Joseph Ture Jr.

For decades, the question of who had slaughtered the Hulings hung over central Minnesota. ^[1]
It would take a drifter in a stolen car, a toy Batmobile, and a disputed jailhouse confession to finally put a name — Joseph Donald “Joe” Ture Jr. — on the crime. ^[1]

A Family Attacked in Their Sleep

The Huling home sat in the countryside near Clearwater, Minnesota, a rural house where Alice was raising her children: teenagers Susan, 16; Wayne, 13; and Patti, 12; and 11‑year‑old Billy. ^[1][2]

In the early morning of December 15, 1978, an intruder entered the house. ^[1]
He went first to Alice’s bedroom and shot her as she lay in bed, killing her. ^[1][3]

Then he climbed the stairs to the children’s rooms. ^[3]
From his bed, Billy heard his 13‑year‑old brother speak into the darkness: “Who are you?” ^[3]
The intruder raised a gun toward Wayne and fired. Wayne was killed. ^[3]

Billy later said he pulled the covers over his head and lay still as shots rang out in the house. ^[1][3]
Upstairs, the gunman shot and killed Billy’s older sisters, Suzy and Patty. ^[2][3]

The man came back to Billy’s room. Standing close to the bed, he fired twice at the lump under the blanket. Both shots missed the 11‑year‑old at point‑blank range. ^[1][3]
Billy stayed motionless, playing dead under the covers. ^[1][3]

When the house finally went quiet and the killer left, Billy crawled out of bed, made it out of the house, and ran almost two miles down a rural road to a neighbor’s home to get help. ^[1][3]

A Murder Mystery With No Suspect Strong Enough to Charge

Deputies arriving at the Huling home found a scene that would haunt investigators for years. ^[1]
Despite the brutality and the presence of a surviving witness, the case did not immediately yield a clear suspect.

Over time, investigators considered several possibilities, including a Stearns County deputy who lived nearby and later died. ^[1]
There were, as one later account put it, “several suspects” in the Huling murders — but no one was charged, authorities said, because there was not enough evidence. ^[3]

The Huling murders remained an open mystery for decades, one of the coldest and most painful cases in Stearns County. ^[1]
What no one yet knew was that, just days after the shootings, the man who would eventually be convicted of the crime had already crossed paths with law enforcement — and been allowed to walk away. ^[1]

Four Days Later: A Stolen Car at the Clearwater Travel Plaza

Four days after the Huling murders, in December 1978, a man named Joe Ture was sitting in a stolen car at the Clearwater Travel Plaza near Interstate 94. ^[1][3]
He was bothering waitresses inside the truck‑stop restaurant badly enough that one of them picked up the phone and called police. ^[1]

When officers arrived, they discovered the car Ture was driving had been reported stolen. ^[1][3]
They searched it and found a strange assortment of items:

• A metal rod wrapped in a steering wheel cover
• A small toy car, described in later reporting as a Batmobile
• A ski mask
• A list containing hundreds of women’s names, along with license plate numbers and telephone numbers ^[1][3]

The items were turned over to Stearns County Sheriff’s Deputy James Kostreba, one of the first deputies who had responded to the Huling crime scene. ^[1]

Soon, those objects would take on a darker significance.
Experts later concluded that the metal rod found in Ture’s car matched a bruise on Alice Huling’s body. ^[1]
Billy would later say that the toy car from the stolen vehicle looked like one of his own toy cars that had gone missing after the murders. ^[1]

At the time, though, investigators hadn’t connected everything.
Kostreba and another detective interviewed Ture. ^[1]
Video and audio excerpts from the time show Detective Ross Baker questioning him five days after the murders. ^[1]
Ture sidestepped several questions, and when the interview was over, deputies let him go. ^[1]

With no charges filed, the Huling case drifted back into unsolved‑murder territory, even as potential evidence linked to a suspect sat boxed up in the sheriff’s office. ^[1]

Who Was Joe Ture?

By the late 1970s, Joseph Donald “Joe” Ture Jr. was drifting around Minnesota.
Born in February 1951, he had grown up mostly in and around St. Paul. ^[1]
His parents divorced when he was 10. ^[1]
He later said that after the divorce he ended up in an orphanage and then a reformatory. ^[1]

As a young adult, Ture joined the U.S. Marine Corps when he was about 18 or 19, but he served only six months before leaving. ^[1]
Back in the St. Paul area, he rarely held a job for long. ^[1]
At various points he worked at the Ford plant in St. Paul, at junkyards, and at car dealerships as a mechanic or lot man. ^[1]
Sometimes he slept in his car. Around town, people often described him as itinerant, a drifter. ^[1]

In those years, he was hard to miss: shoulder‑length blond hair and bushy sideburns, moving from job to job and place to place. ^[1]

A Pattern of Sexual Violence Emerges

Ture’s record with law enforcement escalated dramatically in the early 1980s.

In 1981, he was convicted of abducting and raping an 18‑year‑old woman and a 13‑year‑old girl in separate incidents near Lake Street in Minneapolis. ^[1]
He was also convicted of attempting to kidnap and rape a 20‑year‑old woman; she escaped by burning his face with a cigarette. ^[1]

After those convictions, investigators linked him to a more chilling crime: the disappearance and murder of 19‑year‑old Diane Edwards in 1980. ^[1][2]

Edwards was walking home from her waitressing job at a Perkins restaurant in West St. Paul when she was forced into a car. ^[1][2]
Ture later told authorities he frequented that Perkins and had asked Edwards out on dates. ^[2]

She never made it home. About two weeks later, her body was found in a rural ditch in Sherburne County. ^[2]
Her clothing was piled nearby; her body lay face down and naked. ^[1]

Upon his capture, Ture confessed to the Edwards murder. ^[1][2]
He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the crime. ^[2]

Even that confession, though, would not stay straightforward. Years later, from behind bars, Ture said he had been “playing games” with authorities and claimed he was innocent of killing Edwards. ^[1]

By then, he was already being looked at for other unsolved murders — among them, the slaughter of a teenage girl in Afton, and the long‑cold case of the Huling family. ^[2]

The Afton Killing: Marlys Wohlenhaus

On a February day in 1979, 18‑year‑old Marlys Wohlenhaus was bludgeoned to death in her family home in Afton, Minnesota. ^[1][2]
For nearly twenty years, her murder was an open wound for her family and another unsolved case on the books.

In 1998, a jury convicted Ture of killing Wohlenhaus. ^[1]
Prosecutors relied in part on the same dictated confession that would later be used in the Huling case. ^[1]
In that confession, a narrative of multiple crimes emerged, casting Ture as the perpetrator of several previously unsolved murders.

Ture appealed, but in 2004 the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld his conviction for Wohlenhaus’s murder. ^[1]

The Dictated Confession and the Huling Murders

By the late 1990s, Stearns County investigators had reopened the Huling file. ^[1]
Sitting in prison, Ture had become a suspect not only because of his violent record but because of the old Clearwater Travel Plaza stop — the stolen car, the metal rod, the toy Batmobile, and the surviving boy who remembered a missing toy. ^[1]

The most important piece of evidence, however, wasn’t physical. It was a story.

In 2000, a jury convicted Ture of the Huling murders largely on the strength of a confession he had allegedly dictated to a fellow prisoner. ^[1]
That same dictated statement had already helped secure his conviction for the murder of Marlys Wohlenhaus. ^[1]

The origin and authorship of the confession quickly became the most controversial part of the case.
Ture denied that he had dictated the confession used to prosecute him for the Huling murders. ^[1]
He has, at different times, confessed to and denied various killings, including Edwards’s, telling one interviewer, “I did not do any of these murders,” even as he acknowledged a history of other wrongdoing. ^[1]
“I did a lot of bad things,” he said. “But I never hurt a body. I never hurt a certain person.” ^[1]

To investigators who worked the case, those denials carried little weight.
Retired Stearns County Detective Lou Leland said he spent “hours and hours and hours” interviewing Ture and described him as a “very mixed‑up character.” ^[1]
On the question of who killed the Hulings, Leland was unequivocal: “He did the deed.” ^[1]

One later account would simply identify Ture as a serial killer. ^[2]

The Minnesota Supreme Court upheld his conviction for the Huling murders in 2001, rejecting his appeal. ^[1]

How Strong Was the Evidence?

Even with a conviction in hand, the Huling case has continued to raise difficult questions.

There is no dispute that Ture was stopped in a stolen car just four days after the murders, near the community where the family was killed. ^[1][3]
Inside that car were items that seemed eerily connected to the crime:

• The metal rod that an expert said matched a bruise on Alice Huling’s body ^[1]
• The toy Batmobile that Billy identified as similar to a toy of his that had vanished after the shootings ^[1]
• A ski mask, and a list of hundreds of women’s names with license plates and phone numbers ^[1][3]

Yet questions have lingered over how definitively those items place Ture inside the Huling home, as opposed to painting a troubling but circumstantial picture: a predatory, itinerant man with disturbing possessions who happened to be nearby. ^[1]

Overlaying the physical evidence is the fraught history of Ture’s own words.
He confessed to killing Diane Edwards, then later said he was lying. ^[1][2]
A dictated confession helped convict him of killing Marlys Wohlenhaus and the Huling family, but he has denied authoring it. ^[1]
Across interviews he has swung between sweeping denials — “I did not do any of these murders” — and cryptic acknowledgements of “a lot of bad things.” ^[1]

The result is a picture that depends heavily on how much weight one gives to that contested jailhouse confession and to Ture’s ever‑shifting stories about himself.

Life Sentences and a Long Shadow

After his 1981 rape convictions and the subsequent murder convictions for Edwards, Wohlenhaus, and the Huling family, Ture has been serving multiple life sentences at Stillwater state prison. ^[1][2]

From prison, he has continued to insist that, whatever else he has done, he is not the man who murdered the Hulings. ^[1]
Investigators like Lou Leland remain convinced that he is. ^[1]

What is not in dispute is the devastation left behind in a farmhouse near Clearwater in December 1978: a mother and three children shot to death in their beds, and an 11‑year‑old boy who survived by lying perfectly still under a blanket while a gunman fired twice at his head. ^[1][3]

Decades later, Billy’s childhood memory of a missing toy car would become one small but haunting part of the state’s case against the man a jury found responsible for destroying his family. ^[1]

And in central Minnesota, the name Joe Ture has become inseparable from the Huling murders — a case born in terror, solved in controversy, and still shadowed by questions that may never be fully put to rest. ^[1]