A MYSTERIOUS DEATH - PART II

It has been over two months since I wrote the initial part of the story of the events that happened in La Farge on that fateful October evening back in 1947.  Since the article was published in July, I have heard from many people about the incident.  They had many different aspects of the story to tell.

            Nearly a decade ago, LaVerne Campbell told me about the shootings that occurred that night to make sure that I knew what he thought actually happened.  He said that Vincent Campton did not commit suicide, as was officially cited as the cause of death, but instead was shot by Ted (Buck) Rolfe that night in the trailer park.  

            LaVerne said that Vincent was a heavy drinker and when he got drunk, he would beat his wife, Thelma, who was the daughter of Buck Rolfe.  She would often flee to Buck’s trailer for safety and to get away from her husband. After several of these incidents Buck Rolfe told Vincent that if he ever hurt Thelma again, he would kill Vincent. As LaVerne told me, “Buck Rolfe was a man of his word.”

            In 2010, as I was nearing the publishing of my first volume of La Farge’s history, I interviewed Dick Johannesen at his house in Viola.  We talked about La Farge history for a couple of hours and during the conversation, he brought up the shooting of Vincent Campton.  Dick told me that his Dad, Finn Johannesen, was the village president in La Farge in 1947.  On the night of the shooting, Vernon County Sheriff Morris Moon came to the Johannesen house to ask Finn to go with him to the trailer park.  (I also have learned that several other village leaders, including Ted Roberts, were requested by Sheriff Moon to go with him to the shooting site that night.)

            Dick told me that Sheriff Moon laid out the crime scene for the village leaders and explained how it appeared that Vincent had shot himself.  There were apparently no witnesses to his being shot.  (By this time, both Vincent and Thelma had been transported to the hospital in Viroqua.)  Unfortunately, the suicide attempt didn’t seem to add up for the sheriff. Apparently Vincent was shot in the back and Sheriff Moon could not comprehend how Vincent could physically accomplish that.  

            “He didn’t have long enough arms.”  Sheriff Moon apparently used this quote that night, and I heard it repeated by Dick Johannesen and several others who talked to me about this incident.  Vincent also had no flash burns on his body, which might have occurred if the gun barrel was held near his body, as in a suicide attempt.  

            Although the facts about the shooting did not seem to line up for Sheriff Moon that evening, the death certificate for Vincent Campton, who died the day after the shooting at the Viroqua hospital, lists death from “a lung hemorrhage due to a self-inflicted gun/bullet wound”.  Dr. Frank Gollin, who treated Vincent Campton at the scene of the shooting incident, ruled the death a suicide.  (Another source told me that although Vincent was near death and barely conscious when he was transported to Viroqua to the hospital that night, he did mumble something like, “He shot me” repeatedly.)

            We now know that Thelma, after quarreling with a drunken Vincent, had fled to the trailer park that night because her father lived there. She had her two-year old daughter, Karen with her.  Eventually she went to another trailer nearby where Lloyd and Velma Kellar lived, as Velma and Thelma were friends.  Vincent burst into the Kellar trailer with a gun and started to threaten his baby daughter, Karen.  Velma and Thelma tried to get the gun away from Vincent.  In the struggle the gun went off, grazing and wounding Thelma. Vincent then fled the Kellar trailer and Velma called the police and doctor.  This part of the story was shared by Dennis Kellar and Rhonda (Kellar) Wemmer and had been passed down to them by their mother, Velma.

            A rather amazing coincidence happened about two weeks after the first part of this story was published.  I had a phone conversation and then subsequent e-mails with Sandra Carmichael, who is the daughter of Karen Rolfe.  (She told me in an e-mail that her mother, Carron K. Campton, had passed away in July of 2015.)  She wrote me that she and her aunt, Anne (Connelly) Stoltz, had been doing research on the Vincent Campton death at the same time as my column was published. 

            After the shootings of October 1947, Thelma left La Farge. Her daughter, Karen Rolfe was raised by Mettie and Art Alvord on their Jug Creek farm.  Mettie was Buck Rolfe’s aunt.  Karen graduated from La Farge High School in 1963 and moved away from the town where she was born.

            Sandra had never heard about the story of Vincent Campton’s death being a possible murder.  (Actually, Karen never talked with her family about Vincent’s death.)   Others always had told her that he died in World War II. When Sandra had started an online search for Vincent’s records, she found a LaCrosse Tribune article about the 1947 shootings in La Farge. She was shocked to learn about the shooting, or as Sandra phrased it in the e-mail, “Her great-grandfather had shot and killed her grandfather.” 

            Sandra Carmichael and Anne Stoltz came to Viroqua in late July to search for information about Vincent Campton’s death at the county courthouse.  They also stopped to visit with Cecil Rolfe, who was the first child of Thelma, born in 1943.  He told his relatives that I had just written an article about the Vincent Campton death that had been published in the Episcope.  That is when Sandra reached out to me about the case.

            In her e-mail, Sandra said that they found Karen Rolfe’s birth certificate of June 1, 1945 and that Vincent Campton was listed as the father.  They also found a marriage record of Vincent and Thelma that occurred on October 25, 1946 at the home of the La Farge Justice of Peace, E.A. Sewell.  Sandra and Anne also stopped at the Vernon County Sheriff’s office to see if there were any records there about the shootings. In her last e-mail to me, Sandra said the sheriff’s office continues to search for any report about the incident.

            “I can’t believe a whole damn town kept this secret for so many years.  Just boggles me on how many people knew about it and did nothing but turn and look away.” This quote from one of Sandra Carmichael’s e-mails does raise an interesting point.

             It does appear that many people in La Farge did think that Buck Rolfe had shot Vincent Campton that October night in 1947.  It also appears that many of those same people thought that a man who beat his wife and threatened to kill his baby daughter probably deserved this fate. More than one person told me, including some members of the Campton family that “He deserved what he got”. “He had it coming”, was another common refrain from many who I talked to.  (In one rather amazing revelation, I learned that one of Vincent Campton’s brothers had been a friend of Buck Rolfe’s over the years after the shooting.) 

            I have been hesitant to write this concluding “Local History Notebook” on the death of Vincent Campton.  In the end, I was encouraged by both Cecil Rolfe and Sandra Carmichael to write it so the story could be told.  It is not a story that adds to the stature of La Farge as a community, but it may be a story better understood with more light shining on it. I suspect many small towns along the Kickapoo have similar tales stored away in dark places.

            Although many have told me that Buck Rolfe shot Vincent Campton that evening so many years ago to protect his daughter and her baby, my writing this column does not prove the fact.  Indeed, the truth of whatever happened to Vince Campton that night probably will never be known.  Instead, this story may shine a little light on a dark chapter in the history of this little Kickapoo River town.  In the end, that may help some. 

            I would like to thank Cecil Rolfe, Deb Rolfe, Beth Larson, Sarah Tunks, Sandra Carmichael, Anne Stoltz, Mike Campton, Dennis Kellar, Rhonda Wemmer, Ron Roberts, Kent Steinmetz, Dick Johannesen, and Winfred Bold for help with information for this article.

            Winfred Bold called me from his home in Janesville after reading the first part of this story back in July.  He shared his memories about that evening and I will end this by sharing some of what Winfred told me.

            He was a senior at La Farge High School in the fall of 1947 and was at a LHS Senior Play practice in the gym on the night of the shooting.  The trailer park was across the parking lot from the school gym where the play practice was being held.  Winfred said the shootings happened sometime between 7 & 8 pm that night.  He said the students heard the ruckus outside and went out to see what was going on.  The police and a large crowd were there, but nobody would say what had happened. He heard later that Buck Rolfe had shot Vince Campton and that Vince deserved it for beating up and shooting Thelma.

            The next week after the shootings, the one-act play contest was held at the LHS gym.  La Farge students performed three plays that evening and the winning play was “The Bad Penny”. 

A MYSTERIOUS DEATH - PART I

As I was preparing to finish up on my first local history book, prior to it being printed in 2010, I received a call from LaVerne Campbell.  He wanted me to stop into the C & S Motors garage building sometime so we could talk about something from the past that had happened in La Farge. Actually, LaVerne really wanted to talk to me about one specific event, a mysterious death that occurred in the village in October of 1947. 

             The conversation with LaVerne took place sometime in 2009 and the following May, I met with Dick Johannesen at his house in Viola to talk about La Farge’s history. During that talk, Dick brought up another recollection of his own about that mysterious death that LaVerne had wanted to talk about.  So, armed with those conversations and the newspaper stories of the day, let’s go back to that time.

            The Post-World War II years were a vibrant time in La Farge.  As the men and women who had served in the armed forces during the war were discharged, most returned to their hometown.  Many were recently married and starting families.  La Farge, like many small towns during that time, was immediately hit with a housing shortage – there were virtually no vacant houses or apartments available.  A housing boom began in the village as new houses were being built along every street, particularly those north of Main Street.  However, due to a nation wide shortage of building materials at the time, building new homes was a slow process.  It took time for those houses to be completed and immediate housing needs still had to be met.

            In January of 1946, La Farge municipal leaders learned that the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) would provide the village with ten temporary housing units (trailers).  The FHA trailers (available from military bases after the war ended) would be loaned to the village with the idea that military veterans would get preference to live in them.  The La Farge village board appointed a committee to purchase land for the new trailer houses.  Soon after, several lots just to the south of the schoolhouse were purchased for the housing project.  (This property is currently the school parking lot just to the south of the gymnasium.)  

            The village was also responsible for providing any rough grading, street access and utility lines to the property.  In March, La Farge Village President Finn Johannesen (Dick’s father) and board member Bill Adams went to Chicago and signed the FHA papers so that La Farge would get the trailers.

            In mid-July the ten trailers arrived in La Farge. Because some of the trailers did not have any water or toilet facilities, the FHA also constructed a building on the grounds that housed showers, bathrooms and a laundry for those who lived in the trailers.  Eight of the trailers were standard models (22 feet long by 7 feet wide), large enough for one or two people.  The other two trailers (double-wide’s at 18 by 20 feet) were expandable and large enough to house a small family.  The FHA set rents for a trailer at $15-20 per month, while the FHA also paid the village for all property taxes and utility fees.  The new trailer camp was filled and operational by the end of August. 

            For the next several years, the trailer camp was usually occupied to capacity.  But as more new houses were built in La Farge in those post-war years, the trailers, because of their size and limited amenities became less desirable.  After a few years, the federal government became less involved in providing housing for WW II veterans as well.  In April of 1949, the FHA gifted all of the buildings at the trailer camp to the village of La Farge.  As more and more of the trailers became vacant, the village decided to sell them.  On October 17, 1950 an auction was held at the site and the ten trailers were sold and soon moved.  The utility building remained on the site.

            The school district bought the trailer park lots after the auction.  The utility building remained on the site and when football was started at LHS in the fall of 1956, the building was used to store the player’s football equipment. The new Wildcat football team also used the shower room and bathroom facilities in the utility building that inaugural year.  

            During the evening of Wednesday, October 22, 1947, an incident occurred in the trailer camp in La Farge.  Two people were shot during the evening and one man died. Here is the front-page story about the incident as printed in the October 30^thissue of the La Farge Enterpriseunder the headline:

Vincent Campton Dies Thursday Night at Viroqua

            Vincent La Verne Campton, 26, passed away at the Viroqua hospital Thursday night, as the result of a self-inflicted wound he suffered Wednesday night.  Campton shot himself through the heart following a quarrel with his wife, Thelma, during which he shot her in the leg.

            Mrs. Campton had gone to the trailer park near the school to visit her father, Ted Rolfe, after quarreling with her husband.  She had left the trailer home of her father to go to a neighboring trailer occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Keller.  Campton followed her there and renewed the quarrel.  After striking her he shot her just above the knee with a .22 rifle.  He then ran a short distance from the trailer and shot himself, the bullet piercing the edge of his heart.  Mrs. Keller was a witness to the shooting of Mrs. Campton.

            Mrs. Kellar called Mervin Erickson, who was on duty as night watchman, and Dr. Gollin.  Sheriff Morris Moon was called to the scene.  The Campton couple was taken to the Viroqua hospital, where Campton died Thursday night.

            Campton was a veteran of World War II.

            Mrs. Campton is expected to recover.

            I need to add some clarification before we continue. Velma Kellar, (last name is misspelled a couple of times in the article), who witnessed the shooting of her friend Thelma that fateful night, called Mike Erickson, who had the night shift as the village policeman (identified in the article as a watchman).  Dr. Frank Gollin, the village’s doctor at the time, was also called to the scene and arranged transportation to the hospital in Viroqua for both people who were shot.  Another article in the next day’s (October 23) LaCrosse Tribunesaid that Vincent “Campton had not regained consciousness at the time he was moved”.

            There is another side to this story, actually an almost completly different version that was told to me by both LaVerne Campbell and Dick Johannesen.  Next time in the “Local History Notebook” we will look at the other version of what happened that evening in the La Farge trailer park.