The Unsolved Murder of John Hays
In this first episode of Minnesota Mysteries, we discuss the first ever recorded unsolved murder case in Minnesota’s history. Interestingly, several of our state’s landmarks are named after the primary suspect.
[Intro radio tuning static & old music]
Narrator: Tuning in to another episode of Minnesota Mysteries.
Pascal: Welcome to the first episode of Minnesota Mysteries, where we attempt to shed light on some of the dark corners of Minnesota’s history. We explore the supernatural elements, folklore, murders, and unsolved cases that surround our home state. Tonight, we will be looking at the killing of John Hays, the first unsolved murder case ever documented in Minnesota.
Lauren: I’ve never heard of that before, so I’m excited.
Pascal: All right! Well, let’s jump right into it. In the year 1838, 20 years before Minnesota became an established state, two soldiers entered an agreement to claim land together. The first was Edward Phalen, a 27-year-old soldier of Irish descent. Standing over 6 feet tall, he was a muscular man with a bad temper. The second man was John Hays, also of Irish descent, and 11 years older than Phalen. Hays was well-liked and had money saved up.
After the treaty of 1837, land across the Mississippi became available for purchase. Phalen was ready to be discharged after having served for three years. He would have one of the first opportunities to claim land as a discharged soldier. But he had no money. Hays still had one year left to serve but possessed enough funds to purchase two plots of land. Together, the two would be able to purchase land right away, ensuring the best opportunity to make a claim.
On June 8th, 1838, Phalen was discharged and claimed two land parcels in downtown St. Paul between today’s Eagle Street up to the Robert Street Bridge. He then began farming and built a cabin where the Xcel Energy Center parking ramp is located today. The following year, Hays was able to join Phalen and they began to raise cattle.
In September, 1839, Hays went missing, so Phalen organized a search party to look for him. Phalen claimed they had lost a calf, so he canoed with Hays across the river and left him to confront the Native Americans at their village, who may or may not have stolen the calf.
Lauren: Wait, he left him by himself at the village?
Pascal: Yeah. Supposedly.
Lauren: Okay.
Pascal: Sadly, after searching all the areas described by Phalen, the search party was unable to find Hays. The missing calf wandered home a few days later.
Three weeks later, a group of Native Americans came to Fort Snelling and told soldiers that they discovered a white man’s body down the river near Carver’s Cave in today’s Dayton’s Bluff. So a doctor and several soldiers went down to investigate and found Phalen already at the site. Hays’ jaw was broken, and his head bashed in, clearly beaten to death. Phalen, who was definitely a suspect at this point, was arrested and tried for murder.
Now, the judge at the time, Judge Joseph R Brown, assumed Phalen was guilty for quite a few reasons. Some witnesses say they saw Phalen canoeing alone and not with Hays on the day he went missing. There was also a lack of footprints where Phalen and Hays supposedly docked. Also, neighbors reported Hays and Phalen arguing often. And then, obviously, Phalen’s reputation for being a bit of a brute.
Lauren: Okay.
Pascal: Phalen was sent to jail to await trial by a grand jury. However, the grand jury did not convict Phalen, and the documents surrounding the trial are nowhere to be found.
So Phalen finally returned home only to find that a different settler had claim-jumped Hays’ tract of land (which was allowed at the time). Now this, and the fact that many of his neighbors thought he was guilty, led Phalen to sell his own tract of land. He then moved and established a new cattle farm by modern-day Swede Hollow where Phalen Creek meets the Mississippi.
Phalen became fairly successful with this new farm and was even elected a delegate to the Stillwater Convention in 1848, which helped pushed Minnesota towards statehood.
Interestingly enough, around this time, a member of the Dakota tribe, while on his deathbed, confessed to killing Hays, though the record of this was a secondhand account.
Two years later, in 1850, Phalen was charged with perjury which, if you’re not familiar with, is lying under oath. The exact details of this charge are unknown. Was it for the Hays case? Probably not since this was a good ten years later, but who knows?
Phalen decided to make a run to California with some other people. Unfortunately, for Phalen, he was killed by those companions who claimed self-defense. Now, okay, I’m not sure what kind of people would want to go traveling with a fleeing criminal who was earlier suspected of murder, but —
Lauren: Yeah.
Pascal: You know what I mean? Like, why would you run with this guy to go to California who’s escaping trial, basically.
Lauren: Right.
Pascal: So a lot of historians and reports that I’ve read call Phalen a cold-blooded murderer, but I’m not, like, so convinced. But I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Lauren: Well, so, it said that these people he was traveling with, they killed him and they claimed it was for self-defense?
Pascal: Yep.
Lauren: And do we know anything about, like, was he attacking them? Or —
Pascal: That’s what it’s, they made it sound like he, they said he attacked them and then they had to kill him as self-defense.
Lauren: Well, I mean, I don’t know. Like, you can’t knock it, like, because maybe, like, what, like, say he did kill Hays, and he has this, like, murderous urge now.
Pascal: Right
Lauren: And then he’s, like, with a group of travelers, and it’s the middle of the night, and he gets that tingle, and he’s like ‘ope, gotta go kill again.’
Pascal: Okay [Laughs]. He drew blood once, and he’s out for more. [laugh]. Like, I don’t know, it could be, it very well could be, I’m not trying to dismiss that. Someone did confess. Now, was that a false account? Cuz, like, a lot of historians it seemed like they were against the idea that this Native American killed Hays. We have the secondhand account which said that this dying Native American confessed.
Lauren: We didn’t get that directly from the horse’s mouth.
Pascal: Not directly from him. Right. I don’t know if I would dismiss that, because we take secondhand accounts into consideration, too, if there’s something there that’s legitimate. But determining that legitimacy —
Lauren: I think it’s easy to pin a crime on a dying man, because, you can’t convict, like they’re dead.
Pascal: It would help to know, like, were they a friend of Phalen’s? Or who was that person? Was it another native?
Lauren: Right.
Pascal: And there was no information I could dig up about who that was and —
Lauren: I’m going, I mean, are those our two prime suspects?
Pascal: I guess so, yeah. Just Phalen and that person, cuz we don’t know.
Lauren: I’m voting Phalen.
Pascal: You’re voting Phalen, too?
Lauren: I think he’s a dirty rat.
Pascal: So [laugh] yeah. He probably did that shit. You know what I mean? There’s land, and he was like, he would get both tracts of land but he came back and then someone else had claim-jumped it? So he sells his stuff and moves and starts his own cattle farm. He starts living the same way he was before, and it’s like the only reason he partnered up with Hays in the first place was so he could buy land, cuz he couldn’t do it by himself.
Lauren: Yeah, he needed a little extra dough.
Pascal: So he convinced this guy who was well-liked to kind of do it and he was 11 years older than Phalen! He might have been, when they were arguing and stuff, trying to, like, boss him around or something, but Phalen would not, I could see that getting in arguments a lot and the neighbors did say that they saw that.
Lauren: Yeah.
Pascal: Also, later, he was liked enough to get elected as a delegate to the Stillwater Convention.
Lauren: Well, I mean, how many people were there, 30? [laughs]
Pascal: At that time, there was a lot more, it was the 18, like, 1850, about.
Lauren: Well, I mean, we don’t have a profile on Phalen.
Pascal: Right.
Lauren: But I wanna say —
Pascal: It sounds bad. [laughs]
Lauren: I know this guy! Like, I don’t know him, but I feel like I know him.
Pascal: Okay.
Lauren: You know what I mean? Like, I feel like there was, like, ten different types of people in the world, and he’s, like a certain type, like, he’s, he’s a hothead. I feel like he just tries to climb the ladder, and he seems kinda, like, you know —
Pascal: But he was still dismissed by the grand jury and stuff like that. It’s just like a very complicated and muddled case, especially for us looking back so far.
Lauren: Did you, ah, did you see any, any photos of Phalen?
Pascal: I did not see photos of either.
Lauren: Sometimes that helps to look in their eyes.
Pascal: [laughs]And it’s also weird that the day they found Hays, the day the Native Americans come and told a soldier, Phalen’s already there? Wait, did he find that on his own, after the Natives did? Was he, like, ‘what are those Natives doing?’ Wait a minute, he would have known it’s the body, right? Or maybe he did. Maybe he, like, killed him, throws him in the river, he washes downstream farther, and the Natives found him later.
Lauren: Shady times back then.
Pascal: Right? [laughs]
Lauren: 1850s, could have been anyone. They didn’t have, uh, forensics and all that which is, like, even recently, I’ve heard that uh, like, fingerprinting isn’t as, like, we can’t trust it as much as we thought we could. And so it’s like, think of how many people we put away for that, they didn’t have anything back then, just kinda like, ‘where were you? did you know ’em? are you a witch?’ I don’t know.
Pascal: You know, so then, like, coming back to today, there’s Lake Phalen, there’s a lot of landmarks, you know? There’s Phalen’s Creek —
Lauren: That’s a beautiful lake!
Pascal: Phalen Blvd. There’s a lot of places named after this guy.
Lauren: Some shrines of a murderous Irishman.
Pascal: So, it’s like,did we just name our stuff after this murderer guy? And how did that even, I’m just not sure.
Lauren: Well, he was a, he was a delegate, you said?
Pascal: Yeah, he was a delegate. So some people had to like this guy, you know what I mean? But it’s like, he might have been a sketchy guy, they like him, but he’s a sketchy guy. He might have killed that one dude, remember? Remember that one guy that he bought that land with a long time ago? He might have killed him. You know, and then he gets in trouble for perjury! Lying under oath, later!
Lauren: But he’s super charming.
Pascal: [laughs] He’s super charming unless he wants to kill you and buy land with you.
Lauren: He’s got a silver tongue.
Pascal: Sctually, this year, a play was put on called ‘The Unsolved Murder of John Hays’. It sounded like their take was, like, yep, Phalen was a murderer, and they just kinda —
Lauren: That’s interesting.
Pascal: It would have been interesting to see. I think it was on, like, early September, late August even.
Lauren: Yeah.
Pascal: I’m not sure. I believe it was this year, it could have been last year.
Lauren: It was a play?
Pascal: Yeah, it was a play.
Lauren: Like, playing in Minneapolis?
Pascal: I think in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Do not quote me on that, though.
Lauren: Ok, you just quoted yourself. I don’t want to be too biased. It’s hard, there’s not that much evidence to work off of when it’s that long ago, but, based off what we do have, believe you!
Pascal: No, but believe me when I say, like, some of the accounts I read, were pretty biased-sounding. Yep, he’s a cold-blooded murderer. That’s the guy we named our places after.’ But then when I was reading, like some other ones, it seemed a little more detailed, they gave a little more unbiased information it seemed like, and I tried to really put everything in here basically. You know what I mean? That’s unbiased. But I don’t want to, like, leave out some of the details, so it’s like, it sounds like the guy was probably a crook, and some of his friends were too, they killed him, you know?
Lauren: There’s nothing, like, he wasn’t found with, like, blood physically on his hands and he wasn’t like ‘ope! you caught me! but I didn’t do it.’ like it’s, it really is just kind of, like, where he was at the time, and how he knew him, and the circumstances that led —
Pascal: Snd they’re killing cattle, too, you know what I mean? So people were like ‘there’s blood on the farm. but was it cattle blood, we can test,’ cuz they can’t. [laughs]
Lauren: Oh yeah, they taste it. [laughs]
Pascal: Lovely. [laughs]
Lauren: I wanna know more about this, the Native American man that was dying and supposedly confessed to this crime. And I wanna know who quoted him on that. Who was that person who was like ‘I heard it! he told me! he whispered it into my ear as he was dying, his last breath.’
Pascal: That would be the number one thing I want to know, too. It would be really strong evidence there, I think.
Lauren: Have you heard of the people who confess things on their deathbed, just ridiculous things. There’s been, like, eight people who said they were DB Cooper as they were dying or, like, crazy stuff, and they’re just losing their mind a little bit and then they’re dying, and also they want, like, something to be remembered for, or one last secret, and it’s just like, I can’t imagine that murder was so brutal, this is so cool, how impressive, how insane, so he was like ‘I’ll take credit for this before I die.’
Pascal: Yeah, I don’t know, the whole thing’s a mess and forever will be, so, we’ll never know what happened to John Hays. But Phalen probably did it.
[both laugh]
[outro static]
(Podcast was originally released 5 months ago and was accessed through Player.FM)
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