In Memoriam: Little Shrimp on the Prairie

Some of you will remember that I've been covering, off and on, any news about the Little Shrimp on the Prairie, i.e., Tru-Shrimp's Madison Bay Harbor since 2018.

(See HERE for my adventures with Dark Ally as we went to Bellaton, searching for the lost Salt Water Aquariums of South Dakota Agriculture.  It's worth it for the scene where we found with 5 listless shrimp floating in a hopefully saline home aquarium, probably begging for their blessed release...)  

And, even though Tru-Shrimp got counties and towns to pony up development, money, and lots of publicity, and even though they promised endless pounds of shrimp from their dark saline towers, nothing has yet been built. Anywhere.  

And now it's official, folks, it never will be:  Sob, sob, sob... (feel free to read that anyway you like.)

"In December, 2018, the [South Dakota] Governor’s Office of Economic Development, or GOED, announced plans for a cutting-edge shrimp production facility in Madison, South Dakota. GOED granted $5.5 million to the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation for the project.

The Lake Area Improvement Corporation loaned the money to Tru Shrimp, the company, at 2% interest. The company is now known as Iterro. They planned to build the facility in 2019. Then, they pushed it back to 2024. As of today, it has yet to be built...

Rep. Marty Overweg is the Vice-Chair of GOAC. He said they need answers.

“They took that out and got private investors, South Dakota investors, to invest in their company also because the state of South Dakota gave them the startup money of $5 million," Overweg said. "So not only did they stick us for $5 million, they also stuck a whole bunch of South Dakota people who privately invested in this company. And this is bad business. I mean this is a drop ball, huge mistake.”  

(Uh, Marty, this is what South Dakota does best - look at EB-5, Gear Up!, and many, many more...) 

Iterro and the Madison Lake Area Improvement Corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment."  (LINK) 

(And if they did, Iterro would undoubtedly answer, "How about never.  Is never good for you?") 

And to anyone who wonders how on earth this happened:  Greed.  Simply greed.  Tru-Shrimp might as well have been selling shrimp-shaped trombones - NO ONE WAS GOING TO MAKE MONEY EXCEPT TRU-SHRIMP.  But there's one born every minute, and a lot of them wear suits and ties and seem sane on the outside... 

Oh, and before they ripped Madison off for $5 million in tax dollars, they ripped off Luverne, MN, for $5 million in tax dollars before ditching them.  

So that's their MO, and if someone comes to your small town or city somewhere on the priarie - or anywhere else - says, "Guess what! There's a company that wants to come here and raise shrimp!" RUN, do not walk, away from them, holding all your money tightly to your chest, because otherwise they'll rip it away from you the way you rip an exoskeleton from a shrimp.  

Me and Dark Ally offer our thoughts and prayers:

Oh, how we hardly knew ye.

*******

And now for something completely different...  

Some days it seems like that's all that's out there, doesn't it?

This is why I miss Colombo, Maigret, Tommy & Tuppence Beresford, and other detectives who actually like their spouses and their jobs.  And I keep reading Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Dame Frevisse and Cadfael, Nero Wolfe and Jackson Lamb's Slow Horses misfits. They all know who they are and are pretty comfortable with it, no matter how weird and wonderful they get.  

And speaking of being comfortable with who you are, if you haven't yet, check out 1989's mini-series "Summer's Lease" with the late, great Sir John Gielgud playing (at 85!) the cheerfully sponging, endlessly lecherous, sometime journalist Haverford Downs, who manages to slide into his only daughter's family vacation to Italy. There they find their host has disappeared, and there's a very suspicious death...  Gielgud won a Primetime Emmy Award for that role and he deserved it.  Here's episode one, from YouTube (which has all the rest of the episodes, too):

Enjoy.

MEANWHILE, BSP!  

A review from London's own "Murders for August" by Jeremy Black:

"Paranoia Blues. Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon (Down and Out Books, 2022) is an excellent volume edited by Josh Pachter, following similar volumes for Joni Mitchell (2020), Jimmy Buffett (2021), Billy Joel (2021) and the Marx Brothers (2021). Each story is matched to a song. Hardboiled America is the setting, and the themes are grim but also well-realised. The writing is spare and aphoristic, violence is to the fore, and it would be good if several of the novelists mentioned this month could match the quality of the writing here. There is no space to review all 19 of the stories, but they are impressive, kicking off with Vietnam echoes and killing in the New York subway system in Gabriel Valjan’s “The Sounds of Silence”. R.J. Koreto’s “April Come She Will” addresses fraud and blackmail, with some marvellous lines: “For men, the possibility of sex is actually better than sex itself…. August, the end of summer, a time when relationships die”. Robert Edward Eckels had stopped writing in 1982 but resumed at 90 to write “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine”, an account of office theft, poor management, and measured retribution. Frank Zafiro’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” deals with the travails of an elderly mob enforcer: an instructive perspective. Anna Scotti’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a brilliant and humane account of hardship, care, and a concealed suicide. Tom Mead’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” takes Civil Rights into violent crime in New York including a spring-loaded leather strap on the protagonist’s wrist. Excellent book."  

I am proud to say that my first "Cool Papa Bell" story (which is also its title) appeared in it.  Cool Papa Ted Bell, former shortstop for a minor league Florida team, is serving life for murder. He feels "kind of bad about it now", but not enough not to turn to the tried and true when he finds Aryan Nation gang The Brand is beating up the infirmary orderly. In prison, justice comes in all kinds of forms. And I never said he's reformed...  

Available at DownandOutBooks:

https://downandoutbooks.com/2022/10/31/new-from-down-out-books-paranoia-blues-crime-fiction-inspired-by-the-songs-of-paul-simon-edited-by-josh-pachter/

And my second Papa Bell story, "Round and Round" is in "Janie's Got a Gun", edited by Michael Bracken.  That one's a ghost story set in a penitentiary, and I can assure you that the ghost is real...  

Available at https://whitecitypress.com/product/janie/

And, of course, both are available on Amazon.com...

Enjoy!
  

Little Shrimp on the Prairie - the Return!

Stop the presses and start mixing up the cocktail sauce! 

Or maybe not yet.  

Once again, aquaculture company Tru Shrimp has announced that they're sadly going to have to put off groundbreaking for the Madison Bay Harbor until 2024. 

What could possibly have happened?  After all, this facility will be "modeled exactly on what is here in Balaton. That facility will be capable of producing about 1.8 million pounds of shrimp, over 4,700 kg of chitosan, and about 600,000 pounds of pet food ingredient.”  

What is chitosan?  I'm so glad you asked.  It's "a sugar that comes from the outer skeleton of shellfish, including crab, lobster, and shrimp. It's used as medicine and in drug manufacturing." However, there is no good scientific evidence for its use for most purposes. In fact, the words used throughout the WebMD article are "might be used for", and "possibly safe". Unless, of course, you're allergic to shellfish. (Reminds me of Barb Goffman's Bug Appetit, which was nominated for multiple awards.)

And I would love a definition of "pet food ingredient."   

Now back in 2019 I wrote a blogpost about Tru Shrimp (Little Shrimp on the Prairie) where I related how me and my compadre Dark Ally went to Balaton, MN, in search of the Great Cultivated Shrimp.  We found an old elementary school with 6 shrimp bobbing around in a home-sized aquarium in the lobby.  There was a new construction with no windows out back, in the former school playground (?) and the lobby obviously had cameras, because a person in charge came out to try and find out who we were and what we wanted.  We told him the truth:  we were a couple of old snoops who wanted to know what was going on.  And, after pointing out the shrimp in the aquarium, he encouraged us to leave. 

Back then Tru Shrimp had already received $11 million in "incentives" (i.e., grants and loans, and nobody's talking about how much private investors have put into it).  But so far all they have - still - is a lot of money and they haven't spent a penny yet, except on advertising and fundraising as far as anyone can tell.  Oh, and research.  Endless research. 

And they don't even own the land yet:  Brooke Rollag, the executive director of the Lake Area Improvement Corporation, said that the LAIC has "engaged in a land option with Tru Shrimp Madison" with Lake View Industrial Park land the LAIC owns.  (SDPB)  WHAT????

BTW, the Lake Area Improvement District (LAID for short, and Oh, the things I could riff about that, but this is a semi-family publication) in Madison also invested money in the company. "That money holds a convertible note that becomes stock in Tru Shrimp when the company breaks ground."  (SDPB) Leading to the obvious question:  STOCK IN WHAT????  

Also, back in 2019, Tru Shrimp promised the potential for 120 jobs and tens of millions of dollars of economic impact. Now? 60 jobs. (Dakota Free Press)

Back in 2019, I wrote, when someone asked me if I thought there was any "there" there, and I replied that I think there's just enough "there" there to cover taking millions in South Dakota money. Especially if we just give it to them. Which South Dakota did.  And there's still nothing to show for it, except a sign:  "Future Home of Tru Shrimp Bay Harbor"  

Purely informational: The dictionary definition of Ponzi scheme is "a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors."

South Dakota really needs to take to heart the immortal words of Paul Newman:

If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you. 

Meanwhile, Dark Ally and I have been discussing how we can get in on the game.  Not Tru Shrimp, but the amazing game of launching a new company without assets or (as far as anyone can tell) product.  I mean, Jared Kushner got $2 billion or so from the Saudis for an investment firm with no assets or experience, so how hard can it be?  Anyway we've come up with a new idea:  Urban Buffalo. 

Basically, the idea is to take a newly, probably permanently emptied urban office building and repurpose it for industrial, indoor buffalo ranching.  They'd have to have feed, which perhaps we could source from Tru Shrimp, but they're probably angry with me by now, and I'd want a definition of "pet food ingredient" first.  Better yet, it could be a new way for South Dakota farmers to make revenue.  Raise the feed, and ship it to Gotham for the buffalo.  

And the buffalo would supply so many needs, from the meat (incredibly healthy and nourishing) to the hides (incredibly warm).  But perhaps its most important product would be the buffalo chips.  Used as fuel on the prairies from the earliest days of Native Americans to mountain men to the pioneers, buffalo chips were and still are ideal.  They burn like coals, with an intense heat that is odorless (no pollution!), almost smokeless (again, no pollution!), and almost ashless (easy waste disposal!).  

And, working on an industrial scale, we may have the solution to the entire problem urban heating / cooking costs.  The potential is massive.  The research is invaluable.  The investment is obvious.  

My only question is, what should we call it?  Is "True S***" too subtle?  

Now for some BSP:

Josh Pachter's Paranoia Blues is one of the five finalists for the Anthony award in the Best Anthology category, and Ed Aymar's "Still Crazy After All These Years," from it is a finalist in the Best Short Story category! And I am honored to have "Cool Papa Bell" in it!

Available at https://downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-paranoia-blues/

And on Amazon HERE

Just Another Day in Paradise

First of all, RIP, P. J. O'Rourke, with whose writing I often disagreed, and almost always laughed. A couple of my favorite quotes from Parliament of Whores:

"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

"A reporter needs to remember that any time a politician tells them they are 'present at the making of history', can achieve the same feeling by going around to the backside of a dog and being 'present at the making of earth.'" (That one's paraphrased – but close enough!)

It's been a hell of a month, so far, in South Dakota. Suddenly Marty Jackley and Kristi Noem are endorsing each other, for AG and Governor respectively.  Four years ago, of course, they were taking knives to each other on horseback.  

We had two successive Sioux Falls police officers arrested for possession, manufacturing and distribution of child porn on yet another app I'd never heard of, Kik Messenger, where apparently you can sign up and send anything you like without giving them name, address, email address, phone numbers, in other words, in near-total anonymity.  (Argus)  Rumor is that the feds are investigating.  The mayor and police chief are vowing to review hiring practices for the department. Good idea. And maybe check their cell phones every once in a while. After all, employers can check your social media online, right?  

I know everyone's saying Covid is over, but no one's told us up here.  We're averaging 6 people dying a day for quite a while.  Only 31% of South Dakotans have been fully vaxxed and boosted, which means - for those who don't do math – that 69% of the population have NOT been fully vaxxed and boosted. In fact, 30% haven't had even 1 dose. And people wonder why I still wear a mask when I'm shopping at the grocery store. That and the fact that there's always one person who's unmasked walking down the center of the aisle while sneezing and/or coughing up a lung without benefit of hands or inner elbows.  (Ewwww!!!) 

Meanwhile, Little Shrimp on the Prairie is back!

(For those of you who have forgotten my previous investigative journalism on this company - with the help of my dear friend, Dark Ally - see this walk down memory lane:  Little Shrimp on the Prairie)

Or maybe not.  Tru-Shrimp, the Ballaton, MN indoor shrimp farming company, which has been on hold for a number of years after getting a few million investment dollars from, among other things, Lake County, SD, announced a month ago that they would be offering an IPO – 1.5 million shares at between $9 and $11 per share. Among my inner circle, loud laughter ensued. And it's only continued now that – once again! – Tru-Shrimp is backing off, and once again, our dream of home-farmed shrimp for the masses is dying in a vat of stagnant water.  (SEE HERE.)

Meanwhile, on February 21, 2022, Jan Grape did a post about "Been arrested lately?" which was great. (HERE)

And my answer is yes, I have been arrested - way, way, way back in 1972, in L.A., specifically downtown Hollywood, in a police sweep that was meant to assuage shopkeepers who were tired of shoplifters and other kinds of trouble. 

So one night the police came through and arrested quite literally everyone in sight. EVERYONE. Including my then boyfriend. Well, that freaked me right out, but I knew better than to go running up and raise hell. So instead, I went home – which was about 3 blocks away, in the Blackburn Hotel (names changed to protect the guilty). And a cop followed me. Inside. Up the stairs. And walked right into our studio apartment and arrested me. Cuffs, a muttered Miranda, and down to the station, where I was booked and put in jail. 

That was Friday night. I spent the weekend inwardly hysterical, thinking of endless possibilities of never getting out, or getting lost in the system, while outwardly pretending to be calm, fasting, and doing yoga in the cell hallway whenever they let us out for a bit. God, I was a good actress. The result was that on Monday, I was let go along with almost everyone else against whom there were no real charges. (Just about everything that my arresting cop did that night was illegal.) No arraignment, nothing. Just led me out, gave me back my few belongings (including a crumpled pack of cigarettes), and out the door. That first cigarette was sheer heaven!  

The only problem was that I had no real idea where I was. The jail was not in downtown Hollywood, so I bugged some people, found a bus, got a ride, made it back to the general area, and got back home late that afternoon. Great reunion. All was well. 

BTW, the shopkeepers really reamed out the cops over that sweep.  They didn't want us, the residents, arrested. We were their customers. Poor as we were, we were the ones buying coffee, cigarettes, newspapers, donuts, in the morning, the Red Mountain wine at night, not to mention toiletries and generally keeping the bodegas and the coffee shops going. You know, regulars. The shopkeepers didn't want us locked up. They wanted more police presence in the stores, keeping an eye on the strangers coming and going. In the [short] remainder of my time in the area, there were no more sweeps. 

And that's been it for my official criminal record – and after 50 years, with no arraignment, I kind of think my non-existent record has been expunged.

Little Shrimp on the Prairie

by Eve Fisher

I realize it's been a while since I've updated everyone on South Dakota's own particular band of crazy, and there's a lot of it.  So much, that I'm going to have to do this over a couple of postings.  Today:

LITTLE SHRIMP ON THE PRAIRIE

Sadly, the Great Cultivated Shrimp will not be roaming the aquatic halls of Madison, South Dakota, any time soon.  Some of you may have forgotten that the idea of raising shrimp in tanks was first floated by Tru Shrimp to be built in Luverne, MN.  But then things went mysteriously sour, and Madison, SD leadership grabbed the project for themselves.

Tru-Shrimp supplied photo at Argus Leader

But why?  How?  Well, according to the Argus Leader (HERE)

"Luverne officials say they didn't know it, but concerns expressed in late 2018 with the city's wastewater facility had effectively driven away Tru Shrimp.  A big pork producer was also planning to open in the city, adding its own significant amount of volume to Luverne's wastewater system.  Documents obtained by the Argus Leader show that regulators wondered about they system's capacity with two new businesses coming to town. Luverne's wastewater plant had already failed two tests measuring the quality of water it was releasing into the environment.  Even if the city's plant could treat Tru Shrimp's wastewater, state pollution control officials worried the fluid would still be too salty to discharge and eventually flow into the nearby Rock River, endangering fish, wildlife and downstream agriculture.  Luverne met with pollution regulators in November, also inviting representatives from Tru Shrimp to the meeting at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s office in Marshall, Minnesota.  Minnesota’s pollution control officials never got a clear understanding about what to expect from the Tru Shrimp facility despite multiple requests for information, wrote ex-MPCA Commissioner John Linc Stine in a letter to Luverne officials, sent after the company's decision to build in Madison." 

Another version, floating around Madison, is that when  a certain member of the Madison task force asked why they thought of Madison, the Tru Shrimp representative said, "God told us to come here."

But apparently God has other plans, because now the Tru Shrimp ground-breaking in Madison has been cancelled, and "No new ground-breaking date is currently set for the [Madison] facility."  (Madison Daily Leader)

But why?  How?

The whiteleg shrimp (juvenile shown),
the preferred species for shrimp farming. - Wikipedia

Because, while "[SD] State and local officials committed $6.5 million in taxpayer dollars for a low-interest loan for the Tru Shrimp project this winter, including $5.5 million directly from the governor’s Future Fund... [that] money has not been enough to justify starting. It will help Tru Shrimp prepare for the Madison site, and is being used to help cover research and development costs at Tru Shrimp’s Balaton, Minnesota-based facility." (emphasis mine)  (Argus Leader)

In other words, millions of South Dakota, Lake County, and Madison tax payer backed $$$ are currently going to their "research and development center" in Balaton, MN.

Purely informational:  The dictionary definition of Ponzi scheme is "a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors."  

Anyway, all of this intrigued me to no end, so I made a road trip to Balaton, MN, with my trusty sidekick and best friend - "Ally - Dark Ally" - because this whole thing was increasingly feeling like The Hunting of the Snark, and I had to have someone to snark with.

Balaton, MN, home of Tru Shrimp R&D, is a shady, old-fashioned little town of 640 people.  If that strikes you as being kind of small to host the headquarters of a multi-million dollar research and development center, you're not alone, and was one of the reasons I had to go see the place.  Balaton does have a beautiful lake on the outskirts of town which would presumably take care of their water needs.  The old Balaton school is being used as the administration building.  The large concrete building (built in 2017-18) in the back with no windows and a barbed wire fence (which reminds me, some day I'll have to tell you about Cheneyville on the outskirts of Sioux Falls) is where the R&D is done.  In other words, where the tanks are.

Dark Ally and I stood around, discussing the place, and watched as various people - all men, dressed in office casual - went inside.  So we walked across the street and tried the door.  It was open, and in we went, too.

The lobby has not been renovated from its old school days.  There was a generic pop machine (with a variety of religious quotes and verses posted on it), a sign that the gym could be rented out for special occasions, but was otherwise private, and a standard-sized aquarium, complete with aquarium tchotchke and 5-6 shrimp bobbing along the bottom.  A few people came and went, but to go past the lobby area, you needed a computerized chip card, and I wasn't even going to try that.  Besides, there was a camera watching our every move.

"Shrimp Girl" by Hogarth
Wikipedia

Someone must have seen us on camera, because a man came out of the back and asked if we needed help.   Now remember the first Argus Leader quote above.  I said, "I'm from Sioux Falls, and I heard about Tru Shrimp and wanted to see what it was about."  His instant reaction was to tell us that "The Argus Leader article was all wrong; we don't dump salt water anywhere. We pay for that salt. We don't dump it, it's expensive."  Then he asked - pointing at the aquarium - if we'd seen the shrimp.  We said yes.  (Later, Dark Ally said we should have asked if we could buy some, and I replied yeah, we could ask if they sold by the pound or by the piece.)  I asked if he had any handouts and he went back down the locked hallway and returned, eventually, with a large postcard style flyer saying they're a subsidiary of Ralco Agriculture (out of Marshall, MN).  And strongly sent out a vibe that it was time for us to go.  So we went.

BTW, if you want to check out the Tru Shrimp website - it's HERE.  Pretty boiler-plate, stock photos, lots of color, little actual text, and no maps or pricing.  And a hint - "consumers confirmed that products raised in a trū Shrimp facility," and "Advanced water filtration systems are implemented for each and every trū Shrimp location" - that there are multiple facilities, when so far the only facility is in Balaton.

Anyway, later someone asked me if I thought there was any "there" there, and I replied that I think there's just enough "there" there to cover taking $6.5 million in South Dakota money.  Especially if we just give it to them.  Which South Dakota did.

EB-5, Gear Up, Tru Shrimp - we keep this standard up, and someone might start to think we're easy.

STOP THE PRESSES!!!!  HOT HEADLINES FROM MADISON!!!!

Last night's headlines in the Madison Daily Leader (Click headline for complete article):

Tru Shrimp is committed to building Madison Bay Harbor

My notes after reading the article:

Initially, Tru Shrimp planned to harvest 4.5 million pounds of shrimp annually; that has been increased to 8 million pounds annually.  

• BTW, the first shrimp for sale were offered 3/27/19 - in Balaton.  "About 300 pounds of shrimp was harvested for Tuesday’s sale, and more will be available fresh on Thursday."  300 pounds x 365 days = 106,900 pounds a year. (Link)  Wherever their next harbor is built, it would have to be VERY big indeed.  

The Balaton Bay Reef in Minnesota cost $11 million. 

The Luverne Bay Reef was expected to cost $45 million.  (Star Tribune)  

The Madison Bay Harbor is expected to cost around $350 million. 

Ziebell hopes the necessary capital will be raised by the end of the year.  The company currently has 24 investors and "a very engaged investment bank."

• From $11 million to $350 million is a heck of a leap.

• From $45 million to $350 million is a heck of a leap.

• $350 million is half of the State of South Dakota's entire education budget, and one-fifth of the state's entire revenues.  

• It's going to take some very rich people or a very large number of investors to pull this one off.  

And now for some BLATANT SELF PROMOTION!!!!

Check out Me Too Short Stories:  An Anthology, edited by our own Liz Zelvin!  I am honored to be part of the company with a story in it - "Pentecost" ("The minister worries about her parishioners" - and she should.  Or maybe they should worry about her...  Darla's a firecracker!) - along with a whole host of wonderful authors.  It's now available for pre-order
HERE Amazon.com Kindle and
HERE for Amazon.com paperback. The official release date is September 3, and there will be a launch party at the Mysterious Bookshop in the Big Apple on Tuesday September 24.

And my latest short story will appear in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  On a cruise ship, a trophy wife in pursuit of a country-western singer seems like an obvious case of "The Seven Day Itch".  But it's never that simple...

Best to all, and more craziness coming soon!

What We're Best at Being Bad At

Ah, the nuances of our various United States.  And, thanks to the Internet, we have more memes and statistics and sites than ever before to show everyone what we're good - and bad - and very VERY bad at.

According to the Reader's Digest, South Dakota is Best at Retirement — Everyone’s golden years are more, well, golden in South Dakota, where a combination of low taxes and happy residents makes it the best state for retirement according to Bankrate. And we're Worst at Child Mortality Rate — Unfortunately, the younger generation in the Mount Rushmore state isn’t faring so well. With 47 teen and child deaths per 100,000 people every year, it’s leading the nation in child mortality.  So - give birth somewhere else, but come here to retire.  Interesting...

How does this compare to other states I've lived in?

Well, California is Best at diversity, and Worst at quality of life. I'm surprised at that, because I remember California as wonderful - and I don't think it was all youth and hormones...

But it beats North Carolina (where I went to graduate school for a while at Chapel Hill), which is Best at Millenial Living but Worst at STDs. Please folks - start using condoms!

Georgia is Best at onions - specifically Vidalia, and I can attest to their sweetness.  It's Worst at flu prevention.

Tennessee is Best at Fast Wi-Fi - apparently the state's internet is 50 times speedier than the national average, and God only knows how they got that - and Worst at childhood obesity rates.

But let's move on to crime.  What's the most famous unsolved crime in every state?  (see MSN to look up your state.)

In South Dakota, it's the murders of 30-year-old LaDonna Mathis and her two sons, aged 4 and 2, shot dead on September 8, 1981, in Mount Vernon in Davison County, South Dakota. The father, John Mathis, was shot in the arm, but survived. He said a masked man had carried out the attack, but investigators considered him the prime suspect. He was acquitted a year later when a jury found him not guilty, mainly because the prosecution had no witnesses, no murder weapon and little physical evidence.  "As I look back, I would have recognized that at that time there was a myth, a myth that parents could not harm their children, No. 1," then-Attorney General Mark Meierhenry said. "No 2., that sometimes myth overwhelms reason. Because it's what we all want to believe."

NOTE:  The Argus Leader has a whole different set of top five unsolved mysteries - look them up HERE.

BTW, there are lots of gruesome stories on this website, but the weirdest one is from Vermont:
Between 1920 and 1950, as many as 10 people mysteriously disappeared in a patch of woods surrounding Glastenbury Mountain in southwestern Vermont. Native Americans consider Glastenbury Mountain “cursed” and used it strictly for burying their dead. They believed the land to be cursed because all four winds met in that spot. There is also mention in native American folklore of an enchanted stone which is said to swallow anything that steps on it. Some have also reported UFO activity and Bigfoot sightings in the area.  Author Joseph Citro coined the term "Bennington Triangle" in 1992.  Well, sounds like a new movie franchise to me.

John Dillinger

The most notorious crime for each state is almost always entirely different (see Insider) than the "most famous unsolved" one, with the exceptions of the murder of Jon Benet-Ramsay in Colorado, and the murder of TV star Bob Crane in Scottsdale, AZ in 1978.  But they are indeed all notorious - I'd heard of most of them, including the 1924 murder by Leopold and Loeb of their 14 year old cousin, Bobby Franks, the 1954 Clutter murders which was the source material for Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", and Jeffrey MacDonald, who was accused and eventually convicted of the 1970 murders of his family at Fort Bragg.  BTW, Mr. MacDonald has consistently declared his innocence (but then so do so many), but has consistently been refuted, denied, etc.  However, in 1997 DNA testing was done on some hair from the crime scene, some of which matched no one in the MacDonald family.  So far this evidence has not been enough to get him a new trial.  That happens more often than you'd think.  

Meanwhile, in South Dakota, it's when John Dillinger robbed the Security National Bank in Sioux Falls on March 6, 1934.  He got $50,000, which would be almost a million dollars today.

Now it's very appropriate that a bank robbery would be our most notorious crime, because when it comes to crime statistics, South Dakota is best known for its larceny.  61% of all our major crimes are monetary, and if you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention to my past blogs on EB-5, Gear Up!, and Maria Butina:  61% larceny and theft, 14% burglary, 14% aggravated assault (combine drinking and winter, and a lot of stuff happens around the bars or at home), 7% motor vehicle theft, and the remaining 4% rape, robbery, and murder/manslaughter.  (MuniNetGuide)

I looked over the charts, and while the numbers do change, the actual proportions of crime look almost the same for all the states. But you feel it a bit more in a state like this.  South Dakota has a current population of around 870,000, which means that each and every South Dakotan will either experience crime, commit crime, or feel the effects of crime upon them or someone they know. You know that whole "Six Degrees of Separation" rap? Here it's Two Degrees. At the most.

It's like when Carl Ericsson, 72 years old and holding a serious grudge, came to Madison, SD one night in 2012, and went literally from door to door, looking for someone on his grudge list who was home.  (Yes, he had a list.)  Fortunately for all but one, the only one home was a very popular retired teacher, Norm Johnson, who Ericsson shot twice in the face.  Johnson died that night.  I knew Johnson - he always was the host of the annual Spelling Bee, and I was one of the AAUW women who judged it.  I also knew him from substitute teaching at the high school when we first moved up to Madison.  I didn't know Carl Ericsson, but I knew his brother (who was also on Carl's grudge list), and all of his brother's family.  And that night the deputy who lived next door to us knocked on my door and asked me to babysit his kids while he went to join the other law enforcement looking for the shooter.  This was before anyone knew who the shooter was, or where he was, or who he was looking for.  The deputy gave me a gun in case the shooter came calling, and I sat there while the kids slept for a few hours.  Safe, but listening for footsteps on the sidewalk, and/or a knock on the door.  Everyone in Madison (population 6,000+) knew either Ericsson, Johnson, or both.  It resonated in a way that you almost never see on TV.

But back to embezzlement.  Besides grifting on the state level, there's also one heck of a lot of small potatoes embezzlement here in South Dakota, much of it fueled by gambling addiction and/or medical bills.  $500 from the local VFW; $1,500 from a doctor's office; $2,500 from a nursing home.  Interestingly, besides the public humiliation, the punishment is more a slap on the wrist:  the main penalty is to pay the money back and do community service; rarely is there any jail time.  Perhaps that's why it's so common...

But every once in a while it gets bigger than video lottery.  Just recently, up in Kingsbury County a family-run grain elevator has gone bankrupt because the family was hedging commodities and lost as much as $15 million of other people's money. Now that's serious gambling. And the farmers who trust them are in a world of hurt.  The farmers hauled their grain to the elevator, waited for prices to go up and the grain to be sold, and then waited, waited, waited for their checks...  Besides the fact that the grain elevator pocketed the money, while grain purchasers have to post bonds to guarantee that they'll pay the grain producers - but this company only had a bond of $400,000.  That's going to resonate for a long time.  Maybe longer than murder.  (KELO-TV)

Anyway, that's all from South Dakota, where we talk like Mayberry, act like Goodfellas, and the crazy just keeps on coming.

 

PS - In a sea-filled flavor of things to come, Madison, SD is taking up shrimp farming!  Tru Shrimp, from Ballaton, MN, has announced plans to build its first commercial shrimp harbor in Madison. "The facility is expected to employ 60, produce 8 million pounds of shrimp annually, and have a $30 million impact on a five-county area."  (Madison Daily Leader)  Because nothing says shrimp harbor like the plains of South Dakota... I see a real story coming here, folks, and I will keep you posted!

PPS - Leigh Lundin's tid-bits from Florida have made me feel that I need to provide aid and comfort to him in regard to a certain Mr. Sardo.  (Leigh's post)  Here in South Dakota, on January 11, 2019, an Ipswich man was convicted for fulfilling his dream of having sex with underage twins - in this case, two calves.  He tried to claim that the laws against bestiality were unconstitutional, but the judge didn't buy it.  (Story Here)