IN THE SUMMER of 1958, the murders that would come to be known as the “Bloodless Murders” or the “Dracula Murders” swept through the Midwest, beginning in Nebraska and sawing through Iowa and Wisconsin before turning back to my hometown of Black Deer Falls, Minnesota. Before it was over, the murders would claim the lives of seventeen people of different ages and backgrounds. All would be discovered with similar wounds: their throats slit or their wrists cut. A few sustained deep cuts to the inner thigh. Each of the victims died from blood loss, yet each of the crime scenes was suspiciously clean of blood.
By the end of August, the murders had tracked eastward, closer and closer to the Minnesota border. We’d been following the trail in the papers, marking each new victim on the map. When those two college kids were found killed in an abandoned house outside of Madison, Wisconsin, it was like a sigh of relief. It was terrible, what’d happened to those kids. Richard Covey and Stacy Lee Brandberg had been their names. They’d been graduate students and engaged to be married. We were sorry that it had happened to them. That it had happened at all. But at least they’d been all the way over in Madison. The murders had passed us by, Minnesota had been spared, and whoever had done it—and however they had done it—they were probably most of the way up to Canada.
