RAY, North Dakota — In the midst of World War I when farmhands were hard to come by across the Great Plains, Bruce Parkinson, who used the alias Guy Hall, hopped off an eastbound train from Washington near Ray, North Dakota.

On the run, he was also a huckleberry above a persimmon, to use early 19th century slang for being needed. Good looking, brown haired and brown eyed, Parkinson was fit: weighed 140 pounds, and stood no taller than 5 feet 4 inches.

Parkinson, who was 21 years old, found farm work, but took an interest in a 17-year-old girl named Violet Hart, whose family had recently moved from Viola, Iowa, to a quiet farm outside the town of Ray.

The Hart family needed help. Arthur Hart, the husband, was nearly 1,000 miles away in Iowa tending to his mother, Mary C. Hart, who had fallen and broken her thigh, according to the Evening Times-Republican of Marshalltown, Iowa.

A scar over his left eye — as mentioned in newspaper reports at the time — possibly endeared Parkinson to Mattie, Arthur’s wife, who remained behind with their four children to take care of the farm. Previously employed at the neighboring McFarlane (some reports spelled McFarlin) farm worked to his advantage.

Mattie’s two sons, Vaughn (Vahn), 9, and Roy, 13, were too young to go to war or pull the weight of a grown man. Daughters Violet and Doris, 15, were students at Ray High School, and without further prompting, Mattie hired Parkinson without delay.

They called him Guy Hall.

Starting in early December, Parkinson began working at the Hart farm. The attraction he had for Violet — widely reported in newspapers from around the region — grew over the next four weeks.

News reports made it unclear if Violet reciprocated Parkinson’s attention, but the young man enjoyed whiskey, and Mary, 42, strictly forbade the relationship to continue, according to the Ward County Independent and The Forum, which in 1916 was called The Fargo Forum and Daily Republican newspaper.

“He (Parkinson) was about 21 years old, and of good appearance, but addicted to the use of liquor. Both yesterday and the day before he had been drinking heavily. He had been paying attentions to the oldest daughter, 17, which were objected to by the girl’s mother,” the Ward County Independent reported.

On Thursday, Jan. 6, 1916, however, something snapped inside Parkinson’s mind when the two Hart boys approached him, asking him about missing flax. Both Violet and Doris had gone into town and were visiting their aunt, Mattie’s niece, Grace McFarland.

Two motives that police at the time gave for what The Forum termed “one of the most cold-blooded and fiendish murders ever recorded in the history of the county,” was Mattie’s denial of a continued friendship with her eldest daughter.

The other motive, discovered by Mattie’s two sons, Vaughn and Roy, was that they discovered Parkinson had been selling flax from the family’s farm without authority and pocketing the money.

“The discovery may have led to their murder,” the Ward County Independent reported.

When the boys confronted him, Parkinson used a nearby thick iron bar to beat in the boys’ heads. He dragged their bodies nearly a mile away and buried them under a haystack.

“That the boys were slain while making inquiry with reference to the proceeds for the load of flax, is the generally accepted theory,” the Ward County Independent and The Forum reported.

Parkinson then turned his attention to Mattie, someone he deemed an obstacle against his romantic intentions with Violet. Using the same iron bar, he beat her over the head at the doorway to the Hart family home, then dragged her body inside the house.

Parkinson then drove into the town of Ray and purchased a handgun. He stopped by several shops and newspaper reports at the time said he acted nonchalantly. Before returning to the Hart farm, he stopped by McFarlane’s house and told Violet and Doris that their mother wanted them to come home.

They complied.

On the drive home, the girls suspected nothing until Parkinson led them to where their mother lay dead, The Forum reported.

“There she is. See what a terrible thing I have done,” Parkinson reportedly said.

He then forced the girls to sit beside their dead mother, threatening to shoot them if they tried to move or escape.

“Parkinson kept the girls prisoners in the ghastly death chamber until 2 a.m… When he ordered them into a vehicle and began a wandering drive that ended at 8 a.m. at the McFarlane home,” the Ward County Independent reported.

When they arrived at McFarlane’s home, Parkinson said he had to speak to her.

“She noticed his revolver and tried to wrest it from him. He broke away, dashed upstairs and fired a bullet through his head, dying instantly,” The Forum reported.

Police found him kneeling beside the bed, “head buried in the blood-soaked bedclothes, the gun laying on the floor,” The Forum reported.

The bullet was found lodged in an adjacent clothes closet.

Little was known about Parkinson before the murders. The “Gruesome Details of the Ray Murder Horror,” as The Forum reported, would have left many unanswered questions except that he left two notes behind, one stuck in Mattie’s mouth, the other on the dining room table.

“This is the beginning of my finished work of crime,” the first note read. It was signed: Bruce Parkinson, alias Guy Hall, escaped prisoner from the Washington State Reformatory.

A second note was found on the dining room table that read: “Please excuse me, for I am insane.” Signed: Guy Hall.

Reporters at the time worked as quickly as telegrams allowed to verify Parkinson’s notes, and by Jan. 20, 2016, a reporter from the Williston Graphic newspaper verified the information with Superintendent Donald B. Olson of the Washington State Reformatory. Built in 1910, the reformatory would later be the site for the prison scenes of the 2004 movie “The Butterfly Effect.”

According to Olson’s description of Parkinson, the man was flatfooted, and had another scar on the back of his left hand, and another from a groin operation. He had offered a $50 reward for information leading to Parkinson’s capture, equivalent to about $1,400 today.

Shortly after the murders and suicide, Arthur, who was still in Iowa at the time, wired instructions by telegram that the bodies of his wife and sons, and his two remaining daughters, be brought back to their old home. Mattie, Vaughn and Ron were buried in Wilcox cemetery.

Parkinson, who had been reported missing after his escape from the reformatory, had family in Everett, Washington,

according to the Grand Forks Herald.

His mother was too poor to have his body shipped home, so he was buried in a cemetery near Williston, North Dakota.

Newspapers in Iowa gave more details of the Hart family’s history.

“The news of this terrible tragedy is a great shock to the people of Viola where Hart and his family lived until within a few years ago,” the Times Republican reported on Jan. 3, 1916.

Fear surrounding those suffering from mental illness captured headlines around North Dakota at that time. The horrors of a triple homicide also near the town of Ray three years before was still fresh in many people’s minds.

“The murder resembles the Culbertson murder which took place in Williams County several years ago. In each instance, there was a triple murder by a degenerate, who had escaped from a penal institution,” according to a

Jan. 13, 1916 article

in the Ward County Independent.

Three years before the Hart family murders, a man named Cleve Culbertson called at the home of the Dillon family, who also lived outside of the town of Ray.

Culbertson was hired by D.T. Dillon to help build a barn the morning of the murders Oct. 21, 1913.

“After eating supper, Dillon and Culbertson, it is said, went to the barn to feed the horses. Culbertson was standing in the doorway, and according to the story told by the wounded man, deliberately fired at Dillon as the latter was stooping over the oat bin.

“He fired four shots, each one taking effect,” the Grand Forks Herald reported, adding that Dillon was shot twice in the back, once in the face, and once in the neck.

After shooting Dillon, Culbertson ran toward the house and was met by Dillon’s wife, and “killed her instantly,” according to the Grand Forks Herald. He then went to the 12-year-old Lela’s room and “deliberately killed her.”

Before Culbertson trainhopped, he ripped registration sheets from the Ray Hotel where he was staying, according to the Grand Forks Herald.

What he couldn’t have planned for is that the husband, Dillon, didn’t die instantly. He crawled to a nearby road and neighbor, J.H. Drake, heard his cries for help as he passed by. After giving him what assistance he could, he notified the authorities in Ray, The Forum reported.

Dillon gave police a full description of Culbertson, and he was arrested in Temple, North Dakota, after workers found him stowed away on a freight train. He was brought to a dying Dillon by sheriff’s deputies and identified as the shooter.

Residents of the area then said that Culbertson was Mrs. Dillon’s first husband, named Marsh. They based their judgments on a photograph that bore a likeness to Culbertson.

Culbertson, however, adamantly denied the relationship, and refused to speak with authorities, according to the Grand Forks Herald. Police found the Ray Hotel registration sheets — with his name on them — in his luggage.

For weeks, authorities failed to find a motive as to why Culbertson killed the Dillon family. The idea that Mrs. Dillon was Culbertson’s first husband “appears to have dissipated by the failure of Mrs. Dillon’s parents to identify the prisoner as Loren Marsh, the man whom Mrs. Dillon divorced six years ago…” The Forum reported.

Stumped by the inability to tie Culbertson’s homicides to an act of revenge against a former wife, and Culbertson’s sticking “to his story that he is innocent,” the case against him focused on several facts: He asked neighbors directions to the Dillon’s home before the murders; he tore the registry sheets from the Ray Hotel; and he was positively identified as the killer by Dillon before his death.

“Sentiment in the Ray district has been very high against Culbertson, and the prisoner escaped rough treatment only through the fact that the sheriff spirited him away in an automobile, making a hard drive across country to the county jail…” The Forum reported.

Culbertson’s wife was also discovered in Dorchester, Nebraska, and while she said he had not been a good husband, she professed that although he was innocent of the murders, he was a known horse thief in northern Montana.

Culbertson based his defense on an insanity plea, and at one point attacked North Dakota State’s Attorney Usher Burdick with a chair in the courtroom, according to the Ward County Independent, a jury found Culbertson guilty.

“Prisoner Says He’ll Not Hang,” declared one headline from the Williston Graphic on Dec. 4, 1913, adding that Culbertson was caught with a spoon that he tried to sharpen on the jail cell floor.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment, a penalty that did nothing to lessen the mounting anger around the town of Ray and from a group of people from Montana who began recruiting a mob.

On Dec. 16, 1913, Williams County Sheriff Carl Erickson woke to a mob of more than 40 people battering down the Williams County Jail door.

“Masked Mob Batter Down Doors of Jail,” a headline in the Ward County Independent read on Dec. 18, 1913.

Outmanned and outgunned, “(Erickson) did his utmost to hold the crowd back. Once in, they covered the sheriff with their guns and demanded the keys to Culbertson’s cell,” the Ward County Independent reported.

“He refused to give them up and when he saw that the mob meant business, he unlocked the cell door and entered the cell with the condemned murderer. He drew his gun and for a moment it appeared that the sheriff as well as some of the members of the mob would be killed,” the Ward County Independent reported.

Hearing the commotion, Erickson’s wife arrived and pleaded with her husband to surrender.

“The cell door was quickly battered down and the prisoner secured. Culbertson got down on his knees and prayed to Almighty God that the mob would spare him,” the Ward County Independent reported.

“You gave the Dillon family no mercy, and you may expect none from us,” a mob member answered.

A rope was placed around Culbertson’s neck and the mob, many of whom were masked, dragged him to waiting automobiles.

For the mile-and-a-half “torture trip to a bridge over the Little Missouri, Culbertson “fought for his life,” according to the Bismarck Tribune. One of his hands was crushed, and he may have been shot once before the mob secured the rope to a bridge and “hurled (him) to eternity,” the Ward County Independent reported.

“The mob then surrounded the body and many shots were fired, eleven of the bullets taking effect. Many shots missed, as can be seen by the splintered bridge timbers,” the Ward County Independent reported.

“The lynching grew out of bitterness against the jury’s verdict of life imprisonment for the prisoner, who brutally murdered Mr. and Mrs. D.T. Dillon and their daughter, at their farm near Ray, on October 18 last. Culbertson’s crime was without motive, and was cold blooded in the very extreme,” the Grand Forks Herald reported.

Gov. L.B. Hanna demanded a complete investigation of the lynching. Trackers were sent after the culprits, which led them to Mondak, Montana, and around the town of Ray.

“I consider this crime an outrage on the name of North Dakota and a disgrace to the state,” Hanna said.

Despite investigators promising to “not rest until they discover the identity of the ringleaders,” the investigation led to Attorney General Andrew Miller calling for Erickson’s resignation for failing to exercise due diligence.

No culprits were caught, according to a Jan. 2, 1914 article in the Bowbells Tribune. They all got away.

And no one showed up for Culbertson’s funeral near Williston, the Courier Democrat reported on New Years Day 1914.