough for investigators

more than one person to keep a secret. And we're on the 49th year. The 49th anniversary of this case is coming up this fall, and we still don't have the answers that we would like to provide to the family about what happened. And no one credible has come forward saying, I know this occurred, this is who did it, and provided us with the evidence to show that this actually did happen the way they say it did.

Everything I've come to learn about this case, on the record and off, makes me believe a solve is within reach. The clock's ticking for someone. Mary and Susie are stuck forever in 1974, while whoever killed them got to grow up and make a whole lifetime worth of memories. The girls didn't get to meet a partner or have kids and careers. And Susie could have been anything. She was so stinking smart.

She was a more serious person. She was a bookworm and she was rather quiet. During the summer months, she read a lot of books. We went back and forth to the library to get books for her. She practiced her violin. She was a violin player. I don't know if I mentioned that, but that was definitely an interest. All of our family had an interest in music. Rita knows that without a doubt, Mary would have been a teacher. Maybe a teacher edging toward retirement now.

She loved teaching the neighborhood kids. We had some desks down in our basement when she was growing up, and she often had students over. One day I was up in my kitchen, and I heard Mary teaching in the basement, just teaching away. So I went down there, and there were no students sitting there at all. She was teaching to the empty desks.

"I always believed that there are people who care, people who probably worked this case to the bone. And I think Sergeant Bolig really cares today. I think he sees all that was taken from Mary and sweet Sue and every member of the Raker family whose life was never the same after September 2nd, 1974. But you can't go back. There's no redo button. There's just hindsight.

And in hindsight, I think these two girls and their horrific murders got lost in a lot of grown men's egos. And they deserved so much better. Sergeant Bolig is trying to give them better. To give Rita better. It's not about me. It's about them. And them going 49 years with not getting what happened to her daughters. Fred has passed away several years ago.

So they still have sisters and things. They're aunts now, you know, and there's just, there's a family there that doesn't have answers what happened to the loved one. Maybe you have the answer. There is a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people responsible for the murders of Mary and Suzanne Raker. There's a link in the show notes that'll take you to the Stearns County page if you have any information about this case. ♪

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? No.

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