Eugene Butler was a farmer near Niagara, a small town in the westernmost part of Grand Forks County, North Dakota. He had homesteaded his land there in 1882. In 1906 he was committed to the state asylum at Jamestown, and he died there in 1912. Three years later, in June 1915, six human skeletons were found on the land he had homesteaded. Accounts written since then attribute the deaths to him. He was never charged with any crime, no court ever heard the case, and none of the six people has ever been identified.
Niagara sits on U.S. Highway 2 near the western edge of Grand Forks County. In 2018 the High Plains Reader, a Fargo weekly, described it as a farm town of about 50 people. The land Butler had farmed lay between Niagara and the neighboring settlement of Shawnee.
Butler homesteaded there in 1882, according to both the High Plains Reader and Prairie Public's Dakota Datebook. Neighbors remembered him as a miser, and the High Plains Reader reported that they recalled him complaining that his housekeepers cost him too much money. Over the years, both accounts say, he grew more and more suspicious of other people. He became convinced that someone was trying to get into his house, and he took to prowling his land and his home at night. He would not let anyone photograph him; the High Plains Reader said he believed a photograph would cost him his soul.
In 1906 Butler was sent to the asylum at Jamestown, North Dakota. The institution had opened on May 1, 1885, as the territory's Hospital for the Insane, according to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, and it kept a version of that name until 1951, when it became the North Dakota State Hospital.
His fears did not leave him there. The High Plains Reader quoted the asylum's superintendent, W. M. Hotchkiss, as saying Butler "was haunted by the hallucination that someone was after him." After he was committed, the paper reported, about $6,000 in cash was found in his small house, and he also owned a good deal of land in Grand Forks County.
Butler died at the asylum in 1912, according to the High Plains Reader and Prairie Public. The cause of his death is not recorded.
On June 25, 1915, six skeletons were found on the property, Prairie Public and the High Plains Reader both report. They were described at the time as five adults and one child.
The county sheriff investigated, Prairie Public says. The first idea, according to its account of the 1915 reporting, was that the dead were transient laborers, the kind of men who moved from farm to farm for seasonal work. Further speculation, it says, led to the belief that the remains were two housekeepers, their children and a large, elderly man. Neither theory was ever confirmed.
The High Plains Reader noted that no disappearances had been reported in the area, and that the deaths are thought to have taken place over several years.
The High Plains Reader, in 2018 and again in 2022, named him as the man responsible and described the case as one of the state's notable unsolved mysteries. Prairie Public's Dakota Datebook, in a 2022 segment drawn from the Grand Forks and Minot newspapers of June 1915, also connected the remains to Butler as the original owner of the farmstead.
No court ever tested that conclusion. Butler had been dead for three years when the remains were found, so there could be no charge, no trial and no verdict. The High Plains Reader noted plainly that he was never convicted.
Nobody knows why the six people died. The High Plains Reader set out the possibilities that have been raised over the years: that the dead were hired workers whom Butler did not want to pay, that they were transient farmhands no one would miss, or that the deaths followed some personal quarrel. It presented these as open questions, not findings.
News of the discovery drew crowds. More than 150 people came from the surrounding area to see the farmstead, according to Prairie Public.
The official record has not survived. The High Plains Reader reported that the original case file is missing and that whatever records once existed may have been lost or destroyed.
More than a century later, none of the six has a name. It is not known whether they were related to one another, where they came from, or when each of them died. One of them was a child.
Several points about this case remain unproven.
Whether Butler caused the deaths has never been proven. The remains were found on land he had homesteaded, three years after his death. There was no confession, no charge and no court finding.
Who the dead were is unknown. The 1915 theories, as Prairie Public summarizes them, moved from transient laborers to a group of two housekeepers, their children and an elderly man. None of these identifications was ever confirmed.
When the deaths took place is unknown. The High Plains Reader says they are believed to have spanned several years; no dates are known.
1882: Eugene Butler homesteads land near Niagara, Grand Forks County.
1885 (May 1): The territorial Hospital for the Insane opens at Jamestown.
1906: Butler is committed to the asylum at Jamestown; about $6,000 in cash is reported found in his house.
1912: Butler dies at the Jamestown asylum.
1915 (June 25): Six skeletons, described as five adults and one child, are found on the land he had homesteaded, between Niagara and Shawnee.
1915: The county sheriff investigates; more than 150 people visit the farm.
1951: The Jamestown hospital is renamed the North Dakota State Hospital.
2018 and 2022: The High Plains Reader reports that the dead have never been identified and the case file is missing.