About Thomas Hinze (AKA Tom Terrific)

Just a brief account of a few things I know or have heard about Tom Hinze that I haven't already mentioned on this blog.

I met him in late 1997. I had a car parked down on the end of the driveway of my place on the Birch Point Road in Twig with a "For Sale" sign on it, and Tom wanted to buy it to fix up a little and resell.

I'd never met him before, though he told me he'd been living down at his parents' place for some time.

I soon learned that he drank a lot, that his dad, Gerald Hinze, had been the Sheriff of Red Lake County, Minnesota, that Tom got along better with his mother than with his dad, and that Tom was a very friendly, often helpful, and usually jocular guy -- except at certain times when he'd had too much to drink -- then he could "flip" without warning and turn kind of weird, including starting fights, beating people up, and getting beat up himself. But I didn't see that right away.

I believe it was during the winter of 1998 - 1999 that Tom got me a small job to haul some stuff out of an apartment building he was living in, in downtown Duluth. The apartments were behind and above the Twins Bar, which were owned by a guy named Charlie Lemon. At the time, the bar was known as a hangout for certain Duluth policemen, as it is very near the Duluth Police Station.

The apartments in the upstairs were being remodeled, and there were some old carpets, metal closet doors, and miscellaneous stuff that Tom said he figured I could perhaps use on my farm -- and Tom said that the owner would rather pay me and see the stuff get used, than to pay (probably more) to get the stuff hauled to the dump.

I agreed to haul the stuff, and made 2 or 3 trips down there and back, during the coldest part of the winter. Then Tom gave me a call and asked if I could come down there to pick up my pay. 

While I was down there, Tom let me know that it was he himself who had thought that Charlie Lemon wanted me to haul the stuff out of there rather than to haul it to the dump -- and that it really wasn't Charlie's idea at all. 

In fact, Charlie had balked at paying me, so Tom told me nonchalantly that Charlie had only agreed to pay me after Tom had threatened to kill him if he didn't pay me. That sounded kind of overboard to me, and I figured Tom was exaggerating. Anyway, I got paid. I never have met Charlie Lemon, though I believe he still owns the building down there. He may know some things about Tom that I don't know.

I've already mentioned how Tom dressed in black, nearly always drove a black vehicle, and lived in a black trailer at his parents' place. The black Chrysler mini-van he drove the week before the murder was a pale yellow color when he first bought it, but he had it painted black almost immediately. That van wasn't in Tom's name, I know that for sure -- he'd bought it from the owner of Twig Meats, who's name I can't remember offhand -- and the former owner of the van was angry that Tom was stalling on transferring the title.

Tom had parked his trailer at my place during the summer of 2000, as his dad had died. Tom could always be friendly and helpful, and he offered to let my daughter stay in the trailer for the summer to save her paying rent somewhere else. Tom had moved into his mother's house, after his dad died. My daughter moved to an apartment in town the end of August 2000, and Tom asked if I'd mind if he stayed there himself for a "couple of weeks", until he could get things "wrapped up", and then he was going to head "out west to look for work". That was just before the Trina Langenbrunner murder, and that's all been related in previous posts.

A few other things Tom told me about himself -- he'd been a problem child for his dad, the Sheriff, and his dad had "sent him up", to Bethany in Duluth, as a juvenile delinquent, back in the 1960s. Tom told me he'd given a cop a chase up in Northwestern Minnesota, and had successfully outrun the cop. The problem was, Tom told me with a grin, the cop was his dad, and his dad knew he was chasing his own family car. 

Tom also told me that he'd been an iron worker. He told me that he didn't like to have his picture taken, and he actually intercepted a batch of pictures in which there was a picture of him that I'd taken without realizing he didn't like his picture taken. He found the picture of himself out of the others, and he burned it. He didn't want me to keep a copy of his tax return, either, though actually I was required to keep a copy, as I had done his taxes for him as a paid preparer.

Another time he told me that he could not own a gun, because he himself was afraid of what he might do with a gun while drinking. He told me that he had been "out west" in some state, and had gotten drunk and shot out some street lights. But he told me that he "didn't have any felonies", and he repeated that more than once to me.  He'd kind of brag about the amount of DWIs he'd had, and then laugh and say again as if he wanted to emphasize the point, "But I don't have any felonies, Lloyd."

Tom told me that he never put a car in his own name, but used the name of a certain Rodney from out in North Dakota, who was in prison (for meth, I believe), and couldn't object to his name being used on car registrations.

Tom told me he had owned a black house in Red Lake Falls, but that the chimney was painted all the colors of the rainbow. 

He compared women to animals, and was always talking about "Indian girls", especially. He told of getting a prostitute into his room in Duluth one time, getting her to undress, then kicking her out into the hall, with no clothes on. He talked about having "flushed a girl's head down a toilet". This was all while he was drunk, which he so often was.
Not long after the murder of Trina Langenbrunner, but before I realized that the Sheriff's Department was (or was not, depending on the day of the week) looking for someone who had size 11 or 12 New Balance shoes, Tom sent me a note scribbled in pencil on a napkin through the mail. The envelope had a North Dakota postmark, and it said something like "I picked up a hitchhiker, I wanted to lick her pussy, but she said she had children and didn't have any time. I felt real bad."
I thought that note might mean something, and brought it to the Sheriff's office when I went down there the fall of 2001. Both Ross Litman and Sally Burns scoffed and wouldn't even keep the note, though I tried to give it to them. It has since been lost.
Another thing Tom told me that I didn't give any significance to until later is that he "liked to eat cheese, so he always carried a knife on the dash of whatever vehicle he was driving, so he could slice off a chunk."

A few things that other people told me about Tom: Tom DID have at least one felony, as "out west", he'd shot into a car with people in it. I heard from several women who'd met him that they didn't like being around him, as he had a "strange look in his eyes", and seemed to be "eyeing them up".

None of which proves anything, I guess. Just that I don't think it would have been a bad idea for Sheriff Litman's Department to have run a DNA test on him.

After I sold my house in Minnesota in 2004 and came to Southeast Asia, I have many times looked for "Thomas Hinze" with various other words, on Google, to see if I could find out what he was doing. I never could find anything, in any state or locality, except in Twig, in 2003. My former neighbors told me they were sure he was dead, as he was already in such bad health from having drunk so heavily for so many years.

However, about in November of 2013 I thought I would do another search, and this time, I did a search for "images" of Tom Hinze. That's where I came up with the picture of him I've been using in this blog -- and indeed, it seems it must be the only picture in existence of him, as it's the picture his family used in his obituary.

Anyway, here's a link to Tom's obituary, that I finally ran across just a month or so after his death in October 2013. He HAD been in Minnesota all along, he died at a nursing home in Red Lake Falls -- and he certainly COULD have been DNA-tested to prove his innocence, if he was indeed innocent. However, as far as I know, he's still not been DNA-tested, and as I've said over and over again, Joseph Couture was convicted without any DNA evidence being presented to a jury.

Notice that not much is said about Tom in the obituary -- here's the entire text from the "Life Legacy" section of the obituary -- the rest of the sections are all blank, except for a couple of names in the guestbook: 

Thomas John Hinze was born on December 27, 1952 in Minneapolis, MN the son of Gerald Theodore and Betty Ann (Peterson) Hinze. The family moved to Red Lake Falls, MN in 1956 and Tom graduated from Lafayette High School in 1970.

He was an iron worker for several years, traveled the country and loved cars.

Survivors include his mother, Betty Ann Hinze; sisters, Diane “Pinky” Bakken and Donna Whitcomb; one nephew, Lars G. Bakken Jr.; and many friends.

Thomas Hinze, age 60 died peacefully on Sunday, October 06, 2013 at Hillcrest Senior Living in Red Lake Falls, MN.

Well, that's the end of this post. I may come back and make corrections or additions within the next day or so, but will post it right away, as I'm not on my own computer today. 

I have recently sent a couple of emails to the person who was head of the forensic analysis section of the MN Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in the case. I'm still giving that person a little more time to investigate and respond (if he wants to), before I continue commenting in a subsequent post.

Thanks for staying tuned.