In the early morning hours of December 15, 1978, 13-year-old Wayne Lowell Huling was shot dead in his family’s rural Stearns County home near Clearwater. Wayne and his 11-year-old brother William Billy Huling were awakened by noise; Billy later said he heard a struggle and a gunshot. A masked man entered their upstairs bedroom and shot Wayne. The intruder then killed 16-year-old Susan and 12-year-old Patti in their bedrooms and shot and killed their mother, 36-year-old Alice Huling, downstairs. Billy survived by playing dead and fleeing after the attacker left.

A man named Joseph Donald Ture Jr. was arrested four days later on an unrelated vehicle charge; items found on him were later linked to the scene. Over the following years Ture remained a suspect and was ultimately indicted in 1999. In February 2000 he was convicted on four counts of first-degree murder and given life sentences; the Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 2001. The motive for the killings and how the assailant chose the Huling home remain unclear. Does anyone have memories of the neighborhood or information that could shed light on that night?