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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IN EARLY MAY of this year, Jeremy Hull appeared before Judge Steven Anderson at the Mille Lacs County courthouse in Milaca. (When Lewis’s body was unearthed near Foreston, it fell to that county’s authorities to investigate and prosecute the case—a task that they quickly turned over to the state attorney general’s office.) Jeremy had been transferred to the Mille Lacs County jail, and shortly after 9 in the morning on May 9, a bailiff escorted Jeremy into the sun-bathed courtroom for a pre-trial hearing. Exactly one year had passed since Jeremy had been charged with Lewis’s murder.

Shackles bound Jeremy’s hands and feet. He was clean-shaven, with his brown hair cut short and swept straight back. Sitting alongside his lawyer in an oversized orange prison uniform, pink socks, and a pair of brown sandals, Jeremy was attentive and alert, carefully following the discussion as the attorneys and witnesses volleyed exchanges like players in a tennis match.

Family members say Jeremy has written several letters from jail. In one, according to his cousin Chad Gombos, Jeremy claims that Lewis’s death was an accident—that Lewis came to his apartment, an argument ensued, the two men began fighting, and they were wrestling when Lewis tripped over Jeremy’s dog and broke his neck—a fatal fall. Paul Wilczek Sr. says Jeremy made similar claims in a note sent to his family. Jeremy’s lawyers declined to comment for this article and an interview request sent to Jeremy at the Mille Lacs County jail went unanswered, but a letter he mailed to Casey shortly after his arrest seems to confirm that this is Jeremy’s view: “They can’t convict an innocent man,” he wrote.

The trial of Jeremy Hull is expected to begin in October, and when it officially gets underway the star witness is likely to be his former girlfriend. In June, Casey waived her right to a trial and pleaded guilty to aiding a criminal in concealing evidence of a crime. Building on her testimony and the accounts of dozens of others, prosecutors will paint a picture of a killer who plotted his crime, detailed his plans in dozens of notes and letters, and left an astonishing trail of receipts and other clues in his wake. “We can account for every step and action that he took,” says Chief Pender. “I can’t see any holes anywhere…. He could’ve kept a frickin’ diary and it wouldn’t have been any more incriminating.”

Prosecutors have declined requests to talk about the case, but court documents filed in advance of the trial suggest that their theory goes something like this:

A few days before Lewis went to St. Cloud, he got a call from Jeremy. Jeremy told Lewis he was tired of running from the law, says Sharon, and he planned to turn himself in. But before he did, Jeremy wanted to make things right. He wanted to give Lewis the $2,500 that he’d made from the recent sale of his Mustang.

Shortly after arriving at Jeremy’s apartment to collect the money, Lewis found himself with a noose around his neck—probably a dog leash. And, despite his larger size and his wrestling skills, he couldn’t free himself. Jeremy would later tell Casey that he pulled the ligature “until his arms began to tingle,” says a source familiar with her statements to police. Then, the story goes, Jeremy drove to Little Falls, took a handful of documents from Lewis’s shop, planted the note that Lewis’s friend Josh would later find, and returned to St. Cloud to give Casey the news.

The next day, Jeremy visited a branch of the Wells Fargo bank in St. Cloud and opened a checking account in Lewis’s name. He called the St. Francis Credit Union in Little Falls, where Lewis had kept his money in savings for more than a decade, and transferred $50,000 into the new account. He stopped at Wal-Mart and purchased several glass scrapers. He ate lunch at Arby’s.

In the afternoon, Jeremy dropped by the Donohue Harley-Davidson dealership in Sauk Rapids, where he bought a motorcycle. He registered the vehicle in Lewis’s name, met with an insurance agent to take out a policy on the cycle, and then—feeling suddenly flush—returned to the dealership to purchase a pair of chaps, two vests, and two leather coats. One of the jackets would be a gift for Casey.

But Jeremy still had one problem: How to dispose of the old Lewis? Getting the body wrapped in a bedspread, out of the apartment, and into the bed of the silver Ford must have been relatively easy.

“College kids were moving out, so if someone was carrying something out of the building, it wouldn’t have attracted attention,” observes Pender. But getting rid of it altogether would take some work. The day after Lewis disappeared, Casey drove Jeremy to the local Target, where he bought two shovels. After dark, she would later recall, they set out for Foreston.

They took two vehicles and drove fast. They flew along Highway 23, her car following Lewis’s truck through the towns of Parent, Foley, Ronnesby, and Oak Park, stopping only briefly at a service station to buy a sub sandwich and fill a container with diesel fuel. At Foreston, they turned south, slowing only as the road twisted past the old school, the baseball diamond, the cemetery, and a new real-estate development, Foreston Oaks (“New Homes Starting at $160,000”). A mile south of town, they turned off the road into a driveway marked by an antique threshing machine. It was Jeremy’s old place. Casey got out of her car and into the pickup.

On the far eastern end of the property, down an old rutted road that crossed a field, skirted a junk yard, traversed a marsh, and passed through a thicket of trees, lay an old gravel pit. At one end were the hulks of two gutted speedboats, filled with Miller Lite cans and Mountain Dew bottles; at the other end, stood an old Frigidaire, used for shooting practice.

During high school, Jeremy and his friends had often come here late at night to get drunk, make out, race four-wheelers, and tell ghost stories as unseen creatures hooted and trilled in the shadows around them. There was a huge pile of wood on the premises—perfect for making fires.

Jeremy removed Lewis’s body from the back of the truck. It was shoeless, Casey would later recall, and bound with tape and electrical cord. Jeremy dug a small grave, dumped the body in it, chopped at the hands and feet with a shovel, and poured on the diesel fuel. While he stoked the fire, she made trips to the woodpile. Casey would later recall him saying it smelled “like a barbecue,” says a source familiar with the case.

But a body is not an easy thing to destroy. Even burning fuel can’t incinerate bones. So Jeremy covered the remains in dirt and they left for the night. Early the next morning, he rented a Bobcat and returned to the site to finish the job. He sent Casey a text message: “LOL he is deep!”

Pender shakes his head in disbelief as he recounts the story. “I think that he lived in fantasyland,” he says of Jeremy. “He thought he could change his life for himself and his girlfriend. It’s money, but it’s not a lot of money. You don’t assume someone’s identity, go 30 miles down the road, and expect that you’re going to get away with it.”

He pauses, then adds, “Everything that Lewis was, he wanted to be.”
 

ON A SUNNY but windy afternoon this past April, more than 200 people gathered at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Little Falls to bury Lewis. It was the first anniversary of his disappearance, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had only recently released the remains of Lewis’s body after processing them as evidence. The assembled included a few cops, a detective from St. Cloud, and dozens of teenagers and twentysomethings. Many wore specially made T-shirts that read: “Show them angels what a real Ford sounds like.”

A murmur went up from the crowd as the funeral procession arrived. Following the white hearse were four Ford trucks in different colors. Three of them had once belonged to Lewis. At the wheel of the last vehicle, an old orange four-door, was Paul Sr. He helped Sharon from the passenger side and they joined Norine, Lori, and Paul Jr. under a red canopy as the pallbearers pulled the casket from the hearse. The coffin was metallic blue with silver trim—shiny as a sports car.

After the service, Sharon had everyone over to the house for sandwiches and coffee. The mood was almost festive. Adults reminisced and ate bars at tables set up in the garage, while Lewis’s friends chewed tobacco and talked out in the yard. There was a table with pictures of Lewis at every age. There were scouting awards and high-school diplomas. One girl had even painted a picture of Lewis’s truck at a mud run.

Midway through the evening, Sharon went down into the basement and opened the door to Lewis’s old bedroom. He hadn’t lived there since high school, and storage boxes filled half the space, but the room still contained mementos of his childhood: There were boxes of Legos, drawings of monster trucks, a picture of the Little Falls wrestling team circa 2000, and a closet full of T-shirts and polos carefully arranged by color.

Just outside the room was a framed poster: a series of photographs pasted on tag board. Sharon explained that it was something Lewis had made in elementary school. His fifth-grade teacher had instructed the students to construct a visual chronology of their lives, beginning with a baby photo and ending with a picture of the person they most wanted to be someday: Michael Jordan, the president, a movie star, a NASCAR driver.

Lewis and Sharon had spent several evenings working on the project, sifting through old albums to find images of him as a baby, as a toddler, as a kinder-gartner. He selected snapshots of birthday parties and wrestling meets, pictures from a scouting trip to Fort Portage and a family vacation to Disneyworld. Lewis had arranged the photos in order and, above them, written his full name in cursive script. He had added stickers to the mix, and handmade drawings, too. And at the end of the series, where others had put images of actors and astronauts, singers and sports stars, Lewis had pasted a picture of himself.

Joel Hoekstra is the managing editor of Minnesota Monthly. He can be reached at jhoekstra@mnmo.com.