Fatal Collision

Lewis Wilczek, a 21-year-old from Little Falls, had the kind of life some people would kill for. Did someone?

Photo by David Bowman

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PICKUPS ARE BUILT to take a beating, and there’s no surer test of a truck’s toughness than its performance in a mud run. Held in the spring, when swampy fields can mire even the biggest vehicles, mud runs are the highlight of the year for off-roading enthusiasts in Minnesota—and a magnet for rural kids like Lewis.

Lewis collected old Fords, especially models from the 1970s and ’80s. He bought them cheap, fixed them up, and tricked them out with fat tires and slick accessories. Outside his shop in Little Falls were nearly a dozen trucks in various conditions. Occasionally he entered one of his pickups in a weekend competition. He loved the crowds and camaraderie, and it was at a mud run in the spring of 2006—roughly a year before he disappeared—that Lewis was introduced to Jeremy Hull, a 23-year-old St. Cloud resident with no steady job and a passion for cars, trucks, and cycles.

Jeremy owned a black Mustang, and a few weeks after the mud run he brought it to Lewis’s shop to have some work done. When the bill for the job came due, however, Jeremy was short of cash. So Lewis arranged a payment plan: Jeremy could work off the debt doing odd jobs and running errands for his business. When Jeremy indicated he’d also like to buy one of Lewis’s trucks but, again, didn’t have the funds, the arrangement became semi-permanent. That
summer and into the fall, Jeremy was at Lewis’s side nearly every day. He was quiet, sometimes barely noticeable. Friends joked that Jeremy had become Lewis’s “gay shadow.”

But the similarities between Lewis and Jeremy began and ended with their interest in cars and trucks. Lewis’s parents ran a successful business and were well-known in Little Falls. The Wilczeks were a family of athletes: In the late 1970s, Lewis’s father, Paul Wilczek Sr., had taken second place in wrestling at the Junior Olympics, and Lewis, too, was a skilled grappler. In school, Lewis consistently earned high Bs and low As, and, in 2004, he graduated with honors from Central Lakes College in Brainerd. He dressed conservatively: Most days he wore jeans and a beat-up Carhartt jacket, but never baseball caps. He was friendly, respectful of his elders, and often helped Father Nick serve communion mass at St. Mary’s during Holy Week. He got along with almost everybody.

“He made other people feel comfortable,” recalls Doug Ploof, an ag teacher at Little Falls Community High School. “He was comfortable with himself.”

Lewis also had the mind of a mechanic. He once fashioned a tool out of Legos to help his mother split green beans. When the family computer needed fixing, Lewis was on the job, and, as a teen, he built a phone from a kit so he could have a private line in his bedroom. Tutored by his father, he learned to fine-tune engines and make vehicle repairs, eventually developing an expertise in exhaust systems. “He could make the vehicle sound the way people wanted,” says Paul Sr. “People liked that crackle, that pop.” Lewis began doing custom jobs for friends, then launched his own business, Performance Exhaust and Metal Fabrication.

“Lewis was just a worker,” Ploof says. “He got stuff done. He made money. He had a carrot there that he wanted to work for.”

Customers admired his meticulousness. Local dealerships liked his cheap rates and offered him subcontracting jobs. Soon, Lewis had more than $50,000 in the bank and a shop that any mechanic would envy. It housed a hydraulic lift, a tire changer, and more than $10,000 in hand tools. It was immaculately kept: no greasy wrenches, no oil spots on the floor. Glass bottles and cigarettes were banned from the premises. Above the small business office was a loft where Lewis lived—the kind of bachelor pad that every young man dreams of owning, complete with sagging couch and large TV. At the foot of the stairs leading to the space, Lewis had posted a sign: Please take your shoes off when going upstairs. Thanks. Lewis.
 

JEREMY’S PARENTS HAD divorced when he was a teen, and he had stopped communicating with his father. A lackluster student, he dropped out of school after his junior year, left Milaca, and went to live near his mother in Little Falls—until he was evicted for failing to pay rent. He moved to St. Cloud, never staying at the same place or keeping a job for long. Construction work, roofing gigs, automotive repair—nothing lasted.

What’s more, with each passing year, Jeremy’s legal and financial problems seemed to mount. In March 2005, Citifinancial of St. Cloud sued him for $7,500. Four months later, a Morrison County judge ordered him to pay nearly $400 for speeding and driving without a valid license. That fall, he was charged with stealing a Bobcat skid loader from a construction site in Sartell and selling it on eBay for $21,025. (Though eventually nabbed by police, Jeremy posted $1,000 in bail and then skipped his court date.) In mid-November, the owner of an auto-repair shop called the St. Cloud police to report that someone had forged two checks on company accounts, a theft of $7,250: Both were made out to Jeremy Hull.

Still, he eluded the law. In the spring of 2006, when he met Lewis, there were outstanding warrants for Jeremy’s arrest in Goodhue, Stearns, Wright, and Sherburne counties. The job that Lewis offered Jeremy must have seemed like a godsend. No background checks. No tax forms. It was barter, pure and simple: free labor in exchange for repair services and a vehicle.

The agreement must also have suited Lewis, an avid penny pincher. “Lewis didn’t borrow money,” Paul Sr. says. “If he couldn’t do it without a loan, he didn’t do it.” His thrift extended to every aspect of life: If one can of soup was a few cents less than another, he bought the cheaper one. (“And if it didn’t come out of a can, Lewis didn’t cook it,” says his uncle Tom Wilczek.) If he could buy slightly used tires for less than new ones, he did. Lewis was “tighter than a crab’s ass,” jokes one longtime friend. Sharon recalls Lewis returning from a trip to Florida with a tattoo that stretched three-quarters of the way around his bicep: “He said it would’ve taken too long to go all the way around. But I knew it was because he was too cheap. It didn’t cost as much.”

Frugal perhaps to a fault, Lewis was furious when he discovered that $6,000 in cash and checks had vanished from his business in September 2006. The funds had been taken from a locked desk drawer, but there were no signs of forced entry. Eventually, Lewis came to suspect his former helper: Lewis had dismissed Jeremy a few weeks earlier for doing slipshod work.

One night shortly after the theft was discovered, Lewis, some friends, and his sister Lori were hanging out in a field outside his shop when they heard an engine roar. They turned to see one of Lewis’s pickups racing away. It was a vehicle that Jeremy had openly coveted, and when the police finally caught up with the truck outside the Falls Ballroom, they found him at the wheel. But Jeremy took off running, jumped a barbed-wire fence, and vanished into a thicket of trees. “The defendant remains at large,” a report later noted, “and his whereabouts are unknown.”
 

A WARRANT WAS issued for Jeremy’s arrest, but it didn’t matter. By that time, he was safely across the county line and unlikely to be apprehended unless he caused additional trouble. He worked odd jobs, hung out with Casey in St. Cloud, and, in April 2007, found an apartment near the vo-tech. The lease must have seemed too good to be true: The first month was rent-free—only a $150 deposit was required—and he could move in right away. True, there were restrictions on some kinds of pets, but that policy was easy to ignore: In short order, Jeremy’s pit bull was running around the apartment and he’d set up a reptile cage in the bedroom. To his neighbors, Jeremy was known as Chad Gombos—the name he had signed on the lease. In fact, it was his cousin’s name.

It wasn’t the first time that Jeremy had pretended to be someone else. His criminal record and lack of a driver’s license (revoked in 2004) had made it increasingly difficult to get loans, land jobs, and secure housing. Forgery became a way to survive. When a buddy joined the Air Force and got shipped overseas, Jeremy reportedly siphoned funds from his bank account. After another friend, Keith Ransom, died in an auto accident in 2005, Jeremy tried to obtain a copy of his birth certificate. The effort failed, but he did eventually manage to get a birth certificate and high-school transcript for Calvin James Leonard, a Little Falls resident who had died in 1999. On more than one occasion, Jeremy signed checks or documents with the names Cory Smith, Jeremy Smith, or Jay Kober. But even these aliases couldn’t liberate him from his criminal past and financial problems. He began to formulate a plan.

One Sunday night, roughly three weeks after he’d moved into the apartment near the vo-tech, Jeremy met up with Casey at his apartment and announced that all their problems were solved. According to court documents, he told her she didn’t have to worry anymore. He had a new identity.