I feel like I need to resolve this story.”

Jeff Sauve

For more information about Minnesota Mystery Night and to reserve tickets, visit www.mnmysterynight.com

Lucky's 13 Pub
1352 Sibley Memorial Highway
Mendota, MN 55150
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Mystery lovers, crime junkies, and readers alike braved the negative temperatures to attend Minnesota Mystery Night’s first event of 2025 featuring authors Lou Raguse and Jeff Sauve on Jan. 20, 2025. Each third Monday of the month, Minnesota Mystery Night features authors of all stripes to discuss their books, their processes, and the crimes that spurned them at Lucky’s 13 Restaurant in Mendota, Minn. The event, now in its third year, is recorded and broadcast as Masters of Mystery Radio Hour at a growing list of radio stations including in Benson and Buffalo, Minn. 

Minnesota Mystery Night was born from the demise of the Hastings literary event “Bookstube at the Bierstube: which ended in September 2022. According to Rob Jung, one of the founders of Minnesota Mystery Night, “I just decided to pick it up,” with the first Minnesota Mystery Night taking place in October 2022, just a month after the final Bookstube at the Bierstube. 

Raguse, an Emmy-award winning reporter for Kare 11 and author of Vanished in Vermillion, spoke with longtime archivist for St. Olaf College and award-winning author of Murder at Minnesota Point Jeff Sauve about how they found the stories at the center of their respective books and what caused them to want to write about it. 

Raguse’s book, Vanished in Vermillion, tells the story of two South Dakotan teens who disappeared in 1971 and were presumed to be murdered. 

“The whole process of how they disappeared resonated with me,” said Raguse, who was a reporter for a local news network called KELO when the case was reopened as a cold case in the 2000s. The case remained unsolved for more than 40 years until 2013 when new evidence came to light reframing much of the investigation. 

“The story isn’t about the twist. The story is about what gets you to that point,” said Raguse about the book. 

Sauve’s book Murder at Minnesota Point focuses on an 1894 Duluth murder of 32-year-old Lena Olson pieced together from newspaper clippings, letters and documents befitting an archivist. 

“I don’t know how this story chose me,” said Sauve, speaking about the story of the murder he discovered while working in the St. Olaf archive that he would eventually “become obsessed with,” to the point of having reoccurring nightmares about. While Sauve would eventually shelve the project due to the death of a friend and the continued nightmares, the story of Olson’s murder stuck with him. 

“I feel like I need to resolve this story,” said Sauve to his wife after a visit to Duluth. He picked back up the project of what is today Murder at Minnesota Point. 

Both men spoke to their own involvement in the stories told within their books, on how much they needed to insert themselves within the story they were trying to tell. 

For Raguse, who covered the cold case investigation, he was unsure how to combine the timelines of the original investigation, the cold case, and finally his own research into the event as well as his involvement in the last two sections. To better make sense of the timeline, the book is separated into three sections, only the last of which—titled simply ‘The Truth’—goes into detail about his own reporting in order to answer questions of what really happened in 1971. 

Sauve’s story of Lena Olson’s is much more intertwined with his own search through archives and newspapers across the country from Butternuts, NY to Topeka, Kan. to Tacoma, Wash. Through the course of his research, Sauve continued to have nightmares until he finally tracked down Olson’s grave located in Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. 

“The story was more than just Lena Olson’s death and her murder and the capture of her assailant, more about my own family life and when we drove home, I never had another nightmare associated with writing that book ever again,” said Sauve. 

For more information about Minnesota Mystery Night and to reserve tickets, visit www.mnmysterynight.com