Joseph Ture Jr. is serving life sentences in Minnesota for six murders committed in 1978, 1979 and 1980. The first four were the deaths of Alice Huling and three of her children, shot near Clearwater, in rural Stearns County, on December 15, 1978. The fifth was Marlys Wohlenhaus, 18, who was fatally injured in Afton in May 1979. The sixth was Diane Edwards, 19, of West St. Paul, who was abducted and killed in 1980.
Ture was a drifter when the Hulings were killed. A deputy picked him up four days later in a stolen car and found a metal bar, a ski mask and a child's toy Batmobile inside it. He was questioned and released. He was convicted of Diane Edwards's murder and was still in prison when a cold-case investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) went back over the two older cases in the 1990s. A Washington County jury convicted him of murdering Marlys Wohlenhaus in 1998. A Stearns County jury convicted him of the four Huling murders in January 2000, and the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld both verdicts. He has said repeatedly that he did not kill anyone. "I did not do any of these murders," he told APM Reports in 2016.
Joseph Donald Ture Jr. was born on February 7, 1951, according to the Minnesota Department of Corrections. His prison record also lists the name Joseph Kaiser. He spent most of his early life in and around St. Paul, APM Reports found. His parents divorced when he was 10. He later said he had lived in an orphanage and a reformatory, and that his mother had not been able to care for him.
By his own account he joined the U.S. Marine Corps at 18 or 19 and left after about six months. After that he held a string of short jobs: on the line at the Ford plant in St. Paul, in junkyards, and at car dealerships as a mechanic or lot man. He was often described as itinerant, and at times he lived in his car. He called himself a "truth teller" and told reporters that his trouble with women came from his bluntness. "I did a lot of bad things," he told APM Reports, adding that he had stolen cars but had "never hurt a body."
His father was also named Joseph Ture, and also worked at the Ford plant. That fact would matter two decades later.
Alice Huling lived with her four children in rural Stearns County, near Clearwater. On December 15, 1978, she and three of the children were shot and killed: Susie, 16, Wayne, 13, and Patti, 12. Reports spell two of the girls' names in different ways; the court used Susie and Patti.
The youngest child, an 11-year-old boy, survived and went for help. He was the only eyewitness. He described a person of medium build, under six feet tall, wearing a stocking cap, whose face he could see only in silhouette.
The killings frightened the whole area. APM Reports, looking back in 2016, described parents who armed their children and sat up at night facing their front doors. Investigators considered several suspects over the years, including a Stearns County deputy who lived nearby and who later died, and a teenage neighbor who was never charged. No one was charged with the murders for more than 20 years.
On December 19, 1978, four days after the murders, Wright County Deputy Gary Miller answered a complaint about a man at a truck stop by Interstate 94 at Clearwater. According to APM Reports, a waitress had called police because the man was harassing the waitresses. The man was Ture. The car he was driving had been reported stolen, and Miller arrested him for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.
On the front passenger seat Miller found a metal bar about 32 inches long, which APM Reports described as wrapped in a steering-wheel cover. An inventory search of the car turned up a ski mask and a small toy car, a Corgi Juniors Batmobile. There were no guns or ammunition in the car. CBS News reported in 2000 that police also found a list of hundreds of women's names, with license-plate numbers and phone numbers. A Wright County booking photograph was taken the following day.
On December 20, Stearns County Deputy James Kostreba and Detective Ross Baker interviewed him. Kostreba had been one of the first officers at the Huling house. Ture told them he had recently been fired and had been living out of his car. Asked about the toy car, he first said it was his and then said it was for his sister's children. He would not say whether he had a gun, and he acknowledged that he was being evasive about where he had been on the night of the murders. The interview was taped, and the tape was played to the jury at his murder trial in 2000.
The deputies kept the bar, the mask and the toy. Ture was released on the stolen-car charge on January 4, 1979. He was not charged with the Huling murders, though he remained a suspect.
Marlys Wohlenhaus was 18 and lived with her family in Afton, in Washington County. On the afternoon of May 8, 1979, she was fatally injured in Afton. She died in a hospital the next day.
The Washington County Sheriff's Department followed several leads. A neighbor had seen a car leave the driveway at about 3:15 p.m. A friend told detectives that on the night before the killing the two of them had been at a restaurant in Afton, where Marlys became upset at the sight of a light-haired man in a leather coat, sunglasses and a baseball cap. The man then seemed to follow them on a motorcycle. No one was charged.
Ture became a suspect in her death, but he was ruled out because investigators believed he had been at work at the Ford plant in St. Paul that day. CBS News reported that the alibi was accepted for about 20 years.
Diane Edwards was 19 and lived in West St. Paul. In 1980 she was abducted and killed. Ture was convicted of her murder. He confessed, APM Reports said, but he later said he had only been "playing games" with the authorities and that he was innocent. The Minneapolis band Husker Du later wrote a song about her killing.
In a 1980 search of Ture's car and of a garage in South St. Paul, police seized address books and notebooks. According to the Minnesota Supreme Court, they held women's names, license-plate numbers, addresses and phone numbers, and one entry referred to the West St. Paul restaurant where Diane Edwards worked. In October 1980 a Minneapolis homicide investigator, Jack Kulseth, interviewed Ture.
In 1981 Ture was also convicted in cases in Minneapolis involving the abduction of a woman of 18 and a girl of 13 in separate incidents, and the attempted abduction of a woman of 20, with other charges. The Department of Corrections lists him as incarcerated since September 23, 1981, on a life sentence, with court files in Sherburne, Washington and Stearns counties.
In November and December 1981 Ture was held in the Sherburne County jail, awaiting trial in the Edwards case. A fellow inmate, Toby Krominga, later testified that Ture dictated a four-page confession to him and that he watched Ture sign it. The letter covered two crimes: the killing of Marlys Wohlenhaus and, in the court's words, "another matter," the murders of Alice Huling and three of her children. It gave an account of how Marlys was killed and said Ture had worked for her father. According to the Minnesota Supreme Court, Ture reportedly hoped the confession would get him sent to the state hospital at St. Peter.
Ture's version was different. He said the pages he signed were blank and were meant to be used for complaints about the jail food, and that the inmate had written lies on them. CBS News noted that Krominga was the only person who said Ture had dictated the letter. Police questioned Ture about it in 1981 but brought no charges.
That same November a second man heard Ture talk about the Wohlenhaus case. David Hofstad, a former employee of the Sherburne County Attorney's Office who knew nothing about the killing, went to see Ture in the jail after a Twin Cities television cameraman suggested it. Ture described how he had entered the Wohlenhaus house and argued with Marlys, and how he had killed her. "I killed her," Hofstad recalled him saying, in an interview with CBS News. Hofstad passed the account to the Washington County Sheriff's Office. Nothing came of it for years.
In the early 1990s Special Agent Everett Doolittle of the BCA's cold case unit began to reinvestigate the Wohlenhaus murder. CBS News, which called Doolittle the unit's head, reported that the case was reopened in 1996. Ture became a suspect again because of the 1981 written confession, and Doolittle went back to the alibi that had cleared him.
He found it was wrong. When investigators checked the Ford plant's records in 1979, they had looked at the work schedule of Joseph Ture Sr., the father, rather than the son. The Joe Ture who had signed in at work that day was not the man in prison. With the alibi gone, Ture became the chief suspect in both the Wohlenhaus and Huling cases, which had happened five months apart.
The CBS News program 48 Hours broadcast a story on the case in 1996. That broadcast alone did not produce enough to convict anyone, CBS later said, but it led several women to come forward who recognized Ture as a man who had attacked them years earlier. Many of them had been waitresses. One told CBS that police had urged her and another woman to forget what had happened to them. "It was a 'boys will be boys' mentality," she said.
A Washington County grand jury indicted Ture in 1996 for first-degree premeditated murder. His trial began in September 1998 and lasted 12 days.
Krominga testified about the 1981 letter, and a BCA handwriting expert told the jury the signatures on it were Ture's. Hofstad testified about the jailhouse conversation. A former Washington County deputy, Jeff Klarich, described a report he had received that Ture had admitted to another man that he had beaten a girl. Four former inmates, Donald Mampel, Randall Ferguson, Ray Lumsden and Leon Lasley, described things Ture had said to them in prison; Lasley said Ture had asked a fellow inmate who had cancer to "take the rap." Marlys's friend testified that Ture could have been the man at the restaurant the night before she died. A worker from the body shop where Ture had been employed, and a neighbor, each linked him to a motorcycle in the Afton area. Jack Kulseth described his 1980 interview.
The defense called witnesses from around Afton who contradicted details of the written confession and who did not recognize Ture. Ture did not testify.
Over the defense's objection, the judge let the prosecution present the Edwards murder as evidence of intent and method. Twenty-four witnesses testified about it, filling nearly three of the 12 trial days. The judge kept out any evidence about the Huling murders and about another homicide. The jury convicted Ture of first-degree premeditated murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison, consecutive to his other sentences.
Ture's direct appeal was dismissed by agreement after an unsuccessful attempt to add to the record on the jury instructions. He then filed a petition for postconviction relief, which the district court denied without a hearing. The Minnesota Supreme Court heard his appeal from that denial and affirmed it on June 3, 2004, in an opinion by Justice Paul H. Anderson.
The court found the Edwards evidence relevant, because the two killings were close in time, place and method. It was critical of how much of it the jury heard, calling the presentation "practically a retrial of the Edwards case" and "unduly cumulative," but it would not second-guess the trial judge because the defense had not objected to the number of witnesses or to specific testimony. It called the admission of the notebooks a "close call" and held that any error was harmless. It found that the prosecutor had committed misconduct in closing argument, by referring to evidence the judge had excluded, by asking the jury to consider "what kind of man Joe Ture is," and by injecting personal opinion. The closing had run about two and a half hours, the court said, and the misconduct appeared inadvertent; it was "harmless beyond a reasonable doubt and does not warrant a new trial." Ture's own arguments, including a claim that his lawyer should have done more with the state's inaccurate testimony about his hours at the Ford plant, were rejected.
In the summer of 1998, at the state prison at Oak Park Heights, Ture talked with another inmate, Randall Ferguson. Ferguson told the authorities in August 1998 that Ture had confessed to the Huling murders and had talked about the toy car.
State cold-case investigators also went back to the surviving son, who by then was grown and serving in the Navy. APM Reports noted that the Stearns County Sheriff's Office had never asked him about the toy car in 1978. When Doolittle showed it to him, he said it was his. "He said the last time he saw it was on his kitchen table the night of the murder," Doolittle told CBS News.
In May 1999 a Stearns County grand jury indicted Ture on four counts of first-degree murder. At a hearing in December 1999 the trial judge ruled that the toy car was "clearly relevant" to whether Ture had been at the Huling house, and refused to suppress it.
The trial took place in January 2000. The surviving son testified, as did Krominga, who described the 1981 letter, and Ferguson, who described the 1998 conversation and Ture's remarks about the toy. Deputy Miller described the arrest at Clearwater and the search of the car, and the jury heard the tape of the December 20, 1978, interview.
Three doctors, among them the pathologist who had performed Alice Huling's autopsy, testified that the metal bar from Ture's car could be linked to her injuries. Ture did not testify.
The jury convicted him of all four counts of first-degree murder. He received four consecutive life sentences. "I still have feelings of anger, madness, disappointment that it took so long, but I'm just glad the day has come," the surviving son told CBS News.
The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the convictions on August 16, 2001, in an opinion by Justice Page. Ture's lawyer, Mark D. Nyvold, argued that the bar, the toy car and the ski mask should have been suppressed, that the police had no right to keep them for two decades without a court order, that the toy car was irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial, and that Dr. Davis should not have been allowed to say the bar caused the injury.
The court rejected each argument. The bar was lawfully seized as part of a search incident to arrest, because it could have been used as a weapon. The toy car and the mask were found in a proper inventory search of a car that had been reported stolen. Under the state law in force in 1978, the police could keep seized property under the court's control without first asking a judge, and Ture's continuing status as a suspect justified keeping it. The toy car met the low bar for relevance, given Ture's evasive answers and Ferguson's testimony. And because Dr. McGee had said essentially the same thing as Dr. Davis, excluding Davis would not have changed the result. Ture's own claims, about pretrial publicity, his lawyer's performance and his rights during questioning, also failed. CBS News reported in 2004 that by June of that year Ture had lost his last chance to appeal for a new trial in any of the murders.
Ture has never accepted any of the verdicts. He told APM Reports in 2016 that he had been framed so that the authorities could close the cold cases. A retired Stearns County detective, Lou Leland, saw it differently. "He is a very mixed-up character," Leland told the same reporters. Of the Huling murders, he said: "He did the deed."
The Huling case was one of several old Stearns County investigations examined in 2016 by APM Reports in its podcast In the Dark, which questioned how the sheriff's office had handled unsolved crimes in the area.
Life-sentenced prisoners in Minnesota come before the Supervised Release Board for parole review. The board's January 2026 agenda lists his parole eligibility on his Sherburne County sentence as October 1, 2008, and on a Stearns County sentence as January 2016. Four more consecutive sentences, three from Stearns County and one from Washington County, remain to be served behind them.
In 2016 APM Reports said he was held at the state prison in Stillwater. By January 2026 he was at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Lino Lakes.
On January 13, 2026, his case came before Minnesota's Supervised Release Board in St. Paul as a review after a 10-year continuance. The board list described his offenses as four counts of first-degree murder. One member moved a motion that drew no second. A second motion, to deny parole and continue the case for 20 years, passed with the votes of all five members present: the chair, Commissioner Paul Schnell, Christine Bray, Jo Earhart, Andrew Larson and Sheryl Ramstad. The board directed him to remain free of discipline. As of October 2026 the Department of Corrections listed him as incarcerated at Lino Lakes.
February 7, 1951: Joseph Donald Ture Jr. is born; he grows up in and around St. Paul.
December 15, 1978: Alice Huling and three of her children, Susie, 16, Wayne, 13, and Patti, 12, are shot near Clearwater, Stearns County. An 11-year-old son survives.
December 19, 1978: A Wright County deputy arrests Ture at Clearwater in a stolen car containing a metal bar, a ski mask and a toy Batmobile.
December 20, 1978: Stearns County officers interview him; he is evasive about his whereabouts.
January 4, 1979: Released on the stolen-car charge; he remains a suspect.
May 8, 1979: Marlys Wohlenhaus, 18, is fatally injured in Afton; she dies the next day. Ture is later cleared on a mistaken alibi.
1980: Diane Edwards, 19, is abducted in West St. Paul and killed; Ture is later convicted of her murder.
October 1980: Minneapolis homicide investigator Jack Kulseth interviews Ture.
1981: Convicted in Minneapolis abduction cases; in prison from September 23, 1981.
November and December 1981: In the Sherburne County jail, Ture signs a four-page confession written out by another inmate and talks with David Hofstad; no charges follow.
Early 1990s to 1996: BCA Special Agent Everett Doolittle reopens the Wohlenhaus case and finds the Ford plant alibi belonged to Ture's father.
1996: A 48 Hours broadcast on the case; women come forward to identify Ture. Washington County grand jury indicts him for the Wohlenhaus murder.
August 1998: Inmate Randall Ferguson reports that Ture confessed to the Huling murders at Oak Park Heights.
September 1998: Wohlenhaus trial; Ture is convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced to life.
May 1999: Stearns County grand jury indicts him on four counts of first-degree murder.
January 2000: Stearns County jury convicts him of the four Huling murders; four consecutive life sentences.
August 16, 2001: Minnesota Supreme Court affirms the Huling convictions.
June 3, 2004: Minnesota Supreme Court affirms the denial of postconviction relief in the Wohlenhaus case.
October 1, 2008: Parole eligibility on the Sherburne County sentence.
January 2016: Parole eligibility on a Stearns County sentence.
October 11, 2016: APM Reports publishes its profile of Ture and its In the Dark episode on the Huling case.
January 13, 2026: The Supervised Release Board unanimously denies parole and continues his case 20 years.
October 2026: Listed as incarcerated at MCF Lino Lakes.