Hello and Happy Halloween. This is your host Troy Larson. I searched for a special subject for a Halloween podcast, something short, that wouldn’t take up a lot of your time, because hey, it’s Halloween and we all have plenty to do… parties to attend, cocktails to drink, and candy to steal from our kids when they’re not looking…
I think I found just what I was looking for… a story that takes us back to the pioneer days, when settlers on the prairie couldn’t conceive the phenomenon of a serial killer. I hope you enjoy The Strange Tale of the Midnight Rider, Eugene Butler.
Tales of True Crime, episode 7
The Strange Tale of the Midnight Rider
In the early 1900s settlers had been arriving arriving by the thousands on the austere plains of North Dakota for decades with the promise of land and prosperity. Every eight miles along the track was another railroad stop where the steam locomotives could refill their tanks with water, and in one of those places, Niagara, North Dakota, Eugene Butler found success.
Butler arrived in Dakota Territory from New York in 1880, nine years before North Dakota became a state, picked out a large parcel of land and built a substantial home. By all reports, he was a prosperous man who built his farm’s worth to 40 to 50-thousand dollars’ value within a decade, a value equivalent to between 1.1 and 1.4 million dollars today. Butler became acquainted with locals and area businesses but kept to himself and did most of the work on his homestead himself, with the help of his horses.
It was as the 19th century became the 20th that some noticed Butler began to act… a little strange. The farmer became somewhat reclusive and was rarely seen in town… and when he did show his face, he would make unusual claims to anyone who would listen. He believed all the widows and old maids in the county wanted to marry him.
“They all want my money, my land, you see. They think I’ll leave it to ‘em when the Lord calls me home.”
It was a harmless claim, really, some even found it humorous that Butler saw himself as a ladies man. And others thought Butler might be losing his mind.
His claims, however, got stranger.
Eugene Butler told several local residents of ominous visitations… he claimed men would come to his home in the night, force him to get out of bed and get dressed, and then talk a long walk or a horseback ride in the night. Who were the men? How did they get in his home? Butler never had good answers when the questions were asked, but soon enough area farmers would hear the sound of galloping hooves in the night, and Eugene Butler bellowing at the top of his lungs in the otherwise quiet countryside.
“No! Keep them away from me! I won’t do it! You can’t make me! Leave me alone!”
Butler’s behavior was considered very strange, even frightening by some unlucky enough to have him gallop by their house at breakneck speed, shouting in the middle of the night. His bizarre antics were attributed to a number of things we would consider odd today… a newspaper article in 1904 credited the leap year as the cause of Butler’s acts, and another would claim it was simply his hermit habits which had caused him to lose his mind… in 1904, a likely case of schizophrenia was not well understood.
Regardless of the actual cause, Eugene Butler was branded insane and committed to the state asylum in Jamestown. A story from the Jamestown Weekly Alert on February 4th, 1904 reported Butler was likely the “wealthiest man who has ever been committed to an asylum from this county.”
Butler lived an uneventful 8 years in the state hospital in Jamestown until his death on October 22nd, 1911. Several weeks later the Bismarck Tribune reported Butler’s former attorney had been appointed as the administrator of his estate, which was expected to be divided between two brothers, a nephew and a niece.
This wouldn’t be a Halloween podcast if it ended there, would it?
Four more years passed and no doubt most had nearly forgotten about the strange man who had occupied the now-vacant house in Niagara, but in June, newspapers statewide carried a story that shocked residents of the upper midwest. The Bismarck Daily Tribune reported on June 27th, 1915:
SIX BODIES WITH SKULLS CRUSHED ARE FOUND AT NIAGARA, N.D. Are Believed To Have Been the Victims of Eugene Butler, an Insane Patient.
Workers excavating under Butler’s former home discovered the skeletal remains of six individuals. Each individual skull showed a sharply defined hole on its left side, suggesting Butler killed them all in the same manner, with a blow from some type of deadly instrument.
The earliest reports speculated that the bodies were those of farm laborers Butler had hired and then, for unknown reasons, murdered. The Tribune story said the bodies had been dropped into the basement through a cleverly constructed trap door.
Over the ensuing several days, the authorities’ theory on the murders evolved. On July 1st, 1915 The Bismarck Tribune reported the details of a new theory:
Butler had murdered five people at once–a mother, father, and three of their children–and then a lone adult male at a later date. The lone male had been dropped into place under the house through a trapdoor, and the bodies of the other five victims had been buried under the house from the outside when Butler removed several stones from the foundation to gain access to the crawl space, then replaced them after the deed was done. BUtler had reportedly broken the legs of two of the victims to make their bodies fit.
There was one big question that puzzled everyone who learned about the crime, however. Who were the victims? At the time, the population of Niagara was just a few hundred. An entire family could not disappear without notice, and yet, there appeared to be a family buried under Eugene Butler’s former home.
A common investigative technique in the time before forensic science was to identify victims by their clothing, shoes, buttons, accessories and jewelry, but Butler’s victims had been stripped, leaving nothing for the authorities to examine.
One theory posited the bodies of the family might be Butler’s own family who had arrived for a visit and he had dispatched them before anybody had seen them, but nobody knew for sure who they could be, and it makes Eugene Butler’s crimes especially uncommon… in most cases, it’s the killer who is unknown, not the victims.
In late July, 1915, a possible identity of the single victim came to light. Leo Urbanski, a wealthy former saloon keeper from northern Minnesota believed the single male victim reported in the papers might be his brother, and asked his attorney to send a letter to States Attorney O.B. Burtness, which read:
“I have been requested to make inquiry concerning one John Urbanski who disappeared near Niagara, N.D. in 1902. The last heard from him was a letter received by his brother stating that he was working for a bachelor near Niagara. The post mark showed that the letter had been mailed at Larimore.”
“John Urbanski was a young man about five feet seven inches in height, weight 145 pounds, light hair (almost white) and light complexion.”
“He was sometimes called John Miller and such may have been the name he was called when working near Niagara.”
We never got an answer on whether Leo Urbanski’s brother was the lone male victim, or on the identity of the other victims for that matter, due to a number of complications, foremost of which is the custody of the victims’ remains.
A now-offline story from a Fargo TV station reported, upon hearing about the crime, townspeople flooded to the crime scene and actually looted the bones of the victims, taking remains as souvenirs. Another story from the Ward County Independent said the bones that remained after the looting were stored in the basement of Grand Forks Sheriff Art Turner. The current whereabouts of that physical evidence, and the original case file, is unknown.
In the century since, numerous alternate theories have been proposed… some have disputed the claim that a family accounted for five of the victims, insisting that the victims were all male adults. Another theory proposes all six victims were adult females, former housekeepers to Eugene Butler.
The evidence is gone, and even Butler’s former home has been razed. Unless someone finds some bones in an attic somewhere and comes forward, there will likely never be answer to this mystery. In the absence of physical evidence that could be tested for DNA and linked to a missing person through genetic genealogy, we will likely never know who were the victims of the Midnight Rider, Eugene Butler.
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[music] Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com. Creative Commons license via FilmMusic.io
[feature photo] Juanjo Menta, Pexels.com
