The Tragic and Heartwrenching Murder of Dennis Jurgens 

Unable to have children of their own, Lois and Harold Jurgens took in several adoptive children over the years. Dennis wasn’t even their first. When he came to live with them, he already had an older brother, Robert.

On Palm Sunday, in 1965, a local doctor responded to a call from Harold Jurgens, who said, “I think my son is dying.” 

When Doctor Peterson arrived, he found a 3-year-old’s body, already dead and covered in bruises. The cause of death proved to be peritonitis from a ruptured bowel.

But how the bowel had ruptured and where the bruises came from was never pursued. Neighbors were told that Dennis had fallen down the basement stairs, and on his death certificate, where words like “homicide” or “accident” should have gone, authorities simply wrote “deferred.” 

“In the 1960s,” writes Murderpedia.org, “the term child abuse had not yet been coined and no one, not even medical professionals and teachers, was required to report suspicions.”

There was an investigation, and Robert was temporarily removed from the Jurgens’ home, but no charges were filed, and Dennis was buried in nearby St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

Within just a few years, Robert was returned to the Jurgens household. And he wasn’t alone for long. In 1972, the Jurgenses were allowed to adopt four more children, three brothers and a sister, all hailing from Kentucky.

While social workers raised red flags—a child had, after all, died in the Jurgens’ care—they were overruled. The Jurgenses had hired new lawyers, they had been cleared by psychiatrists, and they had a letter of support from their pastor. 

Leaving aside the tragic death of Dennis Jurgens, the Jurgenses seemed like exactly what authorities were looking for in an adoptive family. They were devout Catholics, financially stable, and Lois Jurgens’ brother was the police lieutenant in the town of White Bear Lake, Minnesota, where the couple lived at the time of Dennis Jurgens’ death.

Furthermore, the Jurgens had been charged with no crime in relation to the death of the child, so authorities could find no reason to prevent them from adopting more children. 

The conditions that those children would later describe were nightmarish. Force-feeding; holding heads under running water. According to Robert, however, it was Dennis who received the worst of his adoptive mother’s violence.

Testimony from neighbors and family members said that as early as two years of age, Dennis appeared in public wearing sunglasses to hide black eyes.

It was said that Lois Jurgens tied him to his crib or bed to keep him there. By the time he was two years old, Robert was able to flawlessly recite the Rosary.

When Dennis did not learn as quickly, she forced him to kneel on a broomstick and practice until he had it down. 

Ultimately, it was the tenacity of Dennis’ birth mother that put an end to the abuses of Lois Jurgens, though by then, Dennis himself had long been in his untimely grave.

In 1980, Jerry Sherwood called the Ramsey County welfare department, trying to find out what had happened to her child. Her reply came six weeks later, in a devastatingly terse letter. “We are sorry to inform you that your son died on April 11, 1965.” 

By 1980, Dennis should have been 18 years old. Instead, he had been gone for more than a decade. Jerry Sherwood was devastated, and she felt she had to learn more.

It was during a trip to Dennis’ grave site in St. Mary’s Cemetery that the truth came crashing in on her. There, in the cemetery’s record book, she found a brief newspaper item from the day after his death. It said that the child had died of a ruptured bowel and that the body bore multiple injuries and bruises. 

“My God,” she said aloud. “They beat my baby to death.” 

Following this discovery, Sherwood pushed for the case to be reopened. A lot had changed since 1965, after all, and the biggest change was in the ways that authorities recognized and responded to child abuse.

In 1962, a landmark paper had been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Titled “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” the study began a nationwide shift in how child abuse cases were diagnosed and treated. But the shift hadn’t happened in time for Dennis Jurgens. 

In fact, it wasn’t until 1971 that the term “battered-child syndrome” made its way into a case before the Minnesota Supreme Court, and 1975 when Minnesota adopted legislation requiring doctors to report on the mistreatment of minors by their guardians. By then, Dennis Jurgens had already been dead for a decade. 

When Sherwood brought the case back to the attention of the authorities, however, this sea change had already taken root. The response was very different than it had been more than a decade before, when Doctor Peterson arrived to find a 3-year-old dead.

It didn’t take long for the investigation to conclude that the child’s death had not been an accident but murder, and that it was the result not of an isolated incident—but a pattern of abuse that also made victims of the Jurgens’ other adopted children. 

On May 12, 1987, Lois Jurgens went to trial for the murder of 3-year-old Dennis, some 21 years after his death. In an avalanche of damning evidence and harrowing testimony—including from Dennis’ older brother, Robert, who, alone among the Jurgens children, had stayed close with his adoptive parents over the years—Lois Jurgens was found guilty of third-degree murder and sentenced to up to 25 years in prison. 

She served considerably less than that. In 1995, after spending just 8 years behind bars, she was paroled. Her husband, Harold, died in 2000—there was some initial suspicion that she had poisoned him, but the coroner’s report ruled that out—and she lived the rest of her life as a widow, dying at age 87 in 2013. 

Though justice came late for Dennis Jurgens, Jerry Sherwood, and the rest of the children abused by Lois Jurgens, the case became a landmark in the history of child abuse law. While it’s too much to say that such a tragedy could never happen again, the safeguards in place now are far sturdier than those that failed Dennis Jurgens.

Barry Siegel, who reported on the case for the Los Angeles Times, went on to write a 1990 book about the incident, A Death in White Bear Lake.

The story was also turned into a TV movie in 1992, starring Beverly D’Angelo, and a stage play in 2005.

So, while Dennis Jurgens is gone, the “bubbly, sturdy boy” that he was in his brief life is not forgotten. 

To learn more about Dennis' story, listen to the podcast here. 

Featured images: Murderpedia and White Bear Press