The Terrible and Totally Preventable Death of Dennis Jurgens

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
True Crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
I'm Jill and I'm Dick.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Today's show is a fascinating case that involves adoption, law,
mental illness, and sadly, child abuse. I'm giving a trigger
warning for anyone who's especially sensitive to crimes against young children.
As always here at the Brewery, we're not planning to
focus on the horrible details of the crime itself, but
more on the people involved and what really made them tick.

(00:55):
But there's no question that this case will disturb you
and will stay with you. But maybe that's a good thing,
because children like Dennis should never be forgotten. More than anything,
We'll be telling the story from a perspective of sociology,
protecting the vulnerable and what it really means to be human.
Of course, Dick will help us also with the medical

(01:18):
evidence from the perspective of an experienced pediatrician. So let's
take one deep breath and onward. Dennis Jurgens was a chubby,
joyful and active toddler when Harold and Lois Jurgens adopted
him in White Beer Lake, Minnesota. Unable to have children
of their own, Lois and Harold adopted several children over

(01:39):
the years. Dennis wasn't their first or last. From the
very beginning, caseworkers from the adoption agency had their concerns
about whether Lois would except Dennis. But you know, homes
were scarce and there was nothing factually wrong that would
prevent the placement, the signing of the adoption papers Dennis's fate.

(02:01):
Join us today for the terrible and totally preventable case
of Denis Jurgens. One cold and wet Sunday morning, a
local doctor responded to a call from Harold Jurgens, who said,
I think my son is dying. When doctor Peterson arrived,
he found a three year old's body, long dead and
clearly beaten. The cause of Dennis's death was peritonitis from

(02:25):
a ruptured bowel. But why had Dennis's bowel ruptured? Lois
and Harold claimed that Dennis had taken a fall, but
still that wouldn't explain the multiple bruises of every shape
and color that peppered his tiny body on his death
certificate where homicide should have been. The coroner wrote, deferred
this failure to acknowledge that a crime had even occurred

(02:48):
or to punish the perpetrator would leave five more children
at risk of leading tortured lives, being murdered or both.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
We have a nice beer Bruden, Minnesota for today's episode.
I was looking this beer up from when I had
it my notes, and it seemed to me that this
is our first case from Minnesota.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Interesting, well, maybe Minnesota is kind of a safe place
to live. Then.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
I'm not sure what it is, but this is the
first one. I'm going to pick. A really good brewing company.
It's called Surly Brewing Company. It's in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota,
and they produce a series of beers that are stouts
called Darkness. I had a great privilege of having Darkness
rye barrel aged stout. This beer is black, small tan head,

(03:34):
a little bit of lace aromas, booze, chocolate, some sweet fruit,
and it tastes even better a little hint of whiskey, chocolate, cherry,
kind of sweet. The alcohol really went well with this
beer in the sense that you're not going to feel
like you're getting drunk by sipping it. Chocolate and cherry
went very well together, pretty much a fantastic beer.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Sounds great. Let's open it up, okay, de kay, Let's
bring that beer down to the quiet at and start

(04:15):
on this difficult story.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
This was a really difficult story for me.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
We read a brilliant book on this by Barry Siegel
called A Death in White Bear Lake. Actually he's a
Pulitzer Prize winner, so it was a great book and
it was a wealth of information. Just really tough topic obviously.
So Lois was one of sixteen surviving children of John
and Lois Zerwas. The family was dirt poor, partially due

(04:42):
to the Depression and partly due to John's aversion to working. Lois,
their fourth child, was born in August of nineteen twenty
five in Saint Paul. Soon after, the family moved to
a farm near the small town of Richwood, Minnesota. Now
by the start of the depression. They lived in Fargo,
North Dakota, with John painting, hanging wallpaper, and sometimes working

(05:05):
on dairy farms. Throughout the nineteen thirties, the growing family
moved frequently in search of work, so they lived on
farms or in run down houses without water or even electricity.
They moved down to a farm in Hastings, back up
to North Saint Paul, then Maplewood, then Park Rapids, and
then finally in nineteen forty nine to a weathered yellow

(05:28):
frame house at the end of Park Street in White
Bear Lake. So they were at the edge of a
swamp across the railroad tracks, far from the actual lake.
Some of John's sons followed his ways, sleeping till noon
and scavenging for junk in the countryside that they could
sell for cash. The children with jobs had to give
most of their paychecks and their income tex refunds to

(05:50):
their father. In fact, the eldest Eloise, remembered working at
the local Montgomery Wards store and one day her parents
who needed groceries to get her paycheck. So as the
Zerwa's children married and had their own children, the Klan
really built up a reputation in White Bear Lake. Some
thought they were carefree and fun loving, that was the

(06:13):
generous way to put it, while others considered them wild
and just plain old no good. The director of White
Bear Lake's recreation department had to call the Zerwa's family
often about their kids misbehaving at the parks, at the
skating rinks, and at other recreational events. Once, when he
called the Zerwa's home, they told him, don't call us,

(06:34):
call the cops, so that was pretty much the attitude.
Most of them were unwelfare and neighbors walking past their
home often heard Lois's father shouting, so there was a
lot of a lot of fighting in that house. Lois
stood apart from the rest of the family for her shyness.
As she grew up into a teen she longed for escape.

(06:57):
She quit school in the eighth grade when she was fourteen,
and after that, when she wasn't working or doing chores,
she would go dancing and bowling and roller skating. So
at a dance at the school one night in the
spring of nineteen forty one, when she was fifteen years old,
Lois caught the eye of a band leader, a quiet
nineteen year old boy who played the saxophone in the clarinet.

(07:20):
Everyone called him Hets, but his real name was Harold Jurgens,
So with his musical talent and his gentle manner, he
showed the possibility of a new path to a better
life for Lois. Harold grew up an only child and
Both of his parents always worked, his mother in an
office and his father as a radio repairman, so even

(07:42):
during the depression, they never really lacked for money. He
went camping with his father at times, and his mother
was quite protective and domineering, but neither was around that much,
so he was mostly raised by a grandmother. He loved music,
and he took piano lessons from the ages of seven
to twelve before turning to the sas and the clarinet.

(08:04):
His band played many high school and college dances and
even in local nightclubs, so for a time, Harold dreamed
of making a living with his own dance band. After
graduating from high school in nineteen forty, he drifted but
continued playing at different events. So Harold met Lois at
that spring dance and thought she was very pretty and nice,

(08:27):
and they ended up dating for several months. Over time,
Harold realized that a dance band really wasn't the type
of life that a married man could live. He decided
he wanted, above everything else to settle down and have
a family. So his bond with Lois had held, and
in December nineteen forty three, when Harold decided to return

(08:47):
home and enlist in the service. He also decided that
he would get married. Lois and Harold's wedding was in
Mason City, Iowa, on January thirty first, nineteen forty four,
when Lowe was eighteen years and five months old. So
they'd run off, Lois would later say, because their parents
did not approve. Her mother had already gone through weddings

(09:10):
for three of her children, and his parents, who were Lutherans,
were not pleased that their son was marrying a poor,
uneducated Catholic. So Harold enlisted in the Naval Air Corps
and Lois traveled with him to North Carolina, but when
he was transferred to Indiana, she went home and moved
in with Harold's parents. Then, when Harold came home, he

(09:33):
decided to work as an electrician, so he completed the
training and qualified as a Union journeyman in nineteen fifty two.
The couple settled in a house at six fifty four
Second Avenue Southwest in North Saint Paul. From a distance,
they seemed happy, financially stable, and really on their way
to a good life together. But after eight years of

(09:55):
marriage or so, they'd been unable to conceive a baby,
so it turns out that Harold was sterile, So now
they're going to look into adoption. So this is where
really the trouble starts. So looking back at Lois's upbringing
and then his, what does that give thought to to
them as a couple.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
Well, neither of them had a very good childhood, did they. No.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
I would say Harold's was probably better. But I do
think it's significant to note that his mother was controlling,
because certainly Lois would end up being very controlling, so
maybe that's what he was used to.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
It's very true, very likely.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
They also, at least Lois and Shame had moved around
a lot. Do they never really established roots in anyone place.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
No. Well, and Lois was pretty I don't know if
i'd say she was ashamed of her family, but she
certainly wanted to think of herself as being better than
the rest of them. It was pretty motley crue really, Yeah,
it was. Yeah. Well, so they couldn't have a baby,
and Lois actually wasn't feeling very well either. Her complaints
included fatigue, insomnia, lower abdominal pain, and chronic constipation. Her

(11:07):
sleep was often plagued by nightmares too. She felt irritable
and agitated and above all really tired. So Harold took
her to doctors, but no one seemed to help. Then,
in July of nineteen fifty one, Harold decided to write
to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Dear Sirs, he wrote,

(11:27):
I believe that if it would be possible to send
my wife through your clinic, much could be accomplished. She's
twenty five years of age and hasn't been well for
quite some time. I've sent her to several doctors, but
no good has come of it, and money was spent foolishly.
I'm awaiting your reply very truly yours, Harold are Jurgens.

(11:47):
So the Mayo Clinic did write back on July thirteenth,
saying that they were sorry Harold's wife was feeling unwell,
and they offered help. The Jurgenses would come to the
clinic immediately without an appointment and then wait their turn,
so they left soon after that for Rochester. Lois was
admitted to the Mayo Clinic on July seventeenth and stayed

(12:08):
there until August third, so about two weeks.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
In this whole time they.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Were testing yep. Well after a medical examination found nothing
out of the ordinary. On July thirtieth, they had her
seen by a psychiatrist, a doctor Goldstein. So he found
her friendly and willing to answer all of his questions,
but at times she was a little bit repetitive about things.
They actually talked for quite a long time, and the

(12:35):
psychiatrist later would summarize what she had told him, so
he wrote that the patient came from a large and
poverished family. The father was an alcoholic and quite brutal
towards her mother and the children. Lois had left home
at age fifteen, and she resented being taken out of
school in the eighth grade so she could help out

(12:56):
at home. Despite all that, though, she was okay until
she got married and began to live with her mother
in law. Harold's parents had wanted the marriage annulled because
Lois was not educated. Harold was an only child, too
closely attached to and dominated by his mother. Lois said
she said that she broke him of that, but that

(13:17):
he wouldn't convert to Catholicism, and she fought with her
mother in law over religion and over control of Harold.
So he's kind of this guy in the middle of
these two controlling women.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Yeah, that's a tough place to be.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
I can imagine. Yes, she believed her mother in law
once tried to gas her to death when she was
asleep in the house. And she said she didn't enjoy
sex with her husband because they couldn't have children. And
she said that she wanted to be more religious.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
Oh that's a viewpoint, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
The not wanting to have sex if you can't get
pregnant from it.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Yeah, the only reason for having sex is for procreation.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I think that's what she was taught. I mean, look
at all the siblings she had. At the end of
her session with doctor Goldstein, he prepared a diagnosis and prognosis.
So this is interesting. He wrote, a twenty six year
old married woman with a long standing psychoneurosis of the
mixed type starting back to childhood, as evidenced by bed

(14:18):
wedding until age thirteen, fears and nightmares. It is fortunate
that this woman has not been able to carry through
pregnancy at this time, as a child will only compound
and complicate for emotional disturbance. She would be a poor
candidate for adopting a child at this time because of
their financial limitations. Goldstein referred the Jurgenses to a therapist

(14:42):
at the University of Minnesota's Department of Psychiatry. So we
don't know if Harold or Lois actually contacted that university doctor,
but we know that Lois did continue to get help.
She would be hospitalized many times throughout her life as well.
She stayed at the ham Memorial Psychiatric Clinic in Saint

(15:02):
Paul from December thirteenth, nineteen fifty four, through January twenty fourth,
nineteen fifty five, so she underwent electroshock treatment in early
nineteen fifty five, and three months after Lois was discharged
from a psychiatric facility in June of nineteen fifty five,
they filed an application with the Bureau of Catholic Charities

(15:24):
in Saint Paul to adopt a child. So clearly they
weren't going along with the recommendation of doctor Goldstein, so
it would seem so. The records don't show whether they
revealed all of her psychiatric history to Catholic Charities, but
the couple didn't hide that she had visited the Mayo Clinic.
She said she'd gone there to determine, among other things,

(15:46):
whether or not she had cancer, and then she signed
a consent for release of medical information. The Mayo Clinic's
report to Catholic Charities was not encouraging though, because it
included doctor Goldstein's judgment that Lois would be a poor
candidate for adopting a child. So at that point Catholic
Charities turned down their request to adopt a child. So

(16:10):
right now it seems like the system's working. It does, yeah,
but that will not continue. So they're still hoping for children,
and Harold and Lois began looking for a house with
extra bedrooms and a large backyard in a quiet neighborhood.
Because Lois's parents lived in white Bear Lake, they moved
to a home across the railroad tracks from her parents' house,

(16:32):
in a much nicer neighborhood. So at this home on
South garden At Drive, they had hope of what they've
been longing for. Garden At Park had earned its nickname
Basinette Park because the streets were filled with kids day
and night, playing whiffle ball, kickball, hide and seek, and
just laughing from early morning to sundown. So a real

(16:53):
family neighborhood. So she, by marrying Harold, had kind of
moved up to a higher socioeconomic status, and the rest
of her family.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Yeah, well he's scat. He has a job.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, he's a pretty good job. Some of Lois's siblings
felt that she was putting on airs, though, and she
really kind of did. Still, the family did admire and
respect her. In their eyes, she'd smartly married into money
and married someone with a good and dependable income. So,
like most of the Zirwasses, both the men and the women,

(17:26):
Lois dominated her spouse, even in public. So when Harold talked,
she often cut him off and corrected him. She told
him when it was time to leave. Harold seemed afraid
of Lois. When she spoke, he came to attention, and
when she told him to shut up, he did. Most
of the time, Harold sat in the background, trying to
avoid aggravating her. Those who had visited their home said

(17:49):
that Harold was not allowed to use the front door
or the upstairs bathroom. I don't know if that's about,
you know what, any Maybe he sprinkled Aran on the seat,
but I don't know why she she just didn't make
him sit down. I've heard of women doing that before. Yeah,
that's a way of avoiding the seat controversy.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Right.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
Also, if Harold wanted to go to a ballgame after work,
he couldn't go home first, or he knew he'd never
be allowed back out of the house, so he wouldn't
do that.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
Oh, no, he's doing everything and to make his.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Wife happy, he really is, which he probably did with
his mother all his life. Yes, so Lois seemed more
refined than anyone else in her family, and knowing that
her siblings were poor, she was kind. She brought their
children presents. When babies were born, she was right there
with a gift, and she'd hold the newborn. When her
brother Jerome's wife Rose had to re enter the hospital

(18:40):
just days after giving birth to their second child, Lois
went over and took care of the baby for them
for a full week. Lois gardened out in her front
yard in her shorts, and she was pretty. She got
the attention of the male neighbors at thirty one years old.
She was attractive, with slim legs, a curvy body, and
she had thick, wavy, dark hair. But still the Jurgenses

(19:02):
were childless. Lois would say, I was in this big
house all alone, and when I would be around children
and come home to the empty house. It really bothered me. So.
Harold and Lois had been living on self garden at
Drive for three years when in early nineteen sixty they
heard about a pregnant waitress working at a coffee shop

(19:23):
who planned to give up her newborn for adoption. Whatever
the source was, the news of this newborn and that
there was no need for formal approvals was really exciting
for them. Private placements in Minnesota were not illegal then,
and the prospect of adopting a baby outside of official
channels definitely appealed to them because of the trouble they'd

(19:44):
been having recently with the Ramsey County Welfare Department. In

(20:11):
nineteen fifty nine, four years after the Bureau of Catholic
Charities rejection, Lois and Harold had applied to the county
to adopt a child, and they found resistance there as well.
This was mostly from caseworkers who found Lois to be
cold and rigid, so.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
They have two different factors involved. It don't feel that
the Jurgons would be a good place to adopt a.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
Kid, yes, exactly, and mostly her, mostly her, not Harold.
Right when the county finally offered them a two year
old boy, though they turned that down. They said that
he was too old and seemed handicapped. So not only
were they having a hard time, but they were kind
of picky and in a very shitty way. Right, two
years old is too old and what do you mean

(20:56):
seemed handicapped. It's kind of gross how they wanted a
small child and a good looking child, and it kind
of turns your stomach. But Harold knew the name of
the waitress and quickly contacted an attorney, and just that
easily they did become parents. The baby boy was born
on June twenty second, and four days later, on the

(21:16):
afternoon of June twenty six, he was delivered to the
Jurgens home. Harold and Lois gave him the name Robert
in honor of Harold's father, and furnished one of their
two extra bedrooms with a crip. Despite resistance from the
Welfare department officials, who disliked these arrangements and remembered their
negative experiences with Lois, the Ramsey County Juvenile Court approved

(21:40):
the placement, so Harold and Lois finally had the child
they'd wanted. Robert was little, kind of a sickly baby,
quiet and not super active, so he didn't really disrupt
the household routine. The Jurgons home, despite the new baby,
remained immaculately clean and very ordered. Harold by now had
converted to Catholicism, so from the time Robert was nine

(22:03):
months old, they made a point of reciting their morning,
evening and before meal invocations in front of him. Lois
was so proud to show off that Robert, at age
one and a half, could make the Sign of the Cross.
Kind of weird, huh, we got to teach the basics.
He so, not the colors or the ABC's, but the

(22:25):
Sign of the Cross.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
So the couple, though, was still unsatisfied with their new
little family. They still had one empty bedroom. By now,
Harold was forty and Lois was almost thirty seven, both
near the age where they'd be considered too old to adopt.
So on the day after Christmas in nineteen sixty one,
they again applied to the Ramsey County Welfare Department, seeking
to adopt a second child. This time, Harold and Lois

(22:51):
would need official approval, though, so Jeraine Recdahal, a Ramsey
County Welfare Department caseworker, was shivering when the Urgins's met
her at their front door and let her inside. The
furnishings inside, she noted, were of good quality but pretty comfortable.
The floors were hardwood. Harold had converted a breezeway off

(23:12):
the kitchen into a room, making for a large, open
family dining and cooking area. Robert's toys were confined to
a corner of the space. There was a large base
fiddle occupying one corner of the living room and a
piano in the other corner, so Jerine thought that Jurgens's
home was really lovely. Next, she would turn her attention

(23:34):
to the couple themselves. Harold was tall, with dark brown
hair and eyes. Lois was attractive, though quite short and
by now a tad on the chubby side. As they
began to talk, the difference in their personalities became very clear.
Harold seemed friendly and in his rambling conversation, almost too
eager to please, and Lois wasn't as open. Durine sensed

(23:58):
that Lois tered her visit to be an imposition. Robert,
twenty months old, then was brought forward to meet her,
and to Jerine, he seemed happy and outgoing and not
at all afraid. She also thought he was very well disciplined.
When Harold and Lois sent him off to play with
his toys, he did it without any kind of protests,

(24:19):
which I don't know if you really want a twenty
month old to be that disciplined. It's kind of young
where it.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
Runs counter to their normal activities. Two year old and
nearly two year old should be all over the place exactly.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
So I don't know if it was well. I mean,
we do know now that it was likely Lois's parenting
and that he probably did have some fear, but at
the time it seemed okay, although Jerine will get some
real red flags as time goes on. So standing in
Lois and Harold's living room, Jerye was an eager, open
young woman of twenty seven who had more idealism than

(24:56):
experience in her field. She had a bachelor's to green
social work and she had sixteen months of casework experience,
so having seen too many babies without homes, she very
much wanted children to be with parents. She had grown
up in southwest Minnesota and this had really shaped her personality.
People living around her hometown of Clarkfield were friendly and caring,

(25:19):
but very private and not inclined to intrude on other
people's business. So in those early days, DuRane trusted people
and tended to blame herself whenever she had contrary thoughts.
At the same time, DuRane would later recall that she
had arrived at the Jurgen's home with a negative bias
because of their poor record in the welfare department files.

(25:42):
There was to begin with Lois's psychiatric history of depression
and hospitalization and shock treatments. There were also three different
discouraging reports from the welfare department intake workers who'd interviewed
Lois each time the couple had tried to adopt a child.
So Joraine had arrived at the house prepared for some trouble,

(26:03):
and as the three settled in the living room, Lois
brought brought out coffee and cake on a tray. Then
the conversation began with talk about Robert and how happy
they all were together. When Jerine reached the issue of
Robert's on sanctioned placement, meaning they had not gone through
an agency, Lois became quite defensive. She said, we may

(26:26):
not have anything else, but we do have love. So
m the defensiveness is a little bit of a red
flat o kidding, So Jerraine chose her words carefully, knowing
it would be difficult to hear their true feelings if
they felt, like sheered, the department was against them. Independent
placements do not necessarily turn out bad every time, she said,

(26:48):
but it is much safer and happier to adopt through
an agency. So gradually the Jurgens seemed to relax a bit.
Lois said that she wanted to get the home study
done right away so that Robert could have a brother
or a sister. As she spoke with Lois, certain things
kept coming up in the conversation. She was insisting that

(27:08):
they were a happy family and that she was a
good parent, and it seemed excessive, as if Lois needed
to be seen as perfect. So Jerine actually started to
feel irritated and this lady kind of turned her off.
The home was nice, and they were church goers. They
did have money and job security. They'd passed the intake screening,

(27:29):
which weads out the most unacceptable cases. The department supervisor
had told her to be objective and professional, so Jerne
decided she would just move very slowly in this case.
So when Jerne asked Lois to tell her about her
early life. Her account differed from what she'd told doctor
Goldstein at the Mayo Clinic. Aha, So that's never good, right,

(27:51):
It's not a good way to get to the truth now,
especially if you're going to have people comparing that, because
they do have those records.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
So there were always lots of babies, left said when
she was growing up, the siblings near her age were
all boys, so she hung around with them, and she
was a bit of a tomboy. She remembered living on
a farm with lots of animals, playing in the woods
and creating their own games. They always ate, she said,
even though they were poor, because their mother gardened, canned

(28:18):
and baked, and the boys would go hunting and fishing.
She said. There were sleigh rides and picnics, and the
whole family was together and happy, which isn't at all
what she told the psychiatrist.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
Oh, pretty much one.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, so she's trying to put up this rose colored
glasses of her childhood. Jerine believed Lois had come a
long way toward making adjustments in her life, though, and
she was impressed with that. Her psychiatric problems may have
stemmed from her childhood deprivation, but she was trying to
rise above all that. So the repressed anger beneath her

(28:54):
glowing family description was definitely there. Jerinne could see it,
but it also seemed understandable to her. Jerine would do
at least three home visits with Lois, and by August
she had positive recommendations from two neighbors and from the
Jurgen's priest. The priest very strongly favored the Jurgons having
another child. He knew about Lois's mental problems but thought

(29:18):
they really weren't serious. I don't know what he was
basing that on.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Oh, that's a question I was going to ask you.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, it seems like he was making his own assumptions.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
Yeah, he and Lois got along pretty well, absolutely, So
he was happy to be a writing a favorable evaluation.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
For he was and he's kind of a problem in
this story because of these things. But he believed that
Lois loved Robert and that they would give another child
a happy, religious, secure home, which is all that any
child could want. Much later, Jerine would say father Riser
was actually the conclusive element in her study. The next

(29:54):
time she visited Harold and Lois. She told them that
they were being approved for a child. They both smiled
and thanked her. Then talk turned to what they hoped
for in a child, which this is kind of a
turn off. They wanted a healthy Caucasian of at least
average intelligence. They said, Okay, what does that mean, because
how do you tell a baby's intelligence?

Speaker 3 (30:16):
Anyway, there we are, you have a healthy Caucasian infant.
There's no way you can predict what their intelligence is
going to be.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Well, yeah, exactly, especially since you don't want them to
be any older than a year. You think a year's
too old.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Yeah, well, even if they took a one to two
year old, you don't have a big grasp on how
their intelligence is going to turn out.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
True true story there. Well, they said they didn't care
about the sex, but they wanted the child to be
as young as possible, preferably under the age of one.
And of course they wanted a Catholic. Now, this whole
Catholic thing is weird to me because you wouldn't think
a baby would have a religion. But I guess back
in the day, in the fifties and sixties, they would
only place Catholic babies in Catholic home and Protestant babies

(31:01):
and Protestant home so very old school like the baby's
going to care so at Saint Michael's Hospital. On December sixth,
nineteen sixty one, twenty days before the Jurgens filed their
adoption application, an eight and a half pound baby boy
was born without any complications. The father of this baby,
Dennis McIntyre, was an unmarried nineteen year old Irish Swedish Catholic,

(31:25):
six feet tall and one hundred and eighty five pounds
with light brown hair and hazel eyes. The mother was
an unmarried seventeen year old named Jerry Anne Pucket, an
attractive and very troubled girl of Danish German background. So
at five feet five inches tall and one hundred and
sixty pounds with long blonde hair and blue eyes. She

(31:47):
was a well built young woman with attractive facial features.
Jerry named her baby Dennis Craig Pucket. She was a
Protestant by background, but just then she was planning to
join the Roman Catholic faith. So nine days after his birth,
Dennis was baptized as a Catholic. Jerry was living at
a home for girls after getting in trouble with the

(32:09):
juvenile authorities in the years that followed her mother's leaving
when she was just three years old. So Jerry was
of average intelligence and had completed the tenth grade, but
she was erratic and she was moody. Caseworkers thought she
was reluctant to make emotional commitments because of her traumatic
and short lived relationships, so they saw hers unhappy and

(32:32):
emotionally immature. Jerry wanted to keep her baby, but the
county caseworkers thought she wasn't capable of being a caretaker,
so after giving Jerry's reluctant consent, Dennis was discharged from
the hospital and taken to a foster home. Then termination
of Jerry's parental rights occurred four months later. In the

(32:54):
Scott County records, there's a description of Dennis in his
foster home written in May of that year, so this reads.
He's solidly built, with blue eyes and blonde hair. His
foster mother, missus Martin's beams when she talks about him,
calling him a real nice baby and a clown, for

(33:14):
he always laughs at himself or at other people when
they are around. He's extremely strong, already able to turn
himself over. He has no teeth yet, but they're coming.
He's drooling. He naps in both the morning and the afternoon,
and he eats well. So sounds good, right, It sounds
like a nice baby. Yeah. In Denis's short life, there

(33:39):
were several times when his fate could have been changed.
Soon after authorities took her baby from her, Jerry canceled
her plan to convert to Catholicism, but by then Dennis
was already registered as Catholic on the state adoption roles,
so Catholic he would stay. This made him unusual because

(33:59):
at that time there were very few Catholic babies in
the state registry. Private agencies like the Bureau of Catholic
Charities handled most of the Catholic placements, and if Dennis
was not listed as Catholic, he never would have been
placed with Lois Jurgons. So there's one missed opportunity. The
official notice sent on November second, nineteen sixty two, from

(34:22):
a Minnesota State Adoption Unit social worker to the director
of the Scott County Welfare Department said that the State
Department of Public Welfare had made a match between Scott
County and Ramsay County. The agency had a prospective adoptive
home for a Catholic child who'd been living in a
foster home for almost one year. This child was Dennis

(34:45):
Puckett and the adoptive parents were Harold and Lois Jurgens.
Although we have some reservations as to the suitability of
this home for Dennis, wrote the state social worker. We're
referring it to you for your consideration as it's the
only Catholic home available at this time. If you don't

(35:05):
wish to proceed in this manner, feel assured that we'll
continue to search for new homes for this little boy.
So it was the morning of November twenty eighth when
Geraine drove from Saint Paul to Scott County and there
was a conference to discuss the possible platement of Denis
in the Jurgen's home. So the Scott County people began
by describing Dennis. They said he was an ideal little

(35:27):
baby who should move into placement very easily as he
was afraid of no one. He was a very active boy,
quite alert and curious. He needed to be watched all
the time. Gerainne, listening and looking at the documents, began
to feel concerned. Dennis was within days of being one
year old, and Lois and Harold had wanted a younger child.

(35:50):
In fact, she felt like Lois had been very certain
about that. So what do you think is her obsession
with having a younger child like that? I think, in
my opinion, she thinks she can kind of form this
person into what she wants the person to beat. Absolutely, yeah,
and the younger the better for that. That's right before
I get bad habits exactly. And she had some pretty

(36:14):
harsh judgments about this boy that were red flags before
the placement, and Doerine seemed to really understand that, at
least for some time. So Erne drove to the Martin's
Foster home to meet Dennis. He was sleeping and Missus
Martin's went to wake him up. Then a moment later
she saw this husky, smiling, blondhaired toddler crawl out from

(36:36):
a bedroom. Dennis came straight over to her and climbed
right onto her lap, very friendly and outgoing, babbling and
showing her his toys. Jerne thought he was very appealing, beautiful,
blue eyes, spontaneous and really just an exuberant child. Missus
Martin's definitely was fond of him too. She laughed, and

(36:57):
she said he was never shy and would go to anyone.
She did add that he was a wild one, not
a bad baby, but he did keep her going all
the time. So that doesn't sound like something that would
go well with Lois and her perfect little house.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
Well, it sounds like a recipe for something dead, yes.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
So Jurine decided that she would call Lois and Harold
and then tell Scott County when or if they wanted
to see Dennis. When Jerine reached Harold later that day,
he seemed really excited over the description of Dennis, and
he was not concerned that the boy was a bit
older than they'd want it. So the next morning, the
Jurgens met Durne at the welfare office in Saint Paul,

(37:40):
and this was for a pre placement interview. Lois said
right away that they were disappointed in his age. So
to me, as soon as someone says they're disappointed about
a child, that's just such a turn off.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
I'd scratch him.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
I would too. It'd be like, okay, fuck, you were leaving.
He didn't really don't need to have a child anyway,
You're horrible and I'd say that without really knowing how
horrible she is, just from that statement. What a thing
to say. So when Jerine mentioned that Dennis was quite active,
Lois leaned forward and said that he didn't sound very
well behaved. This is a one year old, okay, weird,

(38:20):
So she wanted to know if he looked like Robert too.
Juraine said they had the same coloring, but Dennis was
larger boned and huskier. After studying Durne's photos of Dennis,
Lois said that he didn't look much like Robert. Jerine
again looked at Harold and he didn't say anything. He
does not stand up to her, but Lois looked worried.

(38:42):
What would happen if we decide to reject the child,
Lois said, would we get another chance? Do we have
to accept Dennis or get no child at all? So
very shitty, not good signs. So Done said that wasn't
how it worked. If she had negative feelings, the state
would think it best that they don't take him. Their

(39:03):
name would be returned to the state register and they'd
be considered for other children. But she did have to
say that they were Catholic and there were very few
CAFA babies on the register, so there was a high
possibility that they'd wait quite a long time. But at
the same time, she didn't want this to influence their decision.

(39:23):
She didn't want them to just take Dennis because that's
all they could get, But the reality of the situation
did have to be told to them. But by now
the caseworker had a sick feeling in her stomach about
the whole thing, and she just wished that Lois would
say no to this placement, but they didn't. They decided
they'd visit Dennis that same afternoon. When they arrived hours later,

(39:46):
Dennis rushed to them with the same enthusiasm that he'd
offered to all strangers. Harold played with them right away
on the living room floor, and the visit seemed successful,
but something was very troubling about it. The caseworker and
the foster mother realized that Lois had never responded to
Dennis at all. In fact, Lois never even touched him

(40:08):
the whole time, which is really weird. With a one
year old that you're going to adopt, you want to
put your best foot forward well, and you think you
if you want a baby, you'd want to hold the
baby or interact in some way. So when Duane called

(40:46):
them the next morning, Lois didn't sound enthusiastic. They were
still undecided, she said, but they weren't hopeful about this.
They said they planned to decide over the weekend. So
Lois actually said she wasn't impressed with his looks. She
called him sloppy, fat, and she had other complaints. His

(41:07):
navel stuck way out, it was purple and awful looking.
He must have had a little hernia, had an umbilical hernia, Yeah,
which is not a big deal and definitely fixable.

Speaker 3 (41:17):
Oh, you don't have to fix it. They go away.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Oh okay, I didn't know that this.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
They're a huge but I.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Don't think it was huge, or she would have called
him deformed or something.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
Right, Yeah, yeah, I mean it can be pretty uh ctrued,
but it's no medical issues with it, and.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
It usually goes away on its own.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
Yeah. The opening that makes the hernia gradually closes and boom,
you have no hernia.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Huh okay. Well. Lois also complained that Dennis did not
look like them. He was so large, his eyes weren't
the same color as the Roberts. She was just very
negative Overall, she said she didn't want to appear too fussy,
since she knew that they might never get another child
that way, but she just didn't feel as though Robert

(42:06):
and Dennis fit together well. Dennis's aggressiveness and wild behavior
were extremely unlike Robert. She said she was afraid he
would man handle Robert. So Jerne said he was just
a more active child, and no matter how much anyone
tried to discipline him, he would probably be more active
than Robert. So Lois said children can be trained to

(42:28):
behave themselves, and Jerne said to her, well, Dennis is
still a little young to be so disciplined. So Jerinne,
by now, as you can imagine, was feeling pretty unsettled
about this. She told Lois that if she had such
negative feelings, then it might be better not to take him,
but Lois just said that they would let her know
in two days. Then Jerne was surprised when Harold called

(42:52):
her and said, when can we come get our boy.
Jerne had been really certain that they were going to
reject him. She tried to discuss Lois's objections, but Harold
just ignored her. Dennis was a real nice boy and
could fit into their home. Just fine, he said. Lois,
though still seemed conflicted. We're not getting any younger, she said.

(43:13):
We know the agency doesn't place babies with people over forty,
so if we don't take Dennis, we'll probably never get
another one. Jerrayne felt angry at the state for making
this referral at all, and she wished that they would
just turn down Dennis, even with all the negatives. I
really don't feel as though we want to turn the
baby down, Lois said. We should at least give it

(43:36):
a try, so Doerayne, looking for a way out of
giving Dennis to these people, proposed a week long trial visit.
When Harold and Lois agreed to that, the caseworker left
the house, relieved that at least there would be a
preplacement period. Maybe they'll decide against taking the boy, she hoped. Then,
on December seventh, nineteen sixty two, Lois traveled by herself

(44:00):
to Scott County to pick up Dennis. He weighed twenty
pounds and he was exactly one year old and one day.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
That doesn't seem to be overweight.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
No to me, ye Old, no, of course not. I
guess that Robert was just kind of a tiny baby,
and she's one of these women that think you can't
be too skinny or too rich, right, that's right. But
this time when she went to pick him up, I
guess she sounded positive and happy. And Jerine called her
five days later and everything seemed good. Lois said she

(44:33):
was having a bit of a rough time because of
Dennis's energy and Robert's jealousy, but that they were also
having fun together. She said Dennis seemed happy and had
already adjusted. He did wake up now and then in
the night and cry out, Lois said, But according to Lois,
this was because he'd gotten used to having a bottle
in the middle of the night, so she wasn't going

(44:56):
to give that to him. So Dennis really never had
a chance to proved that he could be a good boy,
Lois said, but they would try and give him this
training and restrict him from getting into things. She also
said that Dennis had a lot of sloppy fat on him,
but she was going to change that by feeding him
more vegetables and meat and less milk. Lois still couldn't

(45:17):
say if she wanted to adopt him, though they wanted
two weeks to a month more of a trial period.
So it's all kind of not great.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
No, everything sounds more negative than positive about this pairing.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Well, yeah, and it seems clear the only reason she
would take him is because she's afraid she won't get
another child. If there was another child she liked better,
she certainly wouldn't have taken Dennis.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
Well, I don't know how you can call it twenty
pounds one year old, sloppy fat.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Well, she's an awful person, or she was an awful person.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
But changing his diet to more veggies and meat and
less milk, that sounds okay to me.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, and no, no, and.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
The same thing, not doing a nighttime bottle and bile carries.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Well, sure, but I don't think that was her real hot.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
But that's not what she's I think for.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Her, it was more about appearances, you know. And if
he's used to getting a battle in the middle of
the night, maybe wean him off of it, get him up,
give it to him, rinse's mouth whatever.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Yeah, there's things he can do, of course.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
So when Harold called to say they decided to keep Dennis,
she was quite surprised and a little bit scared. She
conferred with her supervisor but they eventually decided that this
was a good placement. After Lois signed the adoption agreement,
Jerine made five postplacement visits to the home over the
course of nineteen sixty three, and what she saw each

(46:42):
time left her feeling more encouraged. Dennis would come running
to the door to greet her, and he'd run just
as readily to Lois, and each visit, Lois seemed to
grow increasingly casual and relax too. In August, Lois called
Jeraine sounding a little upset. Dennis had burned himself with
some very hot water, she said, and the doctor said

(47:04):
he might need a skin graft. The burning had happened
seven days earlier, on August twenty first, and since then
Dennis had been at the hospital. Jerine was concerned that
Lois hadn't called earlier, but Lois explained that she'd been
trying to call but had been unable to reach her.
So what do you think of that so far? Well,

(47:24):
it's kind of the first red flag.

Speaker 3 (47:27):
No, the first red flags have already come and gone true.
But this is a definite red flag. You'll see in
a lot of abuse cases, the explanation for the injury
doesn't fit the injury. So here's a little kid who
burned his genitals in the bathtub right right for the sink, Hia, Now,

(47:47):
how are you going to do just the genitals and
not the bidex to the legs.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
That's what occurred to me, because his whole lower body
would have been in the hot water, right.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
So that's a red flag sure that he's been abused.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Oh, Dicky, but we're just getting started. Unfortunately, I know
and I don't know.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
We're applying twenty twenty five logic and knowledge with nineteen
sixty knowledge, and a burn like that's been described might
have been accepted as an explanation.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
But it had to be fairly serious because when you're
talking skin.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
Grafts, he had more than first degree burns.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, so usually if a child accidentally burns themselves as
like a little skald, this sounds much more severe than that.
So Lois's explanation was that Dennis had wet his diapers
and she'd taken them off and set him in the
sink to wash him. She'd run into the other room
for a clean diaper, and in just that minute or
so that she was gone, Dennis had turned on the

(48:45):
hot water tap and severely burned himself, so the burn
was on and around his penis. At first, Lois hadn't
noticed anything wrong because she said he didn't cry or
complain until later, which is impossible for me to believe.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
Yeah, that was going to hurt.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yes, it was then that Lois looked and saw the
genital area was red, and that's when she called the doctor.
But when she was talking to the caseworker, Lois sounded nervous.
Jerane thought, well, maybe she's afraid of what the agency
will think of this happening to Dennis. So when Nancy Dahl,
a physical therapist at the hospital Forirst, saw Dennis, he
seemed very small to her for his age. He weighed

(49:22):
twenty three pounds and that's just three pounds more than
he had when he first arrived at the Jurgen's home
nine months earlier. So tell me about that weight game
or lack of weight gain.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
Oh, it's easy, it's insufficient. Yeah, so he's not getting
he's not getting calories, or he's losing calories with diarrhea vomiting.
But he should have gained at least twenty five pounds
to twenty three pounds at the stage he's closer to
two years old now, so yeah, that's an inadequate weightgain.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Okay, so if he came to you as a patient,
he'd be failure to thrive.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
That would be a consideration. But got to sit down
and go through his try to ascertain how many calories
is he getting in a day?

Speaker 2 (50:04):
Well, and the thing is that Lois seemed happy that
he was thin. Yeah, she isn't really creepy, that's what
she was. Yeah. So with the physical therapist, he was
standing crying with his legs spread apart, and his scrotum
was swollen to the size of a tennis ball. This
poor baby, can you imagine? Nancy had never seen such
a grotesque, unusual injury. Other nurses caring for Dennis in

(50:26):
the hospital also noticed a number of bruises on his body,
and some were bothered enough to mention them to Dennis's
attending physician, doctor Peterson. Years later, the doctor would recall
the nurse's concerned comments, but Jeraine did not remember the
doctor talking about bruises, and there was no written record
of any of them. The phone conversation with Peterson that

(50:49):
she summarized in her log only read, I called doctor
Peterson about Dennis Pucket, and the doctor indicated that Dennis
does have a fairly severe burn and probably will need
some skin grafting. Dennis would probably be in the hospital
at least another two weeks, but Denis never did require
skin grafts. Over the next one and a half years

(51:10):
or so, family and neighbors did notice that Lois treated
Denis poorly and disciplined him with physical abuse. He was hit,
picked up and carried by his ears. He had clothes
pins put on the tip of his penis as he
was forced to kneel on a broom and say the Rosary.
He was also seen in restraints more than once. The

(51:31):
once robust little boy was clearly malnourished and had lost
a lot of the joy that had once been a
big part of his personality. So on the morning of
April eleventh, nineteen sixty five, Harold Jurgens called doctor Peterson
and told him that his son was dying. Peterson arrived
to find Dennis deceased in his crib, already in full rigor.

(51:56):
Neither of the adopted parents cried or showed much emotion
at all. Doctor Peterson called in a doa to the
police at the front door. Peterson briefed Officer Vanderwist. Harold
Jurgens had called him at home about quarter past nine
that morning, saying he feared his son was dying. At
the time he reached the house, the boy was already dead.

(52:18):
It was Dennis, their younger boy, and he had died
around nine thirty five a m. Peterson said so. The
doctor had called the White Beer Police and the Ramsay
County Coroner's office. Vander Weiss stepped into the living room
and Harold and Lois both seemed agitated and distraught, but
they saw no tears. Harold paced, unwilling to sit down.

(52:41):
Vanderwiss looked in the back bedroom and saw Denis in
his crib. Armed shoulders and a small head were seen
above a blanket. So Vanderwise spoke first with Harold, then Lois,
and they were told pretty much the same story. Dennis
had a bad cold. The morning before Saturday. He slipped
on the basement floor near the bathroom, which was damp

(53:03):
from flooding. He'd struck his forehead then on the tile.
Harold said he'd been out of town. He left Friday
morning to help a friend with electrical work in northern Wisconsin.
Lois had called Harold on Saturday to say Dennis was sick,
and Harold had returned home that night. He said he'd
checked Dennis several times during the night. At eight o'clock

(53:26):
Sunday morning, he said he took Dennis to the bathroom.
He claimed that Denis was fine, then talking normally. When
Lois went into Dennis's bedroom to check on him again,
he was gasping for breath and gurgling. And then they
had called doctor Peterson. Vanderwist, asking questions and taking notes

(53:46):
tried to get Harold and Lois to fill in their
story and clarify things, but they resisted. Over time, he
realized they were emphasizing their own themes and wanted to
dwell on them. Only slipping on the floor or bad
cold well taken care of. Harold was out of town,
and they kept going back to the same points over

(54:07):
and over. Only on one issue did the story ever vary.
Dennis had also fallen down the basement's stairs during the
past week and struck the back of his head. Lois said,
so he slipped near the bathroom and also fell down
the stairs, So we're talking about two falls.

Speaker 3 (54:24):
And two falls were he injured two different parts of
his body.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
Right, well, and I think that's the supposed explanation, right Yeah.
So vander Weiss took the little boy Robert to his
house with the Jurgen's permission, and neither he nor his
wife or anyone else questioned Robert. They thought, well, he's
five years old, so he really won't tell us anything,
and that could have been wrong. What do you think

(54:48):
about a five year old and what they could remember
or tell you?

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Five year old was certainly capable of telling what he
had seen recently.

Speaker 2 (54:57):
So it would have been worthwhile. Probably today an expert
would have interviewed him, some kind of child psychologists or
something most likely, Yeah, because I agree, I think a
five year old can give you the basics at least
of what they overheard or what they saw. So after
the policeman dropped Robert at his house with his wife
and children, he returned to the Jurgen's house at eleven

(55:19):
twenty five am, so he probably really shouldn't have left
the scene. A moment after he got back, the corner's investigator,
Severo si Pittera and the ambulance driver John Stone arrived
at the house, so together, the three men entered Dennis's
bedroom and approached the crib. Dennis was lying on his

(55:39):
back in the crib with his arms toutly stretched alongside
his body. The hands and the forearms were reaching upwards,
stiff and eight inches off the mattress. Bed covers were
pulled up to below his armpits. But Van der Weiss
could see many black and blue spots on his face,
his head, and his arms in all different shades, so

(56:01):
some dark and fresh, some faded in healing. On Dennis's
face alone, Vanderwis counted at least a dozen bruises. A
large abrasion covered the center of his forehead too. Dennis's
nose was blood red and peeling, and it looked like
if you just wiped it at once, the skin would
pull away. So this is horrific. But do you have

(56:23):
any comments about I mean, obviously you don't have to
be a doctor to tell that this was abuse.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, I think that's pretty obvious. The bruising alone, all
the different stages, so's he's been hit or struck over
the course of days to weeks. Because of the look
of the bruises and abrasion his forehead.

Speaker 2 (56:46):
Yeah, so the different colors, the different ages of the
bruising that would show chronic, continual child abuse.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
Definitely.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Yeah. So at two pm, the pathologist, doctor Robert Woodburn,
began Dennis's auto He counted from fifty to one hundred
bruises running all over the length of the body, but
the exact number was hard to judge because so many
of them overlapped. So this kid was just bruised everywhere.

Speaker 3 (57:13):
This kid was a punching bag.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Yeah, it's just heartbreaking, a little two year old kid.
I just can't think what's going on in the mind
of someone that young when someone's hurting them like that.
It's heartbreaking. The bruises covered the legs, the arms, the hands,
the front and back of his head, his shoulders, his buttocks,
the small of his back, the back of his left leg.

(57:37):
There was a large swollen abrasion on his forehead. There
was a bluish mark on the right side of his
head that started at the temple and extended to behind
the right ear. Then there was a deep ulcerous lesion
at the base of the penis and dark bruises on
the tip. Something else besides the bruises seemed odd to
would burn as well. The body was nearly emaciated. He

(58:00):
could find no subcontaneous fat at all, but then none
of that is what had killed Dennis. So during the
internal autopsy he found a quarter inch perforation in the
boy's small vowel. The whole had allowed a fifth of
a quart of infectious, purulent pequal material into the abdominal cavity.
The perforation had occurred one to two days before the

(58:23):
child's death. During that time, the pus filled matter had solidified,
forming adhesions. So these are signs of peritonitis. Dennis most
likely had died after an extended period of agonizing pain,
and he died needlessly. Peritonitis was usually treatable with antibiotics,

(58:44):
and the bowel could be repaired, but of course only
if you contacted a doctor.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Yeah, it's not going to heal itself. This is I
guess an equivalent thing would be ruptured appendix same thing.
So you get purulent material in the abdomen and we'll
get infected very quickly, and.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
Just imagine the pain of that. I can't well, it's.

Speaker 3 (59:07):
Tough even walking around. Yeah, yeah, you'd be hunched over
for lying down and not wanting to move.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
So there was no way he went into the bathroom
with his father and was talking a couple hours before
he died.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
No, there's no way he was doing that.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
And there's really no way he just died at nine
thirty or nine forty five. Well, it is full rigor.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
That's another issue. He was in full rigor. So the
timing of when his death occurred, at least from the parents,
is wrong, right, he'd have died earlier. And he certainly
didn't get the owl perforation from falling down the stairs
or slipping on the wet floor. He had to have
had blunt force trauma applied to his abdomen, just kicking

(59:49):
something like that. Just more details that make you want
to hate his parents.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Oh yeah, I don't want to hate them. You have
to hate them really well. In his one page written
autopsy rapport, Woodburn offered to diagnosis of paraitonitis due to
the traumatic perforation of the small vowel, but he didn't
speculate on the nature of the trauma, nor did he
comment on the body's extreme rigor or oddly raised arms.

(01:00:15):
According to him, his job as pathologist was to determine
the immediate cause of death, and it was up to
the coroner to rule on the mode by which the
death was caused the cause of death. So what is
paraitonitis exactly? Just for those who don't totally know what
that is, It's an infection.

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
Yeah. The parenteum is basically the membrane lines the abdomen,
so everything that you intestines, kidneys, and they're all inside
this sack. And what happened with this child. He had
a rupture of the small intestine and poop float from
that into the abdominal cavity.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
So someone hit him so hard that it burst his bowel, Right, Jesus,
that had to be hard. So someone was likely kicking
or punching this little baby in the abdomen.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
Two year old.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
Wow, you think you know how sick a person can be?
And this is just unbelievable. So the coroner was shocked
by what he found, but no one had taken any
photos of Dennis's body when he was still in the home. Still,
Harold was brought into the police station for an interview.
The sergeant told Harold what they'd seen at the coroner's

(01:01:28):
office and asked if Harold could explain why the boy
had so many bruises all over his body. Dennis usually
did have bruises on him, Harold said, because he frequently
fell and bruised easily.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
But you're going to have a sort of a pattern
of bruising.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Yeah, I mean bruises from a kid bumping into things.
That's different.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
That's different. These bruises were all over his body. That's
where they say he had at least ten bruises on
his face. Yeah, so that's not from falling down and hitting.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
No. No. Harold said he could think have no cause
for the fresh bruises other than the fall in the
basement the day before, which would not explain it at all.
How could so many bruises be present in various parts
of the body on related to the area injured in
the fall. Harold said that Dennis was insensitive to pain

(01:02:17):
and didn't complain or tell them when he was hurt.
When don't you think of that whole thing about them saying, well,
Dennis didn't really feel pain or complain. How do we
even interpret that situation?

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
We interpret it by saying that person's making that statement
is lying.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
Yes, But then I also think after that much abuse,

(01:02:59):
maybe a child's stops complaining as much, which is really
a horrible thought.

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
Well, he would probably learn pretty quickly not to be
too boisterous or not to scream.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Yeah, so probably more like curl into a ball and weep,
which is kind of what his brother will describe. We'll
get into that, which is also heartbreaking. Yeah, this is
just such a difficult thing to even talk about. So
Harold said that Dennis always had constipation, and when asked
about the open wound at the base of the penis,

(01:03:32):
Harold said one time last summer, Dennis had been standing
in the bathtob and had turned on the hot water faucet,
which scalded his genital area. Dennis was treated then, but
he said the penis kept healing slowly and cracking open again.
Obviously lies. Yes, how would that happen. It wouldn't, No,
And if it did, any normal parent would be at

(01:03:54):
the doctor's office immediately.

Speaker 3 (01:03:56):
Yeah. It sounds like to me, is that if he
anything's crack open, that someone was still traumatizing.

Speaker 2 (01:04:03):
Yeah. She continued to do it. Yeah, yeah, over and over,
which is just dreadful. Also, the pathologist thought that Dennis
was malnourished. Harold said, he ate good, he ate the
same things that Robert ate. But he said that Dennis
didn't seem to know how to eat properly and didn't
know how to chew, So we're blaming the baby, like

(01:04:24):
something's wrong with this baby. Sometimes he swallowed chunks of
food without chewing, Harold said. Harold again explained that he
hadn't been home for a couple of days. He'd gone
to Wisconsin from Friday morning to Saturday night and had
not known about the fall in the basement until he
returned home. But this boy was dead and somebody had

(01:04:44):
to have caused the death. So the police asked Harold,
has Dennis been hit or kicked in any way, and
Harold said not that he knew of, okay, And as
these questions got more pointed, Harold became less inclined to
talk at all. He repeated his themes that he wanted
to talk about. Dennis was uncoordinated, Dennis fell a lot,

(01:05:07):
Dennis bruised easily, Dennis did not feel pain. So after
about half an hour the meeting ended. That was it.
Harold left the police station just after seven o'clock. Then
the police went to doctor Peterson's office to question him,
and he really was no better he became very guarded
and uncomfortable. He no longer wanted to talk. When Peterson

(01:05:30):
admitted that he'd last seen Dennis just two and a
half months ago in the office, the officers asked about
the open wound on his penis, but the doctor said
he couldn't remember seeing anything like that. How would that
be possible?

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
Well, he either didn't look or is lying yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
When asked if it was possible for Dennis with peritonitis
to be conscious and easily talking at eight am, just
an hour and a half before he supposedly died, Peterson
wouldn't answer. When asked about the bruised wounded condition of
Dennis's body, Peterson said he couldn't recall those bruises. All
he could recall was the forehead and facial bruises because

(01:06:10):
when he'd gone to the house, he hadn't even viewed
the rest of the child's body. It was under a blanket.
But then I think, just to get the police out
of his office, he said he'd contact Woodburn to discuss
the cause of death, and that ended the interview. And
part of the problem here is the police didn't know
what questions to ask. They hadn't been trained in child abuse. Yeah,

(01:06:31):
so that was probably the biggest problem in this whole
case was people that had positions where they could help
the child weren't trained to do so, or even to
investigate it. After the death.

Speaker 3 (01:06:45):
Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
So officers Vanderwist and Coral Chuck returned to the police
station after interviewing family members and neighbors of the Jurgens,
they brought their information about a pattern of physical abuse
by Lois back to the police chief, who was a
total piece of shit and did not seem eager at
all to address any of the issues. So officers Korl,

(01:07:08):
Chuck and Vanderwiss didn't think highly of the chief from
the beginning. They knew if you tell him about something,
he's going to turn it over to someone else. When
they finished talking, the chief told his two officers that
without new leads or information, they'd gone as far as
they could and the investigation was over. That's it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
That's it. But later that same day, to their credit
on their own, Korl, Chuck and Vanderwiss decided that the
Ramsey County Attorney's office should have a copy of their
complete file. Concluding the final analysis, so in a squad
car they headed for the courthouse in downtown Saint Paul.
And this is amazing. When they were five blocks from

(01:07:50):
their destination, their car radio crackled and the dispatcher told
them come back to the office. The chief wants you
to turn around and return to White Bear. So the
officers looked at each other. They didn't know how the
chief knew what they were up to, but they weren't
about to turn around. They continued driving, and Vanderwist reached

(01:08:12):
for the radio mouthpiece and said, we can't understand you.
We can't hear you. Reception is bad here. If you
can hear us, we'll be out of the County Attorney's office.
So I give these guys some credit for doing that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
Well. They did do a little bit more evaluation than.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Other people they did, I think from their knowledge base,
they did try and do the best they could. The
people with the real authority, the physician, the chief of police,
the attorney general, they totally dropped the ball. So the
officers ran up three flights of stairs in the County
Attorney's office, left their package with the file on the desk,

(01:08:52):
and returned to their car. We knew you were calling us,
but we didn't know what it was all about, vander
Weist explained to the chief later that day. So that's
how the case of Dennis Jurgen's death was passed to
the Ramsey County officials. Both the county coroner and the
county prosecutor had decisions to make. So, of course, Dennis

(01:09:13):
was not the only child that was killed during this
timeframe in this area by child abuse, and the dead
children that he saw really troubled the coroner, doctor Thomas
of Botel. There were infants and toddlers with ruptured livers,
cracked heads, and always the parents had explanations that just

(01:09:33):
did not ring true. So that's like what you said.
The first thing is their story doesn't match the injury exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
In all, there'd been a dozen such cases in Ramsey
County between nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty five, pretty horrific.
In four of the twelve, the child had died of
peritonitis due to an abdominal injury inflicted by another person.
Votel had tried flagging the county attorney, Bill Randall on
a few of those cases, but they never went anywhere.

(01:10:02):
These cases are difficult to prove, the prosecutor would tell him,
we have to prove malicious intent, and we need an eyewitness.
So we don't believe that anymore. We think if a
child is alone with an adult and something happens to
the child, we can hold the adult responsible. But they
thought they needed an eyewitness and they needed to prove

(01:10:22):
that the person who did it intended to kill or
severely injure the child. So in suspicious child deaths where
kids in their caskets had busted organs and bones, Botel
began to write deferred on death certificates in the box
that was reserved for mode of death. So the Jurgen's
boy on Palm Sunday had troubled him, but he was

(01:10:44):
not totally shocked by it. He'd seen this before and
he understood that this was an abused child. No question
what to do about it, though, was unclear. As the
White Bear police reports came into the county, Botel received
from his chief investigator, Tom Clarity, Dennis Jurgens had fallen

(01:11:05):
down a flight of stairs and had also slipped on
the basement floor. He told the coroner the police were
still investigating an abused child's death could be caused by
something other than the abuse, was Votel's reasoning. So it
was possible that a ruptured bowel could come from an
accidental fall down fourteen steps to a concrete floor, particularly

(01:11:28):
if the child hit something in the basement.

Speaker 3 (01:11:31):
That's not No, it's.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
Really not true. No, it's not true unless you had
like an item sticking up from the ground in the basement.
That actually the child fell on something protruding like that,
But just to a flat floor.

Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
No, No, you can't do it. You could, like say,
the child was riding a bicycle and took a header
and hit his abdomen on the handlebar. Yeah, that could
cause a rupture bowel, but you had direct to the admit.
So falling down a flight of stairs that could happen.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
No, Well, he had seen one ruptured vowel from a
biking fall, and then he had seen one from a
sledging accident, but most of these were child abuse. Votelle
deciding he wanted the White Bear police to resolve the
issues before he ruled on the mode of death. So
he thinks the police are still investigating, which they kind
of aren't. He put aside Dennis Jurgen's death certificate to

(01:12:29):
wait for more information. But the coroner would still be
waiting when he retired from office two years later in
nineteen sixty seven. So the police really weren't doing anything.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
No, they weren't.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
So batter child syndrome was a new concept which was
just then getting written about, and it wasn't a concept
recognized in a court of law, So it would do
no good in court to expose all the stories of
Lois's of use toward Dennis. Even if the family members
did agree to testify against her, they'd still need an

(01:13:01):
eyewitness to tell how the child had actually died. They
needed to link the ruptured bowel to a specific act
by Lois or someone else, so proving that Lois had
abused Dennis at other times wouldn't bring a conviction at
that time. They could actually show that the child was
beaten up every Friday for six straight weeks, but if
on the Friday before he died they had no witness

(01:13:23):
to a beating, they'd lose in court, at least they believed, so.
I don't know if a jury would be that passive
about it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:30):
Yeah, but there has to be some reason for the
prosecutors to be weary of bringing charges.

Speaker 2 (01:13:37):
So you mean they're kind of making that up or
that is a true reason.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
Well, it's a true reason for them.

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
Yeah, but not totally valid necessarily.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
No. I mean, like you said, I can have all
sorts of injuries and you're fairly certain this child abuse.
But at that time it wasn't a well recognized entity
and it would be difficult to prosecute. Well, yeah, you
these days it's a lot easier, at least to prosecute.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Yeah. Now there was also the matter of people's attitudes here.
The prosecutor didn't think he could convince jurors that middle
class families and suburban homes killed their children, at least
not without an eyewitness. Then there was the coroner's report.
If Votel had called it a homicide, at least an
accidental death would have been removed from the equation. There

(01:14:27):
was a custody hearing over the fate of Robert, Lois's
other adopted son, and he had gone to live with
his paternal grandparents after Dennis's death, so Robert did live
with his grandparents, then with a niece of Lois. In
July of nineteen sixty seven, Lois approached another relative, her
cousin June Bull, asking if she and her husband Richard

(01:14:49):
would keep Robert for two weeks while she and Harold
finished getting Robert back from the courts. So they felt
this was pretty eminent, but it wasn't still and did
not take long to agree to take him in, and
she didn't even mind that that two week visit would
end up lasting two years. So Robert was returned eventually

(01:15:10):
to Lois and Harold, and June baked a cake the
day Robert left her home to return to the Jurgons.
We'll try to celebrate, she figured, because it was either
that or go into despair. He'd been seven when he
came to live with her, now he was nine. She
did try to encourage contact for Robert with her and
her children, but as soon as Robert was back with Lois,

(01:15:34):
she avoided the family completely. So as Robert left June's home,
she was just feeling horrible, like, what's going to happen
to this boy? Because the time he'd been there, he'd changed,
he'd opened up, he'd learned to live a more normal life.
So she called out to Harold, knowing that Lois didn't care,

(01:15:54):
and said, Harold, you watch him, but Lois never let
her see Robert again. When she call Robert on the phone,
Lois would say he was too busy. There were two
occasions driving by the Jurgens home when June met Robert
out by their mailbox. He would talk, but he kept
looking over his shoulder at his parents' house, and June

(01:16:14):
sensed that he didn't want to be caught talking to her.
So very traumatic for June. She just hoped that Robert
would be okay. But then in March of nineteen sixty nine,
there was a mother of four in Kentucky who was
going around trying to give away her children, Renee, Grant, Michael,
and Ricky, ages nine, eight, six, and four. So of

(01:16:36):
course it was difficult to place four children in one home,
and they agreed to look in Minnesota as well as
Kentucky for a family for the children. Lois and Harold
Jurgens would end up taking these children, who Lois abused
from the beginning. So these children were humiliated in public
and they were beaten with kitchen utensils. They lived their

(01:16:58):
lives in fear, and Harold did very little to help them.
The four children were eventually removed and put into foster care.
Then Robert too asked to live in a foster home.

Speaker 3 (01:17:09):
That's Tully, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:11):
Yes, And Robert apparently was not treated as badly as
the other four, but still he was treated badly, and
he cared about these other kids who were his siblings.

(01:17:42):
So now we're going to go to the early nineteen eighties.
In Dennis's birth mother, Jerry Sherwood, she began looking for
Dennis and that's when she learned that he had died
in nineteen sixty five at the age of three. From
a yellowing newspaper notice of his death that she'd found
during this search, she learned that his body had multiple

(01:18:03):
injuries and bruises. From the death certificate, she learned that
the coroner had never ruled whether the death was an accident,
a homicide, or natural causes. They just buried his body
and that was it. So she's not just grieving about this.
She's extremely angry. She wanted justice, and she doubted she'd
get that from anyone in authority. She'd married Dennis's father

(01:18:27):
and her daughter, Misty, had arrived eighteen months later. Misty
had also been taken to a foster home, but Jerry
had managed to get her back in times. She did
divorce the children's father and remarried, but the second marriage
ended in divorce as well. After that, she had supported
the four children as best she could, sometimes managing an

(01:18:48):
apartment building, sometimes drawing welfare assistants, and sometimes dancing in
a bar. So On the morning after police officer Ronnehan
met with Jerry Sherwood Kneehan drove ten miles south to
the Ramsey County Attorney office. That morning he had an
appointment to speak with Jim Conan, the chief of the
Criminal Division. Jerry Sherwood's adult son had already called him,

(01:19:11):
so he knew what Ron's visit was about. He knew
that where the case went would be up to the prosecutors,
so Ron handed over a photocopy of a twenty six
page file in Dennis Alone in his office, Conan read
through the reports and then walked down the hall to
the Ramsey County Attorney, Tom Foley. This one is dynamite,

(01:19:32):
Conan told Foley, wait until you read this. But September
turned into October and still the County attorney did not
reveal his intentions with the case. On October second, two
weeks after Jerry had visited the White Bear Lake Police station.
She showed up at the office of the Ramsey County
Medical Examiner Michael McGhee, who handled their autopsies and ruled

(01:19:54):
on causes of death, so they were able to open
an investigation. And Dennis's body was in zuos doomed. It
had been twenty two years since his death, but the
funeral director had preserved his remains so well that you
could still see the bruises on his face, so he
was kind of mummified. The funeral director and I kind
of got the feeling he did this because he suspected

(01:20:17):
that maybe this would come back to be investigated one day.

Speaker 3 (01:20:20):
Yeah, that's an interesting foot.

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
But he preserved the organs in a bag that he
put by the feet in the coffin and preserved the
body extremely well. So a lot of changed since nineteen
sixty five, and the biggest change was in the ways
that authorities recognized and responded to child abuse. In nineteen
sixty two, a landmark paper had been published in the

(01:20:42):
Journal of the American Medical Association titled the Batter Child Syndrome.
The study began a nationwide shift in how child abuse
cases were diagnosed and treated. But the shift hadn't happened
in time to save Dennis Jurgens. It wasn't until nineteen
seventy one that the term battered child's syndrome made its
way into the case before the Minnesota Supreme Court. In

(01:21:06):
nineteen seventy five, when Minnesota adopted legislation requiring doctors to
report and the mistreatment of miners by their guardians, but
by then Denis Jurgens had already been dead for a decade,
so when Jerry Sherwood brought the case back to the
attention of the authorities, this change had begun. The response
was very different than it had been more than a

(01:21:28):
decade before, when doctor Peterson arrived to find a three
year old dead and did nothing about it. So it
didn't take long for the investigation to conclude that Dennis's
death had not been an accident but murder, and that
it was the result not of an isolated incident, but
a pattern of abuse that had also made victims of

(01:21:48):
the Jurgen's other adopted children. So Lois Jurgens was indicted
on January thirtieth, nineteen eighty seven, for one count of
second degree murder and two counts of third degree. The
Ramsey County Welfare adoption caseworker testified Lois Jurgens had concerns
about the placement, particularly over how Dennis would relate to

(01:22:09):
their older child, Robert, but that it was her husband, Harold,
who was very enthusiastic about adopting Dennis. She also said
that Lois had been concerned about Dennis's age, the fact
that he was larger than Robert, and some of his
other physical characteristics. Multiple witnesses testified about Lois's physical abuse

(01:22:29):
of Dennis. Her attorney admitted Dennis was an abuse child,
but argued about the extent of the abuse. The bulk
of the testimony came from members of the Jurgens large
family who they saw Dennis frequently from the time he
was adopted, and they saw a lot of the treatment
and it's just remarkable they did nothing about it. How

(01:22:50):
could you watch someone do that to their child and
not step in in any way? Kind of shocking, really,
So witnesses testified to incidents of forced feeding, Lois lifting
him up by the ears, striking him with her hand,
tying him to the toilet until he had a bowel movement,
and tying him to his crib witnesses testified Dennis was

(01:23:11):
frequently bruised, He often had black eyes and more sunglasses
to hide them, and they saw him become progressively thinner
and more withdrawn over time. Witnesses also testified that Lois
told them she'd put a clothes pin on Dennis's penis
to stop bed wetting. The autopsy showed an injury to
the tip of his penis. So after Dennis had died,

(01:23:33):
Harold had told relatives he was out of town the
weekend of April tenth and eleventh, nineteen sixty five. Harold's
testimony in nineteen sixty five showed he was in Wisconsin
the evening of Friday, April ninth until nine or nine
thirty pm, and on Saturday, April tenth, Lois herself told
White Bear Lake police her husband had been in northern

(01:23:56):
Wisconsin and that she'd called him on Saturday to tell
him was sick. She said Harold was up with the
boy most of the night. The state, near the end
of its case, presented the testimony of June Bowl concerning
a statement made to her by Harold eight years after
Dennis died. So June related a conversation with Harold that

(01:24:17):
she'd had at her kitchen table over coffee when Harold
dropped by after work one day. So, according to her testimony,
Harold said, I was out of town when Dennis died.
I was doing some electrical work for some friends. Lois
called and said she and Dennis had been at it,
and I knew what that meant. So I put my
things together and went right home. When I got home,

(01:24:40):
I took Dennis to bed with me, and in the
middle of the night, either he had to go potty
or I took him potty, and either he said done
or he was done, and I looked in the pot
and there was nothing there. Then I took him back
to bed with me, and in the morning he was dead.
So how do we what do we make of this? Harold?
How do you make of when it these parents that

(01:25:01):
does nothing. We've seen it many times with women who
just let their husbands abuse their children sexually or physically,
and now we're seeing it with a man, which I
guess that really makes no difference. There are spouses like this,
there are, But it's just weird because he actually seemed
to care about the kid at some level, yeah, but
not enough to do anything.

Speaker 3 (01:25:22):
He's not going to cross his life, which.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Is just crazy to me.

Speaker 3 (01:25:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:26):
Yeah, it makes him just as bad to me. Maybe
not just as bad, but close, pretty damn close to
as bad.

Speaker 3 (01:25:33):
Yes, But you know, we were looking at this in
a rational way, and there's no rational way for that
person to stand by totally irrational.

Speaker 2 (01:25:43):
Yeah. Well. She testified that later Lois had sent her
dirty socks and a lead pipe when she'd asked for
the adopted children's clothing. She'd also received harassing phone calls,
which she thought were from Lois. Probably were, oh sure.
Lois told the police the doctor that Dennis had fallen
the day before, and that he'd had a cold and

(01:26:04):
a fever. Robert Jergens, the big brother, testified that he
remembered Dennis falling down the basement stairs not long before
his death. He testified his mother ran down the stairs
after him and started to hit and shake him. He
testified Dennis had landed on his stomach at the bottom
of the stairs, and he also testified that Lois told

(01:26:25):
him in nineteen eighty seven the fall down the stairs
had actually happened a week before his death. The state
presented the medical testimony of doctor Thomas Botel doctor Robert Woodburn,
and doctor Michael McGhee, who was the current Ramsey County
Medical Examiner, and doctor William Sterner, who was an expert

(01:26:45):
in pediatric forensic pathology. The nineteen sixty five autopsy report
and the Morgue photographs were introduced as evidence. Doctor Botell,
who viewed the body, testified he believed Dennis was a
bad better child, that he was told White Bear Lake
Police were investigating the death, and that he marked the

(01:27:06):
mode of death on the death certificate as deferred to
await further information from the investigation. Doctor Woodburn testified that
there were from fifty two one hundred bruises on Denis's
body at the time of his death. He testified there
was a linear bruise on the upper abdomen. He identified
a perforation of the ilium or small bowel, as the

(01:27:27):
cause of the seepage of the gestro intestinal material into
the peritoneal cavity, which caused the peritonitis. He testified the
perforation had no internal cause and was, in his opinion,
caused by an external force or a traumatic equivalent to
the force generated in a train wreck, so it's not

(01:27:48):
just some little punch that's going to do this. Oh no,
this is extremely brutal.

Speaker 3 (01:27:53):
I mean similarly of the train wreck. That's a little
over the top, but he's still getting You have to
know that there was this huge ann forced to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
This is a baby. Yeah. Doctor McGee testified to the
exhimation of the body in January nineteen eighty seven, and
he re examined the small bowel and reviewed that nineteen
sixty five autopsy report. So doctor McGee testified that the
perforation of the ilium had been caused by a blunt
traumatic injury that had happened from eight to forty eight

(01:28:26):
hours before death. So he testified it could not have
been caused by a fall down the stairs, nor by
a fall onto the floor, unless it was from a
height of at least six feet onto a fixed protruding object.
So yeah, we did touch upon that, So not just
falling to a flat surface.

Speaker 3 (01:28:45):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:28:46):
Doctor McGee estimated the time of death as six to
eight hours before the autopsy was performed, and McGee testified
it was more probable the trauma was to Dennis's stomach
rather than to his back, although he acknowledged which the
trauma could have been to Dennis's back. What do you
think about that?

Speaker 3 (01:29:04):
Yeah, it could. Again, you'd have to have really forceful injury,
but you could conceivably cause that problem.

Speaker 2 (01:29:13):
Yeah, if you're wailing on his back. Yeah, but then
you'd probably see more damage to the back muscles and
possibly like the kidneys.

Speaker 3 (01:29:20):
I would expect you'd see some blood in the y'urine here,
something that was causing problems for the kidneys.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
Mm hm. Well. The current pathologists conceded that batter Child
syndrome is not a cause of death, but testified the
syndrome helped support a finding of homicide. The paratonitis would
have caused Dennis great pain, and it was not possible
that he had been in the bathroom talking shortly before
his death, which you agreed with that. Yeah, he'd be too,

(01:29:48):
if he was even conscious, he'd be an extreme.

Speaker 3 (01:29:50):
Pain, very uncomfortable even moving.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
So he testified from nineteen eighty seven photos of the
Jurgen's home, it wasn't possible Denis's internal injuries were caused
by a fall down the basement stairs or onto the
basement floor. So the jury deliberated for four and a
half hours before they returned with their decision. That Lois
was guilty of third degree murder. Lois Jurgens was sentenced

(01:30:14):
to a maximum of twenty five years, with her release
date left to the discretion of the Commissioner of Correction.
So Lois had requested an instruction on second degree manslaughter,
which would be death resulting from culpable negligence, and the
trial court had declined to submit the lesser offense. So

(01:30:35):
I'll give them some credit there. So by now she
was an older woman. She ended up serving just eight
years behind bars before being paroled in nineteen ninety five.
Her husband, Harold died in the year two thousand and interestingly,
there was some suspicion that she had poisoned him, but
the coroner's report would rule that out.

Speaker 3 (01:30:56):
She's a marked woman now, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
True. So she lived the rest of her life as
a widow, and she died at age eighty seven in
twenty thirteen. So the justice did come late for Dennis
Jerry Sherwood, the birth mother, and the rest of the
children who'd been abused by Lois. So the justice came
late for Dennis Jurgens, Jerry Sherwood, and the rest of
the children who'd been abused by Lois. The case did

(01:31:20):
become a landmark in the history of child abuse law,
so it's quite a famous case. While it's not true
that this type of tragedy could never happen again, because
of course, unfortunately many children are still severely abused, there
are safeguards in place now that are much better than
those that failed Dennis. So while it's not true that

(01:31:42):
this type of tragedy could never happen again, there are
safeguards in place that are much better and at least doctors, nurses, neighbors,
case workers, more people are likely to stand up and
say something to the authorities in these cases. So hopefully
more children are getting help, which they must be because
from what I read from back in this time, kids

(01:32:04):
were just killed by their parents and nothing ever happened.

Speaker 3 (01:32:07):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:07):
It's just horrendous. God, imagine in the eighteen hundreds how
it must have been.

Speaker 3 (01:32:13):
Yes, well, we evolve, we do, and child abuse probably
won't go away. But with time it's more and more
ways to prevent abuse or treat abuse. And just look
what sixty years ago. Yeah, look what's happened in terms
of evaluating child abuse?

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):
Well, tell me about it, because I don't really have
any experience with that. What's happened? What's different?

Speaker 3 (01:32:36):
Well, I think people are more aware that it does occur.
Sixty years ago, I thought was if the child was
abused because the parents were mentally ill, morally corrupt or something.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
Alcoholics. Yeah, poor people, Yeah, poor people, always poor people.
We like to blame poor people.

Speaker 3 (01:32:54):
Among the first things that people found out was it
a nice, middle class, happily married woman or husband could
be the perpetrator of that. So it's not just those
mooney people that do it. Right, there's a story, at
least from fifty sixty seven years ago. I'll give you
a little story about how things got going okay, because

(01:33:14):
it is interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:33:15):
Oh it is in that book. There's there's a ton
of information if anyone's interested. But yeah, tell me what
you know.

Speaker 3 (01:33:21):
Well, this we'll go back to nineteen fifty nine nineteen sixty.
Doctor c Henry kemp and doctor Brand Steele would encounter
each other in the halls of Colorado General Hospital, and
their conversations usually ran along the same line. Kempy was
a pediatrician, and he would ask Steele, who's a psychiatrist,
for his advice on evaluated parents of abused children, because

(01:33:44):
at the time, parents of an abused child were felt
to be somehow psychologically impaired.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):
Well aren't they? Though, well, doesn't you have? In a
larger sense?

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
Sure? Right, And the abused children that Kemp was seeing
seemed to have parents that were loving and caring. H
the afternoon, Camp has Steel to evaluate the mother of
a three month old. This baby had been admitted with
a subdural hematoma and a fractured femur. Now this mother
had had a very troubled childhood. Steele thought that the

(01:34:13):
mother was just doing things to her in because these
things had been done to her. If all you know
is slapping her child, that's what you're going to do. Sure. Yeah,
So this struck a nerve, I guess and steal. But
he suggested to Camp that they collect some data and
see if they could publish some of their findings. And
it turns out there wasn't much to mind in terms

(01:34:34):
of prior studies. Nineteen forty six, doctor John Caffey, who's
a radiologist, he published a paper detailing and association between
femeral fractures and subdual hematomas and that his abuse of
the child. And then in nineteen fifty three, one of
Kathy's proteges, doctor Frederick Silverman, suggested that the perpetrators of

(01:34:55):
abuse might be unaware that they were causing harm really
just because that's how they were raised and they turned
out okay, so they're not going to think they were
harming the child.

Speaker 2 (01:35:06):
Well, yeah, I see some truth in that. I mean,
when it goes through families, that's what you learn is
what your parents do is that's the way to do things.
That's why a lot of these things continue through generations,
right right.

Speaker 3 (01:35:19):
And then a couple of years later, two other doctors
said that some of the legions seen in abuse case
were intentional, and doctor Cathy suggested that the abusers be
punished for their actions. Well, there's a novel, I right,
can't prepare an abstract on child abuse as presented at
the Society of Pediatric Research meeting in nineteen fifty nine. Now,

(01:35:41):
the paper was not presented because other than the abstract,
the full paper wasn't presented because it was considered not
to be sufficiently important, by whom leaders of the Society
of Pediatric Research thought.

Speaker 2 (01:35:54):
That child abuse oh my god. Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:35:57):
Yeah, But the more families got evaluated, more investigators could
see that these were not psychotic or mentally ill patients
for the most part, and this doesn't include Lois, but
for the most part, the parents are doing what was
right by their standards. So then KEMPEN still decided to
present their data at the Annual Academy of Pediatrics meeting.
This is October nineteen fifty one, and the title of

(01:36:20):
their presentation is the Battered Child Syndrome. That's the first
time that was used in studies.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):
Yeah, that was really groundbreaking.

Speaker 3 (01:36:28):
And more and more people were learning about child abuse.
And actually after the AAP meeting, almost every single state
and acted laws requiring physicians or others to report suspected
incidences of child abuse. You're going from.

Speaker 2 (01:36:42):
Something the mandatory reporter law.

Speaker 3 (01:36:44):
Right, yeah, And as long as you're reporting on what
you feel is correct, you can't be prosecuted for that.
So if I said, Jil, you've been abusing Gomez.

Speaker 2 (01:36:54):
Oh ble Gomez dog and it.

Speaker 3 (01:36:57):
Turns out not to be true, you can't assue me
or defamation of character, right.

Speaker 2 (01:37:02):
Because you're doing it.

Speaker 3 (01:37:04):
I'm doing it in good face, good faith. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):
Yeah. And when that happened, then they had a lot
of training as well for the police and case workers.

Speaker 3 (01:37:13):
Yeah, how can you evaluate all of these? We're learning
more and more things probably continued or more things, but
we've touched on some of them. Like kids covered in bruises,
but there's no signs of any bleeding disorder or blood
disorder causing it. How are they getting the bruises or
the location of the bruises. You can look at kids

(01:37:33):
that have marks on your skin, small circular scabs, probably
caused by cigarettes to be touched to the baby's skin.

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):
Well, and Lois had this crazy religious thing, which I
think is what made her focus on his genitals like that.

Speaker 3 (01:37:49):
That would be a crazy religious thing.

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
Well, you see a lot of that with crazy religious things, right,
because sex is evil. She said she didn't enjoy sex
because she couldn't have a child from it. Yeah, and
she had him kneeling and saying the rosary.

Speaker 3 (01:38:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:38:04):
So yeah, that's a big part of it, at least
in that cave.

Speaker 3 (01:38:07):
Yeah, or the other burns. So you see a child
who has second third degree burns, the second degree burns
on his feet up to his ankles. So that baby
was put in scalding water feet first.

Speaker 2 (01:38:21):
You go on and I but Dennis had a scrotum
and penis burned and not his legs and things.

Speaker 3 (01:38:28):
So yeah, so that story, well he turned on the
hot water.

Speaker 2 (01:38:33):
No, that doesn't make sense. No, do we know? Is
there any difference between male and female child abusers? Is
it more often that women do because they're more often
the caretakers?

Speaker 3 (01:38:44):
More often women because they're the caretaker.

Speaker 2 (01:38:47):
Same thing with medical abuse, Munchausen by proxy type of things,
it's almost always a woman, not always but mostly.

Speaker 3 (01:38:54):
Yeah, proportions are quite striking.

Speaker 2 (01:38:58):
But you wonder, as there are more states home dads,
are we going to see that change? Probably because it
really has nothing to do with the sex of the person.
It's the situation they find themselves in and how they
deal with it. Right, Well, it sure is heartbreaking for Dennis,
So I hope that at least something can be learned
and some other children can be spared. We hope, I mean,

(01:39:18):
otherwise it's just horrific to even think about. Okay, Well,
I think since we're getting near two hours, we will
do feedback next week. One thing I really want to
touch on is Crystal Rogers, a case we did way
in the beginning. Ways she went missing in twenty fifteen.
We started the podcast in twenty sixteen. I think she
was one of our first cases we did. She's pretty

(01:39:39):
early and a couple people have already been convicted for
helping either, I think after the fact with her murder.
Her body's never been found, but now her boyfriend is
on trial, just started a couple days ago.

Speaker 3 (01:39:53):
So yeah, and you didn't like him from the start.

Speaker 2 (01:39:56):
No, I think we all knew it was him. There
were some obvious things that just made you think it
was him. Yes, yeah, obviously so, but the family in
on it as well. There was a grandmother who didn't
like Crystal because she already had four children and you know,
she just wasn't good enough for the family. So yeah,
we'll definitely touch on that and whatever else you have.

Speaker 3 (01:40:16):
You will have a few things.

Speaker 2 (01:40:17):
Yeah, So you still have a few days if you
want to get in a voicemail or an email with
a case suggestion or something you'd like us to discuss
and feedback. And we thank you for listening and we'll
see you next time at the quiet Ed Come on
Now plenty room.

Speaker 4 (01:40:31):
Absolutely, bye bye bye, guys.

Speaker 3 (01:41:03):
Never was a wo

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