The Quarry Girls
Jess Lourey
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The FBI defines a serial killer as a person, usually male, who murders two or more people, usually female, in distinct events. While serial killers have always been around (I recommend researching Gilles de Rais if you’re low on nightmare fuel), they didn’t capture the public consciousness until the early 1970s. That’s when the first wave of big-name monsters—John Wayne Gacy, the Zodiac Killer, Son of Sam—were active. Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later.
Specifically, according to Vronsky, while all American soldiers who fought in WWII were trained to kill, a small contingent used the cover of state-sanctioned violence to also rape, torture, and collect human body parts as trophies. Though most returning GIs successfully reintegrated into society, some brought the brutality of war into their homes, abusing their families behind closed doors. That abuse, occurring as it did in a culture openly promoting war, created the fertile ground from which the first major crop of American serial killers would spring.
I’m hungry for this information.
The luridness, certainly, attracts me.
There’s also the truth that 70 percent of serial killer victims are female. You better believe that knowing you’re prey heightens your interest in the predator. You find yourself desperate to make sense of largely random acts of serial murder, believing that if you can understand motivation and hunting patterns, you can protect yourself.
But my desire for this information is more than morbid interest or self-preservation.
There’s something personal there, too.
I was born in Washington State on an army base, my dad fighting in Vietnam. After he was discharged in 1970, we moved to the north side of Saint Cloud, Minnesota. Perched on the Mississippi River, the small city was known for the Pan Motor Company, a car manufacturer that failed spectacularly; granite, with Saint Cloud’s “Superior Red” and “Superior Grey” used in gravestones and prisons across the nation; its two colleges; and a medieval-looking correctional facility surrounded by an enormous stone wall, the second biggest in the world built by inmates. (The Great Wall of China is the largest.)
Three killers were on the loose in Saint Cloud when I was growing up there.
Only two have been caught.
And there you have the truest reason I seek out information on serial killers: to make sense of my childhood, to help me understand the fear in my community and in my home.
Here’s what I discovered about the predators terrorizing Saint Cloud in the ’70s.
CHARLES LATOURELLE
In October 1980, Catherine John and Charles LaTourelle were both managers at a St. Cloud State University pizza parlor. LaTourelle got drunk one night and decided to visit the restaurant after closing time. He lurked in the basement, vomiting at one point from the drinking he’d done. When Catherine John passed his hiding spot on her way to lock up, LaTourelle stabbed her twenty-one times and then raped her. Afterward, he dropped her body into the nearby Mississippi River before returning to the murder scene to clean up her blood and his vomit. When another worker spotted him, LaTourelle called the police to confess.
While serving time for John’s murder, he revealed that it wasn’t his first.
On June 14, 1972, then a seventeen-year-old paperboy, he’d shot and killed Phyllis Peppin in her home. Claiming to have been obsessed with her, he’d broken in intending to rape her. Peppin’s husband was the prime suspect until LaTourelle’s 1999 confession.
KILLER #2
Two years after the murder of Phyllis Peppin, on Labor Day of 1974, Susanne Reker, age twelve, and her sister Mary, age fifteen, asked for permission to walk to the nearby Zayre shopping center to buy school supplies. It was a walk they’d taken many times, and they were responsible girls. Susanne played the violin and had plans to be a doctor. Mary wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. They were both outwardly happy and had a stable home, which is why it was surprising that, shortly before Labor Day, Mary had written in her journal, “Should I die, I ask that my stuffed animals go to my sister. If I am murdered, find my killer and see that justice is done. I have a few reasons to fear for my life and what I ask is important.”
The sisters never returned home from their Labor Day walk.
Nearly a month later, their bodies were discovered in a Saint Cloud quarry, both dead of multiple stab wounds. Authorities believe the killer or killers were young and knew the girls. Traveling-carnival worker Lloyd Welch, age seventeen at the time, sexually assaulted a Saint Cloud woman at the same quarry a few days before the Reker sisters disappeared. Seven months later, he kidnapped and killed two young Maryland sisters, Sheila and Katherine Lyon.
In 2017, Welch was sentenced to and began serving a forty-eight-year sentence after confessing to the killing of the Lyon girls more than forty years after the fact. He has never been charged with the Reker sisters’ murders.
Local teen and contemporary Herb Notch worked at the Zayre shopping center the girls visited the day they disappeared. Two years after their bodies were discovered in the quarries, Notch and an accomplice robbed the Saint Cloud Dairy Bar and kidnapped the fourteen-year-old girl working the counter. They drove her to a gravel pit outside of Saint Cloud, sliced off her clothes the same way Mary’s clothes had been removed, sexually assaulted her, stabbed her, covered her with brush, and drove off. This heroic girl played dead until Notch and his accomplice left, then managed to walk half a mile through the darkness to find the nearest home.