The Hudson Murders

On February 5, 2002, the St. Croix County medical examiner walked into the O’Connell Family Funeral Home in Hudson, Wisconsin, expecting paperwork and found two men dead. Dan O’Connell, thirty-nine, the funeral director, was at his desk. James Ellison, a twenty-two-year-old mortuary science intern, was shot in the back as he tried to get out. Hudson had not had a murder in more than twenty years.

The case went nowhere for almost two years, through a $100,000 reward and roughly 1,800 interviews. In April 2004 a young man told investigators he had been groomed and sexually abused by Father Ryan Erickson, a priest at St. Patrick’s in Hudson at the time of the killings. Detectives learned that on the day he died O’Connell had told a friend he meant to confront someone about children being abused. When they questioned Erickson, he described details of the scene that had never been released.

On December 9, 2004, a search of Erickson’s rectory in Hurley turned up more than forty child abuse images. Ten days later he hanged himself behind the rectory, leaving notes that denied the killings. With no one left to try, prosecutors used a John Doe proceeding, and on October 3, 2005, Judge Eric Lundell concluded that Erickson had probably committed both killings. A wrongful death suit by the Ellison family was dismissed in 2008.