Gitchie Girl: The Survivor's Inside Story of the Mass Murders that Shocked the Heartland

by Phil Hamman

“Are you sure? I can drive back by those buildings”—he pointed to a barn several yards off the road—“and maybe something will look familiar.”

  She shook her head again and pointed to a metal swing set and wooden playhouse between the barn and the house. “I know this isn’t the place.” She swung her head around to catch Vinson’s expression when he wasn’t expecting it. Would he look perturbed? Disappointed? She could handle either of those, but what she couldn’t bear at this point would be a look of doubt etched in the creases below his eyes. To Sandra, his eyes conveyed as much as his words. She’d watched the way his eyes transformed from hopeful to defensive when they’d caught “The Look” from some of the other officers. It was a look that questioned Vinson’s leadership and blatantly challenged his view of Sandra’s honesty. But now, all she saw was the same strength she’d been relying on to carry her through this far. It reminded her of the way her grandfather had looked at her when she’d at first been afraid to go into the big barn. He’d comforted her by saying it was all right to sometimes be frightened. Maybe everyone didn’t believe her, but Vinson did. And her family. That was all she needed, she convinced herself for the moment.

  After several hours in the car together, the conversations had dwindled to an occasional comment about the condition of the road or the number of silos bordering a farm. The car was silent save for the whine of wheels on smooth blacktop. Frustration built as the day wore on. Sandra wondered how many more times she’d disappoint them by having to say, “No, that’s not the place,” before they gave up on her and the search. It felt as if the entire investigation lay on her shoulders, so finding the farm was vital to bring justice for Roger and the boys.

  Vinson fell under enormous pressure from all sides as well. He continued frequent communication with the families of the victims and regularly assured them the department was doing all it could to pursue justice for their loved ones. Keeping the public calm and quelling their outrage at three killers still being on the loose was a daily battle on top of everything else that had to be done. And then there was the media. Just this morning he’d picked up and just as quickly tossed aside several requests for press releases about the investigation. There was nothing more he could share at this point. Even with all of this weighing on his mind, there was something that concerned him even more. Sandra. Her determination and strength right from the beginning had reassured him. To squelch increasing protests from his fellow lawmen, however, he decided to have Sandra take a polygraph test.

  “The girl’s telling the truth,” the expert from the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation said to Vinson. Two polygraph examiners had put Sandra through an intense round of questioning. Additionally the doctor concluded that Sandra had been sexually assaulted on the night of the murders.

  Vinson’s confidence soared; again his hunch was right. He’d thanked God that this sole witness, their shining hope for cracking the case, hadn’t crumbled under the mounting obstacles she’d had to endure. She was gradually earning a reputation as a tough but quiet girl among those who believed her story. Initially, Sandra’s emotional pain had been buffered by a fuzzy layer of shock that protected her mind from the grief and trauma she’d experienced. She’d operated on instinct, moving continuously from one task to the next with hardly time to sleep. Yet, after the sting of reality had crept upon her, her eyes had turned bloodshot, and her face was dulled with grief. She talked, but with a voice that had lost its fire. She answered questions but only with brief responses. This articulate girl who’d written reams of potential evidence and answered endless questions in the wake of breakdown had withered as day after day passed with nothing but disappointment. He could see that she was fading.

  Vinson switched on the radio and tuned in an upbeat country song to quell the uneasy silence. Then, remembering how Sandra had raved about a new rock ’n ’roll song, he moved the dial until the static disappeared, and Mick Jagger’s voice came booming through the speakers. Vinson reasoned that was about as much rock as he could handle at the moment. He pushed thoughts of a hungry press and an anxious public from his mind to concentrate on the investigation. As sheriff, he was used to juggling many responsibilities at once and others considered him adept at being able to focus on the business at hand. Today, the job of keeping Sandra focused was up to him. Over the past several days she’d enjoyed hearing stories about his family, devouring the tales about the time he spent with his friends on the golf course.

  “And you eat dinner together as a family every night?” she’d responded when he’d told her about his family.

  “Oh, not every night. Not with this job,” he laughed. “But we did all the time before I became sheriff.”

  She asked him questions that seemed strange at first. Did someone put plates on the table or did everyone get their own? Was there a tablecloth? Until it dawned on him that perhaps she was wondering how a family ate dinner together. Finally she admitted that one thing she yearned for was eating together as a family. They used to when she was a very small girl back at her grandparents’ farm, but now her mom worked so much that she didn’t have time for family meals. Everyone fended for themselves. What touched him was that she didn’t have a hint of self-pity in her voice. She was more concerned that her mom had to work such long hours and how much the two missed each other when they were apart.

  He drummed the steering wheel with his fingers a few times to break the silence before speaking. “Say, did I tell you about the time I was golfing at—”

  Vinson jumped when Sandra began screaming hysterically.

  Chapter 27

  “THAT’S HIM! THAT’S HIM! THAT’S THE BOSS!” she shouted then shot up from her seat, frantically pointing at a white pickup that had just pulled out of a driveway in front of a two-story white farmhouse. It was headed their direction on the opposite side of the road! Vinson’s foot automatically went for the brake, but he immediately stepped on the gas to regain speed. He didn’t want to draw attention to his actions. It surprised him that the driver of the pickup was unfazed by the sight of a patrol car.

  The detective in the backseat shouted to Vinson, “Pull over! He has—”

  “I saw it. I saw it,” Vinson said steadily, pulling the car sharply to the side of the road near a thatch of bushes by a bend in the road. His well-trained eye hadn’t missed anything. In the rear window of the pickup, he’d seen the shotgun hanging in the rack just as Sandra had described. He couldn’t risk having the driver, who was in possession of a firearm, see the girl. The detective and Sandra hurried from the patrol car and positioned themselves out of view.

  Vinson made a U-turn and stepped on the pedal, rapidly gaining on the white truck ahead of him. He switched on the red lights and prepared himself for a high-speed chase. To his surprise, the vehicle immediately pulled over. Vinson radioed for backup and was out of the patrol car as soon as it came to a stop. With his service revolver in hand, he ordered the driver out of the vehicle. A lanky man with short brown hair, somewhat spiky on top emerged from the pickup. Again, just as Sandra had described.

  The suspect put up no resistance and with the click of handcuffs, Allen E. Fryer, age twenty-nine, found himself in the back of a squad car headed for the county jail. The farmyard that Allen Fryer, “the Boss,” had just left contained the large red gas tank for which they had been searching. He was a hired hand who worked on the farm caring for machinery and livestock. Later, one farmer he’d worked for reported that Allen spent hours cradling and polishing his shotgun in his spare time.

  After his arrest in the early evening, he was read his rights and taken to the Sioux Falls Police Station, where he arrived at 7:00 PM. Allen waived his rights and was interrogated for three and a half hours by two policemen. Knowing that their every action could come under close scrutiny in court, the policemen wisely provided him with frequent breaks to eat and use the restroom. He denied knowing anything about the Gitchie murders but eventually admitted he’d hunted pheasants there that day. His brothers, David L.
Fryer, “Hatchet Face,” and James R. Fryer, “J.R.,” were also placed in custody. Both contradicted Allen’s claims. The investigative team immediately focused on Allen’s brothers as suspects. The detectives separated the three men, and within minutes they were all pointing their fingers at each other. Soon Allen’s story changed, and he admitted being present during the shootings but claimed he hadn’t fired a single shot. The policemen brought Allen back to Gitchie, where he retraced the route he took with Sandra the night of the murders.

  The brothers agreed that James had met Allen and David, who’d both been recently released from the penitentiary, and gone to hunt pheasants. All of them were felons and not allowed to possess a firearm yet all of them did. When they had no success in that area, they headed to Gitchie Manitou to poach a deer. After that, their assorted stories disintegrated, with each implicating the other in the shootings of the four boys. Soon, Allen, David, and James were facing numerous charges.

  David and Allen were placed in a small jail in Rock Rapids, Iowa. James remained in the Minnehaha County jail in Sioux Falls. After almost two weeks of searching for the heinous murderers, it was a satisfying victory for Sandra. Although she still struggled to sleep and had to force herself into bed at night knowing the nightmares were waiting for her mind to slip into slumber, she knew the three brothers couldn’t touch her now. She could return home. All of the questionable looks and guilty stares would now stop. She had helped put them behind bars. But for Sandra, the victory turned bittersweet. David eventually pled guilty before the trials started and was sent to Fort Madison Prison in Iowa. At about the same time, James was transferred to the Rock Rapids jail with his brother, Allen. Had Sandra known the next move James and Allen planned, she wouldn’t have felt safe at all.

  Chapter 28

  In 1928, Lyon County erected a much needed two-story jail in the aptly named town of Rock Rapids situated along the winding Rock River. The jail was built in the typical style for that era with the sheriff’s office downstairs and jail cells on that same level as well as on the second floor. A strong cement wall, presumably criminal-proof, separated the jail from where the sheriff lived as it was common practice at the time for the sheriff to reside in close proximity to the jail. There were no security cameras available and no around the clock staff, so Sheriff Vinson lived on-site along with his family. His wife served as the jail matron and cooked the meals for the inmates.

  At some point new locks were installed on the cell doors, and unfortunately no one noticed that someone forgot to secure the bolts by welding them in place. No one until Allen Fryer arrived. After years of struggling in school, he’d dropped out in seventh grade at the age of sixteen. Although he had only a full-scale IQ of eighty-seven and extremely weak reading and writing skills, he showed a strength in the mechanical skills section. With nothing to do in his cell all day but devise a way to slip out of the charges he faced, Allen’s criminal nature eventually led him to entertain the idea of an escape. He searched the cell and jail routines for potential weak spots when he unexpectedly came across the unsecured bolts.

  If the jail employees had picked one word to describe Allen, it would have been slippery. The convict was wiry, manipulative, and loath to accept blame. He was determined to side-step charges one way or another. Upon discovering the bolts, Allen stuck his slender arm between the bars but wasn’t able to bend it at the awkward angle required to reach them. A quick search of the sparsely furnished cell turned up just what he needed. The cell beds were attached to the walls with chains and a hook, giving Allen just what he needed. The hook fit snugly around the bolt. He replaced the hook back onto the chain and waited.

  Later that evening, Vinson made his usual preparations before heading home. He filed some paperwork, checked on the inmates upstairs and down, turned off all the lights, and locked the front door of the jail. Then, in the corridor above, a thin arm slid from behind the bars, hook in hand. The jangling of metal on metal echoed through the darkened cells until each bolt had fallen to the floor with a thwack. Clink, scrape, clink, scrape. The door swung open, and he let out a rowdy victory whoop. Rushing to the lower level where his brother James was locked up, he was pleased to find the cell keys still hanging on a wall peg where he’d previously seen them. Soon both brothers were loose inside the jail. Allen performed a quick search of the lower level to find anything that might be helpful to them while on the run. Yet, he found nothing of use. Minutes later, they walked out the front door in their light green jail-issued coveralls that Vinson had purchased at the hardware store as the jail operated on a limited budget. The murderers were free again.

  One sure sign of a career criminal is the ability to operate unnerved in situations that would cause most people extreme anxiety. That night, Allen and James moved boldly through the town, strutting confidently down the darkest streets and checking for a vehicle that was an easy mark. As they expected, the two found what they needed a few blocks away in front of a car dealership. It was an International pickup, which suited Allen perfectly, and it had a tank of gas as well as a set of keys in the ignition. The car belonged to a salesman who kept stacks of sales literature and forms in the pickup. The brothers shoved the papers out the door onto the car lot as they made their escape. Speeding down the nearest street, they headed west.

  The next morning, Vinson’s wife stood holding a breakfast tray in hand staring at the empty jail cell, a broken lock swinging from the open door. In times of crisis, Vinson didn’t falter, panic, or second guess himself. He acted on instinct and experience, two qualities that allowed him to immediately size up a scenario and prioritize a plan of action. The moment the news left his wife’s lips, he ran for the phone and dialed the Sioux Falls sheriff, a phone number he now knew by heart.

  “Get Sandra to safety right away!”

  Over the course of the day, Vinson and Deputy Griesse collected the few clues left behind by the escapees. “Well, Sheriff, at least the Fryers left the cell keys behind. We don’t have to fork out money for new locks,” Griesse, the jovial optimist, said with a grin, attempting to lighten the situation. Their budget was always stretched to the limit. Vinson failed to appreciate this humor. Down the street at the car dealership, the salesman had assumed someone hid his truck as a joke. When the sales literature was discovered strewn around the dealership lot, a red flag went up. That day an all-points bulletin was released to every law enforcement agency in the surrounding states.

  In less than a week the truck was spotted in Wyoming after the Fryers struck a pedestrian with the stolen vehicle. Luckily the pedestrian was not seriously injured, and the two brothers were again in custody, offering little resistance while being recaptured. Allen and James were soon back in Iowa to face their murder charges.

  Homicide investigations are notoriously complicated, and this case was muddied further by the brothers’ conflicting statements of the events of that fatal night. It was clear to the detectives that the multiple stories they’d recounted were not adding up. Each brother had made numerous claims incriminating the others. Before David decided to plead guilty, officers drove him to the crime scene. While walking through the park, he surprisingly confessed to about a dozen burglaries, allowing the police department to tie up these unsolved cases. However, he offered limited information about the night of the murders, saying he would never plead guilty because he’d told his mom he didn’t do it, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. Undeterred, the investigators continued their inspection of the campsite and surrounding area, noting each of David’s vacillating answers. By the time the investigators wrapped things up, the prosecution was ready to storm the courtroom and nail the Fryer brothers. And the prosecution was armed with a trump card that the defense couldn’t match, a thirteen-year-old star witness.

  Chapter 29

  On the first day of the trials, a detective slipped Sandra in through a side door of the courthouse to avoid the camera-wielding journalists and a sea of microphones. The media were yearning for a stateme
nt or photograph related to this high-profile case, but the police department implemented special protection to shield their young witness from the pressure of the press. Nonetheless, one enterprising photographer managed to capture a photo of her on the steps of the courthouse. For years to come, this image of a brave young girl standing alone and looking determined before facing ruthless killers would come to symbolize the essence of this trial. Vinson feared that a circus-like atmosphere might descend upon the trials, but the media showed restraint in their treatment of Sandra. Still, press from most of the major newspapers in the region poured into the city to write frequent reports about the proceedings.

  Many courtroom spectators had been waiting anxiously for their first glimpse of the lone survivor. A hush descended and heads turned when Sandra was finally ushered in by a stone-faced bailiff. The prosecution unrolled a detailed time line of events complete with evidence, crime-scene photographs, forensics reports, testimony from ballistics experts, and every contradictory interview with the Fryer brothers. When the trial for Allen began and Sandra was finally called to the witness stand, she had to force herself to look at him. His eyes were more sinister than she’d remembered, and then there was this aura of superiority about him from his smug expression to his arrogant body language. Although her lawyer had coached her ahead of time, no one could have prepared her for how difficult the questioning would be. She’d been instructed to answer only yes or no when possible and to leave the rest of the answer open. Sandra’s mom came to court with her loyally every day.

  Under the glare of Allen’s hate-filled stare, Sandra could hardly keep up with the defense attorney’s questioning.

  Attorney: And could you tell who fired the second shot?

  Sandra: Allen.

  Attorney: Do you know FOR SURE that it could not have been James that fired the second shot?