It was never definitely established that there had been any promises or understanding between Erickson and Mrs. Marquardt. If there had been any clandestine meetings, they had the good sense, or more likely the good luck, to keep it well under cover. The one certain thing is that Erickson coveted his neighbor’s wife — and that was bad business.
The Marquardt children were too young to realize what had happened. The older child, a boy of four, could say nothing but “Boom!” The younger child died two years later in the home of William Morris.
The older boy — now Adolph Nissen — still lives. He was taken into the home of Christian C. Nissen. Or rather, the Nissens came to the boy’s home, acquiring the right through due process of law. And they adopted the boy.
The Marquardts were regarded as fine people, and if there had ever been any rifts in the family, the world did not know it. Jim Erickson was a rather quiet and apparently honorable man who owned a homestead north of the Marquardt home. The Marquardt land is now owned by Mrs. C. C. Nissen, Christian’s second wife, mother of Frits Nissen, and C. C.’s other four children—Bill, Homer, George, and Mrs. Charley Love. Peter Nelson owned the intervening eighty then. Erickson was a bachelor. The residents of that settlement were all countrymen. That is, they or their ancestors had immigrated to this country from that little corner of the old world known as the land of the midnight sun—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
There were no telephones then and the process of summoning the law was necessarily slow. William Liebig was constable. He was reputedly a very brave man, but that was one time when he displayed more caution than |. bravery. With a posse of deputized men, Liebig went to the scene of the murder—that is, they went near it. For long hours the men hung around on the fringe of the premises, watching and waiting. Finally Liebig crept noiselessly up to the house and very cautiously pushed the door open. His tension relaxed a bit. All occupants of the house were dead. Jim Erickson had killed Mrs. Marquardt while in bed. He then sent a bullet through his own head.
At that time there was a small publication at Netawaka whose outspoken editor believed in calling “a spade a spade.” His printed version of the affair, purporting to be based on revealments in the house on entry of the officers, was, to say the least, racily rotten.