Anyone with information should call the sheriff at 701-567-2530.
No answers in disappearance
By VIRGINIA GRANTIER, Bismarck Tribune People started noticing things. Things were different.
Tillie Rosenow noticed that next door a light had burned through the night, Aug. 11, and then it kept burning through the next -- the light above the kitchen sink in Norman and Yvonne Olson's house, 409 N. Main St. in Hettinger, said Adams County Sheriff Eugene Molbert. In the about 10 years Rosenow had lived next door to the Olsons, that light had never been left on before.
"My folks never did that," said Jackie Muggerud, the Olsons' daughter, who lives in Hettinger.
And there were other things.
The Olsons normally had a routine. They were up early and had their things to do. They kept their yard mowed and trimmed, their decorative well and water pump and planters full of flowers, and the two-story house was always clean, everything poised in its proper place -- always in ready-for-company condition. But things were starting to look less routine.
The Rev. John Mathai, 39, Holy Trinity Catholic Church's priest, noticed that Yvonne Olson, 69, an extremely reliable Saturday night Mass attendee, wasn't at Mass on Aug. 14 in her regular spot in the third row to his right.
Maggie Wandler, a friend of Yvonne Olson's for more than 30 years, lives across the street from Holy Trinity's rectory. Wandler started noticing she wasn't seeing her anymore working over at the rectory. Yvonne Olson was the flower caretaker for the rectory's flowerbed that she and her husband had planted.
Rosenow also started noticing that the Olsons' flowers in their yard weren't being watered and their car was gone.
Muggerud, 47, unable to reach her parents by phone on Saturday, Aug. 14, came over, noticed their car was gone and was planning to scold them about not telling her about their travel plans. She liked to keep in touch for various reasons.
One reason: Her father, Norman, is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. He was diagnosed about a year ago and in June had started taking Prozac.
On Sunday, Aug. 15, she went over again. Still not there.
On Monday, Aug. 16, she saw a note left Friday at her place of employment, Dakota Bank, while Muggerud was out of town on business. The note, from a fellow employee, was to let her know that Rosenow had watered her parents' flowers. About 15 minutes after reading the note, Rosenow walked in and asked where her parents were.
Muggerud tried calling them again. Nothing. "I was really getting nervous."
On Tuesday, Aug. 17, she called during the day. Nothing. That evening she called an aunt in Montana to see if they were there. They weren't.
At about 7 p.m., she had her husband, Dave Muggerud, break down the small garage door to get into the house. They first smelled and then saw the rotting pork chops in a package on the kitchen counter.
And their concern kept growing. They saw her mom's purse with checkbook and credit cards in its usual place right beside dining room buffet. They got more worried when they saw the locked front door barricaded by a chair.
The coffee pot was on and the pot was hot. There was a cup of coffee with a little coffee inside, spots of mold on it.
A plate with banana bread slices were on the counter. Jackie Muggerud said one of the Olsons' phone messages, a Thursday, Aug. 12 message, had a conversation on it, apparently recorded because Yvonne Olson had picked up the phone late. In the conversation, Olson is heard telling next-door neighbor Neil Krischen that she'd bring the banana bread over right after it came out of the oven, around 4:30 p.m. that day. Krischen told investigators he never got the bread, Jackie Muggerud said.
At the end of Tuesday's search of the house, Dave Muggerud spotted his mother-in-law's glasses on the floor -- the ones she put on first thing in the morning and didn't take off until night and which she absolutely needed for driving. After seeing the glasses, "(We) knew something was really wrong," he said.
They called the police from the Olsons' house.
Dave Muggerud said a .22-caliber revolver that family members had seen in the past, and which Norman Olson had promised to one day give to a relative, hasn't been found.
Two people told investigators they saw the Olsons on Saturday morning, Aug. 14. One saw Yvonne Olson in her garden. Another saw Norman Olson staring out from behind the front door.
A third person is about 80 percent sure she saw them walking together down Airport Road on Saturday morning.
Those were the last sightings.
So where are they now? They're still gone. More than a month later.
And Molbert said Friday he has nothing new to report.
Numerous searches involved law enforcement, volunteers, relatives, friends and Jackie Muggerud's two brothers from Arizona -- who since have had to go home to job and family responsibilities. The sheriff's department is now taking a wait-for-new-information approach.
"If something comes to us, we'll check it out," he said.
Dave Muggerud, a respiratory therapist at West River Health Services, said he sees in his wife's face what this is doing to her. It's always on her mind. She still won't go out with friends and spends a lot of time at the dining room table looking at maps.
Jackie Muggerud didn't know that when she took some rhubarb over to her mother on, she thinks, Tuesday, Aug. 10, that it might be the last time she would see them. Everything seemed normal.
Normal conversation. Small talk with her dad.
"They seemed absolutely fine," she said.
And that was comforting because there had been some concerns in recent weeks.
Muggerud confirmed that her mother had told her she was concerned that, she didn't know anymore what would upset Norman Olson and it was like living on egg shells, pins and needles.
"She had told me it was getting kind of tough," Jackie said.
Molbert said Yvonne Olson had told a couple of other people that, too.
Friend Maggie Wandler, whose husband was afflicted with Alzheimer's, said not long before they disappeared, Wandler was at the church as a volunteer doing laundry, when Yvonne Olson had come up to her to ask about her husband's behavior during his Alzheimer's.
"She asked me if (my husband) was mean," Wandler said.
Wandler told her that, no, her husband had been good, quiet, easy to take care of.
Yvonne Olson told her that her husband got "real mad."
The Rev. Mathai remembers Yvonne Olson telling him in a casual conversation that "she was getting a little frustrated with the the behavior changes she finds in him ever since getting Alzheimer's."
Norman Olson, born and raised in the Hettinger area, didn't finish high school, went into the military at 18 and served in Korea. While he was there, shrapnel damaged one side of his face.
In 1956, Norman and Yvonne, raised in south Hettinger County, married after meeting at a dance in the Hettinger area. They would live in a couple of states during his employment on a seismograph crew.
The couple, with three children, returned to the Hettinger area about 45 years ago. The couple farmed at one point, then quit and moved into town. He became a house painter and she started a cleaning business, the children helping. Yvonne Olson at one point worked as a waitress and later at the hospital laundry. She retired a couple of years ago.
Norman Olson didn't have many hobbies except making model airplanes and reading World War II history, said family members. Muggerud said he really didn't have any close friends. "He was very private," Dave Muggerud said. But he became the fastidious house painter that everyone in Hettinger wanted. He did things right, a clean, accurate job, always. It's estimated that about three-quarters of the homes in Hettinger have his stamp on them.
Yvonne Olson was the organizer of an Aug. 20 bake-sale fund-raiser for her niece's kidney transplant.
"She'd never miss it," Jackie Muggerud said. But she did.
A doll with a crocheted dress stands on the couple's kitchen table. Every stitch looks perfect, another careful Yvonne Olson project.
"They took great pride in their work," said Mathai, referring to their garden and other things. "They never did anything half-done," Mathai said.
Jackie Muggerud said her mother, smiley and about 5-foot-2 or -3, would keep busy keeping the house immaculate. Even the basement was perfectly organized, and she'd make various "crafty things."
She was tidy but casual, wore loose smock tops and stretch pants and some awful old high-top tennis shoes that her family kept telling her to get rid of but she wouldn't. They'd buy her new things, like new towels to replace her thread-bare ones, but she'd put them in a closet to save, saying they were too good to use.
The couple, devoted to family, their six grandchildren and two great grandchildren, now has a family desperate to find them and hoping that with hunting season around the corner, hunters will be able to help.
"We have to find them ... or it's going to be a very long winter," Dave Muggerud said.
The couple's missing car is a tan 1999 Ford Taurus with North Dakota license plates, EUY-288.
Anyone with information should call the sheriff at 701-567-2530.
