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An unlikely crime scene: How investigators unraveled an ax murder-suicide mystery

A week after the July 30, 1956 farmstead shooting, Cavalier County Coroner George K. Books ruled that a.22 bullet to the base of farm hand David J. Goertzen's skull killed him, not the ax wounds, drawing more than 200 people to the courthouse.
The confrontation began when cattle buyer Ralph Williams told Goertzen he was leaving for Langdon, and Goertzen replied he wasn't going anywhere before shooting Williams in the forehead at the Padden farmstead about six miles northeast of Langdon, North Dakota.
After his.32-caliber pistol emptied, Goertzen attempted to kill himself with a double-bladed ax, hacking his head repeatedly before retrieving a.22 rifle from inside the farm home and shooting himself by placing the butt on the ground and pushing the trigger with a stick.
Williams survived the forehead and arm wounds and was rushed to a Langdon hospital by Elizabeth Padden and her daughter, who heard the gunshots; the Cavalier County Sheriff's Office eventually lost the case file and nobody was ever charged.
Padden, who immigrated from Germany, moved away and died about three years later in Wisconsin, while a coroner's jury including newspaper publisher R.E. Forkner and cattle buyer Richard Fliflat conducted lie detector tests on the case.

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