A Long-Lived Misconception, Finally Put to Rest

I must start this post by offering abject apologies. Several times in this blog, and over some 10 years before I even started this blog, I have mentioned and shown a picture of a red and tan Camel advertising jacket as a clue in the murder case.

I have just become very belatedly aware as of December 30, 2014, more than 14 years after the murder I am discussing here, and over 10 years after I first heard of a “Camel advertising jacket” as a clue in the case, that the advertising jacket that was found at the murder scene was not red and tan, but black.

Becoming aware of this information, after so many years of misconception, has floored me. It has made me feel literally sick to my stomach, as I realize now that this glaring error has tainted my testimony, and undoubtedly has even made this blog look ridiculous, to anyone who knew all along that the jacket was black.

I will now explain how such a misconception came about. I will give full resentful “thanks” to everyone who helped it come about – in such an important case as a brutal murder case that I have been accused (by Shelly Tormanen) of taking “as a joke” and trying to scam money on. I will also have to go back to each post in which I mentioned that jacket, and correct it. I think the way I will do that is to just add a short statement over the picture of the jacket itself, and a link to this post.

Nevertheless, many hours of my time have been spent in the past couple of days writing and checking this post to correct this disinformation. One of my Thai colleagues in the English Department at Nakhon Phanom University even donated an hour of her time to this project. She graciously postponed the beginning of her New Year break from the University, to give me time to finish copying and pasting 14 years (63 pages’ worth) of newspaper articles off my email account, before locking up the office and leaving on her long drive to her home town for the holiday. I’m afraid that delay may have put part of her drive through the mountains after dark.

(I had to cut and paste the articles onto my hard drive, so I could work on this post at home. I don't have an Internet connection in my apartment, and ride my bicycle about a mile to use one at another University office. No, Shelly, I'm not doing this because I'm bored. I have a whole stack of final exams I need to work on this weekend, besides this damned thankless blog.) 

And many more months have been wasted in disinformation just during this past year, because of this mistake on my part. There were several people who could easily have prevented or corrected this error at an early stage, but who didn’t. Some were, I think, naïve and ignorant themselves, some had just grown careless and lazy in collecting their ample pay, some were downright malignant, and some should be arrested and imprisoned for accessory to murder, after the fact. The very best that I can plead for myself in this fiasco is “ignorance on this one point of the jacket”.

I have already mentioned in previous posts that I did not become aware of the fact that the police were looking for someone with size 11 or 12 New Balance shoes, until about the 3^rd of September 2001. That was the first anniversary of the murder, when I happened to read an article in the Duluth Budgeteer. This was the weekly paper that contained mostly advertising, plus a small amount of mostly cheerleading booster-type “news”, that used to be delivered free to my mailbox in Twig every Saturday, just before noon.

The only thing I had heard about the murder case prior to reading that article, was Mr. Bob Stoneman’s gruff opinion over the phone that the murderer may have been “that Tom guy”, because Tom “drove that black minivan”, and that the police had mentioned a minivan in connection with the murder. Well, as I’ve said repeatedly, Tom had been arrested for a DWI just shortly before the murder, and his van was in impound -- so (as far as I knew at that time), it couldn’t have been Tom. And that’s what I told Bob.

And I’ve also already related that even when I read the September 2001 Budgeteer article saying that the police were looking for someone with size 11 or 12 New Balance shoes, even that fact didn’t ring a bell at first … until I began thinking back to what I thought was a totally insignificant event of over a year before: namely, Tom coming into my house on his walk down the dead-end Birch Point Road, telling me he’d just been released from jail and had to walk out, thus explaining why he was wearing such a laughably large pair of flashy sports sneakers. The jailer had given them to him, out of storage, Tom said.

The brand name of shoes, the size of shoes, or the identity of another person in a room during a casual conversation, are not the sort of info-bits that a person stores in the part of the brain where they will be readily available for retrieval. Instead, these sorts of things are quickly shelved away in the “dark back closet”, and are almost completely forgotten.

However, that Budgeteer article did kind of ring a bell when I read it, and after I spent several sleepless nights, and did a lot of digging in that “back closet”, the details started coming back to me. I did vaguely remember something about “big shoes”, and “new” and “balance”, but I was afraid that perhaps I was just thinking this because I had just read it in the Budgeteer. But, after another determined search of the cluttered back closet of my mind, I finally recollected who the other person in the room had been.

I remembered that I had been sitting in front of the kitchen stove. Tom had been to my left, in front of the refrigerator, with his left foot up on his right knee, so the shoe was right under my eyes, almost … and the other person in the room had been standing across from Tom and me, in front of my old “Hoosier” cabinet.

I phoned around, and got that person’s number. I then phoned her, and asked if she remembered the shoes. She told me immediately, “They was New Balance shoes, and they was bigger than his feet. Remember, Lloyd, you told him, ‘Tom, you gonna have to learn to keep your balance all over again on those new shoes.’”

Well, that is exactly what I had said, and my memory was confirmed, so at that point, I went to the Sheriff’s office with my information. I didn’t bring that other person with me, however, because she had long been a victim of the sort of court-ordered forced psychotropic drugging by Human Development Center “doctors” that I’ve mentioned in this blog post, and whose story I mention in this link – and I knew for sure the police would denigrate her testimony for that reason alone. However, she had quoted my direct words back to me, more than a year later, and that brought the scene clearly back to me.

At the Sheriff’s Office, I was grinned at and sneered at by Mr. Ross Litman, who pointed out that Tom's minivan had been in impound the night of the murder. Ms. Sally Burns also sneered at me, and informed me in her best mother-lecturing-a-stupid-child voice that New Balance shoes are “very expensive shoes, Lloyd”, the jailer wouldn’t give shoes like those out of storage!” I guess she knew that by “detective’s instinct”, or something similar. And nobody in this “very thorough” investigation following “100’s of leads” even made a phone call to the jail, to ask. Or if they did ask, and were answered, the answer has been buried.

However, later that same day over the phone, Ross Litman excitedly asked me some very pointed questions specifically about my charcoal gray 1987 Nissan car, (as opposed to a Chevy Corsica that Tom could also have taken out of my yard the night of the murder), such as, whether or not that specific car (the Nissan) had matching tires, and where was that specific car (the Nissan) now, and then (accusingly), if I had sold that specific car (the Nissan) … and then after I answered all of these questions specifically about the charcoal-gray 1987 Nissan car, Mr. Litman told me he wasn’t interested in a 1987 Nissan passenger car, but in a minivan.

Mr. Litman knew for sure that the murder vehicle was a minivan, from its tire tracks (!), and he was so sure, that he refused to look at the Nissan, even when I reported repeatedly that the kid who had bought it as a “beater” had told me there were streaks on the headliner that looked like somebody had tried to wipe his fingers clean of blood on the headliner of the car.

More “detective’s instinct”, I guess, told the Sheriff’s investigators that it wasn’t necessary to even look at the car – though it certainly hadn’t prevented Mr. Litman from quizzing me very sarcastically and in an accusing manner, about that car, specifically.

 (By the way, I’ve often wondered if the Sheriff’s office keeps recordings of phone calls. Probably not, I’d guess, as the police do not seem to like to be held accountable – though they do like to record other people’s conversations, to “decode” later, as I related in the first few paragraphs of this blog post.)

Anyway, to sum up: The total extent of what I knew about the Langenbrunner murder case by about early October 2001 was from the September 3, 2001 Budgeteer article, and from the bullshit I was being fed by the Sheriff’s Department.

A reader of this blog might fairly ask me, I suppose, if I didn’t read the newspapers or listen to the news at all, much, back then? My short answer to that question would be, “No, I didn’t read or listen to that much at all, back then, as I had absolutely no trust in the integrity of any of the local newspapers or TV stations, and had found I could get much more reliable news via the grapevine.” I will expand on why I didn’t read the papers or listen much to the news, in an indented aside, below.

I had cancelled my subscription to the News Tribune at least a couple of years before the murder, for a couple of reasons. First, I couldn’t afford it any more. As I’ve reported previously in this blog post, my farm been put out of business by the corrupt, Good-Old-Boy Boss/Prison-Labor-Boy Captive-Worker gardening “business” being run at the Northeast Regional Correction Center (NERCC) in the 1990s and early 2000s. I was in the process of losing my grandparents’ farm and everything that I (and they) had worked for all of our lives. The Tribune certainly wasn’t going to report on that story, except perhaps to praise the success of the Good Old Boys, as that paper certainly was and is still known for doing. No, I didn’t buy their “cheery fascist rag”, anymore.

The second reason I hardly read the Tribune, even second-hand, for free, was that its reporting was so biased and obviously controlled by the “Good Old Boys” in town, I didn’t think it was even worth reading.

On the day of the “big drug bust that wasn’t”, (related in this blog post), my son had asked Dennin Bauers of the Lake Superior Drug Task Force, “When you guys don’t find any marijuana here, will we see this reported in the News Tribune tomorrow?” Dennin Bauers answered with a sardonic grin, “Not everything that happens in Duluth gets reported in the News Tribune.”

In fact, this is the exactly the same comment a former Twig neighbor of mine got from a Duluth judge, no less. That neighbor had angrily phoned the judge to ask how in the world he had issued a warrant to that same well-armed and blustering Lake Superior Drug Task Force to raid the property of a widow woman in her 80s for marijuana, scaring her half to death. My neighbor asked the judge the same question: Would this terrifying but fruitless raid be reported in the News Tribune? And the judge answered him as Dennin Bauers had answered my son, in the same words, even! “Not everything that happens in Duluth gets reported in the News Tribune.”

I can give example after example of the News Tribune’s selective reporting and skewing of the news. This went even to the extent of “editing for clarity” my Letter to the Editor in a way that changed my meaning and blunted my point in a true story about a Twig girl being committed by the Court to a Cloquet “treatment center” for adults, where she was drugged against her will, homosexually molested, and “encouraged” to accept “treatment” by electro-shock (to erase bad memories) when she was 17 years old. This took place back in 1997, even before the murder of Trina Langenbrunner.

I have related part of her story myself at this link here, as the News Tribune certainly wasn’t going to tell any truth about the forced psychiatric drugging that goes on in Duluth or the deaths that are caused by the “side effects” of these “meds”. Prosecuting Jim Carlson on the front page and closing Last Place is more to their speed. You can read about the Jim Carlson/Last Place story by checking it out on Google, I won’t get any deeper into it, here.

But I’ll leave the News Tribune at this point, and say that I considered the Budgeteer even worse in its “journalism”, about on the same quality level as a weekly “shopper”, and the Reader just slightly better.

The Reader has published and does publish some very good opinion pieces by individual writers, even on the forced psychiatric drugging issue. It has even published some fairly deep-digging investigative journalism in the past. But the paper has invariably backed down at critical times. When it should have backed and encouraged the investigator to dig deeper and get to the bottom of the matter, all of a sudden on the threat of a lawsuit, the series was ended. The result is that it too prints mostly "fluff", with some decent opinion pieces that the Publisher himself (Bob Boone, the guy who doesn't like to answer his email) can easily enough disavow.

As far as integrity in reporting the news, the local TV channels were/are even worse than the newspapers -- yes, I do think that’s possible -- with luxuriously expensive productions, in which well-dressed and well-groomed “talking heads” act as though they’re real knowledgeable and of course authoritative – but they too report the news exactly as told, and do absolutely no digging beneath the surface, whatsoever. They don’t want their fingernails to get dirty, though they may sport flannel shirts and jeans for the show!

So, to answer my readers’ hypothetical question: No, back then I didn’t much read the newspapers or listen to the news.

I have since come to appreciate, however, the wisdom of the person who said back in the days of the total information-controlled Communist U.S.S.R., that a person can get a lot of truth even from Pravda (the official propaganda newspaper of the former U.S.S.R.), by “simply reading between the lines”.

As I have been writing this blog, I have deeply regretted not having kept closer track of the for-profit reporting, back then. In an attempt to partially remedy that defect, I have made open requests on my Facebook page starting back about May of last year, and within this blog itself starting in September, for anybody in the Duluth area to please get me copies of the original newspaper articles on the Langenbrunner case. These can be gotten only at the Duluth Public Library. I can’t go there, myself, of course, as I’m working in Thailand. 

At first, back in May 2014 (seven months ago, already!!) [name redacted] told me he would get the information for me from the library. Then he doubled back and asked me why I wanted the information, then he again asked me why I wanted the information, then after I had explained twice why I wanted the information (so I wouldn’t miss-speak myself in this blog), he told me, in a very direct manner, and I quote, “No, I will not be going to the library for you. I have other projects I am working on.”

So, I’ve had to go into this blog without the information. As a result, I have miss-spoken, on the matter of the Camel advertising jacket. Yet once again, I’d like to extend my apologies to my readers, and my “thanks” to [the person whose name I redacted, as he knows who he is]. 

Well, anyway, after a very, very long wait, a person very dear to me finally got the opportunity to get to Duluth, Minnesota, to get to the library, and to get all the applicable articles from the day of the murder onward, from a computerized data-bank. The very helpful research assistant at the library explained that this data-bank is not generally available on the Internet, but only at the library.

My dear-heart wasn’t sure of my email address, but emailed the articles to a personal email account, then forwarded everything from that account to me, after ascertaining my address on Facebook that evening. (We are exactly 12 time zones apart, exactly halfway across the planet!)

There were 63 pages, in total. I asked how long it took to get all that information, and how much did it cost. I was told that it took about an hour (once having arrived at the library, and not including the time it took to email me that evening) and that it didn’t cost anything. So, I extend my sincere thanks to that person.
As far as sarcastic "thanks" for helping me try to expose the obfuscation and uncover the lies in this murder case, there's the person whose name I redacted, and in addition:

(1) I’d like to “thank” the Sheriff’s Department investigator, Sally Burns, who I heard (nearly a year after the fact) had visited everybody, except me, on the Birch Point Road. This visit came shortly after the murder, to ask for information about Tom Hinze’s whereabouts.

Evidently, I hadn’t been home that day. Instead of visiting me personally and showing a badge, Ms. Burns called me on the phone instead, and asked me some questions. I thought she was Tom's sister.

She later claimed indignantly that she had identified herself as being from the Sheriff’s Department – and maybe she actually did identify herself verbally over the phone, but I couldn’t see any badge over the phone.

However, as she asked only about Tom’s whereabouts and “property” at my place, I assumed that she was a sister of Tom’s who Tom had complained about after his father had died. Tom was helping his mother prepare the family property for sale. Tom had told me that the sister hadn’t helped a bit, yet was complaining about the way Tom had disposed of some of the property. (He’d brought some hand tools and gardening tools down to my place, for instance.)

Tom had told me way back in July or early August of 2000 that he would be heading west to look for work as soon as his mother was settled, and he had asked me to sell his trailer for him and send the money to his mother, minus $200 for my efforts in selling the trailer.

Just a few days after the murder, Tom did head west, by bus. One time, Ross Litman asked me very sarcastically and accusingly why I thought Tom had headed out of town right after the murder. Why, I assumed it was exactly because as Tom had told me many weeks previous to the murder: as soon as he got his mom settled, he was going to head west to look for work, and we “wouldn’t be seeing him around there, anymore”.

Anyway, the woman on the phone that day didn’t tell me a single thing as to why she was looking for Tom, except to mention the “property”. I didn’t have any idea where Tom was, so I told her he was “out west” which was where he had told me he was going.

And I certainly didn’t want Tom’s sister at my place digging through my belongings thinking they were her belongings, so I told this woman on the phone that no, Tom hadn’t left any of his property at my place.

Sally never mentioned any of the following objects to me over the phone that day: (a) a black Camel advertising jacket found near a body in a murder case, (b) a pair of size 11 or 12 New Balance shoes connected to that same case, (c) a minivan, or any other clue as to what investigators were looking for in a murder case, for Christ’s sake.

Had she mentioned any of the above, I certainly wouldn’t have thought she was Tom’s sister, and I certainly would have started thinking about the murder case and Tom’s possible connection to it – close to a year before I actually did start thinking about it.

And, I certainly would not have thought that the Camel advertising jacket found near the body was red and tan, instead of black.

Thanks, Sally, for a very thorough, well-done, and non-informative investigation, that left me as much in the dark about the murder, as if you hadn’t bothered to call me at all! No hard feelings, toward you though, Sally, as we’ve all been young, once.

(2) I’d also like to thank the two “friends” of Trina Langenbrunner who came to my house in December 2004 (told about in this blog post). They did mention a Camel jacket found at the scene of the murder – but didn’t bother to tell me what color it was.

This led me to do an extensive search of all my many hundreds of photographs, to finally find the picture of the red and tan Camel advertising jacket, to find a photo-shop in Laos to copy it, to try to get it delivered by friends from Laos to Brookston, Minnesota, to later get a friend to drive me from Munger to Brookston to try to make sure it had been delivered, to present it innocently (and ignorantly) to Shelly Tormanen and the Public Defender’s office as “the” jacket … and finally, to publish it in this blog, as “the” Camel advertising jacket.

In over 10 years since the first time I first heard of the “Camel jacket” in December 2004, nobody had told me that the jacket found by the body was black. And no one before 2013 had told me that that jacket had evidently already been identified as belonging to a friend of the victim – as far back as October 2000, as that is the last time I see it mentioned in any of the newspaper articles I just received by email. As of the 19^th of October, 2000, only the New Balance shoes, a minivan, and someone who "had been in the Brookston area between 1 and 10 a.m. the morning of September 3" were mentioned as clues in the case. Plus, maybe someone who had “left the area”. All of those clues certainly could have matched Tom Hinze, and as related before, I have repeatedly tried to get the Sheriff's Department to clear him by a DNA test. 
The Camel jacket was no longer a clue, and it was black. But I was led to believe it was still a clue, and wasn't told what color it was.

Thank you too, “friends” of Trina, for your non-informative “help” in getting my story out!! I told you everything I knew, anyway, and even gave you the tire that had been on the Nissan the night of the murder. Evidently, you took my info somewhere and buried it, because even in 2013, I was informed by the Public Defender’s office that Tom Hinze had still not been DNA tested (as can be seen in this blog post).

(3) Thank you too, Shelly Tormanen and other members of the victim’s family who have (a) accepted uncritically and unquestioningly whatever the Sheriff’s Department has told you (b) neglected to demand any physical proof or sworn testimony of Joseph Couture’s guilt, but uncritically and unquestioningly accepted second-hand testimony of unnamed witnesses – and obviously induced confessions of impossible events – in your understandable eagerness to get the case “settled” and see someone “hang” – even if scapegoats were convicted instead of the real murderer, (c) insulted me and called me “ignorant” and a “joker”, and accused me of trying to scam money out of Nigeria while I was actually in Cambodia – while (d) at the same time not even respecting a person who actually DID bother to "come forward", enough to tell me that the Camel jacket at the scene of the crime was black, and not red and tan, as I had thought.

(4) Last but not least, I’d like to “thank” Ron Taggart, so-called “investigator” of the Public “Defender’s” Office, who had indeed informed me in this blog post that the jacket had already been identified -- but also didn’t bother to tell me that the jacket was black, and not red and tan. This allowed me to continue on in my misconception for another year and a half. Thanks, Ron, for your obvious devotion to your fairly well-paid duty. (I looked it up on the Internet, and found that these Public Defender guys “earn” like around $60 grand a year!!)

Thanks for doing your job so thoroughly, Ron!

So, proper corrections, thanks, kudos and – not least, by any means -- apologies on my part now having been offered, I can now continue onward with this blog. I hope some of you are still with me.

What other information did I learn from all the 63 pages of newspaper articles that I hadn’t known before? Well, this post is very long already, so I’ll just make a short list below, and will then discuss each item in subsequent posts.

First, I learned that there were two different opinions expressed whether it was likely that Trina was acquainted with the killer, or not. 

Personally, I kind of think she may have seen Tom Hinze before, as he loved to cruise around the back roads late at night, swigging vodka out of the bottle, sometimes go into bars, meet with people, and “watch the sun come up”.

In the back of my mind, I suspect (and another person has suggested) that Tom may have been a police informant – because he always seemed to have money in his pocket, but seldom worked. And he sure seemed to get by with things that no one else would get by with, such as multiple DWIs, inimical to public safety driving on the Birch Point Road (right in front of the police, in fact, on two occasions that I know of) and elsewhere, open bottle, and test refusals.

Plus, he was known for starting fights and beating people up (or getting beat up himself more than once). These incidents were reported to the Sheriff’s Department, but no assault charges were ever filed. I myself reported some of these incidents by name both to Dennis Fink and to Ron Taggart, but the witnesses I named were never interviewed. So, Tom got by with assault more than once, too, in front of witnesses, including myself. Not to mention getting by with murder. It would take a DNA test to prove that! 
Second, I learned that the investigators and victim’s family members kept on complaining over the years that no one would come forward, and that certainly someone knew something, and pleading that people please come forward, and please come forward, and please come forward.

Both the family members and head investigator Richard Swanson mentioned that they feared that this type of “killer may seriously injure or kill someone again”.

So, just as soon as I suddenly became aware that I actually did know something in this case, I did come forward. That was now over 13 years ago. I have gotten nothing but abuse, cover-ups, insults, and threats from Tom Hinze to injure or kill me, for having come forward.

When I complained to the Sheriff’s Department in a certified letter that Tom Hinze had threatened my life, they did lock Tom up – in a low-security NERCC facility for a few months, just across the road from my house, for his umpteenth DWI, and fined him $50, as reported in this blog post, and illustrated in this blog post.

Then Tom received an early release from NERCC, right back into the neighborhood, with no reporting requirements or probation, and evidently not one was afraid at all, anymore, that he “may seriously injure or kill someone” – though he had threatened to kill me and another witness, who I will not name, here. That seriously pisses me off, even yet. As does being accused by Trina Langenbrunner’s relatives of “thinking this is a joke”.

When Tom finally did leave the area, he took with him on a trailer a running 1940 Chevrolet out of my yard that belonged to my father (though the title had been misplaced). Only half the agreed price had been paid for that car, and that not even by Tom – and Tom by no means had the legal title for the car. My son was angry about that, but I told him that it wasn’t worth getting murdered over, as the Wagner family obviously had NO police protection, out on the Birch Point Road.

That was how the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department really rewarded witnesses for “coming forward” in the Trina Langenbrunner murder case. It seems that they much prefer “unnamed witnesses”, and unreported and impossible “arson fires”, and other such unsubstantiated “evidence”, and winks and nods with the Prosecutor, than any real person actually “coming forward”.

I’m still “coming forward”, though, and I will continue to as long as I can.

Maybe eventually, somebody will help me do something about this damned ugly and tragic affair.

As Great Aunt Frances Pulaski told me when she was about 100 years old, “Lloyd, we live in hope.”

Thanks for reading, and please stay tuned.