By Stan Roeser

Oct. 6, 1960, was a beautiful, sun-splashed day in the Litchfield area.

At her rural home a short distance southeast of town, 81-year-old Mrs. Herman Clausen went out to the main road to get the mail.

Returning, she handed a copy of the paper to her husband. Then, as reported by the Independent Review of that week, “she stepped out again into the warm October day and quietly vanished.” No trace of her was ever found.

It was about noon when her husband reported her missing, touching off what was the most extensive search in the county’s history.

Hundreds of volunteers, National Guard members and fire and rescue personnel spent days combing the woods and wetlands surrounding the Clausen place and checked every outbuilding in a wide arc of the area.

Members of the Meeker County Saddle Club spent long days in search and a state helicopter was called in.

The incident remains as the greatest unsolved mystery in Meeker County’s history and it occurred to me the other day that we have another mystery forming now, although different in scope.

It has been almost five months now since a crew of stern-faced FBI agents swooped into our commnity to investigate ... well, nobody seems to know what.

Since that time, not a shred of information has come forth as to what the FBI was looking for, what they found, and what triggered the much-talked-about visit.

Particularly puzzling to me, as I’ve written in this space before, is the fact that our County Board and our county attorney have not recognized officially that an investigation has taken place — not made a single reference to it at meetings.

A couple of weeks ago in my story on a County Board meeting, as a last paragraph, I mentioned that this meeting had been the 11th since the FBI visit and still no mention of it at a board meeting.

This was sort of a breach of journalistic ethics since it was not relative to what happened at the meeting and did not belong in a news story.

The editor recognized that and dropped the paragraph since that comment was more appropriate to the Opinion page.

Now, writing on the Opinion page, I can report that if reference to the FBI probe is not made at this week’s meeting, and it’s not on the agenda, it would mark the 16th meeting that the FBI’s visit has been ignored.

I did have a long and serious discussion with the county commissioner from my district about this.

I noted to him that if the FBI investigation turned up indictable material it is long since past time for that to have come forward.

Similarly, if the FBI visit turned out to be nothing more than a wild goose chase triggered by the whining of disgruntled former sheriff’s department employees, the federal agency should own up to that, too.

My conversation with the commissioner resulted in no action, and I’m pretty much resigned to dropping the subject.
Why the FBI came here and what agents learned will remain through the years a mystery akin to Mrs. Clausen’s disappearance.

That FBI probe will soon be forgotten, I suppose, and it appears we’ll never learn anything about it just as we’ll never know the true fate of Mrs. Clausen.

Stan Roeser is former co-owner of  the Litchfield Independent Review.