Cults and witchcraft
One day in the early 1980s, James Dunn came home from work and asked his wife, Sharon Blasing, to scrub out his truck.
Reddish-brown stains covered the seats and floorboard.
Blasing shook off an uneasy feeling and asked her three daughters to clean up the mess.
Surely the smears were just Rust-Oleum, a protective paint with a distinctive color Dunn often used in his job as a roofer and house painter. That’s what Blasing told herself at the time. But when she later saw a sketch of a suspected kidnapper in the newspaper, she wasn’t so sure.
Blasing, who lived in rural Watertown, called in a tip after she noticed a resemblance between Dunn and the sketch of a man wanted for questioning in the 1981 disappearance and death of a local toddler, Michelle Manders.
The case was re-opened after Michelle’s mother hired a private detective a year later. Not long after that, investigators from the state Department of Justice, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and Watertown police questioned Blasing about Dunn’s possible involvement. By then, the couple had divorced. Blasing told the investigators she first saw Dunn’s dark side in 1973, two years after they married.
Dunn’s drinking became a problem, and she kicked him out. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and got sober, so she took him back. But his recovery didn’t last. Sometimes he went on binges and she didn’t see him for days at a time.
Then, on the morning of Sept. 6, 1980, Blasing’s daughters, then 17, 14 and 10, told their mother Dunn had been molesting them for years.
When she confronted her husband, Blasing said, he didn’t deny it.
“He had several answers,” she would later testify. “He said he had a perfect right. He said every time he walked in the house he could smell douching powder … and that, you know, he had to keep checking them for that reason.”
She didn’t believe it, and neither did the Jefferson County district attorney, who charged Dunn with sexually abusing the girls. As part of a plea agreement, Dunn was convicted of three felonies.
After talking with Blasing about the weekend she saw stains in Dunn’s truck, the investigators quickly determined he couldn’t have been involved in Michelle’s death. On the day she disappeared, Dunn was in jail — serving a sixmonth sentence for molesting Blasing’s daughters.
But the timing did fit with Dunn’s possible involvement in another open case that confounded police: The disappearance of teenage sweethearts Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, who were last seen at a wedding reception in the summer of 1980.
Like Michelle, their bodies weren’t found for weeks after they vanished.
Blasing turned over some of Dunn’s books, which featured descriptions of Satanic cults and witchcraft. They included information on human sacrifices and rituals that involved drowning unbaptized children, then using the water to bless cult members.
All at once, a possible explanation for a series of mysterious disappearances and deaths in Jefferson County during the 1970s and early ’80s came into focus.
Across the country, day care providers and preschool teachers were being charged with molesting children. Some of them were accused of membership in Satanic cults that espoused sexual abuse and ritualistic murder of children.
What if the scourge had made its way to Jefferson County?
Dunn wasn’t surprised when he was summoned to the Sheriff’s Department for a chat with police.
He’d read all about Blasing’s allegations in the newspaper. Although neither of their names appeared in the articles, he knew the source was Blasing, and he could tell she was talking about him.
I want to stay as far away from that woman as
possible, Dunn told the state and county cops interrogating him. She’s taken everything I have. My money, my property, my vehicles.
Dunn said he didn’t know anything about the deaths of Michelle or the teenage couple; didn’t know Michelle’s mother, Jan Manders; and didn’t know Joe Mueller, whom police considered a suspect in Michelle’s case.
What’s more, Dunn said he’d never abused his adopted daughters. He only took the plea deal, he said, because his lawyer told him if he didn’t, he could go to prison for 20 years.
When the authorities showed Dunn the books Blasing had given them, he had a quick answer: They belonged to her, not
to him.
She was into that screwy stuff long before I met her, Dunn said.
Didn’t that bother you?
one of the investigators asked. Nah, he replied. If she wanted to do that stuff, it was OK with me.
Dunn said he knew nothing about a cult or a group that practiced witchcraft, but said Blasing did know a former priest who could be involved in something like that.
Police tracked down a Watertown man they figured must be the so-called ex-priest. The man had quit the seminary and fallen in love with a former nun. She left the service of the church to be with him. They had been married 20 years and knew nothing about any cults, he said.
The man had attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Dunn and also knew his ex-wife.
The investigators went through the list of people connected to Michelle’s case, asking the man if any of them had been at those meetings. None of the names sounded familiar except one.
The description fit, too: a blond woman in her 20s.
The ex-seminarian didn’t know the woman’s last name because of AA’s confidentiality rules, but he did know her first name.
It was Jan.
In the first few days after Michelle disappeared, police had considered the possibility her mother was involved.
Two days after Michelle was reported missing, police searched the Manders’ home.
As Jan waited outside, she saw cops walk out with her nurse’s aide uniform, a white zip-up smock. She tried to tell them the red slash across the front wasn’t blood. It was liquid food, the kind she fed elderly people at the nursing home where she worked. One of them didn’t like it and spit it on her.
The police didn’t seem to believe Jan’s explanation.
A state investigator questioned her husband, Mike, grasping for a reason she may have harmed their child.
Mike told the agent Jan never used drugs, rarely drank and had never been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
They had been to a bar together just once in the previous eight months, and any time they did go, Jan would order a single beer and nurse it all night, Mike said.
The only thing they fought about was money. During one of those arguments, about two months earlier, he threw an iron. It hit her in the head, he said, even though he wasn’t aiming in her direction.
Jan had a tendency to cash Mike’s checks as soon as they arrived in the mail, and as a result they had gotten behind on the house payments.
But his mother bailed them out and got the mortgage back up to date. That had been a year and a half earlier. Since then, he said, they’d been getting along really well.
The police asked if Mike ever suspected his wife of having an affair. They were particularly interested in whether she could be involved with Joe Mueller, whose wife had been visiting Jan the night Michelle disappeared.
Mike told the police he had no reason to believe Jan was cheating with Joe or anyone else.
In a recent interview, Jan said she believes the false and unfair implications of those questions raised doubts for Mike, who has since died.
“We needed to be close, all of us at that time,” she said. “But we never had a chance.”
A few months before Michelle’s death, the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned polygraph evidence from being used in court, concluding that while the results may be valid in some cases, they rely too much on the subjectivity of those who interpret them.
The ruling did not prevent police from using polygraphs in their investigations, and many officers back then still believed lie detectors were foolproof machines that could determine whether someone was telling the truth.
The officials investigating Michelle’s disappearance asked Jan to take one to prove she wasn’t involved.
She passed, and police later determined she wasn’t the same Jan who had attended AA meetings with James Dunn and the former seminarian.
They dismissed her as a suspect.
They also asked Joe Mueller to take a polygraph. It didn’t go well. Authorities hooked him up to the machine at least three times. While Joe claimed to be cooperating, the men conducting the test had their doubts.
Even when they asked him something as simple as his name, it looked to them as if Joe was lying.