Roots & Riddles

In the early morning hours of September 15, 1951, 19-year-old Doelan Peterson was shot and killed outside a Rushford home. The person holding the rifle was 16-year-old Carrol Bakken—and at the center of the story was a 15-year-old girl both boys knew.

Within hours, Bakken had signed the first of two statements describing firing at Peterson from just four feet away. But when the case reached a packed Fillmore County courtroom, the story became far less straightforward. The defense argued the shooting was an accident, challenged Bakken’s confessions, and pointed to a broken piece of the rifle as evidence of what may have happened that night.

Was Peterson deliberately shot in a fit of jealousy, or did a confrontation between teenagers end in a tragic accident?

This week on Roots & Riddles, we revisit the shooting, the controversial confessions, the dramatic murder trial, and the verdict that left Rushford divided—and ultimately prompted the community to take action for its young people.

In the early years of Fillmore County, social lines could still follow settlers into the frontier. One local story tells of a mother who once objected to her son’s friendship with another boy she considered beneath him.

Years later, the Civil War changed everything.

Charles Pray and Patrick H. McConville enlisted in the fall of 1861. At Gettysburg, Charles was wounded—and according to the 1912 history of Fillmore County, McConville carried him on his back to safety. When the two men eventually returned home, Charles’s mother welcomed McConville very differently than she had as a boy.

In this episode, Preston and Lenora explore the story of friendship, class, war, and reconciliation behind two young men from Fillmore County whose lives became forever connected on one of the most famous battlefields in American history.

No, not that Freddy Krueger—but the real Fred Krueger of Wykoff has a story strange enough on its own. In 1885, a local newspaper reported that former German newspaper editor Frederick C. Krueger had “skipped” town, leaving his wife and children behind amid allegations of financial wrongdoing. But where did he go?

Follow the trail from Wykoff to Rochester, Missouri, and Chicago as we piece together the life of a newspaperman who seemingly vanished—and discover that disappearing from Wykoff wasn’t quite the end of his story.

On the night of July 6, 1947, an unidentified man was struck and killed by a freight train near the Wykoff depot. He carried no identification, and no one seemed to know who he was.

But his fingerprints told a much stranger story.

Authorities connected the dead man to seven different names, used during arrests stretching from New York and Pennsylvania to Iowa and Minnesota. One of those names—Oar Diehl—would provide tantalizing clues about his past, including a birth date and hometown. Yet despite the trail he left across the country, his true identity remained a mystery.

Who was the man who died on the tracks in Wykoff? Why had he spent decades traveling under different names? And could the clues left behind finally reveal who he really was?

This week on Roots & Riddles, we follow the paper trail of a man who had seven names—but died without one.

In November 1929, a Wykoff man walked into Rochester police headquarters and confessed to a murder in Germany.

There was just one problem: the murder apparently never happened.

George Rohde told police he had killed a friend, stolen his identity, and come to America using the dead man’s passport. But as officers questioned him, the story began to unravel. Soon Rohde admitted the confession—and even his tale of a lost $20,000 fortune—had been fabricated.

His real motive was much stranger: he was homesick for Germany, tired of American farm life, and hoped that if authorities believed he was wanted overseas, someone might pay to send him back.

In this episode, Preston and Lenora revisit one of Wykoff’s most unusual stories—a false murder confession fueled by loneliness, homesickness, and one very complicated plan to get home.

This September, Roots & Riddles is celebrating Wykoff’s 150th birthday with a month of stories from the town’s past.

In the early morning hours of March 28, 1895, fire tore through the heart of Wykoff.

Starting near the town hall, the flames raced through the village’s business district, destroying stores, homes, barns, and nearly an entire block before finally burning itself out. With limited firefighting equipment, intense heat, and rapidly spreading flames, residents turned their attention to saving whatever goods and belongings they could carry into the street.

By morning, Wykoff’s once-busy commercial center was reduced to smoking ruins—but the town was already talking about rebuilding.

In this episode, Preston and Lenora revisit the devastating 1895 fire that changed Wykoff’s Main Street, the businesses that were lost, the questions surrounding how the fire began, and the community effort that followed.

This September, Roots & Riddles is celebrating Wykoff’s 150th birthday with a month of stories from the town’s past.

September is Wykoff month on Roots & Riddles as we celebrate the town’s 150th birthday—and we’re starting with one of its most remarkable early residents.

Robert Crowell came to the Wykoff area in the 1850s, built a log cabin, and later enlisted in Company K of the 6th Minnesota Infantry. He served under General Sibley, saw action during the U.S.-Dakota War, and later campaigned in the South during the Civil War.

By the time he died at age 95, Crowell was remembered as the oldest Civil War veteran in Fillmore County and the last surviving veteran in Wykoff. His family’s military service stretched across generations—from the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War and World War I.

In this episode, Preston and Lenora look back at the life of Robert Crowell, one of Wykoff’s earliest settlers, and the extraordinary military legacy carried through his family.

🎉 All September long, Roots & Riddles will be featuring stories from Wykoff in honor of the town’s 150th birthday.

In December 1921, 23-year-old schoolteacher Inga Magnusson failed to return home from the rural school where she taught just across the Iowa line from Houston County, Minnesota.

Her family went searching—and what they found inside the schoolhouse launched a manhunt across three counties. Bloodhounds followed the trail. Evidence was discovered beneath a suspect’s bed. By the end of the day, 26-year-old Earl Throst was in custody.

Throst would later confess to killing Inga, and little more than a year later, he walked calmly to the gallows at the Iowa State Penitentiary.

In this “on the outskirts” episode, Preston and Lenora revisit the brutal murder of Inga Magnusson, the search for her killer, and the case that ended with one of Iowa’s early 20th-century executions.

Calvin Siscoe Powers was never just one thing.

Before settling in Fillmore County, he worked as a marble cutter, sculptor, newspaper publisher, lecturer, and traveling phrenologist. In Fountain, he became a businessman, hall owner, editor, politician—and, in 1877, the inventor of a patented electro-vapor bath designed to combine steam, medicated vapor, and electrical treatment inside one elaborate wooden cabinet.

Newspapers remembered him as “the Professor,” a forceful speaker with a colorful personality, a talent for attracting both admiration and ridicule, and an almost endless appetite for new ventures. He later served Fillmore County in the Minnesota Senate and continued operating businesses in Fountain and Preston.

In this episode, Preston and Lenora explore the extraordinary life of Calvin S. Powers: the sculptor who became a phrenologist, the publisher who entered politics, the inventor behind one of Fillmore County’s strangest patents, and the man whose final months were shadowed by the tragic death of his young grandson.

This is the story of the Professor of Fountain.

Sources

Sources for this episode include Calvin S. Powers’s 1877 U.S. patent for an improved electro-vapor bath; an 1871 profile in The Phrenological Journal; the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library; and contemporary reports from the Preston Times, Preston Republican, Chatfield Democrat, Western Progress, and The People’s Press.

In the spring of 1952, seventeen-year-old Don Haugen was preparing to graduate from Spring Valley High School while carrying burdens few of his classmates could see. He worked exhausting hours on a farm west of town, attended school in worn clothing, and watched as his father, Elling Haugen, became increasingly thin, weak, and desperate.

Then Elling fled the farm and told authorities he had been held captive and nearly starved for five years. The allegations drew newspaper attention across Minnesota, prompted an FBI investigation, and placed Don—still living on the farm—at the center of a deeply personal public scandal.

Decades later, Don described those years in his memoir, Mom, Dad, Lawrence and Me. His account does not offer a simple answer to the accusations. Instead, it reveals what it was like to be a teenager caught between conflicting adults, questioned by investigators, separated from his father, and forced to face his classmates while his family’s story appeared in the headlines.

In this episode, Preston and Lenora look beyond the sensational “farm captive” story to explore Don Haugen’s experience of poverty, humiliation, family trauma, and survival in 1950s Spring Valley—and the complicated historical record left behind by those who lived through it.