27 years ago this month, a Winona search for 5 missing SMU students, alums ended in tragedy
Mar. 24—WINONA, Minn. — They were last seen on a Saturday morning outside a bar in Winona.
And then they disappeared.
For five days, the mystery as to the whereabouts of three students Saint Mary's University students and two alums riveted and haunted Winona and the college community to which they belonged.
The search for them, by air, land and water, covered a 35-mile area of ice-covered backwaters, off-road trails and bluff areas. But in the end, the answer to what happened to the five lay only blocks from the downtown Winona police command center for the search.
Two searchers in an airboat patrolling the Mississippi River spotted two tire tracks bending down toward the river near the end of Huff Street. There, they found a hubcap and some green auto parts — items were later confirmed to belong to a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, the kind of vehicle owned by one of the missing alums.
Divers found the vehicle resting on the river bottom not far from shore. They pulled the bodies of Anne Locher, 22, Susan Wall, 21, and Mary Clare Karnick, 21, SMU seniors, and SMU alum Jason Collins, 24, from the vehicle. The body of Timothy Stapleton, 25, who escaped through a sunroof, was found two days later in the river.
As word spread of the discovery, onlookers massed along a flood dike near the downtown, as a towline pulled the sport utility vehicle partially out of the water. Onlookers sobbed. A person wailed. Relatives of the victims were also present. Blankets were held up to shield the work of pulling the bodies out of the vehicle. The bodies of two dogs were also found in the vehicle.
Twenty-seven years to the month after the March 1, 1997 incident, it remains one of Winona's great inexplicable tragedies. The desire to know what happened in such circumstances could never be and was never fully answered. But beyond that, the price paid in human life was so exorbitant for what was likely a chain of youthful mistakes that is easy to imagine anybody making.
The vehicle appeared to have missed a turn on Riverview Drive that paralleled the Mississippi near downtown Winona. It then hurtled over two sets of railroad tracks, went down an embankment and drove over a flood dike.
The Nissan Pathfinder was moving 41 to 49 mph — at least 10 mph above the speed limit — and there was no evidence of significant braking, investigators concluded.
They were reportedly last seen at about 1:15 a.m. in the area of Second and Third Streets and had left Rascal's Bar. Officials said a cellular phone owned by Stapleton continued to send out an electronic signal until 3:22 a.m. Saturday. The time was recorded by the Winona County Coroner as the official time of death.
The two-hour gap between their last sighting and when Stapleton's phone stopped working fueled speculation by authorities that the group went to another bar in Wisconsin where drinks were available until 2:30 a.m.
Even before the discovery, a pall of gloom and foreboding had settled over the campus. Friends would describe the five as "spontaneous," "adventurous" and "fun-loving." It wouldn't have been surprising, they speculated, if the group had gone on a road trip together. Stapleton was known to take the Nissan four-wheeling and drive on ice.
Alarm began to grow among friends when one of the women failed to show up for work Saturday and one of the men didn't show up for a local dart tournament.
"You look and see an empty seat next to you and you know it's supposed to be filled by one of them, but they're not there," said one SMU student.
The driver was taking the most direct route from downtown to the campus when the accident happened. The possible timing of the accident appeared to back up theories that the group left the downtown area for another place to party or drink. But investigators were never able to corroborate that theory with eye-witnesses who saw them in Wisconsin.
Still, the possibility of their crossing the bridge into Wisconsin was the main reason for conducting a search covering such a wide swath of area.
Soon after the end of the search with its harrowing conclusion, a dispute broke out about whether the toxicology report on the five should be made public. Because investigators were never able to determine who was the driver at the time of the accident, opponents argued that the information on their blood-alcohol content should not be released. But a judge ruled that the results of the investigation were public information. All five were found to be legally intoxicated.
How the students should be remembered also became a source of tension in the community. Saint Mary's University wanted to erect a memorial in the form of a bench at the crash site. It would include a plaque memorializing the five. But the proposal was rejected by the city council, which worried that it would send the wrong message about drinking and driving.
