The murder of Marlys Wohlenhaus

The case was solved by men who had sat in cells and corridors with Joseph Ture and were willing to repeat what he said there, and by an investigator who went back and checked an alibi nobody had questioned. According to the Minnesota Supreme Court's 2004 opinion, in November 1981 a television cameraman told David Hofstad, an employee of the Sherburne County Attorney's Office, that he should talk to Ture, who was in the county jail awaiting trial for the murder of Diane Edwards. Ture told Hofstad he had known Marlys Wohlenhaus, that she worked at a restaurant, that he had wanted to date her, and that he had killed her with a hatchet or a crowbar after an argument. Hofstad, who knew nothing of the case, passed it to the Washington County Sheriff's Office. In the same jail that November and December, Ture had a fellow inmate draft a detailed confession to the Wohlenhaus murder, which he signed; he later said he had signed it hoping to be transferred to the state hospital at St. Peter, and later still that he had signed blank pages. A BCA handwriting expert testified the signatures were his. The confession said he had waited at the house, that Marlys let him in, that he made a sexual advance she refused, and that he struck her with a hatchet. None of this was acted on for years, because the original investigators had cleared Ture: they had been told he was at work at the Ford plant in St. Paul that afternoon. When BCA Special Agent Everett Doolittle's Cold Case Unit reopened the file in the early 1990s, he found that the time card belonged to Joseph Ture Sr., the suspect's father. CBS News reported that after a 1996 48 Hours broadcast in which Ture professed his innocence, dozens of women recognized him as the man who had attacked them, and Hofstad called Doolittle because he could not forget what Ture had told him. Ture was indicted in 1996. At the 1998 trial the state added a former Montana cellmate, who had told a deputy that Ture said he beat a young girl to death with an axe or hatchet, and four other former inmates who described his remarks about a girl killed in Afton, one of whom said he overheard Ture asking a dying prisoner to take the rap. The jury convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder.