Secrets of the Congdon Mansion Read online

  Secrets

  of the

  Congdon Mansion

  Jaykay Publishing

  White Bear Lake, MN

  © Copyright 2002 by Jaykay Publishing

  Reprinted 2009

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

  Jaykay Publishing

  White Bear, MN

  ISBN 978-0-961-37782-3

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Revised 2004

  Don't expect to get all your questions answered when you take a tour of Glensheen, the Congdon Mansion in Duluth. For the real story about the murders and the family intrigue and the decades-long aftermath, you need more information than the tour guides can reveal. You need the information available here in Secrets of the Congdon Mansion.

  You'll also find an entire section – Inside Stories – with never-before published tales that I've told over the years to friends and family about the fascinating characters in the case, along with the story's many twists and turns.

  The Official Tour through the mansion, of course, is very worthwhile. You'll learn that the 39-room home is a striking example of Jacobean architecture. You'll be told about the design and décor of the building and you'll see state of the art woodwork and furnishings from the early 1900s.

  But for many of us, those aren't the main reasons for visiting Glensheen; we're paying for mystery.

  The mansion was the site of the infamous Congdon Murders. It's where 83-year-old heiress Elisabeth Congdon was murdered June 27, 1977, smothered in her bed with a pink satin pillow.

  Miss Congdon's night nurse also was killed that night, beaten to death with a candlestick holder as she tried to protect the defenseless dowager.

  The prosecutor called it a crime of greed. The murderer wanted to speed up his share of the vast estate, he said.

  It was a complex and intriguing murder case. At times, the plot seemed to leap from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel and each succeeding chapter made frontpage news throughout Minnesota. It catered, somehow, to the public's fascination with murder and mansions and money.

  But you won't get the entire story on the Official Tour. The guides much prefer to talk about the family's philanthropy and the garden and the architecture. For decades they were instructed not to reveal which bedroom was Miss Congdon's or where the murderer broke into the house or how he escaped.

  That's the reason for this book, to answer those questions and more; to tell you the Secrets of the Congdon Mansion.

  In a cemetery next to the mansion he waited, huddled next to a tree, trying to stay out of sight. He was jumpy, drunk and desperate. The instructions ran through his mind. Through the woods, he heard cars race by on London Road, busy even then, in the wee hours of morning. Behind him, waves from Lake Superior broke along the shore, steady, insistent, growing louder, he thought, with each passing minute.

  Finally, after more than an hour, he steeled his nerve and clenched his teeth. It was time. He took one last swig from the bottle in his pocket, then walked slowly to the lake side of the mansion. He soon found the covered patio area — the place the family called the subway. The windows had been removed for the summer, so he stepped right in.

  Using a rock, he broke a hole in the window of the billiard room. He reached inside, unlatched the window and opened it wide. He climbed into the room, then paused a moment and listened. Nothing stirred.

  Stepping gingerly, sometimes crunching the broken glass strewn on the floor, he felt his way around the large billiard table and walked out into the hallway. Still no alarm.

  Around to the right he found the stairs, just as he'd been told. Quietly, gently he went up, step by step. He made it to the main floor. Just one more flight and he'd find the bedroom of Elisabeth Congdon, his wealthy mother-in-law.

  The plan was simple. Miss Congdon was 83, her right side was paralyzed. No one would be surprised if she died one night in her sleep. All he had to do was make sure tonight was the night, then he'd slip unnoticed out the door and return to Colorado. When all the probate details were worked out—in a suitable, but hopefully short, period after the funeral — he and his wife would receive their inheritance worth millions, more than enough to pay off the thousands of dollars in debt that were piling up back home.

  (Later, he denied that he planned to murder the old lady. He said he wanted to burglarize the mansion and sell the stolen items to pay off the bills. And some speculate that he wasn't alone, that a cohort from Colorado came with him to help with the job. But police investigators maintain that he was alone and that murder was the mission.)

  Climbing slowly, he neared the top of the stairway. He stumbled, breaking his trance. He pulled out the pint of vodka and took another drink to restore his resolve. He shook his head to clear the tangled knot of liquor and fear and started back up the stairs.

  Suddenly, a door opened in the hallway above.

  A ribbon of light swept past him. A woman with a flashlight came to the door, probing the darkness. She screamed. He shouted. They struggled for a moment on the stairs but she was old and much smaller; he overpowered her easily. He flung her down toward the landing, midway between floors. This wasn't part of the plan, he thought, shivering with fear. He raced to the top of the stairs, more anxious than ever to finish the job and be gone.

  But from below, on the landing, the woman moaned. He had to stop that noise. From a table at the head of the stairs he found a 12-inch brass candlestick holder and walked slowly toward the moaning woman. He beat her on the head and arms, fracturing her skull and breaking her jaw on both sides. Reaching out in blind defense, she clawed at the attacker's head and pulled out several locks of his hair. She clutched the hair tightly in her hands as she died.

  Bloodied from the unexpected encounter, the killer rushed up the stairs and found his target — Miss Congdon s bedroom — the first door around to the right. The old woman should have been asleep, but was awakened by the racket from below.

  “Who's there?” she asked.

  The killer didn't reply, but pulled a pillow from beneath her head and held it firmly against her face. Terrified, she tried to resist. She fought vigorously with her attacker, turning her head from side to side. Skin from her nose rubbed off on the pillowcase as she struggled for her life. It took nearly four minutes, but then she, too, was dead.

  The killer methodically opened all the drawers in the bedroom. He found a small, wicker basket in the back of the closet and filled it with jewelry from the bureau and dresser. From the dead woman's finger he took a sapphire and diamond ring, from her wrist he took a gold watch. Those, too, went into the basket. As he started to leave, he noticed a gold coin in a memorabilia box. He took that, too.

  He ducked into a small bathroom across the hall and washed his bloody hands, wiping them on his shirt and pants, which were already streaked with blood. On a bed in an adjoining bedroom he saw a purse. Inside was a set of keys — the nurse's car, he thought. Grabbing them, he ran down the steps, past the dead woman lying across the window seat on the landing.

  He left through the front door and matched the keys to the 1976 white and tan Ford Granada parked in the driveway. Then he drove to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, 175 miles away, stopping once to ask for directions.

  It was a hot Sunday afternoon at the Congdon Mansion on the shores of Lake Superior in Duluth. Elisabeth Congdon and her attendant had just returned from a weekend at the summer place, the family home on the Brule River in northwestern Wisconsin.

  As Miss Congdon reste
d in her bedroom, one of the nurses unpacked the clothes from the trip and put a small wicker basket away in the closet. Miss Congdon went to sleep shortly before 11 p.m., without her usual medication. “She was tired and very happy and went right to sleep,” the nurse said. It was June 26, 1977.

  Those weekend trips away from the mansion weren't easy for Miss Congdon — or Miss Elisabeth as the staff affectionately called her. She was 83-years-old and still hobbled by a stroke that had caused partial paralysis eight years earlier. But she tried to keep a normal routine. She had some assistance: around-the-clock nurses and the best medical care money could buy. She was, after all, one of the richest women in Minnesota, the last remaining child of Chester Congdon, and heiress to his fortune.

  Chester Congdon had been a legend in his time, known throughout northeastern Minnesota for building a fortune in the burgeoning iron mining business at the turn of the 20th century. Born in New York, he became a lawyer in 1877, then worked as a teacher in New York and was a school principal in Wisconsin for a short time. Next stop was St. Paul, where he joined a local law firm. He got a break a year later when he met the U.S. District Attorney and was hired as an assistant D.A. He married his college sweetheart, Clara, and began raising a family. Then he ran his own law firm in St. Paul for a while before moving to Duluth to join a larger firm. There he invested in large tracts of what appeared to be marginal iron producing land. When large steel companies later bought that land, Congdon's fortune was cinched. He later served in the Minnesota Legislature, and also invested in Arizona mining lands.

  In 1905 he began building the mansion. The family called it Glensheen and it was the best money could buy. It cost $864,000 in 1908 dollars and was complete with marble and oak, gold leaf and teak trim, and furnishings from around the world. The property included 7½ beautifully landscaped acres, with a creek running through the property to the lake.

  Elisabeth Congdon

  Chester and Clara had seven children. Elisabeth, the youngest, was 14 when the family moved into the mansion in 1908. She went east, briefly, to Vassar College, but then returned to Duluth. Chester died in 1916 at the age of 61. Elisabeth was the only unmarried child, so she lived in the mansion with her mother. She was active in many charitable activities. She was the first president of Duluth's King's Daughters Society, which later became the Junior League of Duluth.

  Even though she never married, Elisabeth adopted two daughters in the 1930s, an unusual event at the time. The two girls grew up at the mansion, with all the comforts of the rich. One daughter was Jennifer, who eventually married Charles Johnson, a successful businessman who founded a large electronics company. They lived a relatively normal life in Racine, Wisconsin.

  The other daughter was Marjorie, whose life was far from normal.

  Congdon notes:

  Five years before her death, Elisabeth Congdon allowed the Mansion to be used as the location for the filming of the movie “You'll Like My Mother,” stoning Patty Duke and Richard Thomas. The film is about a young widow who visits her new mother-in-law in the family's large, spooky mansion. She doesn't realize, however, that her real mother-in-law has been murdered and that one of the killers is impersonating the dead woman.

  Shortly after the real murders in the Mansion, a downtown Duluth theater revived the film for a short time. And because of the Congdon case, the video version generates a small, but steady business on Amazon.com/.

  Marjorie lived in Colorado during the summer of 1977, in Golden, a suburb of Denver and the home of Coor's Beer. Her new husband, Roger Caldwell, was born and raised in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the home of Rolling Rock Beer.

  This was her second marriage. She met her first husband, Richard LeRoy, in St. Louis in 1950. They married a year later and had seven children. The marriage ended in 1971.

  Marjorie had moved to Colorado in 1975 with her youngest son, Ricky. Her other children remained in Minnesota. She met Roger Caldwell, who was also divorced, at a Parents Without Partners meeting. They hit it off and were married two months later in March 1976.

  Roger told his family that he didn't know about Marjorie's wealthy family for some time. Years later he told me about their first financial chat:

  She told him: “I have some money.”

  He said: “Good, because I don't.”

  “No, really, Roger. I do.”

  “What do you mean by ‘some money?' “he asked. When she told him about her family's fortunes, he said he almost fell over.

  Marjorie did, indeed, have some money — at least in theory. Upon the death of her mother, Marjorie stood to inherit a good share of the Congdon estate. In addition, Miss Congdon had set up two trusts for Marjorie and her family in 1968. At one time, these trusts were worth more than $1 million. But Marjorie withdrew large sums from the trusts, as much as $105,000 in one year. Apparently she didn't always pay attention to the limits of her bank account.

  In 1975, the bank handling the trusts asked a judge for permission to stop paying her bills, if the bank felt that the payments were not in the best interests of Marjorie or her family.

  Marjorie had been known as a spendthrift throughout her life. When her daughters were young and interested in horses, she bought 300 to 350 riding outfits for them, when they really needed only three apiece, according to one of the daughters.

  Marjorie Caldwell

  In 1976, a Minneapolis judge wrote: “It is all too apparent from the evidence that Mrs. LeRoy (Marjorie)…tended to spend sums of money greatly in excess of the income available to her from the two trusts.”

  Congdon notes:

  Marjories first husband, Richard LeRoy, was once chairman of the Minnesota T (Taxpayers) Party and he was the Minneapolis chairman of Minnesotans for Goldwater in 1964. He was on the Minneapolis Library Board and ran unsuccessfully for the Minneapolis School Board in 1967.

  Roger Caldwell was raised in Latrobe, Pa., a small town near Pittsburgh. Roger's father worked in the steel mills all his life. Roger was one of four sons; one brother followed their father into the mill and became a supervisor, another was a college professor. The third was a local policeman.

  Roger eloped with his childhood sweetheart in 1954, when he was 20. He spent some time in a seminary, then worked as a salesman in several different states. The couple had two daughters and eventually settled in Colorado. But he drank heavily and the marriage ended in divorce.

  After his whirlwind marriage to Marjorie, the couple soon found themselves in financial trouble. Marjorie kept up her torrid spending pace. In late 1976 and early 1977, she signed contracts for more than $750,000 worth of Colorado ranch land. But all the deals eventually fell through when she failed to come up with the money. In several cases, she told real estate agents that her mother was wealthy and would pay for the transactions.

  The Caldwells were apparently desperate when Roger flew to Duluth, alone, on May 25, 1977, for his first meeting with his mother-in-law, Elisabeth Congdon. During the visit, Roger spent half an hour at the Congdon Mansion, chatting with Miss Congdon. They talked in the library on the main floor of the house, just inside the front door. That was the only part of the house that Roger saw that day.

  He did not discuss money with Miss Congdon, although that was the point of his visit. He knew she no longer handled her own financial matters. Financial trustees had taken over those duties a few years before, after Marjorie had convinced her mother to make several questionable payments.

  So Roger met with the trustees to make his plea. He told them he needed $800,000 so that he and Marjorie could buy a ranch. He even produced a letter from a prominent physician, stating that Marjorie's youngest son, Ricky, needed to live in the mountains because of an asthma condition. The letter, it turned out later, was forged.

  The trustees turned down Roger's request. A week later, Roger met with another Congdon family member in Denver, again asking for money. Roger told the man that he and Marjorie were desperately short of cash and had even used slugs in a pop machine. They need
ed $81,000 right away to pay off debts, or else they could land in jail.

  Roger Caldwell

  But once again, Roger returned empty handed.

  Congdon notes:

  Latrobe is best known as the hometown of golfer Arnold Palmer and Fred (Mr.) Rogers from public televisions children s senes. Roger ran track and played football in high school.?

  At 7 a.m., on the dot, the morning nurse reported for duty at the Congdon Mansion. It was Monday, June 27, 1977.

  Nurse Mildred Garvue was scheduled to relieve her old friend, Velma Pietila, who'd spent the night at the mansion, caring for Miss Congdon. Velma had retired as a Congdon nurse in May, but had agreed to fill in on the Sunday overnight shift, because one of the regular nurses was on vacation and another had company.

  When Nurse Garvue arrived, she stopped in the kitchen to get some medicine for Miss Congdon, then headed up the stairs towards the bedroom. She saw Velma's body lying across the window seat on the landing. She wondered if Velma was resting, then worried that she'd had a stroke. She checked for a pulse. There was none. Then, she realized that Miss Congdon was upstairs, alone. She ran up to the bedroom and saw a pillow over the heiress's face.

  Fearing the worst, she looked under the pillow and realized that Miss Congdon was dead. She ran downstairs, told the maid, and then called police. Worried that the murderer might still be in the house, the two women waited anxiously in the main hallway for help to arrive.

  Police arrived, searched the house and the grounds, then began interviewing the household staff. Loren Pietila, Velma's husband, was called and told to hurry to the mansion. He couldn't believe his wife was dead, and told Ernie Grams, Duluth's Chief of Detectives, that he had asked her not to work that night. Talking further, Grams realized that the car Velma drove to work that night was missing.