HOLY CROSS TOWNSHIP, Minn. — Jamie Lynn Dennis-Gianakos slowed the Pontiac as she entered the intersection of County Road 60 and Highway 75 in Clay County, Minnesota. The night sky was dark as Red River Valley earth, but a sign for a rural Haunted Farm pointed the way.
Another mile and she’d reach the lone, tumbledown farmstead, the last place she saw Annemarie Camp on May 1, 1997, a babysitter to her two daughters and maid of honor at her Valentine’s Day wedding to Michael Gianakos.
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“I guess a part of me wanted … wanted to reassure myself that she was dead and the other part of me wanted to make sure she wasn’t out there suffering,” Dennis-Gianakos testified later in court.
An aspiring writer with a closet full of notebooks crammed with her thoughts, Jamie, whose nickname was “Jay,” planned on joining the Army after she graduated from Detroit Lakes High in 1989. A car accident three days before boot camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey, ended that dream.
She tried college, studied psychology and criminal justice, and had a “bizarre fascination with serial killers,” according to 2003 trial transcripts available only in the U.S. Courthouse in Fargo, North Dakota.
College didn’t take and she turned to crime: stole a car and phone services, which sent her to jail, and she didn’t want to go back.
She met her future husband, Michael, in 1995, at a Detroit Lakes karaoke bar during a friend’s birthday party. She was pregnant at the time, and was going to have a C-section the next day. Despite having another man's child, they began dating soon after they met, and Michael would eventually adopt the child, according to trial testimony.
"I wanted to be a father and I wanted the best for that baby she was carrying," Michael told Forum News Service in a recent email from the Federal Correctional Institution, McKean, Pennsylvania. "It didn't matter she wasn't mine. I wanted to save that child, then I got her pregnant with Myra, then my life changed. All I could do was live for my girls."
Nearly two years had gone by, and now everything was going to change. Why did she help Michael stage the botched robbery of the Super 8 Motel in Fargo, North Dakota? It was the place Michael worked, the business that put food on the table for her two young daughters, 20-month-old Bailey, and Myra, 10 months old.
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Somehow, Annemarie knew too much. Police questioned her two days after the Jan. 27, 1997, robbery. What had given them away? Perhaps it was the bags of cash she brought home. Perhaps Michael had said something.
Annemarie threatened her freedom. Nothing personal, it was self-preservation.
Jamie turned at the Haunted Farm sign and accelerated down the rural road. Devastated by the “flood of the century,” the landscape looked the same. The floodwaters had only just begun to recede.
After traveling a mile, she recognized the dilapidated house and pulled into the dirt driveway, headlights harshly illuminating the crime scene: farm equipment, and to the north, her friend, lying face up on the dirt. The closest neighbor was about a half mile away.
Jamie hesitated. She was alone this time. Her husband was at his parents’ house, checking on his mother, who had gone missing.
She opened the car door and stepped toward her babysitter. Blood spatter streaked across the side of the house. Much of her head was missing, blown away at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun. Her throat was cut. Her jaw was “laying at a weird angle and it started to make me a little nauseous,” Jamie later testified.
She rushed back to the car, clasped her hands together, and prayed.
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Then she drove back home to Coachman Condos in Moorhead, Minnesota, leaving Annemarie’s body open to the elements. More than a third of an inch of rain fell the following week before Don Anderson, a local farmer, found her.
Lost, and then found
Anderson and his siblings owned the property where Annemarie was murdered in Holy Cross Township, but they used the farmstead for parking farming equipment.
“I was trying to work up some ground for my son, but it started to rain fairly early,” Anderson testified in court during Michael’s second trial in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 2003. He was driving a four-wheel drive tractor field cultivator when he pulled onto the property on May 7, 1997.
He saw a body on the north side of the house.
“My first thought was it was … a joke, and it was a mannequin or something thrown out, because there have been a lot of things dumped and stolen. I almost got in the pickup and went, but I thought, ‘No I better take a look,’ and I walked over within six-eight feet and I said, ‘This is a body,’” said Anderson, adding that her head was “pretty well destroyed.”
He called the Clay County Sheriff’s Office.
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Jerome G. Thorsen, lieutenant in the Clay County Sheriff’s Office, was one of the first investigators at the scene, and he brought in the big guns, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thorsen was aware of information from the Fargo Police Department about a missing woman. Annemarie’s mother, Kathleen Forness, reported her missing on May 4. He contacted Tammy Lynk, a Fargo Police detective, who had met Annemarie before.
“I learned that authorities in Clay County had discovered a body. They believed it might possibly be that of Annemarie Camp,” Lynk testified in court.
First, she went to Annemarie’s apartment and learned what style of coat she wore and what cigarettes she liked to smoke. Then she was given a ride to the scene and viewed the body. “It was my opinion that it was Miss Camp,” she said.
During the seven days that Annemarie was thought to be missing, Forness received a visit from one of the killers.
“Before they found Anne, Jamie came to us with a rose,” Forness told Forum News Service.
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Two stories
There are two versions of what happened to Annemarie on May 1. One version came from Jamie, who claimed she worked with Michael to meticulously plan how to scare or murder Annemarie.
Her story vaguely resembled the plotline from a movie that intrigued Jamie, the 1992 thriller “A Killer Among Friends,” starring Patty Duke, where a woman schemed to take her friend to a remote location for a scare. In the movie, a tuft of hair was found cut from the victim’s head, and the killer befriended the family to influence the investigation.
At Annemarie’s crime scene, a tuft of hair and latex gloves were also found, but they were never analyzed. Jamie also tried to befriend the victim’s family, according to trial transcripts.
Court documents discussed the similarity between the movie and Annemarie’s murder in depth.
“While the motive in real life for killing Anne Camp was different from the movie, the title of the movie explains Jamie Gianakos’ fascination with the movie because Jamie Gianakos was involved in the murder of her best friend,” court documents stated.
The other story came from her husband, Michael, who, during his second trial, testified he had nothing to do with the murder, that he was at his parents’ home. His wife was obsessed with serial killers, kept a list of their addresses and wrote letters to cult leader Charles Manson, whose ideology led to at least nine brutal murders in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Two trials
When Michael and Jamie married weeks after the Super 8 Motel robbery, they swore to the usual promises, but also vowed not to rat on each other, court records indicated.
Jamie broke that secret vow while serving time for the robbery at Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee. While there, she befriended a fellow inmate, Linda Bay, and told her everything, according to trial transcripts.
“I couldn’t keep it in any longer; I couldn't deal with it by myself any longer,” Jamie testified.
Bay reported her story to police, and received a $2,000 reward.
Jamie’s cooperation with investigators during Michael’s first murder trial in Clay County in May 2000, helped convict her husband, and prosecutors rewarded her with a lighter sentence of 25 years when she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Michael appealed his conviction to the Minnesota Supreme Court, arguing that the decision should be reversed because his wife’s testimony was in violation of the Minnesota marital-privilege statute, which stipulated that spouses cannot be forced to testify against each other in most civil or criminal cases.
The highest court of the land agreed, and reversed the decision, but Clay County prosecutors turned the case over to the federal court in North Dakota. Michael's second trial began after a federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment including kidnapping resulting in death. The case was tried in Bismarck because of the attention the case garnered in Fargo, and Michael was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Jamie’s story
Jamie testified in April 2003 that she and Michael wanted to scare Annemarie away from testifying against them during the upcoming Super 8 Motel robbery trial.
“We were going to go to her house and tell her that we were thinking of buying this property out in Sabin (Minnesota) and ask her if she wanted to go along to look at it,” Jamie testified.
Before the trip, they slipped about 105 Unisom sleeping pills into Fuzzy Navel wine coolers, and Michael bought a 12-gauge shotgun from a pawnshop. The gun was for Jamie’s protection, Michael said.
Annemarie trusted Jamie. She went with her when she asked. They took Interstate 94 to Sabin with Jamie’s two daughters. During the trip, Jamie handed over the wine cooler, which she drank even after complaining it tasted bitter.
“I knew she liked fuzzy navels,” Jamie testified.
Michael took back roads pretending like he was lost, and when they arrived, he said he needed to relieve himself. Using lighters for illumination, Annemarie and Jamie took the kids into the dilapidated house. The sun was setting.
Suddenly, Michael said they had to get going. And that is when Annemarie began acting strangely. She stopped moving at the doorway. The drugs were working.
“I looked up and Michael had come from the back area of the house with a gun and shot Anne,” Jamie testified.
Jamie was holding Myra, who was too young to walk, and Bailey was still wandering. “I just stood there kind of shocked,” she said.
They tried moving the body to a wooded area, but ended up dragging her closer to the house, Jamie testified, adding that she complied because she was afraid.
Then Michael told her to go to the car and get the knife. “He wanted me to slit her throat. I said no, that I would not do that… and that’s when he shot her again,” Jamie said.
Her two girls were crying. She was shaking so badly she couldn’t drive.
Once they returned home, she noticed that Michael had blood over his clothes. A piece of Annemarie’s tooth was stuck inside his shoe.
When Jamie returned home alone early on May 2, she told Michael, and he said she was stupid.
Michael’s defense attorney, Rick Henderson, believed his client was innocent and that Jamie’s story was fabricated.
“It’s nothing but lies. This spin — that all these lies are true — is despicable. She is a liar and she’s a murderer, and she’s trying to convict Michael of a crime he had nothing to do with,”
Note: This is the first of three parts. In part two, learn about how the married couple turned against each other.
Read Part 2
The Trust Project
