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His 'ray of sunshine … was blotted out’ in nearly century-old murder

The 1937 strangulation and bludgeoning of Woo Ah Lee remains unsolved despite multiple suspects, FBI involvement, and decades of investigation by Barnesville police.

  • Barnesville resident Woo Ah Lee was discovered murdered in his shack, with friends Otto Vierth and Leonard Bergeson finding his body, on May 17, 1937.
  • Investigators suspected a robbery motive in the killing, believing Lee’s chickens and scavenging sometimes attracted local thieves and alleged robbers.
  • Autopsy and scene reports show Lee was strangled and hit five times, with a blood-soaked pillow and a tuft of hair on a weapon.
  • Barnesville police questioned multiple suspects, including Tuski and Olson, but no one was indicted despite FBI assistance and confessions to other crimes.
  • Decades later, investigators and reporters say they still find little in the record as the Barnesville Police Department’s case file could not be found, and Woo Ah Lee was buried locally with rites and six pallbearers.
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His 'ray of sunshine … was blotted out’ in nearly century-old murder

BARNESVILLE, Minn. — Three years after the passage of the China Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred most Chinese immigrants from reaching the United States, a young Chinese man somehow managed to slip through an unknown American port. The world that Woo Ah Lee left behind — the dying gasps of the imperial Qing Dynasty — was in turmoil. Already, he had survived the effects of China’s deadliest insurrection, multiple invasions, an opium epidemic f…

·Cherokee County, United States
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Inforum broke the news in Fargo, United States on Wednesday, February 18, 2026.
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