Glensheen Mansion Murders: Evidence, Trials, and Aftermath

The Glensheen Mansion murders took place on the night of June 27, 1977, when 83-year-old heiress Elisabeth Congdon was smothered in her bed with a satin pillow and her night nurse, Velma Pietila, was bludgeoned to death with a brass candlestick in a stairwell of the Congdon family’s lakeside estate in Duluth, Minnesota.¹² Elisabeth’s son-in-law, Roger Caldwell, was convicted of both killings and sentenced to two consecutive life terms; his wife, Marjorie Caldwell, was tried as a co-conspirator and acquitted. Roger’s conviction was later overturned, and he ultimately walked out of prison under a plea deal. The case has never produced a second conviction.

What Happened Inside the Mansion

Glensheen is a 39-room Jacobean Revival mansion on the shore of Lake Superior, completed in 1908 for mining lawyer Chester Congdon. His daughter Elisabeth inherited the fortune after her mother’s death in 1950. She never married, adopted two daughters as infants in the early 1930s — Marjorie and Jennifer — and lived at Glensheen with round-the-clock nursing care after a stroke.³

Velma Pietila had worked several years as Elisabeth’s registered nurse and had retired about a month before the killings. She came back to Glensheen on the night of June 26, 1977, to cover a colleague’s shift.⁴ Sometime in the early hours of June 27, an intruder confronted Pietila on a stairwell and beat her to death with a candlestick, then went upstairs and smothered Elisabeth in her bed. A gold coin, jewelry — including a watch and ring removed from Elisabeth’s body — and a wicker case were taken from the house.

Why Investigators Focused on the Caldwells

Marjorie Congdon had spent through large trust funds, and trustees had cut her off from the family’s wealth.⁵ She was living on about $22,000 per year in trust income but stood to inherit roughly $8.2 million when her mother died.⁶

She had married Roger Sipe Caldwell in 1976, and by the spring of 1977 the couple was broke. They had lost a horse ranch to missed payments, had three cars repossessed, written bad checks for a resort vacation, and needed a $400 payment from a Congdon relative just to avoid eviction from their Colorado hotel. They had tried to pull $800,000 out of Congdon trusts using a forged medical letter. A handwritten document dated June 24, 1977 — three days before the murders — purported to assign $2 million of Marjorie’s expected inheritance to Roger.⁶ Chief prosecutor John DeSanto later summed up the motive plainly: the Caldwells were “desperate for money.”²

The Evidence Against Roger Caldwell

Roger was arrested on July 6, 1977, nine days after the killings. Police found a Radisson Duluth hotel envelope in the Caldwells’ Colorado hotel room. It was postmarked June 27 and addressed in Roger’s handwriting, and it contained a gold coin identified as one stolen from Elisabeth’s bedroom. A state fingerprint examiner, Steven Sedlacek, identified a latent thumbprint on the envelope as Roger’s.⁶

Investigators built the rest of the case around Roger’s movements and the stolen items. Two employees at a Minneapolis airport gift shop identified him as the man who bought a tan suede garment bag on the morning of June 27 while carrying a wicker basket. In the Caldwells’ room at a Bloomington, Minnesota, Holiday Inn, police recovered a wicker case matching one missing from Glensheen and a blue plastic container holding Elisabeth’s jewelry, including the watch and ring taken from her body. Airline baggage tags tied Roger to both the Duluth Radisson and the flight out. Witnesses noticed cuts on his lip and eyebrow and a swollen hand after the murders; he said a horse had stepped on him. The morning after the killings, he told a horse-boarding stable owner that Elisabeth had died and estimated the inheritance at “$10,000,000.”⁶

Roger’s Trial, Reversal, and Plea Deal

A St. Louis County grand jury indicted Roger on two counts of first-degree murder. Because of publicity in Duluth, the trial was moved to Brainerd in Crow Wing County.⁷ It opened on April 10, 1978. Prosecutors argued Roger flew from Colorado to Duluth, committed the murders to accelerate his wife’s inheritance, and flew home. Defense attorney Doug Thomson argued Roger had been framed, possibly by Congdon relatives or by private investigators the family had hired to watch the Caldwells, and questioned whether items had been planted in the couple’s hotel rooms.⁶ On July 8, 1978, after three days of deliberation, the jury convicted him on both counts. He received two consecutive life sentences.

The conviction did not hold. On August 5, 1982, the Minnesota Supreme Court reversed it and ordered a new trial, citing the now-discredited fingerprint testimony.⁸⁷⁹ The plea shed little light on what actually happened. During a break in the proceedings, Roger’s attorney, Douglas Thompson, asked prosecutor DeSanto “if he believed in fairy tales.”¹⁰

Marjorie’s Acquittal

Marjorie was arrested and charged with aiding and abetting and conspiracy to commit murder. Represented by Ron Meshbesher, she went to trial in 1979.⁵ The prosecution cast her as “the woman behind the man,” a wife who had steered a compliant husband into murder for the inheritance.²

Her case was weaker than Roger’s, and new evidence surfaced. Sedlacek, the state’s fingerprint expert, admitted he had noticed the latent print deteriorating during Roger’s trial and had not disclosed it. Other examiners looked at the original negative and concluded the print was not Roger’s. The prosecutor asked the jury to disregard it. A waitress at the Holland House Hotel in Colorado, Candice Byers, testified she had seen Roger there at 10:00 p.m. on June 26, 1977, leaving little time for him to reach Duluth and commit the killings by 2:00 a.m. A private detective named William Furman, hired by Congdon family member Thomas Congdon to investigate the Caldwells, invoked the Fifth Amendment on the stand, and evidence suggested he had falsified some of his reports to justify his fees.⁶

Marjorie’s courtroom demeanor also worked in her favor. Reporter Joe Kimball, who covered the case for the Minneapolis Tribune, noted that she knitted at the defense table and once brought a homemade birthday cake for one of her lawyers. “It became kind of obvious that the jurors were thinking, boy I don’t think this lady would kill her mother,” Kimball recalled.² On July 20, 1979, the jury acquitted her of all charges. Under double jeopardy, that verdict is final; she cannot be retried for the killings.

Roger Caldwell’s Death

After his release, Roger returned to his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he was unemployed and, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, was haunted by notoriety from the murders.⁹ Late on May 17 or early May 18, 1988, he died by suicide at the age of 54, slitting his wrists with a steak knife in his living room. He left three suicide notes. In one, he maintained his innocence, writing that he “didn’t kill those girls.” In a 1987 interview, he had told a reporter: “Someone had to pay. My wife was the most hated member of the family and the only way they could get to her was through me.”¹ Nine people attended his funeral.

Marjorie’s Later Crimes

Marjorie’s acquittal did not end her involvement with the criminal justice system. In the years that followed, she accumulated a lengthy record of additional charges and convictions.

In 1981 or 1982, while still married to Roger Caldwell, she married Wallace Hagen in North Dakota and was charged with bigamy.¹¹
She was convicted of arson for burning a home in Mound, Minnesota, that she had recently sold but on which she remained an insurance beneficiary, and served about 21 to 22 months in prison.¹¹
In 1991, she was caught placing a kerosene-soaked rag on a neighbor’s windowsill in Ajo, Arizona, and lighting it. She was convicted of attempted arson in 1992 and pleaded no contest to charges related to arson fires at a storage yard tied to a suspected insurance fraud scheme. She served 11 years of a 15-year sentence and was released in 2004.¹¹¹²
In late 1992, her third husband, Wallace Hagen, died. Marjorie was charged with his murder. She claimed the two had entered a suicide pact, and toxicology showed he died of a drug overdose. Prosecutors dropped the charges, unable to prove murder.¹¹
In 2007, she was charged in Arizona with fraud, theft, forgery, and computer tampering involving an elderly man’s $11,181 inheritance. In 2009, she pleaded guilty to attempted forgery and received three years of intensive probation.¹¹

Despite the acquittal, Marjorie reportedly continued to receive about $50,000 annually from the Congdon inheritance. As of 2022, she was believed to be living in Arizona and approaching her 90th birthday.¹

The Family Aftermath

Elisabeth’s other adopted daughter, Jennifer Johnson, remained convinced Marjorie was involved in their mother’s death. Jennifer and her husband, Charles, tried unsuccessfully to get Roger Caldwell to reveal what had happened that night, believing a second person had been there. When Marjorie was imprisoned for arson in the 1990s, Jennifer wrote to the parole board opposing her early release. The sisters, once maids of honor at each other’s weddings, were fully estranged after 1977. Jennifer died of natural causes in May 2017 at 82 in Chandler, Arizona. Her obituary did not mention Marjorie.¹³

Glensheen Today

The Congdon family had donated the estate to the University of Minnesota Duluth years before the killings, with ownership set to transfer on Elisabeth’s death.² Glensheen opened as a historic house museum in the summer of 1979, two years after the murders.³

When the museum first opened, tour guides were instructed not to discuss the crimes. Congdon relatives sat on the museum’s board, and the events were still raw. In 2005, the policy loosened: guides do not raise the murders during tours but will answer visitors’ questions afterward. Director Dan Hartman told MPR News: “We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the focus of Glensheen is not the murder. We don’t really hide from it, but it’s definitely not our number one marketing message.” Hartman estimated that about 70 percent of visitors are unaware of the murders when they arrive.² By 2017, the estate recorded 141,000 visitors, making it the most-visited historic house museum in the Midwest.¹⁴

1
Star Tribune. One of Duluth’s Most Famous Murders Was 45 Years Ago This Week
2
MPR News. Glensheen Mansion Murders Still Grip Duluth
3
Minnesota Historical Society. Glensheen Historic Estate
4
Glensheen. Remember and Honor
5
MinnPost. New Judge in Duluth Was Prosecutor in Congdon Murders Case
6
Justia Law. State v. Caldwell
7
TPT Originals. Glensheen’s Gilded and Grisly Past
8
Duluth News Tribune. Bygones: Roger Caldwell’s Conviction Was Overturned 40 Years Ago
9
Los Angeles Times. Roger Caldwell Suicide
10
Minnesota Lawyer. Remembering Duluth’s Most Famous Murders 30 Years Later
11
Duluth News Tribune. After Acquittal, Marjorie Caldwell Faced Years of Additional Legal Trouble
12
Los Angeles Times. Marjorie Congdon Hagen Arson Conviction
13
MinnPost. Elisabeth Congdon’s Other Daughter, Jennifer Johnson, Has Died
14
American Alliance of Museums. From Stodgy to Story: Glensheen’s Historic Transformation