Episode 98: Motel Hell: The Swanson Motel Murders

Dickinson, North Dakota was once a quiet small town, sitting just 50 miles east of the Badlands until the oil boom in the 1960s. The rise in economic prosperity brought a significant transient population to Dickinson, which was mainly used as a rest stop for those seeking their fortune in the oil business. The Swanson Motel was the main area of rest, with affordable rooms to rent on a weekly basis, rather than daily. The oil boom lasted to the 1980s, bringing not only economic success but also crime with the near tripling in population numbers. In November 1981, the Swanson Motel became the scene of a brutal double homicide of a middle-aged woman Priscilla Dinkel and her granddaughter, Danelle Lietz. With no clear suspects in the small community, detectives kept running into dead ends, causing the case to remain cold for close to a decade. When a determined detective used the newly invented FBI behavioral analysis profile made for the killer, a suspect finally emerged. The man aligned with the profile almost perfectly.  Unfortunately, Justice would never truly be served. Do you believe the Dickinson police caught the right man?   Sources: “Swanson Motel Murders” on the Dickinson Police Department website (https://www.dickinsongov.com/police/page/swanson-motel-murders) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/136354938/priscilla-i_-dinkel “Deaths” Priscilla Dinkel and Danielle Lietz” in The Bismarck Tribune on November 18, 1981 “Dickinson Murders Being Probed” in The Bismarck Tribune on November 17, 1981 https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1960/population-volume-1/vol-01-01-g.pdf “Slain Girl Had been Molested” in The Forum on November 18, 1981 “Arrest Made in Dickinson Murders” by Steve Robbins and Kathleen Donahue in The Bismarck Tribune on March 2, 1991 “Relative says she Suspected Reager in Dickinson Slaying” by Associated Press in The Grand Forks Herald on April 7, 1991 “Man Accused in Dickinson Deaths Described as Gentleman and Liar” in The Forum on March 22, 1991 “’We got the Right Man’ Prosecutor says” in The Bismarck Tribune on June 19, 1992 “The Taxi” on Almost Unsolved Season 1, Episode 4 on TUBI