NORTH DAKOTA

Medicaid cuts loom for hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners in ‘big, beautiful bill’

Peyton Haug — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:50:47 GMT

BISMARCK — Under the “big, beautiful bill” being championed by President Donald Trump and a Republican-dominated Congress, hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners are slated to lose access to health care coverage over the next decade as part of a greater effort to cut taxes and reduce federal spending.

Medicaid administrators and providers, from state health departments to clinics, are scrambling to determine the exact number of people who will be impacted by the sweeping changes.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates between 12 million and 17 million Americans will lose health insurance over the next decade under the legislation as it stands. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, is a nonpartisan group that works to inform Congress and its actions.

Program recipients are expected to experience increased copays, paperwork and work requirements, while program administrators would see fewer federal dollars funneled into states to be used by hospitals and clinics.

The major switch-ups

Beginning January 2027, “able-bodied” Medicaid recipients between the ages of 19 and 64 who have no dependents would be required to work 80 hours monthly if the bill passes into law.

Those with incomes between 100% and 138% of the federal poverty level would be asked to foot copays costing up to 5% of household earnings beginning January 2028, according to the CBO.

Medicaid recipients would also have to reapply for the program semiannually, twice as often as what’s currently required.

The bill further prohibits Medicaid coverage that reduces premium costs for migrants who are lawfully present in the U.S., which extends to trafficking survivors, refugees and those seeking asylum. The rule would not apply to green card holders.

On the state and local levels, Republican and Democratic leaders are drawing their approval of the changes to Medicaid along party lines.

Republicans generally say the cuts will eliminate fraud within the system and preserve its services. Meanwhile, Democrats decry the cuts, claiming they will lead to more debt and negatively impact low-income Americans, especially the elderly and those with disabilities.

North Dakota

Of the approximately 105,000 North Dakotans on Medicaid, an estimated 18%, or 18,900, wouldn’t be enrolled by 2034 because of the changes, according to an analysis by the state Legislative Council.

The state would lose approximately $1.42 billion, or 12%, of its federal Medicaid dollars over the next decade, the analysis further found — a loss largely due to the mandatory work requirement.

That money is designed to cover medical costs for low-income adults, pregnant women, children and people with disabilities.

North Dakota’s Department of Health and Human Services told Forum News Service it cannot “speculate the potential impacts” of the legislation, but said it’s “closely monitoring” the situation.

The state’s Hospital Association shared a similar sentiment.

Tim Blasl, the organization’s director, pointed to the CBO’s estimate and said the number sounds slightly inflated, but added that “it’s too early to tell," and “any cuts to coverage are concerning.”

“If people don't have coverage, they don’t get their preventative care and regular wellness checks. Then, you have hospitals and physicians that aren’t getting paid for the services,” he said.

In a Wednesday, July 2, press conference, Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said increasing Medicaid requirements will make the system “more sustainable” and stronger for the people who need it most.

He also pointed to $50 billion in subsidies for rural hospitals in the bill, saying the changes to Medicaid will only benefit the state.

The $50 billion allocation is intended to increase services provided in rural clinics and hospitals. It would be disbursed over the next five years as part of the “Rural Transformation Program,” according to the bill.

Minnesota

Approximately 1 in 5, or 1.3 million, Minnesotans depend on Medicaid services. Under the bill, 253,000 could lose coverage over the next decade, and the state would miss out on up to $500 million in federal dollars for the program annually, according to the state’s Department of Human Services.

The department did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

“Our organization, or any of our rural partners, are on small margins,” Madison Health Care Services CEO Erik Bjerke said in a message shared by the Minnesota Hospital Association. “Any cuts to Medicaid will be detrimental in any of our areas, from the clinic to our hospital, and especially on our long-term care side.”

In a Tuesday press release, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., said, “What Republicans did here is simple: they voted to kick 16 million people off health insurance while giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and corporations, and managed to still raise the debt by a staggering $5 trillion.”

South Dakota

Fewer individuals in South Dakota would be impacted by changes to Medicaid compared to North Dakota and Minnesota, but an analysis from the nonpartisan health policy group KFF determined that around 13,000 of the approximately 115,000 South Dakotans who use Medicaid would lose coverage by 2034.

Overall, the state would lose between $780 million and $1 billion, or an average 11%, of its federal funding for the program over the next decade.

South Dakota’s Health Department said it’s “unable to comment at this time” about the impacts on the state’s Medicaid recipients.

In his statement celebrating the Senate’s passage of the bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., did not acknowledge changes to Medicaid or impacts to health care. He emphasized economic impacts to the state and said the bill “puts even more money in the pockets of South Dakota families” through changes to tax policy.

South Dakota Democratic Party Chair Shane Merrill said the bill “targets our most valuable citizens, robbing them of their health insurance, taking food off the table, increasing energy bills, and killing good-paying jobs.”

What’s next?

Both chambers of Congress passed the bill by a one-vote margin. In May, the House of Representatives voted 215-214 to approve it. After undergoing changes in the Senate, the bill advanced in that chamber on a 51-50 vote Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance as the tie-breaking vote.

The House took up the altered version of the bill Wednesday. If it receives approval there, it will head to Trump’s desk. The president has made his eagerness to sign the bill into law clear.

Lawmakers have a goal of passing the bill by July 4.

Editor's note: This story was updated Thursday morning, July 3, to correctly attribute information regarding Medicaid dollars in Minnesota.]]>

80 years after his death in World War II, remains of Minnesotan's father finally identified

Robin Huebner — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:25:00 GMT

FARGO — Relatives of a serviceman who died as a prisoner of war in World War II finally have the answer they’ve waited so long to receive.

Skeletal remains of U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Irvin C. Ellingson have been identified through new DNA technology at a forensic lab in Hawaii, 80 years after his death.

Lon Enerson, one of Ellingson’s nephews, has led the family effort to bring his uncle’s remains home.

“We are overjoyed and relieved … It's a long-overdue answered prayer,” Enerson told The Forum, from his home in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Ellingson, who grew up in Dahlen, North Dakota, enlisted at age 22 and was 25 when he died, Enerson said.

He was serving as a radar observer on a bombing mission to Tokyo on April 14, 1945, when the plane was shot down.

Ellingson parachuted to safety but was captured by the Japanese army and held captive at a Japanese prison along with 61 other American service members.

The prison caught fire a little over a month later, on May 26, 1945, after high winds fueled fires that were started by an American B-29 bombing raid over Tokyo.

None of the American prisoners survived the fire, as they were blocked in by Japanese guards, Enerson said.

The remains of more than two dozen American service members were identified in the aftermath but those of 37 others were buried as “unknowns” at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines, where they sat untouched until 2022.

The remains are commingled, and the Department of Defense has a threshold for disinterment, for at least 60% of those veterans’ families to provide DNA samples in order to make matches.

Families pushed the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency to disinter those unidentified remains and bring them to a forensic lab in Honolulu, where the newest DNA technology is being used to identify them.

Enerson said his uncle is the third serviceman from the Tokyo prison fire to be identified in this manner. The first identification came in September 2024 and the second in January of this year.

Ellingson’s parents and all of his siblings are deceased, so the next of kin is the oldest nephew or niece, who is Cheryl Severtson, of San Diego.

Enerson is fourth on that list.

Six groups of Ellingson’s relatives have visited the forensic lab in Hawaii since 2022, awaiting his identification, Enerson said.

Now that they have answers, some family members may return to the lab to sit privately with Ellingson’s remains, which will be placed on an army blanket, he said.

The family intends to bury Ellingson’s remains in the Middle Forest River Cemetery in rural Dahlen, alongside his parents and other siblings.

Enerson said when that day comes, he’s been told Ellingson will be buried with full military honors, at government expense.

“We just wish his immediate family could have known 80 years ago, but this is the next best time,” Enerson said.

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Here's hoping that the 'storm of a lifetime' lives up to its label

Jenny Schlecht — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 10:30:00 GMT

Of all the odd things that I saw on the morning of June 21, the one that will stick in my mind the longest is probably the free-standing panel twisted around a fence in our feedlot.

I stared at it several times that day, trying to figure out how it got where it was, halfway through the corral panel and somehow twisted both upward and downward, flapping in the breeze. It will be, forever in my mind, the symbol of the power and unpredictability of the weather. Looking at it, it was hard to believe that the evening before, we'd thought maybe the predicted storms would fizzle before it got to us.

On the evening of June 20, my husband and I were sorting heifers when my youngest daughter started sending me messages from the old decommissioned iPhone she can use in the house: "Are you coming in?" "Mom mom mom mom." "I'm scared."

I'd instructed her to leave the TV on in case there were any weather warnings, knowing that meteorologists had been calling for strong storms in the evening. She'd worked herself into a frenzy before my husband and I returned to the house. We told her the storms she was hearing about to our west likely would calm down before they got to us. After cleaning up, I started making a quick, extremely late supper of grilled cheese.

But before the sandwiches were even half done, our phones and TV went off, alerting us we were in a tornado warning. A quick look at where the spotted cloud was and where it was headed told us we might be in the path. We spent a little more than half an hour in the basement before reemerging. The power had gone out. But we thought the wind would start to taper off before too long.

Instead, it picked up, suddenly and severely. We could hear debris smacking against the siding and made the quick decision to go back downstairs. We all huddled into our spare bedroom for the night.

In the morning, my older daughter and I could no longer sleep and went outside to check things over. While we had known one barn had lost some tin and her basketball hoop had fallen over, what we found went far beyond what we could have imagined. Every building on the farm has some sort of damage, including our house, with a partially ruined roof and deep dents in the siding where debris flew. The two barns in the yard — filled right now with bottle calves and 4-H animals but very vital in calving season — both were missing much of their roofs, and rafters and tin were scattered throughout the yard. Our multipurpose working building — where we park machinery, work cows and store a variety of necessities — strangely had a garage door up that definitely had been down when we left it the evening before. The strong winds had blown through and damaged the opposite wall, leaving piles of insulation to clean up.

There were corrals demolished, panels twisted, trees uprooted or broken off. Everywhere we looked, we saw problems, many we could never explain. That panel in the feedlot, twisted and broken, was the hardest to explain. The National Weather Service, using our photos and those of a neighbor, ruled that a tornado had gone through our farm.

But everywhere we looked, we saw blessings. We were all safe, as were our neighbors, who also had severe damage. We learned quickly, not everyone was so lucky in the storms that had stretched from eastern Montana all the way to Minnesota. The storms were deadly for three people in Enderlin, North Dakota, and multiple families in the region lost their homes. Our house was very much still standing and livable. Our barns, while likely damaged beyond repair, were in no immediate danger of collapsing, and the animals inside were only concerned with how long it had taken us to feed them. My husband's sister and her husband rushed three hours to bring us supplies to patch our roof and help clean up trees and other debris, and their children helped raise our spirits, just by being themselves.

I saw a meteorologist call the storms that blew through multiple states in the region a "once in a lifetime" event. I sure hope he's right. We don't need to experience anything like that ever again.

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Data and archives show deadly tornadoes not unusual in the Dakotas, Minnesota

C.S. Hagen — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:10:00 GMT

MOORHEAD, Minn. — From the east side of the Red River in 1957, Chuck Stenso watched as a killer tornado plowed a path toward Fargo, North Dakota.

He was a junior studying business at Concordia College, and was with a friend while living in a basement on June 20, 1957. Sixty-eight years have passed, but he still remembers the day that one of North Dakota’s deadliest tornadoes killed 10 people in Cass County.

“I heard someplace about this tornado, and we put a ladder up to the roof and went up and looked. It was northwest of Fargo, and we started watching it,” Stenso told Forum News Service in a recent interview.

What began as a funnel cloud around suppertime near Mapleton, North Dakota, spun across the county, injuring more than 100 people and punching Fargo hard, especially around North Dakota State University. It is believed the tornado would be rated as F-5 on the current Enhanced Fujita Scale.

“It was tough. It was a big, very wide, black storm. And there was a big roar, kind of like a train. We weren't up there very long, we got back down that ladder and went back down to our basement,” Stenso said.

Stenso, now 88 years old, wasn’t scared. In 1957, there were no cell phones; he couldn’t take a video. He didn’t have a television so news trickled slowly to him.

“When you are that age nothing bothers you, you know,” Stenso said.

From 1950 until 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has documented 505 tornadoes in North Dakota, not including the deadly tornado that hit near Enderlin last weekend on June 20, killing three people: Michael and Katherine Dehn, both 73 years old, and 89-year-old Marcario Lucio.

In total, 29 people — including three from Friday, June 20 — have been killed in 12 tornadoes, and another 362 injured during all tornadoes in the state since 1950, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the same time span, Minnesota has had 48 deadly tornadoes accounting for 100 fatalities, and 1,982 injured in all tornadoes. South Dakota has registered 84 deaths — from 66 tornadoes — and 845 injuries in the past 75 years.

After the June 20 breakout in North Dakota, the National Weather Service confirmed reports of tornadoes near Spiritwood, Valley City, Fort Ransom and Enderlin, a town of about 900 people southwest of Fargo.

The tornado near Enderlin was categorized as a F-3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, with wind gusts up to 165 mph. The 1957 tornado was worse, damaging more than 1,300 homes, according to Forum archives.

The NOAA's database only includes information back to 1950, with the Enderlin tornado considered to be the state’s third deadliest tornado in the last 75 years. However, newspaper archives show reporting on other North Dakota super cell storms back as far as 1890, with tornadoes just as powerful and at least four even more deadly.

In 1890, a tornado near Fargo knocked 12 train cars on the Northern Pacific railroad off the tracks, injuring several people, according to The Fargo Forum. The same storm killed at least seven people in Minnesota and North Dakota.

Tornadoes were a large enough problem in 1899 that scientists began experimenting with setting off high explosives to divert a tornado's path.

“In this age the nature, causes and measured force of a tornado are problems no longer. The men in the weather department cannot yet check or prevent such storms, but they can and do foretell them with reasonable accuracy,” the Washburn Leader reported.

Several families near Ryder, North Dakota, narrowly escaped a tornado that touched down in June 1908. The storm flattened houses, barns, and “Postmaster Bye’s farm house was turned upside down but the tenants escaped injury,” according to the Bismarck Tribune and the Grand Forks Herald.

A “cyclonic storm” swept through northern and central North Dakota in May 1909, and the high winds and lightning killed nine people and left cities in ruins, according to the Fargo Forum.

In 1910, a “terrific tornado” swept north of Minot in June 1910, destroying farms, killing horses and injuring at least two people, according to the Ward County Independent.

Angry weather throughout the Midwest in 1930 killed 23 people in Missouri, Nebraska and Wisconsin, never touching down in North Dakota, but sent electrical storms and high winds across the state causing massive damage, according to The Fargo Forum.

A tornado landed along the northern section of the Badlands in McKenzie and Mountrail counties in July 1935, killing four people and injuring at least seven others, the Mandan Pioneer and the Grand Forks Herald reported.

In 1946, a “cool-headed village policeman” saved lives when a tornado howled down the main street in Wells, Minnesota in August 1946.

In 1947, a tornado killed at least seven people, first striking in Canada and then moving into North Dakota and Minnesota, according to the Fargo Forum and Grand Forks Herald.

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How a Halloween grave robbery led investigators to a dancer, two college students and a missing head

C.S. Hagen — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:55:00 GMT

WHITE ROCK, SD — As a senior in high school in 1969, Steve Johnson was a little bit of everything. He was a student and played wide receiver on the nearby Rosholt High �� football team. He helped embalm corpses at the local funeral home and drove ambulances. He worked the family furniture store business and he listened when a hysterical woman came in the day after Halloween.

“I was in the furniture store and we were unloading La-Z-Boys and this woman came in and she was really wound up. She said somebody dug up a grave at the cemetery. My dad said she was nuts, and I told him we better go out there anyway,” Johnson told Forum News Service in a recent interview.

The sight at Lake View Cemetery was true, and gruesome.

“We went out there and sure enough the grave was dug up, it was Halloween night they did this, and we called the sheriff and coroner. We buried this man. His name was Warner Wilson. He was a farmer and an old bachelor,” Johnson said.

“Usually, we buried people in cement vaults, but that was a wooden vault we used to bury him,” said Johnson. As he stood over the grave, he realized the culprits had to be close to home.

“Somebody had to have been at that funeral to know. They smashed that crate and took the head off,” Johnson said.

Johnson knew Wilson, a humble, elderly farmer and lifelong bachelor.

“We had buried him a couple years earlier, and this bothered me. The sheriff came out and the coroner, we took the body back to the funeral home in a body bag to try and find the head,” Johnson said.

White Rock

Wilson was born to Swedish immigrants, Swan and Hannah Wilson, who bought third class tickets on the S.S. St. Louis to Ellis Island, New York, in 1901, according to the U.S. Immigration records. Their ship was the same ocean liner that 38 years later brought more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror to American shores, but was turned away. Many of those on board were later sent to concentration camps, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

A farmer, like his father before him, Wilson was 57 when signed up for the draft during World War II. By the 1950s, his younger brother, Ben, lived with him on the family farm passed down from his parents, and subsequent immigration records noted that they reported their birthplaces as Minnesota.

The township of White Rock, once a bustling frontier village along the Bois de Sioux River, which defines part of the border between Minnesota and both South Dakota and North Dakota. The town was named after a pale granite boulder lying near the Fargo line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway.

Founded by Swedish settlers in 1884, it once had about 600 people who built churches, saloons, banks, stores and schools. When the railway moved, the businesses left.

By 1969, the year Wilson’s grave was unearthed, White Rock was nearly a ghost town. One watering hole, named Helen's Bar, was still open, and on the weekends it was a magnet for teenagers who hit the 18-year-old milestone from Minnesota and North Dakota, where the drinking age was 21.

“On certain nights of the week, two or three towns would meet in White Rock, and there were no police around. There could be 1,000 kids on the weekend there, they would come across the border to drink,” Johnson said.

The investigation

The Roberts County Sheriff’s Office told Forum News Service that they no longer had the case file on the grave robbing incident. The investigating officers, who have since died, spent two weeks investigating the incident, according to news reports in 1970.

Johnson remembered that one of the suspects was struck by a guilty conscience and confessed. Two students from the North Dakota �� of Science at Wahpeton, North Dakota, were given LSD or mind-altering drugs by a female nightclub entertainer who worked in Fargo, North Dakota, Johnson said.

“One of the boys, it was probably his conscience that got to him, came down off the acid, and he must have told somebody where the head was. It was out on a farm in an old shed,” Johnson said.

News reports at the time made no mention of why the head was taken, but Johnson said the crime was committed for a satanic ritual.

“She was a witch, she was into devil worship. She wanted that head for rituals. Those poor kids ... were stupid," Johnson said. "I’m sure she was cute. She found a couple kids, and I think their testosterone was going pretty well."

The two-week investigation started in a Wahpeton nightclub “first as a heckling of the girl’s act and then as a dare that magnified into a bizarre action,” The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead reported. Police arrested Eddeana Belle Wood, 22, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the Fargo night club entertainer better known as “Dusty” Wood; along with two college students.

All three were charged with “wanton and malicious removal of part or all of a dead body,” according to the Grand Forks Herald.

The trio were sentenced in South Dakota to serve two years probation and ordered to repay $1,090 in costs for their grave robbery.

“The three admitted entering a rural White Rock, SD, cemetery in the early morning hours last Oct. 30 and opening the grave of a man buried there. The head of the corpse was recovered several days later at a vacant farm near Breckenridge, Minn.,” The Forum reported on June 12, 1970.

The head of the corpse was about 80 years old, according to The Forum. A mound of fresh dirt attracted the attention of a passing farmer. “No attempt had been made to cover the coffin,” The Forum reported.

After their arrests, they all had to pay $2.50 per day for room and board while at the Roberts County Jail in South Dakota.

“It was sad. That poor man was very humble," Johnson said. "I knew him. And to have that happen is just sad."

Johnson continued: “Everybody knew what happened, and I don’t think they knew what to do with these guys. It sounds far-fetched, but that’s what drugs will do to people.”

Three years later

Wood was caught in a “large round up” of known drug offenders in Fargo in October 1972, according to The Forum.

Wood, whose last name had become Iverson, was caught selling amphetamine tablets, and was sentenced to one year in jail.

She spent part of her sentence aboard a state-owned airplane after Judge Ralph Maxwell sentenced her to the all-male North Dakota State Farm in Bismarck, North Dakota, a place where those found guilty of misdemeanors would sometimes go and work. The farm was renamed the Missouri River Correctional Center in 1991, according to the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Before she could get settled in on the 45-man dormitory — which had no separate services for women — Robert Landon, the warden at the North Dakota State Penitentiary, sent her and another woman by car to a women’s prison in Yankton, South Dakota.

Not long after, Landon had to answer for his decision to Maxwell in court, and said if he had the chance to change his decision, he still would have sent them away, according to multiple newspaper reports in March 1973.

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Midwest Agriculture Summit takes on big questions in ag transportation

Jenny Schlecht — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:00:00 GMT

WEST FARGO — What farmers do in their fields is just the first step in a long line of actions to get products to market.

"You can't feed the world if you can't get to the world," said Daniel Maffei, a commissioner on the Federal Maritime Commission. "And getting to the world is through ocean shipping, particularly when you talk about agricultural exports."

A packed crowd at the Midwest Ag Summit, put on Tuesday, June 10, by the Fargo Moorhead West Fargo Chamber of Commerce at the Butler Machinery Arena at the Red River Valley Fairgrounds, learned about "Powering Policy, People & Pathways in Agriculture" during the three-hour event. The summit served as a kick-off for Ag Tech Week, a week of agriculture technology programs throughout the Fargo area.

Along with transportation, the Midwest Ag Summit also featured speakers on ag labor, environmental concerns, trade, fuels, ag business, and policy.

Steve Olson, an agriculture strategist who runs Steve Olson Consulting, led discussions on the transportation of ag products. After the panels on which he participated, he summed up the importance of staying on top of transportation infrastructure issues within agriculture:

"Having a strong infrastructure in the rail, trucking, and the Duluth Seaway Port Authority helps us be able to serve those different markets. And without that ... we wouldn't get the value that we need to for our commodities," he said.

Olson talked to Maffei about the Federal Maritime Commission and its importance to agriculture.

Maffei explained that ag exports usually go out via water, making it vital for the systems to work efficiently and effectively. One issue in recent years in that area has been making sure there are sufficient containers available for products and that shippers wait to take the products out rather than leave them behind while going after more lucrative imports into the U.S.

"If we can't get your product out, we're not as powerful country as we should be, we're not as strong of country as we should be and we're not as generous of country as we should be," Maffei said.

Some of those issues have been helped by bipartisan legislation passed during the COVID-19 pandemic that addressed ships needing to wait to take out exports rather than rush off empty, he said.

Many more challenges and uncertainties continue to impact the shipping industry, like weather, labor, markets, shipping alliances and, most recently, tariffs. The Federal Maritime Commission works to help ease some uncertainties and make sure exporters are treated fairly, he said.

A major ongoing issue is making sure containers for exports get to where they are needed for ag exports, often hundreds of miles from the waterways, Maffei said.

"One of the things that they're doing is trying to make, trying to streamline that and trying to get that more in sync. And so those containers are available, and it's more equitable and lower cost for us to actually get our export markets out," Olson explained later.

Better logistics and possibly even more use of artificial intelligence to determine the best routes for products are on the horizon, Maffei said, which could help ensure that ag products make it to where they're going.

Olson also led a panel discussion with Amy McBeth, regional director of public affairs for BNSF Railway; Kate Ferguson, director of trade and business development for Duluth Seaway Port; and Mike Metzger, executive vice president of Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative.

"It was a fascinating panel," he said.

Ferguson talked about the millions of pounds of grain that go out from the port, along with the machinery and parts that go in and out, which are important to agribusinesses in the region.

A recent improvement that has had a big impact has been the implementation of hands-free mooring in the Great Lakes. That has saved time and money, while improving safety and allowing 10 times more ships to go through the Great Lakes, Ferguson said.

"They're actually able to bring more ships in than they've ever been before because of some of the, again, technology and infrastructure needs," Olson said.

McBeth discussed how vital BNSF is in moving ag products in the western two-thirds of the U.S., especially for moving products from Minnesota and North Dakota to the Pacific Northwest. She addressed how technology is being used to prevent accidents and enhance safety on the rail. The number of incidents has been reduced by 60% since 2000, she said. That comes from training to sensors to using artificial intelligence for predicting problems.

She said streamlining the process for updating, improving and fixing infrastructure is vital to increasing the safety and efficiency of rails, along with other infrastructure.

Metzger explained Minn-Dak's use of autonomous trucking. Minn-Dak is the only sugar company that owns and operates its own rehaul fleet, traveling 3.2 million miles per year with 18 trucks.

"We move a lot of product in a short amount of time," he said.

Having enough truck drivers has been a continuing problem, and the age of the drivers continues to increase; the autonomous trucking trial is an attempt to solve the issue. Expanding production is not possible without more truck drivers, Metzger said. The autonomous trucking uses a leader-follower system that requires one driver for two trucks.

"We operate in the state of North Dakota autonomously," he said. "We really see this as our path in the future."

North Dakota was very open to the project, he said, pointing out that the state wants to be a leader in ag technology. Policies and infrastructure have been worked out to continue to improve the project, he said.

In Minnesota, things haven't been quite as smooth, he said, but getting the project in place there is still in the works. It will require passing legislation in the state, he said.

Metzger also thinks the program is something that someday could be used on farms or for other companies. The "bolt-on" system can be turned off, so people can drive the trucks if needed, and Minn-Dak has been careful to only operate the autonomous trucks in safe conditions.

"The public acceptance has actually gone quite well," he said.

Publicity around the autonomous trucking project has helped get new applicants from young people interested in using the new technology.

"The number of youth that has come to drive for us has been incredible," Metzger said.

Later, Olson said the fact that the Minn-Dak autonomous project has been attracting young people to careers is important.

"I think that's kind of the key to a lot of stuff we do in agriculture, is it's how do we get the attention of people that are younger to help let them know what those career opportunities are for now," he said.

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Soil health specialists sound the alarm on continuing soil erosion

Ann Bailey — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Black soil covering white snow in ditches during the winter and clouds of dirt swirling across fields, farms and roads are stark evidence that erosion is a major threat to soil health.

Despite a “Wake-up Call” warning issued 10 years ago by Dave Franzen, then a soil health expert at North Dakota State University in Fargo, wind erosion has continued to significantly damage soil health.

“Soil moving by surface creep moves into the ditch and into the neighbor’s field. This is what we see,” wrote Franzen, NDSU Extension soil specialist, in a section of the May 7, 2015, NDSU Crops and Pest Report that he titled “Wake-up Call.”

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“Suspended soil is the real soil loss, estimated at about 10 times what you see in the ditch. It lands in the Atlantic Ocean or Ohio or Pennsylvania, or New York, or London. It is lost forever,” Franzen wrote.

Ten years later, travels across North Dakota during the winter of 2024-25 indicated that wind erosion remains the greatest threat to the state’s soil health, Carlos Pires and Brady Goettl, NDSU Extension soil health specialists, wrote in a section of the March 27, 2025, Crops and Pest Report called “Wake-up Call 2."

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“Our soils are much like the human body. We can’t afford to lose blood, just as we can’t afford to lose soil health. Both are vital to sustaining life, and without them, everything else starts to suffer. Stop the soil bleed!” Pires and Goettl wrote.

Both of the Wake-up Calls referred to a 2014 study by David Hopkins, a former NDSU professor, and Brandon Montgomery, an NDSU student, in which they visited the exact locations of several soils characterized by the Soil Conservation Service — now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service — in 1960. The study showed that one soil in Walsh County had 35 inches above the “C” horizon in 1960 and 15 inches in 2014, a loss of 19 inches in slightly more than 50 years.

“Can you really call it topsoil anymore? The ‘topsoil' is a weak blend of a small amount of original topsoil mixed with subsoil,” Franzen wrote in 2015.

Pires and Goettl reiterated in March 2025 that statement: “In 2025 we observed very similar trends across the state.”

Halting soil erosion is critical, Pires said in a May 2025 Agweek interview.

“If we don’t stop soil erosion, we lose all of (soil’s) benefits,” Pires said. “The water is carrying away everything we built.

“We definitely are losing a lot of topsoil in the Red River Valley,” he said.

The optimal way to reduce soil erosion is to use minimum tillage methods, which will reduce soil disturbance, Pires said.

Using no- tillage methods for wheat and soybeans is feasible, he said. Meanwhile, Pires recommends using minimum tillage on corn ground, where possible.

It’s also important to mix up crop rotations to reduce soil erosion.

“Diversification is the key,” Pires said. “Corn, corn, corn, it’s hard to minimize (soil loss).”

Farmers also may want to consider breaking down their acreage by “possibility maps” and planting cover crops on acreage that doesn’t produce an economic return.

“If they're not profitable, is it making sense to farm that?” Pires asked.“Remember that every acre counts, and work on probability.”

One of his favorite sayings is that “productivity is a function of knowledge applied per acre," he said. “We can also say that ‘Soil productivity is a function of knowledge applied per acre.'”

Since starting his job at NDSU earlier this spring, Pires has witnessed a trend of farmers being concerned about soil erosion.

“They are seeing all of this stuff; we have the dust storms,” he said, noting that he's received phone calls from farmers in western Minnesota who are asking about ways they can change their farming methods to reduce soil erosion.

The soil erosion isn’t limited to North Dakota and Minnesota, Pires said.

“It’s a problem everywhere. Every soil specialist everywhere is worried about soil erosion… This is a huge concern in the world,” he said. That includes his native country of Brazil, where water erosion is damaging soil health, Pires said.

Farming a large number of acres does not preclude farmers from using farming methods that reduce soil erosion because there is technology available to do that, Piers said. For example, it’s a lot easier to get 10,000 acres of crops in the ground if fields don’t have to be tilled first.

“The size of the farm shouldn't be a roadblock for soil health," he said. “There are options out there. Sometimes they’re expensive.”

Some North Dakota sugarbeet farmers are using strip-till cropping methods or no-till to reduce soil erosion in sugarbeet fields, said Naeem Kalwar, NDSU Extension soil specialist at the Langdon Research Extension Center.

Planting fall cover crops on fields where there is little residue left after harvest also will reduce soil erosion, Kalwar said.

Joshua Anderson, Three Rivers Soil Conservation District manager, in Walsh County, North Dakota, where the 2014 NDSU showed that a site had a loss of 19 inches of topsoil from 1960, believes that the former tall grass prairie that was the landscape before the ground was tilled holds the key to soil health.

Other practices, such as planting shelterbelts, that were developed after the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s were “easy button” solutions that didn’t work because there still is soil erosion, Anderson said.

In contrast the prairie had minimal soil disturbance, a diversity of plants and livestock integration, he said.

The challenge and the opportunity is to develop an ecosystem like that that is economically viable.

“How can we grow an economy rooted in prairie principles that regenerates the soil and leads to robust rural communities?” Anderson asked.”Do we want a system that regularly grows algae blooms and food deserts?

“There must be opportunities to grow something else and to think about how we’re growing it,” he said.

Farmers need to band together and voice that soil health should be a driving factor in federal farm programs and crop insurance policies, Anderson said.

“I think the big issue in my book is that conservation and ag economics are at odds with each other,” Anderson said.

But bridging that gap is vital to soil health.

“Soil is our common ground in our region," he said. "Soil health is connected to human health, what we eat, water quality, food quality. I think it is one of those things that I would love to see it become a bigger conversation, not just among producers.”

An optimal production system that would reduce erosion would be to integrate livestock into multi-species grass so the land would have a chance to recuperate and regenerate, Anderson said.

If farmers didn’t want to raise livestock, they could partner with someone who does and let them raise cattle on their grassland, he suggested.

Anderson is realistic about the challenges of livestock production.

”There’s nothing easy about raising cattle. It’s a challenging thing in a lot of respects. We hear a lot of resistance to making these kinds of changes,“ he said.

Some farmers who hear suggestions about integrating cattle and grass systems tell soil conservationists that their grandfathers did the same type of farming: smaller acreages with small livestock herds, Anderson acknowledged.

But he believes that type of system is still viable today.

“A lot of stuff we’re advocating for, the very first conservation districts were advocating for. The principles of soil health are stable for a long time.,” Anderson said.

He suggests farmers start with an experiment of 40 acres of an integrated grass-livestock system and see what works and what doesn’t.

It’s critical that farmers start now to mitigate damage to topsoil and work to restore it, soil health specialists say.

“In order to make 1 inch of topsoil, it might take 100 to 1,000 years, We may not see it back in our lifetimes,” Kalwar said. “If they don’t, it would be like your bank account. If you take your money out and don’t put it back, you will be bankrupt.”

Soil, like a bank account, needs to be protected, built and maintained, he said.

“The bottom line is that soils are a natural resource. You can lose it," Karlwar said.

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After decades in prison, Gianakos says ‘I am not a convict, but an inmate’

C.S. Hagen — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 14:50:00 GMT

FARGO, ND — Before the 1997 shotgun killing of Annemarie Camp, Michael Gianakos walked up to his mother and posed a question.

“Why can’t you be nicer to Jamie?” mother Alice Gianakos said her son asked. She didn’t like her son’s soon-to-be wife, Jamie Dennis-Gianakos. She thought she was trouble. Michael had always been the good boy who couldn’t take the pressure of lying. As a child, he was bullied in school. His family privately called him “Porky” while he was growing up.

“I was scrubbing the floor and I looked up at him and said ‘Mike, I would either see you dead or in prison for the rest of your life,’” if he continued his relationship with Jamie, Alice told Forum News Service in a recent interview.

“It was a premonition I had all along. When I saw what she was doing, I knew it,” said Alice, now about 78 years old.

"My mother told me a couple of times that I would end up dead or in prison," Michael wrote in a recent email to Forum News Service. He regrets not listening to his mother's advice and not being forthcoming with the police early in the investigation. "But I did not commit murder. I know a lot of people will not believe me, but God knows the truth, and I am not scared to meet my maker."

Not long after the conversation, Michael robbed the Super 8 Motel in Fargo, North Dakota, with Jamie’s help, and they married in part to avoid having to testify against each other, trial transcripts reported. Although Michael had a girlfriend before, Jamie was his first serious relationship, according to the Gianakos family.

Police questioned Annemarie, Michael’s and Jamie’s usual babysitter who watched their children the night of the robbery, and the couple believed she was a government witness against them, even though her name wasn’t initially listed on the prosecution’s witness list, according to reports compiled by Dick Schmidt, investigator for Michael’s defense attorney Rick Henderson in 2002. The reports were provided to Forum News Service by the Gianakos family.

Prosecutors argued that Michael and Jamie killed Annemarie to silence her testimony, according to trial transcripts.

After conducting hundreds of interviews, however, Schmidt’s investigative team believed they found enough evidence to clear Michael's name, and they dug up information about Jamie's past. They leaned toward a fact that Henderson brought up in court: Michael had already confessed to the Super 8 Motel robbery.

“We propose that the Super 8 business was simply not enough motive to kill Anne Camp, particularly for Michael Gianakos. We find it significant that the prosecutor described Michael as a person who was willing to take the full blame and responsibility for the crime,” Schmidt wrote in a Dec. 19, 2002, report.

The prosecution, however, argued that Michael was in love and would do anything for his family, including protect Jamie from going back to prison. His dream, according to trial transcripts, was to raise a secure family.

Initially, Michael was convicted in state court on murder charges in May 2000 in Clay County, Minnesota, in part because of his wife’s testimony, which stated she was there with him when they killed 22-year-old Annemarie, their babysitter on May 1, 1997, about three months after the Super 8 robbery. They had picked Annemarie up in Fargo and drove to Minnesota, where she was killed.

The ruling was later thrown out of court because of the marital-privilege statute in Minnesota. His case then crossed the border in 2002 into North Dakota federal court, where a jury found him guilty of kidnapping resulting in death. Jamie pleaded guilty during the first trial and served 16 years of a 25-year sentence. She was released in 2016 and appears to be living in Moorhead, Minnesota. Forum News Service reached her telephone answering service and left a message, but the call was not returned. Additionally, nobody answered a knock on her most recent listed address door.

Michael is currently serving a life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in McKean, Pennsylvania.

After more than two decades, the Gianakos family remains adamant that Michael is not guilty.

“We could see the downfall of Mike,” said Tracy Lowrance, his sister, in a June 2025 interview.

“Before meeting her he had a nice car, a nice apartment and nice furniture. Then after meeting her he was losing his car, his job, his furniture,” Lowrance said.

Michael met Jamie at a party in a Detroit Lakes, Minnesota karaoke, and soon after they began dating.

“It is our suspicion that Michael and Jamie’s relationship was not what Michael believed it was from the very beginning,” wrote Schmidt in an Aug. 28, 2002, report. “Michael Gianakos had no criminal history or, for that matter, any history that would indicate untruthful and indecent moral standing. Jamie supplied him with her affections, and he soon thought he was in love with her.”

Michael’s and Jamie’s daughter, Myra Gianakos, was only 10 months old on May 1, 1997, the night Jamie testified in court that she and Michael brought her and her older sister, Bailey, to an abandoned farmstead near Sabin, Minnesota, and killed Annemarie.

She was shot by a shotgun twice, and her throat was slit, according to trial transcripts.

Myra naturally remembers nothing from that night, but after studying the trial transcripts, the investigation and getting to know her father through prison glass or prearranged meetings at federal penitentiaries in Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois and Pennsylvania, she believes her father was manipulated.

“I grew up visiting him. I know him, and I know his character based on what he has shown me," Myra said. "I formed my own opinion on how things have gone down, and I believe he is innocent."

Myra is still trying to obtain a compassionate release for her father, and turned to Tommy Walker, a former inmate who served 25 years of three life sentences, and founded Second Chance 4 R.E.A.L LLC, a paralegal service to help inmates find relief from their sentences.

Prison life hasn't been easy, Myra said.

“He has been beaten up and shot in California, during a riot, he got shot by a cop and he got hit in the leg. He got hit over the head with a pipe, he has been stabbed umpteen times, and he has done nothing wrong,” said Myra.

Guilty verdict 10 May 2003, Sat The Forum (Fargo, North Dakota) Newspapers.com

Michael appealed his conviction in 2005, but the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel affirmed the May 2003 federal court conviction by a 2-1 margin. The dissenting opinion came from Fargo-based U.S. Senior Circuit Judge Myron Bright, who argued that Judge Patrick Conmy erred by not dismissing a juror who had been told during trial that Gianakos had already been convicted in 2000.

Drew Wrigley, the former U.S. attorney whose office prosecuted Gianakos, said the appeals court decision confirmed what the evidence told them long ago.

“Michael Gianakos planned and carried out one of the most cold-blooded, cowardly murders in this region’s history,” Wrigley said in a statement to The Forum in 2005.

Michael has applied four times for compassionate release, he told Forum News Service. His requests were denied.

For more than 26 years, Michael’s prison life begins at 6 a.m. He works until 2 p.m., with lockdown and headcount following. He has about an hour of free time outside his cell, and then back to his cell for the night to start the process over again the next morning, he wrote in a recent email to Forum News Service.

“I am just a tired old man now. I have lived my life in prison the same way I lived on the streets,” Michael, now 54, wrote. "I am not a convict, but an inmate. I do not follow the ways of a convict, which makes me an outcast in prison."

Since his incarceration, Michael said he has received “only two write-ups” in more than 26 years. He has taken rehabilitation, college and vocational training courses, and helps inmates obtain their GEDs.

“I pray one day to come home and just live the rest of my life in peace. I am no threat to anyone. I never have been. I am sorry for the Camp's loss, and I am sorry I did not help to get the truth out there. So many lives ruined,” Michael wrote.

If Michael is ever released from prison, he plans on doing what he can to help the family and watch over his adopted daughter, Bailey. "I would like to fish as much as I can and teach the youngsters about prison. Prison is a bad place with some good men in them, but they turn bad after being in custody for too long."

“He just wants to work. He just wants to help us. He just wants family. He doesn’t want big splashy things. He’ll sleep on the couch, go do work and come back,” Myra said.

When asked if she still has hope that her brother would be released, Lowrance nodded. Her hope comes from her family, she said, trying to stem a flood of tears. She couldn’t finish the sentence. After two decades, the pain of losing her brother to prison was still raw.

“It’s too hard,” she said.

Note: This is the third of three parts. Click below to read the first two parts.
Read Part 1 Read Part 2]]>

Loose lips and an elusive diary brought the ‘babysitter killers’ down

C.S. Hagen — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:50:00 GMT

CHRISTINE, N.D. — On Memorial Day 2025, Kathleen Forness and Lisa Camp walked the rows of headstones at Richland Lutheran Church Cemetery. They knew exactly where they were going.

They stopped at a small, granite headpiece. The grave was well taken care of, decorated with flowers and guarded by three ceramic angels.

“Here she is. Oh. Someone has been here recently,” said Forness, before kissing her fingertips and placing them on a photograph of her daughter, Annemarie Camp, permanently embossed on her headstone as a young 22-year-old woman.

“She would have been 50 years old this year. Anniversaries like this are hard,” Forness said.

“Hair of gold, eyes of blue, you will always be our punky poo.” The phrase, created by her father, Doug Camp, who died in 2024, was chiseled on her headstone.

Annemarie was murdered on May 1, 1997, after neighbors — called the “babysitter killers” — decided she knew too much about a robbery they committed at a Super 8 Motel in Fargo, North Dakota, of January that same year.

She was more than a friend to one of her killers: Jamie Dennis-Gianakos. Annemarie also was the babysitter and the maid of honor at the Valentine’s Day wedding between Jamie and Michael Gianakos, partners in crime.

After the police questioned Annemarie about the robbery, Michael and Jamie plotted to bring her to a secluded rural spot near Sabin, Minnesota, drugged her on the way, then killed her with a shotgun, according to trial transcripts reviewed at the U.S. Courthouse in Fargo.

“She trusted them. I hate this is the way we have to visit her now,” said Lisa. She even misses the fights the siblings used to have.

As sisters, Lisa and Annemarie would take walks together and listen to music. Anything from Guns N’ Roses was a favorite, but Annemarie’s number one song was “Sweet Child of Mine,” which she sang once — awkwardly — at karaoke, said Forness, chuckling at the memory.

A graduate of Fargo South High ��, Annmarie had been diagnosed as bipolar in ninth grade. She lived off of Social Security disability checks, and she was on medications, including sleeping pills, because she had trouble sleeping.

At 20 years old, Annmarie had a daughter, Kimberly, who was born in 1995. The father, Andy Betrosian, lived with her for a while, but they had a messy breakup, according to court testimony. He was one of the first suspects police investigated.

Forness and Lisa visit Annemarie’s grave often.

“May 1 is the grieving and Aug. 13 is her birthday, and we’ll bring her a little piece of cheesecake,” said Forness.

Jan. 27, 1997

Annemarie didn’t have many friends, so when Jamie and Michael befriended her, she trusted them.

On the night of the Super 8 Motel robbery, Michael called Jamie and asked for help. She went across the hall to the Camp's apartment, where Annemarie was with her parents, and asked her to watch the kids. Then Jamie walked to Super 8, found him, and together they staged the robbery to make him look like the victim. "I helped tape his hands and a pillowcase over his head,” Jamie testified in court.

Michael took the stand in his second trial and testified that all he wanted was a stable family.

“We had some financial problems, I made a bad decision … I basically kind of panicked and I called Jamie,” said Michael, adding that they decided to make him appear the victim.

A few hours later, when Michael and Jamie returned, they “came home with all this money and they bought her [Annemarie] a pizza,” Forness said.

Moorhead Police Sgt. Bradley Penas was soon on the case, and Michael misdirected him toward other suspects. He interviewed Annemarie and recounted in court how Jamie watched as he knocked on her apartment door.

After police interviewed Annemarie, she came “and told me about it,” said Jamie. She said she didn’t know anything, but Jamie didn’t believe her; she was on probation and didn’t want to face an additional charge of probation violation.

Michael’s story soon crumbled, and he broke during a second interview.

“Gianakos admitted to staging the robbery at the Super 8 Motel and taking the money himself,” said Penas, adding that he implicated Jamie at the same time.

With a trial date looming, Annemarie became a real concern, Jamie said in court. They needed to scare Annemarie away from becoming a government witness.

The missing diary

The jury’s decision during Michael’s federal trial came down to who told a more believable truth. He was tried a second time because — citing state matrimony law — his wife’s testimony against him in the first trial, in Minnesota, was overturned on appeal.

Jamie testified that Michael pulled the trigger, but they planned the murder together.

Michael’s alibi: he was at his parents’ apartment and had nothing to do with the murder.

For nearly two years, investigators scrambled for clues, offering a reward for information, but in September 1998, Michael’s loose lips made him a suspect.

Thinking his wife was cheating on him, he peeked into one of her diaries. Inside was a tale of murder.

“I came across the story of … a crime that was heinous and gruesome, and it gave gory details in there. When I finished reading it, a lot of things just clicked, and I thought, well, I thought that I was living with a murderer,” Michael testified.

“There were certain things in the story that just made sense at the time now, after a year and a half, two years … the girl was shot, the girl had been drugged. There was a shotgun involved. There was an inference that the husband would get set up in this crime,” said Michael.

“There was a knife involved, that had been buried, with the husband’s prints on it. That coincided with another fact in our house that there was a knife set purchased and … one of the knives missing,” said Michael.

“I felt my whole world ended. I was very distraught, and I didn’t know where to turn, and I turned to the only place I thought of, and that was my parents.”

Distraught, he told his parents about the diary entry. His mother, Alice Gianakos, turned the telephone over to his father, George Gianakos.

“I think she’s going to try to blame me for this murder,” George testified his son told him. He then turned to his wife: “We’ve got to go to the police with this.”

The next day, George met Penas at the Hampton Inn and told him Michael’s story. From that day forward, police refocused their attention away from other suspects, including Betrosian, according to trial transcripts.

Clay County Sheriff’s Office Detective Bryan Lynn Green needed more proof.

“We knew that if the two parties were together, they were going to stick to their story … if we can separate them or if they get separated, then we have a chance,” Green testified.

They wiretapped Michael's telephone, recording 1,328 phone calls to him during a 60-day period in 1999. They began applying more pressure when Jamie went to prison, but still had no smoking gun.

The diary was never found. The shotgun was never found. The entire case depended on Jamie’s testimony against her husband, and the fact that Michael was caught in multiple lies.

‘Anne is haunting me’

Jamie did keep diaries and wrote about how she was haunted by guilt.

On July 27, 1997, she wrote: “I’ve been thinking about Anne a lot lately. She never really leaves my mind. I feel so bad, so horrible, so shocked. I wanted to write down what it is that I’ve been thinking and feeling but I’m afraid to do so. I sometimes feel like Anne is haunting me. It frightens me, makes me think that I’m going crazy.”

The next day she wrote: “In the book I am reading it tells of a woman’s head being blackened by the sun. I wonder if Anne’s was, or did no sun reach the spot where she was found. I almost wish I could see a picture of her the way she looked when they found her — almost — but I am not positive. I don’t know if I could handle it. But would seeing it erase the other images from my mind?”

‘One could not have done it without the other’

The shotgun killing of their babysitter did not save the couple from prison. Michael pleaded guilty to the motel theft and was sentenced to 60 days in jail and a fine of $1,000. A jury convicted Jamie of aiding motel theft in January 1998.

During the Super 8 Motel trial, prosecutor Gregg Jenson told the court that Jamie was an evil, manipulating woman.

“Her record shows an increasing propensity to resort to criminal behavior to get what she wants … and if that’s at the expense of somebody else, that’s what she’s going to do if she thinks she can get away with it,” Jenson said

Before Michael’s first trial for Annemarie’s murder, Jamie pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. She was released on June 21, 2016.

Michael was found guilty twice for Annemarie’s murder, and for a time during the federal trial, he faced the possibility of a death sentence. In 2003, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a jury found him guilty of kidnapping resulting in death.

Michael’s defense attorney, Rick Henderson, relied heavily on testimony from the family that he was at home on May 1, 1997, but the jury decided to believe his wife’s story.

“The prosecuting attorneys said the family were liars because we were family. What do you call Jamie Dennis-Gianakos? She was his wife. Even though she was family to Michael her word was gospel whereas ours were lies,” said Catherine Birchem, Michael’s grand aunt, in a letter to The Forum in 2000.

In September 2024, Jamie sought to have her conviction overturned through Minnesota’s Felony Reform Act, but a judge denied her request.

To this day, Michael maintains his innocence, saying his wife left to practice shooting the shotgun he bought that day, but she never returned home with the weapon.

“If my mom or my dad or my sister, brother, if anybody thought I’d done this, I wouldn't even have contact with them, they wouldn’t even talk to me,” Michael said in a jail interview with WDAY in 2000.

In a recent email to Forum News Service, Michael wrote that his daughters were his priority.

"I thought one time I did love her (Jamie), but then the longer the relationship went on, I guess, I don't know. She used me as a babysitter and provider," Michael wrote.

Forness believes that justice was served.

“They told us right away that whoever came forward first would get the best deal. I think Jamie told the truth as best she could. Michael definitely was lying. But one would not have done it without the other,” Forness said.

“We were lucky; we found Anne,” Forness said. “I just hope their lives are better. If I keep holding onto hate and grudges that doesn’t do me any good.”

Note: This is the second of three parts. In part three, learn about how Michael Gianakos’ family has fought for two decades to prove he is innocent and regain his freedom.
Read Part 1 Read Part 3]]>

How the 1997 'babysitter killers' case resembled a movie plotline

C.S. Hagen — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:55:00 GMT

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,” Henderson said.

Note: This is the first of three parts. In part two, learn about how the married couple turned against each other.

Read Part 2]]>