Murder in Room 30: The Killing of Grygla’s Marie Wick 100 years ago

June 7, 2021, marked the 100th anniversary of one of the most brutal murders to happen in Fargo, followed by what was heralded as “The most sensational murder trial in North Dakota history.” 18-year-old Marie Wick of Grygla, Minnesota, was killed in a downtown Fargo hotel during her first trip away from home. 

In the four-part series, that is shared in its entirety here, Forum Journailst, Tracy Briggs, takes us through the twists and turns of the case in which justice might have come 20 years too late. 

Written by: Tracy Briggs, Journalist, The Forum of Fargo/Moorhead, June 1, 2021

Part 1:

In mid-December 1944, in the waning months of WWII, people all over the world were tuning into radio news reports from a distant European forest. After the successful Allied invasion at Normandy that summer, the Nazis were launching a counteroffensive along the western front to try and turn the tide of the war back in Hitler’s favor. The Battle of the Bulge, as it came to be known, would dominate the airwaves that cold and snowy Christmas season. But not for everyone, everywhere.

On a small farm in northern Minnesota (Grygla), Hans and Katrina Wick’s thoughts were elsewhere 335 miles away in Bismarck, where the man convicted of murdering their beloved teenage daughter Marie would soon be walking out of prison.

The murder, which happened 22 years earlier at a downtown Fargo hotel on June 7, 1921, was among the most brutal in the region’s history, and the subsequent trial was called the most sensational in North Dakota history.

So why was the man convicted of murdering Marie getting out of prison? Did people really think he didn’t do it? And if he didn’t, who did? The thought weighed heavily on the Wick family that year. With the prison release, someone would get their loved one home for Christmas, but it wouldn’t be them.

Forum Communications will take a closer look at the Murder of Marie Wick — a teenage farmgirl from Grygla, Minnesota, whose first trip to the “big” city of Fargo ended in tragedy. What happened? Who murdered her and why? And did the wrong man spend 22 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit?

The sheltered girl takes a trip to ‘the big city’

The ‘20s might have been roaring for many in America, but not so much for 18-year-old Marie Wick. By all accounts, she was pretty sheltered, growing up on her family’s farm outside of the small town of Grygla, Minnesota (population 155 at that time).

Her Norwegian-born father Hans and American-born mother Katrina raised seven children here. Marie was the second born, following older brother Arne. Newspaper reports of the day said the pretty, dark-haired Marie had only ever ventured about an hour away from Grygla. The only things she knew of the world outside her hometown came from the movies she’d see in nearby towns like Thief River Falls, Minnesota.

So no doubt, she was probably more than a little excited — and maybe a little nervous — when she boarded a train out of Crookston, Minnesota, to Fargo, North Dakota, 75 miles away, where she’d stay overnight before making the second half of the trip to Pettibone, North Dakota, to visit relatives.

If Marie and her parents were nervous, they might have been reassured to know that once in Fargo, she would meet up with a family friend from Grygla, who was now living just across the Red River in Moorhead, Minnesota. Once she arrived at the Northern Pacific Train Depot on Main Avenue, that friend, Arnold Rasmussen, even walked Marie to her hotel just across the street.

Staying at The Prescott

Marie had a room at The Prescott Hotel at 15 7th Street near the deLendrecies building, which still stands today. It originally housed The Fargo Daily Argus newspaper in 1886 and became The Prescott Hotel, named for owner William Prescott, in 1901.

An early advertisement declared it “one of the best equipped and strictly modern hotels of the city.” It boasted of “electric light, steam heat, private and public baths, plus excellent cuisine and service.” This was no flop house. It was a respectable hotel for a young woman inexperienced in traveling.

When Marie and Arnold walked into the hotel lobby, the night clerk, William Gummer, picked up Marie’s bags and showed her to her room — Room 30 — upstairs, at the end of the hall. According to reports, Marie came down a short time later, and she and her friend Arnold went out to see the sights of Fargo.

Marie’s eyes were reportedly as wide as saucers as she looked at streetcars she had only seen previously in the movies go up and down Broadway.

The friends enjoyed an ice cream soda before calling it a night.

Arnold walked Marie back to The Prescott around 11 p.m. She stopped at the front desk and asked that same night clerk who helped her with her bags earlier, William Gummer, for a 6 a.m. wakeup call the next morning so she could make her 7 a.m. train to Pettibone. He agreed. She walked up the stairs, went into Room 30 and was never seen alive again.

A tragic night

The next morning at 6 a.m., Gummer said he made repeated calls to Marie Wick’s room as she had requested. But she wasn’t answering. Gummer later told police he decided to go upstairs and knock on her door. When she didn’t answer, he used his pass key to let himself in. What he saw next was described this way by crime journalist Peter Levins in a 1940 retelling of the murder:

“Almost immediately in the dim light which filtered through the drawn shades, he saw that there was something wrong. Frightened, he stepped back, closed the door, and hastened to tell one of the hotel proprietors, Fritz Lawrence, together they returned to discover that Marie Wick had been bludgeoned to death.”

A nightmare scenario for the teenager’s first night in the big city.

The investigation begins

Police officers and sheriff’s deputies were called to the hotel in the early morning hours of June 7. After hours of investigating the bloody scene, they determined Marie had been attacked as she slept sometime between 12:30 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. She was choked into unconsciousness, gagged, tied up and sexually assaulted. Her wrists were tied to the bed frame with torn up bed sheets, and her head was covered in a blood-soaked pillowcase. Authorities say it appeared she was beaten with the brass nozzle of a fire hose that had been taken from the hotel hallway.

Immediately, the police started to look into the last people to see Marie alive. Could her family friend Arnold Rasmussen have had something to do with it? Did he sneak back into the hotel after he had supposedly dropped her off from their sightseeing adventure?

Not likely. Police said Arnold was spotted between 11 p.m. and midnight at Pan’s Cafe on Main Avenue, where he met his girlfriend Jenny Halgunseth. The couple walked to Jenny’s house. Both Jenny and her sister told police Arnold didn’t leave their house until about 2 a.m. Arnold’s roommate backed them up when he told them Arnold came back to their place just after that.

Investigators decided to go farther back into Marie’s day. They looked for a man who reportedly played cards with Marie on the train from Crookston to Fargo earlier in the day. They also took a good, long look at who else was in the hotel that night. They examined the hotel register to see the comings and goings of the other guests.

A bank president for a suspect

One looked a bit unusual. A prominent man named H.J. Hagen, the former president of the Scandinavian American Bank of Fargo, was said to have signed into his room, after getting off the 1 a.m. train from an out of town trip. That was the same time period that police suspect Marie had been attacked. And Hagen was in room 31 right next door.

Hagen said he had nothing to do with the crime and asked authorities to take his fingerprints and examine his body for signs of a struggle. They complied. Days later after a thorough investigation, they announced that Hagen’s prints were not found in Wick’s room, and his body showed no signs of a struggle. He was ruled out. The investigation into the card-playing man on the train also yielded nothing.

Getting their man

But it wouldn’t be much longer that police would find their man — or who they thought was their man. One week to the day Wick’s body was discovered, they arrested the hotel clerk, William Gummer, for the crime...the same man who helped Marie up the stairs with her bags in the evening and discovered her body in the morning.

Part 2:

Who was William Gummer? Depends on who you ask.

In 1921, some claimed he was a boy in a man’s body, an unsophisticated farm kid from Mayville, N.D., the naive youngest of eight children who was inexperienced in the ways of the world.

But ask others and he was a lothario, a slick and promiscuous lady’s man who preyed on women for sport. Gummer, they claimed, was prone to dangerous outbursts, which erupted only after he flashed a smile — his almost wicked grin.

A key figure from the start

Right away, 22-year-old William Gummer was a key figure when Fargo Police officers and Cass County Sheriff Fred Kraemer showed up to investigate Wick’s murder. Gummer was among the first people Wick met after arriving in Fargo. It was him who checked Marie into her room at the hotel that evening, and him who discovered her lifeless body in the morning. Was he so close for comfort that he had to be involved, or was he a victim of circumstance?

Sheriff Kraemer said they arrested Gummer after thoroughly ruling everyone else out. They ruled out Wick’s hometown friend, Arnold Rasmussen, who she went sightseeing with the night she came to Fargo. They also ruled out a man who was supposedly paying attention to her on the train from Crookston. And authorities say they were able to check out and verify the movements and alibis of every other guest in the Prescott Hotel that night.

The prosecution claimed there was simply no one else who could have done it. They laid out their reasons in William Gummer’s trial in Valley City, N.D., in February 1922. The trial had been moved from Cass County to Barnes County because of the sensational nature of the crime and the fear that a fair and impartial jury could not be found in Cass.

The prosecution states its case

Cass County State’s Attorney William C. Green made several points as he pointed a finger at Gummer.

• Green speculated that the murder had to have been done by someone familiar with the hotel — the layout and routine of the place.

• This person would have had to have known there was a single woman alone in Room 30 when he broke in to commit the crime after midnight. Gummer would know that because he checked her into the hotel.

• Green said not only would Gummer have known that Wick was in Room 30, but also that at least until about 1 a.m. the room next door was unoccupied, so there would be less chance to be heard sneaking into her room.

• Also, Green said the person who broke into the room and attacked Wick while she slept would have had to have known the layout of the room since the shades were drawn and it was dark. No one heard Wick scream out before she was attacked, so whoever choked her did so quickly without having to fumble his way through the room waking her up.

• But Green said the light did come on at one point during the attack as there was blood on the lightbulb. He contends that if an outsider had committed the murder, they would have been too afraid to turn the light on because it would attract the attention of the hotel clerk on duty. Because Gummer was the clerk on duty, he knew no one else would notice a light going on in Room 30 in the middle of the night.

• Green said the murderer had to have been familiar with the murder weapon, the brass nozzle of a fire hose taken from the hallway. He said as an employee of the hotel, he would have known exactly where to find that hose and how to unfasten the nozzle.

• Green said Gummer had a clear motive to sexually assault Wick and to eventually kill her. Green claimed that Gummer was angry after Wick rebuffed his sexual advances shortly after she checked in. Gummer admitted talking to his friend Andy Brown around 10 p.m. and telling him there was “a good looking girl in Room 30” and also that he had called her on the phone to “find out if she was sporty or not.” However, Gummer said when she rejected him, he “gave the matter no further thought.”

• In the testimony, Gummer admitted on two previous occasions he had been intimate with women who came to the hotel alone but explained that they consented to his advances. Attorney Green went on to say that Gummer had motive to kill Wick after the attack as she would have been able to identify him since she had met him earlier. If an outsider had broken into the hotel, Green said, he might not have killed her after the rape because she wouldn’t have been able to identify him later to police.

• Green showed the jury bloody trousers — probably the best piece of evidence that law enforcement had. A pair of bloody trousers were found at the foot of the basement stairs of the hotel, but not until June 13, almost a week after the murder. The pants were not found in earlier searches of the hotel in the days following the murder, so Green speculated Gummer, while on duty in the days after the crime, ditched them down the stairs.

Green said it was simple: Gummer had the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime. He claimed Gummer was cold and calculating and that the only law he lived by was “the law of his own desires.” In his closing argument, the state’s attorney pointed out that Gummer was his own worst witness, getting flustered and angry on the witness stand when questioning wasn’t going his way.

It’s interesting to note that Green’s closing argument was being made in front of an all-male jury. Women in North Dakota weren’t allowed to serve on a jury until 1923 — the year after the trial — and then only if they went down to the courthouse and petitioned to be on a jury.

But the lack of women on the jury perhaps played into Green’s final pitch to the jury members as fathers.

The defense fights back

Gummer, his lead attorney, W.H. Barnett, and attorney Hjalmer Swenson (also Gummer’s brother-in-law) answered back. They claimed the prosecution’s case was “like a house built upon the sand” — weak and full of circumstantial evidence.

• The defense pointed out that the crime could have easily been committed by an outsider or hotel guest as at least four guests were out of their rooms and in the lobby during the time of the murder, which had now been narrowed down by police to between midnight and 1 a.m.

• The defense said police failed to locate and rule out a man named James Farrell of Willmar, Minn., who had signed the hotel registry that evening but, for some reason, doesn’t show up as occupying a room in later accounts. And unlike all of the other people who signed the registry, Farrell was never interviewed or even found. Barnett pointed out that Gummer saw Farrell at the front desk and his description of him matched a man named James Farrell who had lived in Willmar at least in 1918. But there is no record of police going to Willmar to investigate it.

• However, the prosecution argued that there was no James Farrell — he was made up to help cover Gummer’s crime. They argued that once Gummer killed Wick, he knew he needed to point the finger at someone else, so he had his friend and roommate, Andy Brown, write James Farrell’s name in the hotel registry. The prosecution brought in a handwriting expert from Minneapolis who testified that it appeared Brown’s handwriting matched Farrell’s signature.

• The defense also had another explanation for the prosecution’s argument that the murder had to have been committed by someone familiar with the hotel. They pointed out that Fred Lawrence was a longtime guest who would have known the hotel, as would Andy Brown, a friend of Gummer’s who was also hanging out at the hotel a lot. Defense attorneys argued they weren’t trying to pin the blame on anyone, just that reasonable doubt existed about Gummer’s guilt.

• The defense also said the timing just didn’t add up. They said Gummer was in the hotel office for all but 15 minutes of the midnight hour when the murder was thought to have taken place. He was found sleeping at his desk when the banker H.J. Hagen arrived at the hotel around 1 a.m.

• Hagen’s name came up in another point made by Barnett and Swenson about how police treated a man of high status like Hagen differently than they’d treat a simple “boy” like Gummer. Barnett said the state had based their claim of Gummer’s guilt on his past life (and sexual history). But if Hagen had been arrested, would they have taken his past into account or given him the benefit of the doubt?

• Gummer’s defense argued that prosecutors were “overly enthusiastic,” caring less about who they’d convict and just that they’d convict someone, to help them maintain their reputations as “good prosecutors.”

What about his fingerprints

While newspapers wrote at least one story about how the fingerprints of another man suspected earlier in the case, the former banker Hagen, did not match the evidence found in Room 30, there is no mention of whether Gummer’s fingerprints matched the evidence in the room or not.

In the accounts obtained by Forum Communications, there is no mention of the suspect’s fingerprints by either the prosecution or defense. If they matched, you’d think the prosecution would have used that as evidence. If they didn’t match, the defense would have used it.

Whatever the evidence, circumstantial or not, it only took the jury of 12 men just six hours to render a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder for Gummer. He was later sentenced to life at the State Penitentiary in Bismarck. But this story is far from over..

Part 3:

In jailhouse interview, Gummer blamed jury for wrongly convicting him

In an interview just moments after he arrived at the State Penitentiary in Bismarck to start serving his life sentence for the 1921 murder of Marie Wick, William Gummer was angry, but confident his conviction won’t stick.

The sky was cloudy and the temperatures were chillier than normal that Sunday morning, March 19, 1922, when a car coming from Valley City, N.D., pulled up to the North Dakota State Penitentiary.

In the car? Officer William Skeels escorting 23-year-old William Gummer to the place where he was set to spend the rest of his life. Gummer had just been convicted in the June 7 murder of 18-year-old Marie Wick of Grygla, Minn. The crime was among the most brutal in the region’s history and the trial called North Dakota’s most sensational.

Gummer got out of the car and walked calmly through the doors of the prison. There he found the warden and told him, “I’m not guilty of this.”

The warden replied, “Well, that’s too bad. For if you were guilty I’d try to get you out. You know we have 250 men in here and they all say they’re not guilty and I wouldn’t want to have one guilty man to show them bad tricks.”

Gummer smiled.

So what if the warden mocked his pleas of innocence? He’d continue to make them for the next 22 years.

As William Gummer, convict No. 3600, sat down for the interview, he was described as lacking “prison pallor” even though he had been jailed for sometime. He looked healthy. He was of slight build, 5 feet, 10 inches tall, medium weight and freshly shaven. By what he was wearing during the interview, it appears the conversation happened just moments after he arrived at the penitentiary.

The reporter noted, “He had not been dressed in as yet. He wore brown trousers and a silk shirt. This he will exchange for khaki trousers and a hickory shirt.”

During the interview, the reporter said it appeared Gummer had retained the “iron nerve” he exhibited in court. He was composed most of the time and even smiled and laughed when he answered questions about the murder.

The reporter opened to Gummer: “Your nerve didn’t fail you as you came in here.”

Gummer replied, “No, because I don’t expect to be here always. I figure something will turn up to solve this crime and I’ll be free.”

Very quickly in the interview, Gummer said he felt he got a raw deal in his trial.

The interviewer asked, “You had a good lawyer to prepare your case, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t think the jury — they had had enough intelligence to try that kind of case. They selected men who hadn’t read the newspapers and I don’t consider that kind of a man of sufficient intelligence to try that kind of a case. There were a couple of old men on there who were pioneers. I learned one thing in that trial and that is that people can get on the witness stand and they’ll be believed as much as someone telling the truth.”

In addition to blaming the jury for its inability to comprehend the case, Gummer blamed overly ambitious Cass County officers who were too eager to rush to judgment instead of thoroughly investigating the case. Gummer told the reporter he also blamed himself for his conviction because when he was first approached by law enforcement, he told a lie about his whereabouts that night because he didn’t want to confess that he was asleep on duty while clerking at the hotel.

Gummer agreed with the prosecution that the motive of the crime was rape, but disagreed that it had to be someone who was familiar with the hotel — in other words, an employee like him — that committed the crime. He and his lawyers claimed that while police checked the alibis and whereabouts of the hotel guests and cleared them, there’s no way they got everyone.

“There were too many people about the hotel about midnight,” he said.

During the trial, Gummer’s attorney pointed to a man who had signed the hotel registry that night named James Farrell who was never seen again after signing in. And Farrell does not show up in a diagram of the guests who slept in the hotel the night of the murder.

The defense claimed police never followed up and looked for him even though beside his name he wrote Willmar, Minn., so they knew where to start looking. Prosecutors, however, claimed there was no James Farrell and that Gummer’s friend and roommate, Andy Brown, forged the name to throw suspicion off Gummer.

But as Gummer sat down moments before he would be incarcerated for life, he told the reporter he didn’t want to get into his theory of the murder because he had been advised not to discuss it. It would be something he and his attorney would talk about in the years to come as they fought to get Gummer’s conviction overturned.

In the meantime, Gummer said he wanted to focus on getting a job in prison “where I’ll get a chance to use my brain. A fellow wouldn’t want to degenerate too much in here.”

However, the warden said there were more convicts than jobs at the time. Gummer would likely be able to get a job in the twine plant soon, but he was expected to spend most of his time in his cell on lifer’s row with the other 18 inmates. He would also get regular exercise time outside the cell and have the chance to write letters and take correspondence courses.

Because of the notoriety of the case, Gummer was coming into prison a celebrity. Other prisoners craned their necks to see the man who had occupied so much of the front page as of late. The warden also guessed that visitors to the prison would be asking about him — and that he might even take some attention away from Henry Layer, the current most famous and notorious murderer at the state penitentiary.

Gummer probably wouldn’t have guessed that cold March day in 1922, as relaxed as he appeared, that he wasn’t getting out of prison soon. In fact, the young man would be middle-aged when a change in the state’s attorney meant a reexamination of the facts — and with that. the possibility that Gummer could be a free man.

Part 4:

New prosecutor ‘convinced’ convicted man is innocent in 1920s Fargo slaying

After years of research, interviews and a boastful confession by another man, the new lead prosecutor fights to make sure justice is finally served in the death of Marie Wick and conviction of William Gummer.

In the spring of 1922, 23-year-old, William Gummer was walking into the state penitentiary in Bismarck, where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life. After a monthlong trial, the hotel clerk was convicted of murdering an 18-year-old woman at Fargo’s Prescott Hotel where he worked.

Meanwhile, not far away from where the murder happened, a young man named Ralph Croal was working as a clerk in the Cass County court that spring. The 29-year-old was a proud graduate of Fargo High class of 1911, an avid baseball fan and preparing to marry his sweetheart Clara Hanson that summer.

Life was very different for these two young men in their twenties in the 1920s, but in the years ahead, the paths of the successful young attorney and the convicted murderer would intersect and forever change the final outcome of what had been called North Dakota’s most sensational murder case.

Would the life sentence of William Gummer be considered justice served or would we later look back at him and think of him as a man wrongly convicted?

This is the final installment of “Murder in Room 30, the Killing of Marie Wick.” In episodes one through three, Forum Communications told you about the tragic death of Marie Wick, an 18-year-old from Grygla, Minnesota, who was murdered during her first overnight stay in the “big city” of Fargo. She was found dead in her hotel room on June 7, 1921. Hotel clerk WIlliam Gummer was arrested, convicted and sentenced for the crime. Gummer professed his innocence from the day police showed interest in him. He thought they rushed to judgement and failed to look into a mystery man named James Farrell who signed the hotel registry that night, then disappeared.

In this final story, Forum Communications will look at how Gummer’s attorney, his brother in law Hjalmer (H.W.) Swenson fought tirelessly for years to get Gummer out of jail. Swenson agreed Gummer did not commit the assault and murder and fought tooth and nail to earn Gummer a pardon.

But the pleas would fall on deaf ears until a new states attorney took over in Cass County. Ralph Croal took office in 1939, 17 years after Gummer was sent to prison. As he reviewed the evidence in the brutal crime, he started to come to the same conclusion as Swenson, perhaps the prosecution did rush to judgement all those years ago and maybe they got it all wrong.

“I’m not guilty of this”

The first words William Gummer uttered to the warden of the North Dakota State Penitentiary when he arrived that cold Sunday morning in March of 1922 were “I’m not guilty of this.” The warden brushed the comment off, implying “that’s what they all say.”

But fortunately, Gummer had a firm believer in his older sister Theresa’s husband, H.W. Swenson, an attorney from Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. The two men met over the next 18 years, trying to strategize about how to get Gummer pardoned. Gummer took and passed a lie detector test, they made appeals to the North Dakota Supreme Court and the state board of pardons. All were rejected. Gummer remained in jail. He was 23 when he walked into prison and 41 when his last pardon was denied. But in 1940, Swenson opted for another tactic. A commutation of Gummer’s sentence.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a commutation “reduces a sentence, either totally or partially, but does not change the fact of conviction, imply innocence or remove civil disabilities, such as the right to vote or to hold public office.” It falls short of a pardon, which absolves the person of guilt for the crime.

Under North Dakota state law, no prisoner serving a life sentence is eligible for a reduction of his or her sentence until that person has served half of their life expectancy. It was determined that date would be October 1941 for Gummer. So the fight began to garner enough support and evidence to petition the pardon board for the commutation.

A boastful confession

Ralph Croal had been digging into the Gummer case since 1934 while he was still an assistant states attorney. But the real breakthrough came in 1936, when a man in Denver named Arthur James apparently bragged to some friends that he and his friend Blackie Carter (also known as Paul Welch) murdered a girl at a hotel in Fargo around the same time of Wick’s murder. He joked that a clerk named William Gummer was doing life for their crime. Three people signed affidavits verifying they heard James making that confession.

Croal and Swenson investigated and concluded that Blackie Carter could very likely have been the “James Farrell” that had signed into the hotel registry the night of the murder, but was never heard from again.

You might remember the prosecution argued that there was no James Farrell and that it was Gummer’s friend Andy Brown who forged that signature to throw suspicion off of Gummer. But could Blackie Carter be James Farrell?

Croal teamed up with Swenson to find out. They traveled to St. Paul where Carter was operating a service station.

Croal, Swenson and Twin Cities law enforcement drove up to the service station to talk to Carter. He denied committing the crime. But all three men say they thought he was lying.

He admitted he was in Fargo that night and that the day following the murder he traveled to Minot. So then does it add up that he indeed could be James Farrell who could not be found the next day?

More handwriting evidence

When they asked for a handwriting sample to compare it to that of James Farrell’s signature, a handwriting expert said Carter’s writing was similar in character and slant as that of James Farrell’s signature. But perhaps more interesting was seeing how Carter wrote the hometown James Farrell wrote in the registry. Farrell misspelled Willmar, Minnesota using just one L in Willmar and so did Carter.

But keep in mind, a different handwriting expert during the trial said Gummer’s friend Andy Brown’s handwriting was also similar to Farrell’s.

So Carter’s guilt might not be a slam dunk. But Croal was convinced he was their man.

Even so Croal said they could not arrest Carter because at that time, “he could not be convicted of the crime except on evidence that is just as circumstantial, or perhaps more so,” than the evidence upon which Gummer was convicted in 1922. While Croal might have been frustrated not to arrest Carter, he felt at least there was enough evidence to question whether Gummer really belonged in prison.

Prosecutor speaks on Gummer’s behalf

In December of 1944, Croal testified to the pardon board saying:

“I feel that the facts which we have developed are sufficient to show that the crime was committed by Blackie Carter and therefore that Bill Gummer could not have been the man who committed the crime.”

It would be up to the pardon board to decide whether it was enough to let Gummer walk.

So we go back to where this story started: a small farm outside Grygla, Minnesota as an aging couple faces another Christmas without their Marie.

What did Marie Wick’s parents think

Hans and Katrina Wick struggled with the thought that the man convicted of killing their oldest daughter might soon walk free. Somewhat surprising however, is that neither Hans nor Katrina Wick was thoroughly convinced Gummer was guilty, but they suspected he might know who did do it.

Katrina Wick said in a telephone interview on Dec 10, 1944, “I don’t think he should be given his release. They should keep him there.”

Mrs. Wick would be disappointed. A short time later, the pardon board ruled that after nearly 23 years in prison, Gummer’s sentence would be commuted. He would walk out of prison later that month.

Even though a commutation does not turn a guilty verdict to innocent, the pardon board seemed to hint that Gummer might have been innocent based upon his favorable lie detector test as well as statements made by Carter and James.

The board ruled, “After carefully considering all of the matters, the state board of pardons has reached the conclusion that grave doubt exists regarding the guilt of William Gummer and that as a result thereof and obvious good conduct as an inmate of the penitentiary for 23 years, that board should exercise the authority vested in it by the constitution and statutes of the state and grant clemency to Willam Gummer.”

A free man

On Dec. 28, 1944, Gummer, the man who walked into prison a confident 23-year-old sure that he wouldn’t be in the state penn long, left a 46-year-old, no doubt worn down by his ongoing legal fight. At 23, he agreed for a long sit down interview with a newspaper reporter to state his case, hoping it would do some good. But on his release day, he told prison officials that he was happy to be out and while he “appreciated the interest of newsmen,” he declined to be interviewed.

He also did not reveal any future plans to anyone, but was taken, at his request, to the Bismarck Bus Depot where he reportedly boarded a Fargo-bound bus.

If he got off the bus in Fargo, he’d find things had changed. For one, the hotel where he worked, where the murder took place , The Prescott Hotel, didn’t survive the scandal. It closed a little over a year after the murder. The building that had been home to the Daily Argus newspaper before it was The Prescott, was eventually used by the YWCA. It was later torn down and is now a parking lot.

What happened next

Perhaps after he got off the bus, Gummer stopped into the states attorney office to thank Croal for his efforts or check up on the case or maybe he just grabbed a sandwich and a cup of coffee and took another bus home to see his family in Mayville, hoping to never think about the case again. We don’t know.

But we do know that following that day, Croal and Gummer’s brother-in-law and attorney Swenson continued to dig into the case, hoping to find evidence to put Carter behind bars. However, their hopes were undoubtedly dashed just six years later, when Carter, 54 and farming in Wisconsin, agreed to take a lie detector test and undergo truth serum sessions.

The man who administered the sessions, Professor C.B. Hanscom of the University of Minnesota, said “the questioning and lie detector tests had absolutely cleared Carter.”

Carter went back to his farm in Wisconsin. Swenson, disappointed that his years of searching still hadn’t fully cleared his brother-in-law, remained undeterred. He continued to seek justice until his death just eight years later in 1958. Cass County States Attorney Ralph Croal also died in 1958. The likelihood of a conviction after their deaths was extremely low.

What happened to Gummer after he was last seen getting on that bus for Fargo? It turns out he would live another 37 years after his release from prison. But what did he do? And were they good years, or was he plagued by his time in the state penitentiary?

According to newspaper reports, Gummer began working as a barber shortly after his release. He worked in Bottineau, Mayville, Larimore and Grand Forks. He met and married Grace McKenzie in Crookston, Minnesota in 1954. A newlywed at 56, he never had kids. 

He retired as a barber in 1972 and lived in Montana and Grand Forks. He died on June 23, 1981, at the age of 82 and is buried in a cemetery in Mayville, N.D.

In photos of Gummer in his later years, he simply looks like a more weathered, slightly wrinkled and grayer version of the mug shot taken the first day at the penitentiary. There’s even a hint of “that smile” prosecutors read as unseemly.

Was it a personality flaw, a hint of an evil lothario who preyed on women? Or was it just a smile that changed his life forever? Marie Wick has been gone now for 100 years and we still don’t know the answer.