Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome back to the 2020 True Crime Vault.
The sheriff's office received a call of a body that had been found in rural Carver County. The murder of Earl Olander was a brutal, horrific crime.
Earl Olander was a thriving, independent, 90-year-old farmer. Earl spent his entire life reaping corn. Clearly, they were looking for something.
Earl was in the living room. His hands were tied behind his back with duct tape.
The house was in extreme disarray.
They left him there to die.
I think we had close to 90 pieces of evidence.
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Chapter 2: What was the brutal murder of Earl Olander about?
So when you hear police cars coming with sirens going, you know something's wrong.
There are cases that you will remember over 32 years, and this is certainly one of those. The sheriff's office received a call on April 11, 2015, about 7 o'clock at night, of a body that had been found in rural Carver County, and that it appeared to be a homicide. I went down there as soon as I found out about what had happened.
The body had been found inside a home on the farm of Earl Olander. I've spent years covering crime in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. This is nowhere where you would ever expect a murder.
As we're looking at Earl's house, in the middle is a large picture window. That's the living room. And the living room is where we found Earl, laying on the floor on his stomach.
I was coming in on the road, and there were flashing lights everywhere like I had never seen before.
His hands were bound with duct tape. His feet had been bound with duct tape as well, but they had kind of worked that loose a little bit. There was a circular pattern of blood around Earl that was on the carpeting. It appeared that Earl had been alive for a while and had been trying to get up.
Earl Lowlander was born on this property in 1925. He spent his entire life here, planting and growing mainly soybean and corn.
Earl Olander was a thriving, independent, 90-year-old farmer, and he was beloved by people that knew him, his community. He was a bachelor and lived on that farm for, I think, almost his entire life and still lived alone in that home, was self-sufficient. In the kitchen, there was a freshly baked blueberry pie on the counter, and that sticks with you.
He was gonna eat this pie, and he'll never do that. Your heart goes out to Earl and what he must have been thinking and how he must have suffered.
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Chapter 3: What evidence was found at Earl's crime scene?
His case quickly made headlines in the local news. This is the original Olander homestead, and it's where Earl was born 90 years ago. And sadly, just a few yards from here, he died a violent death.
I have seen that level of ransacking rarely. I've seen it a couple of times, but it doesn't happen that often. Most of the time, people want to get in and get out real fast.
It was obvious that the individuals involved were looking for something. They were trying to find something.
Figuring out what that something was would become an uphill battle. There is nobody alive who can tell us what was in the house, and so we don't know what to be looking for. The main road getting to his house was closed, so somebody had to have known how to get around that.
There was a detour that was coming out of Carver on County Road 40 going south at Bevins Creek Bridge. They were doing reconstruction out of that. So the only way to get to this area was coming up from the south out of Belle Plaine. You really had to know this area in order to find this place back at the time of the murder. We made Detective Chris Wagner lead detective for this.
For Chris, this crime was also personal. Earl had lived about a mile away from my house at the time. Wow, so this kid very close to home.
Very close.
Literally. What are some of the things you learned about Earl Olander? Everyone said, you know, he was just a sweet man. How could anybody hurt him? He was just very kind. Did he have any enemies? Not that we're aware of. Everyone, like I said, loved Earl. We'd go to church every Sunday at the East Union Lutheran Church where we are here.
And very simple, never had a cell phone, never had a credit card. He'd pay with cash or a check. that the suspects had spent a significant amount of time in the house going through all the drawers and cupboards. Clearly, they were looking for something. Yes. Money has always been in a lot of crimes that you're looking into. How much money did he have?
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Chapter 4: What role did divine intervention play in solving the case?
Earl's money came from all of his previous family members who had passed away and had in turn left him money. Earl was also a profitable farmer in his own right. He even continued to sell hay at the age of 90. Here you have a farmer who spent his entire life reaping corn and soybeans on his farm and clearly reaping the benefits of all that.
Yeah, if you would see his house, he lived very, very simply. I mean, you would never have known. He didn't advertise it. He wasn't a big spender. He had no credit cards, no electronic bank cards. No. No cell phone. When his brother-in-law was trying to get a hold of him, it was on a landline.
We would later learn that that phone line had been cut during the home invasion, so that he was unable to contact anybody. Did Earl keep any money inside the house? When we searched his home, we found about $900 in the basement in a little coffee can that he had hidden under the stairs. $280 was also found on a dresser, perhaps missed by Earl's killers.
Chapter 5: How did investigators initially approach the case?
But there was not a lot of money around in the house. The rest was in the bank. Correct. There's this idea in parts of the Midwest that farmers don't always trust banks and instead keep their money hidden inside their homes under mattresses. But this can make them vulnerable. And nearby farmers had been murdered for money. And the fear of that happening again ran deep.
Last night, a neighbor discovered the bodies of Harry and Clarence Wondra, two elderly bachelors who had farmed here together for more than 30 years.
In 1985, in the county just 30 miles south of Earl, the Wondra brothers were murdered on their farm after a rumor circulated that they kept their money in cans used by dairy farmers to store cream and milk. They believe robbery was the motive, as evidenced by the house, which had been ransacked.
The sheriff says it appears the two were beaten because they wouldn't tell the killer or killers where their money was hidden. It's been reported that large sums of money were stashed away. Earl followed this case and it scared him. Even after the man responsible for the Wondra murders, Virgil Lee Hutchinson, was convicted of both Clarence and Harry Wondra's murders.
He told someone he was scared. It was another home invasion, and he had said, I hope nobody does that to me. We had over 90 pieces of evidence. The first set of evidence that we sent in were the clippings underneath Earl's fingernails, the duct tape that was surrounding his wrists. We found a roll of duct tape in one of the bedrooms, and then those black gloves.
While they waited for the results of that first batch of evidence, Chris Wagner and her team canvassed the neighborhood to learn everything they could about who Earl was and who would want to kill him. My grandmother and Earl's dad, Art, were brother and sister, and they were born on this farm. He's half Norwegian, I think, and half Swedish. As a kid, we'd come up here and visit Earl.
My memories of Earl are kind of when he was working hard, like he always did. Just loved farming, wanted to be like his dad and like everybody else around him.
Many of the folks who live out there have lived there their whole lives, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years, like Earl.
Earl even made the national news once in a story about the secret for living a long and healthy life. No matter how cold, 73-year-old Earl Olander is up with the cows. Never been to a doctor, never been to a hospital. Never been to a doctor? Well, I had something in my eye once. That 90-year-old was still active in farming, and he'd still like to bale hay and throw bales around.
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Chapter 6: How did the community react to Earl's murder?
Exactly. It was his day out. He'd come here on every Thursdays. He had a spot on the seats where he sat. Didn't have a mean bull in his body at all. Just a miss him. I can still see him. Earl always had kind of a darker green cap, and that's the way he was every Thursday. It just hurts the way it went down. Investigators were narrowing down the time frame.
They figured Earl had to have been attacked before Thursday, but they needed evidence to point them toward suspects. Even with all they collected, clues were scarce. I was excited thinking we would get evidence back on the gloves, under his fingernails, nothing. We didn't find one positive connection to DNA or fingerprints or forensic value. What was that like? Very, very frustrating.
Investigators had high hopes that the security camera footage taken from the town hall near Earl's home would reveal an image of Earl's killers.
And what we found was the last recording was from 2012.
It was back to ground zero. In the end, investigators had just one lead from the crime scene.
The shoe prints from the scene became important because we didn't get anything else.
The shoe prints were the only evidence that we had tying the suspects to the scene. Those were the shoe prints of the killer. Marvel Television's Wonder Man. An eight-episode series. Streaming January 27th on Disney+. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar-winning director. Action! Simon Williams, audition for Wonder Man. I'm gonna need you to sign this.
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Chapter 7: What surprising revelations came from the investigation?
Detectives started taking notes of shoes worn by many of the people they talked to, even Earl's close friends. I sat down with Earl's neighbors, the Bokers, who remember that distinctly because it made them feel uncomfortable. They had mentioned they wanted to see shoes. I think took a picture of the bottom of my shoe. They had gone through my other shoes. Did it make you feel like a suspect?
Yes and no. But we knew we didn't do it. The incident with Earl left both Maria and Bill Boker unnerved, especially after what they told authorities happened to them just months prior. I remember that night when that happened, just we had all the flashbacks of stuff that happened to us. We had had a burglary incident. The Bokers had reported in January $30,000 stolen out of their closet.
They had a little safe that they kept money in. $30,000? $30,000 in cash. Bill Boker, he was a painter in the area and had stored some of this money in his house prior to leaving on vacation. When he and his wife Maria returned, they found that the money was gone.
Because the Boker's burglary was only a couple months before Earl's murder, neighbors started thinking criminals may have been targeting not just him, but the whole neighborhood. When Earl was killed just three months after that theft, alarm bells went off. We called to say, hey, we had just had a burglary incident that we had reported, and these things might be tied together.
The Bokers told police that among the only people who had access to their home during the time that the money went missing were their own kids. We asked if the kids had any parties. The kids told investigators and their parents that they didn't know anything about the stolen money. But there was also someone else who may have had access to their home.
The Bokers told investigators about a man who had worked with Bill Boker, a painter named Raynal Vergara. From the day I met him, he said, everybody calls me Henry. Henry was great to work with, super nice guy, very pleasant. Henry worked at our house a lot, especially when we were remodeling. You mentioned the theft at your place. Did you think Henry might have done it? No, but you never know.
Henry Vergara also denied involvement in the missing 30 grand, and he said he would never steal from his boss. We had spoken with Renal. We couldn't prove that Renal had stolen the $30,000. Was the case ever solved?
No. No. I think everybody in the area was wondering if these two cases could have been tied together. And if they were tied together, what did that then mean? Were they going to hit other houses? What was going to happen? And there was a lot of angst and fear
We didn't have any details. We didn't know at that point if this person was still in the neighborhood. Next thing you know, lock in the door. I took a gun and just sat with a gun. Then the woman who lived right next door to Earl came forward with a shocking report to the Carver County Sheriff's Office. She wondered if she had actually seen one of Earl's killers.
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Chapter 8: Who were the suspects in Earl Olander's murder?
Some of the customers within the bar felt that they possibly could have something to do with the murder. The whole room felt uncomfortable. They just kind of gave you that creepy, eerie vibe. They were arguing. The one was hitting his fist on the bar, and then they started to throw the popcorn. They started to get a little bit more, as I like to call it, energized, emotional, angry.
My normal customers were like, Sarah, we just don't feel right. I mean, my customers had said, can you do anything about this? And I was like, well, I'll kick him out. We didn't know them. But their behavior, the second they opened the door, was just not a normal thing to witness.
Nobody knew who these guys were. And they were just spending money and buying rounds of drinks. And so. Loud. Loud. And so we had looked into them. And it turns out they were locals, although not regulars, right? Correct. And that turned out to be nothing. Right.
While small town distrust of strangers failed to generate a new lead, two new tips sent to investigators would be enough to trigger an undercover operation.
What a lot of people did not know was that we had somebody undercover at his funeral that had a camera and a mic on him.
Ten days after Earl Olander's murder, investigators are frustrated. The few leads they have go nowhere, so they decide to do something bold. They stage an undercover operation on April 20th, 2015, at Earl Olander's funeral.
What a lot of people did not know was that we had somebody undercover at his funeral that had a camera and a mic on him. just to get people's reactions and see who all was here and try to get a better handle on what was going on with this case. We had received a tip, I think it was about the day before the funeral, that we should take a look at Bill Boecker.
This is a big twist. Remember, by most accounts, Bill Boecker and his wife Maria were like family to Earl. They would often invite Earl over for Christmas, for Thanksgiving, and other holidays. There were some concerns about that the Bokers may have financial gain.
According to investigators, the tip they received was that Bill Boker, on more than one occasion, had approached Earl about selling them his farm or at least part of his property. that he had wanted to buy Earl's land. So there was some suspicion if the Bokers had any connection with his death during our investigation. We just mentioned to Earl selling land.
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