Strangled Minneapolis woman's death remains unsolved 84 years later

Laura Kruse grew up on her family's farm near Pine City, Minn., the lone girl among seven siblings. After graduating from high school, she moved 70 miles south to Minneapolis in 1936 to enroll at a beauty school that promised salon jobs. She turned 18 that fall.

"Laura was just a farm girl; she didn't make many friends," her brother Ervin said later. "She wanted work so bad she thought she could get it by going to the city."

After several months, things were going well. She'd found a room with a young family in the Hale neighborhood of south Minneapolis. "She was happy" during a Sunday visit home to the farm in March 1937, said her brother Fred.

Laura told her family that she would graduate from the beauty school in a couple of months and start working in a salon. "She even told us she was going to surprise us with another visit Easter Sunday," Fred said.

The following Friday night, March 19, Laura attended a party until just before midnight at the De Guile School of Beauty Culture, 808 Nicollet Av. She hopped on a streetcar to go home with fellow student Irene Mullen, who got off at 38th Street. A Minneapolis police officer on the streetcar got off at 47th Street, four blocks before Kruse's stop.

At 12:30 a.m., neighbor Edwin Hanson awoke to a scream. At 7:50 a.m., another neighbor on his way to the garage found Kruse's battered body behind a vacant home. Laura was so close to home that police found her house key in the snow; she had apparently taken it out to put in the lock.

Police said Kruse had been assaulted and strangled. Her face was bruised, her green fur-trimmed coat torn and bloody, and its belt was found around her neck. There were signs her body had been dragged, with the struggle ending at a pool of blood near a concrete wall.

They found her brown felt hat and a box of cake and ice cream she was bringing home from the party. But her handbag showed no sign of a robbery.

"How could anyone have done such a terrible thing?" said Harriet Simmerman, a high school friend back in Pine City. "I can't believe it. She was such a nice girl, never did anyone any harm. Everyone liked her so well."

Another neighbor told the Minneapolis Tribune: "Oh, she should never have left the farm, she never should have gone to the city."

Kruse's murder was the latest in a string of violent attacks on Twin Cities women at the time. It ignited anger from Pine City to downtown Minneapolis, where several hundred women gathered at the Radisson to demand an increase in the number of police, streetcar stations equipped with phones, better street lighting and closer scrutiny of sex offenders.

"Why are these degenerates as they are?" asked Maude Ziemer, president of the League of Catholic Women. "I hope the people at this meeting will not just go home and go about something else and let it die until we have another murder. Let's do something about it."

The mayor of Pine City, James Sullivan, accused the Minneapolis cops of letting "this case slip through their fingers." A Pine City man told the Minneapolis Star: "I wish we had Laura's murderer here. We'd take care of him. We'd lynch him. Maybe a lynching or two would help Minneapolis to clear up some of these brutal crimes."

At first, police chased tips about a car following the streetcar that night. Despite the streetcar driver remembering five of the coupe's license plate numbers, and offering a description of its young blond driver, the trail turned cold.

Several suspects surfaced but were dismissed, including a 30-year-old man in the St. Cloud jail who confessed to killing Kruse three months later. That confession, "like numerous other promising leads, soon proved to be false," the Tribune reported nearly two years later.

Police tried but failed to connect a 35-year-old rape suspect to Kruse's slaying a couple of months after her death. One front-page headline asked "KRUSE CASE RESOLUTION NEAR?" The answer would be no.

In 1945, Minneapolis cops interviewed an Iowa inmate in an insanity ward who was serving a 30-year murder sentence. He admitted visiting the Minneapolis beauty school that Kruse had attended and watching women board the streetcars. But detectives ruled him out as a suspect after an hourlong interrogation.

On the 10th anniversary of Laura Kruse's death, the original detectives on her case were still tracking several new leads. "Hundreds of clues have been checked and scores of suspects questioned," the Tribune reported, "but the case is still unsolved."

And so it is, 84 years later.

Mickie Ehlert grew up in the same neighborhood where Kruse was killed and read about her case in the memoir of a writer who grew up in 1930s south Minneapolis.

"That murder just profoundly moved me," said Ehlert, a retired nurse living in Richfield. "I have four daughters and the idea that that family could never be at peace is just heartbreaking."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.