"I was in a lineup with Donald Blom" -- A True Crime Anecdote

On May 26, 1999, 19-year-old Katie Elizabeth Poirier went missing from D. J.'s Expressway Conoco convenience store in Moose Lake, Minnesota, where she worked nights as a clerk. Donald Albin Blom is now serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for her murder in 1999. A registered sex offender involved in five cases of kidnapping and sexual assault prior to Poirier's murder, he was suspected of being a serial killer by case investigators. 

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I was making music with a group of musicians this summer when one of the guitar players, John Hyde, told us about how he ended up in a police lineup with Donald Blom, the convicted murderer of Katie Poirier. The story intrigued me because I can't recall ever meeting someone who was in a police lineup. 

John Hyde, far right. Donald Blom, second from left.

"It was late in the day when I got a call about the lineup from Sgt. Dannon Bauer," Hyde said. "He is the guy next to me in the lineup. He said he was looking for someone blonde with a mustache."

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In 1978, John Hyde worked with the Duluth Police Department for a year, not as an officer but as a tech guy. This became a career stepping stone. Hyde had an opportunity to work in this field in exchange for an FCC license and he took it. He returned to the DPD in 1992 and worked there till 2020.  

One day, Dannon Bauer, a department seargent, said, "Report to Moose Lake." When he arrived Hyde was told to dress in prison garb so that he could be placed in a police lineup with four other officers and Donald Blom at the Carlton County jail. Blom had been accused and later convicted of the abduction and murder of Katie Poirier, a high profile case in our region.

When Hyde reported to jail he was escorted to a break room where he and the others would wait for Blom to be delivered to the station for the lineup. "I picked up a magazine to read," Hyde said.

The video surveillance footage showed that the man who abducted Poirier was wearing a baseball jersey, so each of the men would take turns being dressed in a #23 New York Yankees jersey, then ushered into the small room with a two-way mirror. Each was then instructed to read a statement.

Because Blom was late in arriving, it became a late night for all involved. 

"I wasn't intimidated by him (Blom)," Hyde said. "I didn't talk to him. He did talk to one person in the room."

There were three FBI guys involved in this case, Hyde believed. Hyde had interactions with two of them, but not the supervisor they reported to. One of the FBI guys was a jokester, ribbing Hyde by saying, "They picked you out of the lineup." 

Hyde later had to go to court to have his identity verified. Afterwards he went to lunch with the FBI guys.

In an interesting twist, John's 15-year-old son Andrew Hyde also got involved in the case. There was a call for volunteers to go out and search the woods to find evidence regarding where the body might have been buried or disposed of. More than 100 National Guardsmen and an equal number of volunteers participated in the evidence quest. Sadly, the search yielded results. Dental remains were found in a fire pit on Blom's 20-acre property. 

Photo courtesy John Hyde

The Good Nurse: A Frightening True Story About A Maverick Madman

Stephen King calls it "Chilling!" People magazine called it "Riveting." Publishers Weekly called it, "A deeply unsettling addition to the true crime genre." I would call it all of the above and more.

My brother sent this to me (Thank you, Don!) because the story took place in a variety of hospitals near where our family lived in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, two of which were places my mother served as an RN--Somerset County Hospital and Lehigh Valley Hospital. When a story this dramatic occurs that close to home, your stomach quivers as you realize how close you were to something so very dark.

My wife once worked with someone who babysat Jim Jones's children in Indiana before he became an international sensation as a faith healer and cult leader. It's creepy to think about it.

It's quite apparent that author Charles Graeber did a lot of work gathering information for this book. Research alone doesn't make a compelling story, which is why a lot of true crime fails to really grip you. Graeber's telling of the story keeps you turning pages, makes you reluctant to put the book down.

The basic premise is that a male nurse was intentionally doing harm to patients--actually getting away with murder--in a variety of hospitals for a number of years. When his behavior raised suspicions, he'd quit and move on. Since nursing is an area where most hospitals seem to be short on help, he was always welcome wherever he went. Background checks were seldom done, and the cold-blooded killing could continue unabated.

The good part of this story is that the book did produce changes in how hospitals manage prescription medications. It seems the horrifying behavior should not have gone this long. Then again, hindsight is always 20/20 and the same could be said about the Milwaukee Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer or serial killer Ted Bundy.

Just in case you haven't figured it out by now, this book is not about a "good" nurse. Though he confessed to 40 murders, experts believe he may have been responsible for 400 or more deaths.

The thing that is hard in these kinds of cases is trying to understand motivations. The more significant feature of the story is how the hospitals failed to follow up when there was clear evidence that someone was tampering with meds, injecting things into IV bags, and all the rest. These crimes were committed by a single man, but the hospitals' negligence in permitting all this to continue for 16 years seems inexcusable.

Reading through the reviews I see that many of the readers who liked the book best were themselves nurses who understand the processes by which meds are managed. Some said it should be required reading for people in the healthcare field. Another though said, "If you are already paranoid about being in the hospital don't touch this one!"

Here is an excerpt from a review that seems fairly representative of the positive ones:
First off, the fact that this is a true story terrifies me. That one single human being could be responsible for so many deaths, and not even care, just floors me. That said, the story is incredibly well-written. The reader sees and understands the story from several different points-of-view.

On the other hand, not all readers found this a compelling story. Though the book has 86% four and five star reviews, there were many who found it boring or not well written. I may have been biased by the fact that I was familiar with many of the locations in the book.

The publisher (Hachette) clearly did a good job in the promotion for this book in that a couple reviewers heard about it on NPR and another mentioned the story being on 60 Minutes.

The last hospital Cullen worked at was Somerset Hospital in New Jersey where my mother once worked in the 60s and 70s. The hospital did not come across well in the 60 Minutes segment featuring this story.
  

Ghost Burglar

Over the years I’ve been a big fan of Elmore Leonard's crime fiction and went through a couple Agatha Christie spurts as well, but it’s been a while since I read any kind of true crime. So when a friend recommended Ghost Burglar, it wasn’t the genre but rather the local tie-in to Duluth that piqued my interest. From the first page, however, I was gripped. And the story features characters and plot twists as interesting as nearly anything by the masterful Leonard.

Ghost Burglar is the story of Bernard Welch who was one of the most successful thieves in U.S. history, as well a surprisingly witty prison escapee, with two such exits under his belt. A rather unassuming fellow by day, he’d developed a system that made him extremely successful during his night prowling.  He had a nose for neighborhoods that had the kind of loot he was looking for. It had to be goods that were of value but easy to pass along, and easy to retrieve quickly. During the years he was in operation Welch, a loner who achieved the status of America’s Most Wanted burglar, made millions.

One Amazon reviewer wrote, “Ghost Burglar is a riveting read that kept me up at night!” I shared that sentiment, looking forward to the end of each day when I would unwind and make a little more progress in the story.

The book’s authors are Jim King and Jack Burch. King was the detective who became intimately acquainted with the ways of Welch, who also eluded capture by means of a range of aliases. Burch was a reporter who in 2005 decided this would make a worthy topic for a book. When he met and interviewed King he found the detective to be a goldmine of information. King expressed interest in the project, and turned out to be a writer now that he was retired. “We did a lot of talking by phone to nail down details of the case,” noted Burch, ”and during those interchanges, it became obvious that this project would turn out much better if we tackled it together.”

In 2008 they made a trip to Duluth together during which time they drew up an outline and assigned responsibilities. Burch explained: “The combination of our experience and skills was a good fit throughout the project. We wrote one very rough draft, edited that and then just kept on editing and refining throughout the project. The final edits were done by Jessica Radzak, a Chicago-based book editor retained by our publisher, Mike Savage.”

The story begins with an interrupted robbery in which Bernard Welch shoots and ultimately kills a doctor. But the doctor didn’t immediately die and because he didn’t believe he was fatally wounded chose to drive himself to the hospital. To the doctor’s surprise Welch is creeping back to his car a few blocks away and the doctor veers off the road and smashes into Welch with his car. And so we see the end from the beginning as this event leads to the media circus that became Welch’s trial.

Examples of the kind of goods Welch had an eye for.

The book does an excellent job of showing the education of Bernard Welch, how he learned his trade and how he’d become so elusive. How did he end up with a home, including a sauna and indoor pool, in one of Duluth's most elite neighborhoods? That was a lesson he learned from an incident earlier in his career. He was an east coast crook, rich neighborhoods from Jersey to D.C., but he got caught because 200 miles away is still too near when fencing stolen goods. During his first stint in prison he assessed the mistakes he'd made and refined his methods. One of these was how to put his stolen merchandise back into the market and he settled on an unsuspecting community a thousand miles away.

When finally apprehended Welch became a news sensation around the time the Congdon murders took place here in the Northland, two of the biggest crime stories of that period. You can find the book here at Amazon.com .

EdNote: This weekend I will share an interview with the book's two authors who provide additional details only hinted at in their book.