00:00:01 Speaker 1: It was Halloween night, 1986, and Noel Daluge and his friends were looking forward to a weekend of hunting, partying, and celebrating a successful football season. But by early the next morning, Noel had disappeared. The remaining high school seniors were left wondering where their friend had gone and whether some of them knew more. 00:00:21 Speaker 2: Than they were letting on. 00:00:23 Speaker 1: That's next on Blood Trails, brought to you by Tecova's. The woods of Aiken County, Minnesota were full of hunters the weekend of October 31st, 1986. One of them was another high school senior named Jim Riley, who'd made the two-hour drive north from St. Paul with a buddy. Jim's family owned a hunting cabin about 30 miles from where Noel was staying with his friends, and Jim was listening to the radio when he heard a troubling report. 00:01:01 Speaker 2: All of a sudden, it came on the radio. North St. Paul student lost in woods. And that's, of course, where we all went to school. After hearing that, I thought, man, we got to do something. So we listened on the radio, my buddy and I, some more, and nothing came up. So I went in my truck and we drove to the neighbor's house and found out more from them and actually found out who it was that was lost. And it was a gentleman named Noel Daluge. He was a really good kid, kind of a class clown, really fun guy. But I remember just maybe a week before, he had said, how do you go out in the woods bear hunting in the dark? Aren't you afraid? And I said, no, not really. Everything out there is pretty much more afraid of you. And so we had that conversation, and I had that flashback when I heard it was him missing. 00:01:56 Speaker 1: Jim was immediately concerned, so he called his dad for help. 00:02:00 Speaker 2: He said... Listen, Jim, go up there, talk to the sheriff, tell him to get one of the local houndsmen. Don't let people walk in the woods. Don't do anything. Keep the scent down and just run him down. Well, here's an 18-year-old kid, you know, senior in high school, goes and talks to the sheriff and tells him that. And his words to me were, we've never lost a person in this county. We'll be just fine. 00:02:33 Speaker 1: I doubt the sheriff at the time, a guy named Bill Sobey, appreciated a high school kid telling him how to do his job. But his words still echo in Jim's mind, and knowing what happened in the days and months that followed, it's easy to see why. 00:02:51 Speaker 3: Noel and his. 00:02:52 Speaker 1: Friends had driven up to their cabin on Friday, and Noel went missing the next day. By Sunday, Jim decided to drive over and talk to those friends himself. 00:03:01 Speaker 2: But I'll never forget, I told him, I said, hey, you guys got to come clean. If anything happened, if anything strange went down, you need to come clean right now. And one of the kids, I never forgave him for this. He said, just go home, Joe Hunter. Don't be telling us what to do. We're in enough crap already. All of a sudden, I can't talk to them. They're not saying anything. And I grew up with all these guys. They're not telling me a word. They must have decided they weren't talking to anyone. 00:03:31 Speaker 1: Jim's friends wouldn't talk to him for reasons he didn't understand until much later. But they did talk to law enforcement, and the story they told was strange, in more ways than one. Meanwhile, the sheriff launched a search effort for the missing boy that ballooned to include hundreds of people. 00:03:49 Speaker 2: Several other kids stayed at my family's place, and then we drove up every day to help. They brought in the National Guard, and they brought in Black Hawk helicopters. And they searched and searched and searched. 00:04:03 Speaker 3: Everybody was just grasping at straws on what to do and trying to contact people. Everybody was just, I mean, miffed and mortified. 00:04:15 Speaker 1: That's Noel's older brother, Matt. He told me that when the search efforts came to a close, Noel's family didn't know what to do. They didn't believe everything the sheriff or the boys were telling them, but they had no idea how to find their son and brother. 00:04:30 Speaker 3: I mean, I just remember my mom crying a lot. I remember my dad trying to stay strong for the rest of us, but grasping at straws. He would turn to us kids and just say, does anybody have any ideas? Is there anything we can do? I don't know. You know, at one point he just finally said, I don't know what else to do. 00:04:49 Speaker 1: As time passed, the rumors swirling around Noel's disappearance became all the family had of their loved one. But those rumors brought neither comfort nor closure. People whispered about hard drugs, strange cars, missing shotguns, and stolen evidence. They pointed fingers at shadowy figures in the woods, the other boys at the cabin, and even at Noel himself. The family wanted answers, but they didn't know which rumors to believe and which might be intentionally leading them in the wrong direction. 00:05:21 Speaker 3: She also said she opened up his glove box and Noel's mosquito netting was in there. And he got mad and said, don't ever open that again. 00:05:27 Speaker 4: I believe someone at the cabin knew something happened to Noel. 00:05:31 Speaker 5: I don't know who would want him dead, though. 00:05:34 Speaker 6: It becomes a whirlwind and really fast, I'm telling you. 00:05:38 Speaker 2: You know, the woods tells a story. Scavengers, clothes pulled apart. Something's going to tell a story. There's going to be clues. Something's missing with this one. 00:05:49 Speaker 1: I'm Jordan Sillars, and this is Blood Trails, The Disappearance of Noel Daljouge. Part One, Homecoming King. Noel's case has received very little media attention since he disappeared nearly 40 years ago. That's partly due to the fact that there's been very little to report. The sheriff at the time didn't offer many details, and those involved were all teenagers whose parents discouraged them from speaking to the media. But those teenagers have grown up, and two of them agreed to talk to us about why they went to the cabin and why they went to the hospital. what happened when they got there, and how they think Noel vanished off the face of the earth. 00:06:33 Speaker 6: When this year ended and we had gone further than anybody else had gone years as far as into the playoffs with our team, it was the concept, hey, let's get together, let's do something. 00:06:46 Speaker 1: That's one of the nine high school seniors who were there with Noel. We're calling him Steve, though that isn't his real name. Steve describes the group of guys as a hodgepodge, They all knew each other, but they didn't hang out in a group on a regular basis. What united most of them was the North St. Paul High School football team. One of the players, a guy named Mike, suggested the trip to a few of his teammates, and it didn't take long for word to spread around school. The cabin was owned by Mike's family, so he decided to limit the group to 10. Girlfriends weren't allowed to come, and Steve says there were other boys who wanted to be there but couldn't. The point is, while they hoped to do a little partying before hunting Saturday morning, the event was always meant to be low-key. 00:07:30 Speaker 6: I don't think it was ever intended to be like a blowout. It wasn't, you know, for anything more than just to kind of go relax and enjoy and celebrate, I guess, you know, that time of the year and finishing the season, I guess, and winding down our senior year. 00:07:46 Speaker 1: Knowing how the trip was planned makes Noel's inclusion even more noteworthy. Noel was on the soccer team, not the football team. He was good friends with some of the guys, but not all of them. Most kids in Noel's position wouldn't have earned an invite, but he had a quality that I think you'll agree is rare among 17-year-olds. 00:08:05 Speaker 6: Back in the day, you know, right, if you're on the football team, you're on the football team. If you're a soccer player, you're a soccer player. There might even be some ribbing between the two, you know what I mean, as to who's better or who's not or what sport's better, that kind of a thing. But he had no problem with that. He just had that personality that was very, very likable, very easy to get along with. Very magnetic. 00:08:25 Speaker 1: Everyone I spoke with mentioned Knoll's ability to be liked and accepted in any of the normally sectarian high school cliques. It's no wonder he was voted homecoming king by his classmates just a few weeks before he went missing. 00:08:38 Speaker 7: He was a really sweet guy. He was funny. He was well-liked. He was popular. 00:08:45 Speaker 1: That's Aaron Dalyusz. Aaron married Matt Dalyusz, Knoll's brother. She was in the same class as Noel, and she told me that Steve's assessment was spot on. 00:08:55 Speaker 7: All the girls liked him. He was a cutie. 00:08:56 Speaker 4: He was a class clown. He played hockey, soccer, baseball. He loved to go fishing with his dad, brothers. He was an all-around really good kid. 00:09:08 Speaker 1: He got along with everyone, whether it was his friends at school or brothers at home. Here's Matt and Jim Riley again. 00:09:16 Speaker 3: My older brother and I used to fight a lot. Noel was just always a nice kid that I'd say he was probably more of the mediator, if anything. 00:09:25 Speaker 2: I didn't know the kid to argue. He was very lighthearted. He didn't take things too serious. Life was fun to him. Life was a good time for Noel. 00:09:40 Speaker 1: That lighthearted, magnetic personality made it especially difficult for his classmates to accept his disappearance. 00:09:47 Speaker 4: It just started spreading through school that he was missing. And then every day we would go to school and they would bring in a TV and they'd let us watch TV to see if there's any news reports on him. 00:09:59 Speaker 7: We would put. 00:10:00 Speaker 4: Little yellow ribbons on our lockers and put the word Noel everywhere. 00:10:06 Speaker 1: Most of the students reacted with confusion and heartbreak, but not all of them. 00:10:11 Speaker 2: Somebody wrote on his locker just another dumb jock dead. And There's no way any of this had to do with each other, but another kid had committed suicide. In fact, a couple of them killed themselves. And then somebody was like, just another druggie dad. It started like a little mini war in our class. 00:10:34 Speaker 1: Knoll's disappearance sparked exactly the kind of intricate conflict he defied with the way he lived his life. The jocks and the druggies, the soccer players and the football players, the popular kids and the outcasts. Noel became homecoming king and was invited on that Halloween trip because he treated everyone the same. 00:10:54 Speaker 2: Noel wouldn't have been that guy picking on anyone. He was the guy that would make peace with everyone through laughter and jokes. 00:11:01 Speaker 1: Jim described the rest of the school year as weird. Everyone had an opinion, a theory, a wild speculation. No one knew exactly what to make of what happened or how to treat the other boys who'd been with Noel that night. Even those nine classmates looked at one another with apprehension, because the fact was they hadn't all been together for the eight hours between Noel walking away and the beginning of their search. Some of them had split off in pairs. Others had been alone in the woods for hours, hunting, or maybe something else. 00:11:36 Speaker 6: I don't think that any of those guys have the capability to do anything like that, let alone if they did, to come back and behave the way that they behaved if they had something to do with it. 00:11:48 Speaker 1: All the guys? 00:11:51 Speaker 6: Well, except for what we were talking. 00:11:56 Speaker 1: About. The boys agreed to caravan up to the cabin in three vehicles. Darren drove a 1984 Ford Ecoline, so he took Steve, Mike, Dave, and Eric. Troy, Bob, and Noel rode up in Troy's car, and Greg and Mark rode in Greg's. These kinds of details are usually not available when a case is still open, but we know this and quite a bit more because we obtained Noel's case file. This several hundred page document was compiled by the Aiken County Sheriff's Office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. It includes notes, letters, incident reports, and transcripts of interviews with all the boys. Until now, Many of these details have never been made public. According to those transcripts, the nine boys told a remarkably similar story. They didn't leave the Twin Cities area until nearly midnight because Greg was working a late shift at Red Lobster. The two-hour drive landed them at the cabin around 2 a.m., which is when the fun started. 00:13:00 Speaker 6: At that point in time, we're how old, right? So, you know, there's going to be beer involved, right? There was a keg. 00:13:07 Speaker 1: There were, in fact, two kegs. The sheriff reports that the boys tried to hide them prior to law enforcement and their parents arriving on the scene. But Steve's dad found the keg stashed in a shed outside the cabin, and by the time of their formal taped interviews in January of 1987, they admitted to having the booze. However, they all maintained that none of them got so drunk that they blacked out or threw up. 00:13:33 Speaker 5: Yeah, we weren't belated or anything because we knew we wanted to get up in the morning to go hunting. 00:13:39 Speaker 1: That's Bob Galbraith, another of the boys at the cabin that night. He said the investigators were especially interested in Noel's alcohol consumption and state of mind. If Noel had gotten drunk and then wandered into the woods with a gun, it's easy to imagine a tragic accident. But Bob said he talked to Noel shortly before they left to go hunting, and he didn't notice the boy acting particularly intoxicated. 00:14:03 Speaker 5: Last time I saw him, he seemed fine. I mean, obviously he was probably a little buzzed, but it wasn't like, no, no, no, you got to go. He wasn't stumbling around drunk type thing. So he was still coherent. 00:14:18 Speaker 1: Most of the boys said the same thing, except one. Mark told detectives that Noel had been playing a drinking game with Greg and was, quote, really kind of drunk. He later reported that Noel could barely keep his eyes open and was shuffling his feet and slurring his speech. Mark may have been the only kid willing to be honest about the level of Noel's intoxication, but he also may have been trying to cover for the fact that he introduced another toxic substance to the party that night. Someone brought cocaine as well. Do you remember that? 00:14:49 Speaker 6: Yeah, I remember seeing it. I don't remember who brought it. I also don't know if it was legitimate or not. You know what I mean? I just, I don't know. But I did see it at one point in time. 00:15:00 Speaker 1: That someone was Mark. He admitted to law enforcement to bringing, quote, one quarter of cocaine, though he doesn't specify whether that was a quarter ounce or a quarter gram. So it's unclear exactly how much was available that night. What we do know is that four of the boys tried it. Greg, Mark, Bob, and Noel. Not everyone saw them snorting it, but those who did all identified the same four boys. The presence of cocaine adds yet another variable to this equation. and when I say variable, I mean it. We don't know how much Noel drank or how it impacted him. We also don't know how much cocaine he snorted, how his body reacted to it, or whether the substance itself was real or fake. It's difficult to draw any firm conclusions without this information, but it wouldn't have taken much of both substances to create a toxic and potentially life-threatening combination. 00:15:57 Speaker 8: When you combine alcohol with cocaine, you get a unique product that results from that combination. It's called coca ethylene. It can lead to disorientation. It can lead to outbursts of aggressiveness. So mood swings, very high mood swings with aggressiveness, with anxiety mixed in. Sometimes people experience hallucinations. 00:16:23 Speaker 1: That's Dr. Oliver Grundman, a clinical professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy. He explained that cocaine is a stimulant, meaning it makes you more awake and often more confident. But for a first-time user, it can also make you anxious. That effect is heightened when you combine it with alcohol, and those effects can last for an hour, sometimes longer. 00:16:45 Speaker 8: There are reports of people consuming alcohol and then taking cocaine. And this unique product, cocaethylene, then gets relatively quickly into the brain and is just much stronger in creating an altered mental state in general. Hallucinations can be often more in the form of feeling guilty, That somebody is observing you or somebody is following you, almost a delusional state where you feel like you're being followed or you're being hunted or somebody is after you. 00:17:23 Speaker 1: Knoll's age means his body was likely able to process these substances more quickly than an older person. So it's possible that the worst of these effects had worn off by the time he ventured into the woods. But even moving from the warm cabin to the cold woods could have exacerbated his condition. 00:17:41 Speaker 8: Now when you go from an indoors warm environment into a very cold outdoors environment, the cold air is constricting your blood vessels. That interplay of the environment and the cocaine and alcohol combination can exacerbate potentially even a myocardial infarction. 00:18:01 Speaker 1: A myocardial infarction is also known as a heart attack. This side effect is more often seen in frequent users who OD, but it's not the only potential complication. 00:18:11 Speaker 9: Dr. 00:18:11 Speaker 1: Grunman explained that while a cocaine high usually lasts only 30 to 60 minutes, the crash afterwards can make people suicidal or take risks they wouldn't otherwise take. In another timeline, this story ends here. High on drugs and alcohol, Noel wandered into the woods by himself and hit his head, suffered a heart attack, or fell into the swamp. This is tragically a possible scenario, and I'm sure investigators were tempted to write off Noel's disappearance as exactly that. But they had a problem. Try as they might, they couldn't find the missing teenager. They had no idea where Noel was or what killed him. In fact, they couldn't even confirm that he was dead at all. What's more, they kept hearing the same troubling reports from the boys who were at the cabin. one of the teens, didn't seem as concerned about Noel's disappearance as the others. He'd been alone for large portions of the day, and he insisted on searching for Noel by himself. When the other boys were asked whether any of them could have done something to Noel, most pointed the finger at the same kid. That's next, after the break. Part 3. The Morning Hunt You might assume that after a night of drinking, the boys would have opted to delay the next morning's hunt. But an 18-year-old has never met a hangover he can't muscle through, and all but four of the boys went out into the woods the next morning. They started getting dressed and preparing their gear around 5 a.m. Noel had brought his shotgun and planned to go grouse hunting. Mike said he advised Noel to hunt around Robert Lake, where Noel had bagged a bird the year before. Matt says his younger brother wasn't a diehard hunter, but he'd been grouse hunting on several occasions. 00:20:07 Speaker 3: We'd go up to northern Minnesota and walked through the woods and tried to shoot grouse. We also pheasant hunted. We shot squirrels and rabbits, shot a little bit of everything. He was a good hunter and good with firearms. 00:20:22 Speaker 1: Several of the boys told investigators that Noel had found some hunting gear that was already at the cabin. He donned the cold-weather camo clothing along with what was described as a hat with mosquito netting. Bob recalls seeing Noel right before he left and wondering why he chose to wear that netting. 00:20:39 Speaker 5: He came by when I was laying in bed and I was like, what the hell are you doing? I don't even remember what he said, but he just was gone pretty much minutes later. And like, why are you going out like that? 00:20:55 Speaker 1: I think this mosquito netting would be more aptly described as a face covering, like the kind worn by turkey and deer hunters. But it struck several of the boys as odd because there are no mosquitoes in Minnesota in late October and Noel was hunting grouse, not deer or turkeys. It's a strange detail and it becomes even more important later in the story. One explanation, Steve said, is that Noel was just trying to get a laugh. 00:21:21 Speaker 6: If there was a pink cowboy hat, right, he'd have been the one to put the pink cowboy hat on to kind of, you know, get somebody to crack a joke, to put a smile on their face kind of a deal. And that's how I viewed it. He was being Noel. He was being squirrely, kind of funny. 00:21:36 Speaker 1: Whatever the reason, Noel grabbed his shotgun and, as best we can tell, left the cabin around 5.45 a.m. This is an estimate because not only could the boys not agree on when Noel left, they couldn't even agree on if anyone saw him leave at all. Eric told detectives that no one saw Noel leave, but Dave says he saw Noel walk out the bathroom door of the house. 00:21:58 Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure we all made a pact that we'd all go out with at least a buddy. And it was strange for him to go out by himself. 00:22:07 Speaker 6: I don't think he was leaving to go leave to be by himself. I don't think that that was ever the intent. But at the same time, at the time, I didn't think it was strange because I just figured he was just ready sooner than everybody else. 00:22:19 Speaker 1: Mike, Bob, and Eric had brought shotguns for grouse hunting, and they came out of the cabin just a few minutes later. But then Darren's dog got loose, and it took them five or ten minutes to catch it. Steve points to this moment as the reason no one really knows when or why Noel left by himself. 00:22:36 Speaker 6: Fumbling trying to get the dog back and all the hustle and bustle of all of that. And the next thing you know, everybody comes back later and nobody ever connected with him. Was that intentional on his part? Boy, I find the behavior, if that's the case, and now looking back at it as a parent, doesn't add up. 00:22:55 Speaker 1: After they got the yellow lab back into the house, the trio of grouse hunters walked down the driveway to the road. It was here they found something strange. Eric told investigators that they spotted Noel's gray baseball hat lying on the ground at the end of the driveway. They knew it was his. Several of them said they saw Noel wearing it, and they identified it as having a ProKennex logo on the front. Noel had only left about 10 minutes prior to his classmates, so it was an odd find. They didn't have any reason at the time to think it might be important, so Eric picked it up and they went on their way. As they were walking, they heard a gunshot. It was still dark, so this was prior to legal shooting hours. There were other hunters out in the woods, but the boys agreed that they heard the shot shortly after finding the hat. Anyone who's tried to estimate the direction and distance of a gunshot knows how difficult that estimation can be. But at the risk of mixing metaphors, the fog of time has muddied these waters even further. When Eric was interviewed again in 2004, he said they heard multiple gunshots that morning, two shots around sunrise and two about. 00:24:03 Speaker 2: An hour later. 00:24:04 Speaker 1: When I asked Bob about these shots, he said he didn't remember them at all. 00:24:09 Speaker 5: Me and my buddy were kind of like shooting at dead trees on the ground, but we made sure no one was around us. But other than that, I didn't hear no gunshots. 00:24:20 Speaker 1: The trio of grouse hunters walked around for about an hour until they started to get cold. They built a small fire, but soon decided they'd rather be sleeping than hunting, so they went back to the cabin around 7 a.m. Meanwhile, Greg and Darren had taken out their bows to look for deer. They went to separate stands about 80 yards apart, but both reported falling asleep. Darren said he woke up, climbed down, and went back to the cabin around 7 a.m. Greg also claimed to have walked back to the cabin, but we don't know what he did after that. In his original written statement from 1986, he said he slept until about 10.30 a.m. and went grouse hunting. However, when Greg was re-interviewed in 2005, he claimed that he slept until around noon. He didn't mention hunting anymore that morning, but according to a summary of the interview, said that when he woke up, the boys began wondering what had happened to Noel. His account is even more sharply contradicted by Troy, who claimed in 2004 that Greg didn't return to the cabin until around 2 p.m. You can see how difficult it was for investigators to construct a coherent timeline. They had to rely on the memories of nine high school seniors who, at the time of the events in question, were working through varying levels of intoxication. 00:25:36 Speaker 6: At that point, because everybody's spread out into pairs or whatever the case may be, not everybody's coming back at the same time. You and I might come back, let's say, at 10 o'clock or 10.30, and then somebody else comes back at 11.15, and you've got these different groups coming in at different times. 00:25:51 Speaker 1: But the question of who did what and when, and who was alone for what length of time, was at the heart of this investigation. Detectives did their best to construct a timeline of that day's events, and when they did, they realized that what happened that afternoon raised the most serious red flags. Part four, the afternoon search. 00:26:18 Speaker 5: My first thought was, you know, where the hell did he go? He probably lost somewhere in the woods and, you know, maybe tripped and hurt himself. No one can hear him. He got knocked out. I mean, who knows what could happen out there? 00:26:32 Speaker 1: Bob told me they started looking for Noel Saturday morning, but the reports indicate that the first questions began swirling around lunchtime. 00:26:39 Speaker 6: It took so long that day to develop the fact that, oh, shit. Nobody's seen him, right? He hasn't came back and nobody else has ran into him to put, to get everybody back together at the same time, so to speak, and then get everybody to understand or to realize that that's the case. That's a long part of the day that that goes on to where you don't really realize that. 00:27:04 Speaker 1: Mike, Darren, and Mark told investigators that Noel's absence was on their radar when they went out to look for Grouse that afternoon. Greg also said he went grouse hunting in an area he thought Noel would be, but returned to the cabin after, quote, a couple of hours. By 3 p.m., Darren returned from the woods and decided they should begin a more formalized search. Darren told detectives that all the boys participated in the search that afternoon except for Greg, who Darren said had gone hunting, and Bob, who stayed at the cabin. They continued searching, and as the sun dipped below the horizon, they began to consider calling law enforcement. There was some discussion on this point, given the alcohol and drugs in the cabin, but to their credit, the boys did the right thing. The Aiken County Sheriff's Office reported that at 6.18 p.m. on Saturday, November 1st, they received a missing persons report from Greg. Steve told me that the deputies who responded to that initial report seemed unconcerned. Trails and roads cut through much of that area. They assumed that even if Noel had gotten himself turned around, he'd eventually find a road and make his way out. 00:28:12 Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think that that's why the sheriff felt so strongly. Maybe he was doing that just to kind of appease us too, but, you know, hey, we've had other people get lost up here, you know what I mean? Expect, you know, us to come knocking back on the door later tonight, bringing him back to you, and he's not going to be well. He's going to be cold. He might be a little bit confused. You know, understand that he's had a tough day kind of a thing. 00:28:32 Speaker 1: Up to that point, none of the boys reported any kind of arguments among the group. But as they sat around in the cabin waiting for news of their friend, the tension reached a breaking point. 00:28:43 Speaker 6: Everybody talking, you know, as collectively as a group is, you know, oh my God, you know, what if he doesn't come back? You know, what if the sheriff's wrong as the hours are going by? We're all basically just sitting around and kind of talking through the sheer magnitude of what's like unfolding. Oh my God, you know, what if even the parents are coming up and all this other stuff and the reality starts slamming you into it. 00:29:09 Speaker 1: All the boys shared Steve's concern, except, allegedly, one. Dave told deputies that Greg cooked spaghetti that night and was cracking jokes like nothing was wrong. The other boys were already wondering about the fact that Greg had been absent during the initial search that afternoon. When he finally returned from hunting, rather than join in the worry, he was excited to show the other boys the black squirrel he'd shot with his. 22. He continued to act unconcerned through the evening, even though he was closer to Noel than any of the other brothers. and a fellow member of the soccer team. 00:29:43 Speaker 6: Everybody handles things a little bit differently. I get that. But there was never a time where that shifted to be in line with everybody else's worrisome in behavior and posture and all those things. 00:29:56 Speaker 1: That contrast between Greg's attitude and the general vibe in the cabin eventually resulted in Greg and Steve exchanging some heated words. 00:30:04 Speaker 6: I mean, him and I got into it the first night and he just comes on glued nose to nose with me over it, which was something that I think everybody thought was odd. Nobody else is acting like that. You know, everybody else is underneath the same stress. We're all in the same boat. You know what I mean? As far as our parents being there. missing a friend, you know, not knowing all of the same stressors that are going on. But there's a completely different reaction. 00:30:31 Speaker 1: Greg's odd behavior continued into the next day. The sheriff opened a formal search on Sunday. He sent more deputies to the scene who instructed the boys on how they could help. Mark and Dave were walking through the woods with Greg when all of a sudden Greg said, quote, you two get the hell out of here. I don't want you guys around me. When Dave and Mark asked what was wrong, he replied that he wanted to go look for Noel by himself. He gave Mark the keys to his car and told them to send someone to look for him if he wasn't back by morning. Dave's account of this incident made its way to the other boys, who, it's safe to say, were extremely suspicious. Here's Bob. 00:31:10 Speaker 5: We were trying to split up in groups, but he was like, no, I'm going to go all by myself. I think I know which way he went. But he was very persistent about Every time we went out to look for him that he wanted to go by himself, which we all kind of thought it was kind of odd that he would do that. And I think he drove his car like way off somewhere that we weren't even looking. 00:31:34 Speaker 1: Greg's insistence on being alone was troubling enough, but the idea that he may have driven outside what would later become the search area raised all kinds of alarm bells. We reached out to Greg, but didn't receive a response by the time of this recording. He did, however, give an interview to the Twin Cities Reader for an article that came out in July of 1987. When asked about the rumors surrounding him, particularly his desire to search by himself, he said, quote, Of course, the question of Greg's whereabouts didn't emerge in the immediate aftermath of Noel's disappearance. As with many of the cases we've covered, law enforcement focused its initial efforts on search and rescue, not criminal investigation. There was reason to believe that Noel might still be in those woods, and hundreds of search and rescue personnel scoured the area. What those searchers found, and didn't find, is next on Blood Trails. Part 5. 00:32:45 Speaker 2: The Bog. 00:32:48 Speaker 1: Matt Dalyusz had moved out of his parents' home by 1986, but when he heard his brother was missing, he rushed back to help with the search. 00:32:56 Speaker 3: I was up there for the search. I believe this happened on Saturday. I heard about it on Sunday and got up there on Monday. I mean, we had the National Guard out there and we walked, well, they say arm in arm, but we were within five to ten feet of each other at all times. 00:33:12 Speaker 1: The sheriff opened the official search on Sunday, November 2nd. By Monday, about 100 National Guardsmen had been called in to scour the area. They were joined by officials from the Civil Air Patrol, the Minnesota Highway Patrol, and the Minnesota DNR, who searched alongside dozens of volunteers. The Highway Patrol dispatched a helicopter, and dog teams were called in later in the week. Local and state governments expended considerable resources, but the conditions on the ground were working against them. Temperatures hit the 40s and 50s during the day, but dipped into the teens at night. Rain mixed with snow later in the week, which made tracking with dogs much more difficult. 00:33:52 Speaker 2: It's covered in bogs. It's covered in tamarack swamps. It is rugged terrain. 00:34:01 Speaker 1: That's Jim Riley again. Jim grew up hunting this area, and he remembers worrying about stepping through the thick moss and falling into the muddy water beneath. 00:34:10 Speaker 2: Boggy material floats on top of water. That water could be a foot deep. It could be 15 feet deep. And when you fall into it, if you weren't trained how to get out of it, you're going to sink. And if you fight it, you're just going to go deeper and deeper because you're just going to slip on the bog as you try to climb. You're going to go down. 00:34:30 Speaker 1: Some of the National Guardsmen fell through the moss during the course of the search. It was usually no more than knee deep, but some said they fell through to their chests. These searchers showed signs of hypothermia after falling into the frigid water, and some had to leave to seek medical attention. Due to these injuries, Sheriff Bill Sobey decided to pull out the guardsmen on Tuesday. He told the media several months later, quote, We had made as thorough a sweep as we could expect, considering the conditions in there. By then, it was so cold, it was pretty doubtful he could still be alive if he was still out there. Erin Dalyusz, Matt's wife and Noel's high school friend, thought for many years that Noel had fallen into the water and hadn't come back up. 00:35:13 Speaker 7: They thought he. 00:35:14 Speaker 4: Wandered off and was in a bog. That's all I ever heard. It was never blamed on anyone at that time. I wasn't privy to those records of the interviews and stuff, so I thought he disappeared in a bog is what was going around school. 00:35:29 Speaker 1: Matt Dalyusz, however, was skeptical even at the time that this had been his brother's fate. 00:35:34 Speaker 3: I had like hip boots on and I stepped in every low depression in the ground that had water in it. I never saw any type of bog where we were looking. All the areas that we looked, there was nothing that went higher than maybe just below my knee. It gets so thick that you can't even walk in that stuff where they talk about this bog. You just never get to something that you can fall through Because you can't get there. It's so thick and you can't walk through it. 00:36:09 Speaker 1: Matt believes that even with the cocktail of chemicals flowing through his brother's body, Noel wouldn't have tried walking through the thick undergrowth to reach the boggy areas. He would have stayed on the paths, which would have eventually led him to a road. 00:36:23 Speaker 3: I don't feel that he fell in a bog. I think they used it as a scapegoat to discontinue the investigation. And I don't believe that they ever investigated it criminally. 00:36:35 Speaker 1: There's also the question of Noel's possessions, his gun, clothes, and anything else he was carrying. 00:36:41 Speaker 2: Where did the gun go? Where did the clothes go? Where is this stuff? When people freak out from hypothermia, we found a guy up at our place that had hypothermia one time, and they drop their gun, they tear their clothes off, they go running crazy through the woods. 00:36:58 Speaker 1: Searchers did find a face covering similar to the kind Noel was wearing when he left. But when one of the boys mentioned this in an interview with investigators, a deputy said, quote, we're not saying that it was his. If that item had been found today, the sheriff may have been able to pull DNA from it to confirm that it was Knoll's. But based on what's in the case file, it's hard to tell how confident they were that they'd found one of the missing boys' possessions. It's also hard to understand why searchers weren't able to find even more of Knoll's things. Matt believes that even if Knoll had fallen into a bog, A hunter or a logger would have found his shotgun by now. Jim Riley, who thinks there's still a 50% chance Noel fell into the water, agrees. 00:37:42 Speaker 2: Why my brain scrambled on this thing. It just doesn't make sense. There's something missing. And like I said, the only way he's in that woods is if he's in a bog. And I don't know why he wouldn't have floated up. Because that's what happens. Things get pushed up. 00:37:57 Speaker 1: One explanation could be that the search area wasn't large enough. The sheriff mentioned that the boys were hunting two 500-acre parcels, which is where they focused their efforts. The case file also includes a map that shows the parcels they searched marked with an X. Based on this map, it looks like the search extended roughly two square miles to the north and south of the cabin around the lake. The search may have expanded from there, but as you already heard, the sheriff pulled out the National Guard on Tuesday, just two days into the search. Volunteers and dog teams took over on Wednesday, but their efforts were hampered by rain and snow. 00:38:34 Speaker 3: We got bloodhounds out there. They said the bloodhounds got on a trail and it was getting dark out, so they had to stop the trail. And it's like, what do you mean you stopped the trail? Well, we'll go back there tomorrow morning. Well, then it had rained overnight and they said that that may have washed the trail away. 00:38:50 Speaker 1: Then, on Friday, the sheriff decided to suspend the search entirely. 00:38:55 Speaker 3: We were expanding the search area. Until they called the search off. The reason why they called the search off was because deer hunting was starting. And they said, well, deer hunting is just like sending another search party out there because the deer hunters are all going to look for them too. We just don't want anybody out in the woods during deer hunting season because it's not safe. We were in the process of expanding it when they called it off. And I do believe that we probably didn't go far enough. 00:39:23 Speaker 1: The Daluges weren't the only ones who were shocked by the sheriff's decision. Here's Erin. 00:39:28 Speaker 4: Then we heard that they were going to end the search. So like 40 students went up to the Minnesota State Capitol and they lobbied to try to get the search to continue. 00:39:39 Speaker 7: But that didn't happen. 00:39:41 Speaker 3: When the sheriff concluded that he fell in the bog, I mean, we didn't. accept it and we didn't want to accept it, but we didn't have anything to argue because we had no evidence or anything to back up that something happened and we weren't the ones doing the investigation. I mean, we didn't know how to do that back then. 00:40:06 Speaker 1: We reached out to the current Aiken County Sheriff, Daniel Guida, to ask if anyone on his team remembers Noel's case and would be willing to talk to us. Sheriff Guida sent us one sentence in response. This occurred before any of my staff were hired here, and the folks that were involved have no desire to talk with your team. If they did, I would have asked them all the questions we've raised so far, along with a few others. Why didn't the sheriff immediately treat Noel's disappearance as suspicious? Why did he wait over two months to interview the boys at the cabin? And, most concerning of all, why didn't he do more to pursue the one boy who claimed to know where Noel might be. That's next, after the break. Part 6. 00:41:04 Speaker 2: Greg. I think he had gotten kicked out of Tartan High School, so he came to our high school, and he was an absolute loose cannon. I mean, I wouldn't spend 10 minutes alone with that guy. You know how you have animal instincts where you just, your hair stands up on the back of your neck? That was Greg. 00:41:26 Speaker 1: Not everyone I spoke with was so explicit in expressing their dislike of Greg. But everyone agreed that of the 10 boys who went to the cabin that Halloween, Greg was the odd one out. 00:41:37 Speaker 3: Greg probably wouldn't have been on that hunting trip without Noel. 00:41:40 Speaker 1: Steve agreed with Matt's assessment. He told me that neither Noel nor Greg was on the original guest list because neither played football. But everyone liked Noel, so when he said he wanted to go, Mike agreed. Jim also mentioned that Greg wouldn't normally have been invited, but. 00:41:56 Speaker 2: I think they played soccer together, number one. And I think Noel was a friend to everybody. Noel gave everybody a shot. 00:42:05 Speaker 1: That was ironic because, according to Jim, Greg approached others with the opposite mindset. 00:42:11 Speaker 2: I remember we had some Hmong students at our school. You know, they'd just come out of Vietnam. And he would pick on him all the time, call him chink and all this stuff. But that was Greg. He came into our world from another world, another school, and was just a monster. 00:42:30 Speaker 1: Greg was described at the time as a troubled young man. According to a profile of him in the Twin Cities Reader, Greg had gotten in trouble in junior high for, quote, violent outbursts, and in the wake of these was denied admittance to the nearby Tartan High School. The profile goes on to say that he had a temper that scared the other boys, which you heard Steve mention earlier. The Twin Cities reader sums up Greg's attitude like this. Quote, Here's Steve. 00:43:13 Speaker 6: My recollection is he was on a different level. He believed he was on a different level than anybody else there, that he was more mature or more whatever than everybody and could handle things. 00:43:24 Speaker 1: It's possible the suspicions and accusations that followed Greg were rooted in nothing more than personal dislike and a desire to find somebody, anybody to blame for Noel's disappearance. When the sheriff asked the eight other boys who they believed might know something about Noel, all eight named Greg. even though they didn't have any hard evidence to accuse him of murder or of hiding Noel's body. The problem was, at least from Greg's perspective, the outcast of the group couldn't help inserting himself into the conversation. Aaron recalls that in the days after Noel's disappearance, Greg appointed himself an official messenger between the other students and the search parties. 00:44:03 Speaker 4: Greg came back and he was like, he was the speaker of the group and he would tell us little tidbits like, Oh, today they found Noel and he was by a campfire. 00:44:12 Speaker 7: And it was bizarre. And so we're like all getting hopeful. 00:44:19 Speaker 4: Well, it turns out, you know, 20 years later when I'm with Matt and we're reading the stuff, he really wasn't the spokesperson. And I think he was feeding us information. 00:44:30 Speaker 3: There were rumors about Greg at the time. Like, I don't know, the Pam rumor, Aaron, that she said that he had unexplained mileage on his truck. 00:44:39 Speaker 6: I don't. 00:44:40 Speaker 3: Know how she would know that, but it was a rumor. She also said she opened up his glove box and Noel's mosquito netting was in there and he got mad and said, don't ever open that again. 00:44:51 Speaker 1: Pam was Greg's girlfriend at the time of Noel's disappearance. She had told some of Noel's friends about several concerning interactions she'd had with Greg. These rumors made their way to detectives, so they interviewed her the same day they interviewed the other boys. We don't have a recording of this interview, but we do have the full transcript. Here's a recreation of what Pam said word for word. In this section of the interview, she's describing a phone conversation she had with Greg on Christmas Eve, 1986. 00:45:21 Speaker 9: He got a new gun for Christmas. And he said to me, it's been my worst enemy. And I said, why? And he said, because I thought of using it to be with my friend. And I said, how do you know Noel is dead? You know, no one has found him or nothing. And he said, well, I know where he is. And I just, I said, why? Because I didn't think I'd heard right. And he said, I know where he is. And then I said, where? He didn't say nothing. And I just said, don't tell me. I didn't want him to tell me. 00:46:04 Speaker 1: The deputies asked Pam whether Greg was hot-headed and might get angry enough to hurt someone, and Pam admitted that he was. Pam explained that another time they were watching a news broadcast about someone who'd been murdered. 00:46:17 Speaker 9: And I said, God, how can people kill people and do that kind of stuff? And he goes, I could kill somebody if I was mad enough. I wouldn't feel guilty. And he said, all you have to do is kill them and smell blood and drive them up a ways and throw them into the woods. And he goes. 00:46:46 Speaker 1: The transcript indicates that at this point in the interview, Pam burst into tears. When she regained her composure, the deputies asked whether she thought Greg could actually kill someone and hide the body. She responded by recalling a time that Greg talked about killing his father. 00:47:02 Speaker 9: He said, It's. 00:47:17 Speaker 1: Important to note that at the time of this interview, Pam and Greg had recently broken up. The deputies knew this, but they still took the time to interview her, and based on their questions, they appear to be taking her statements very seriously. And yet, they also asked Pam twice whether Greg might be saying some of these things not because he killed Noel or knew where he was, but to make himself the center of attention. Pam agreed that might be the case, as did Erin when I posed the question to her. 00:47:45 Speaker 7: Yeah, 100%. 00:47:46 Speaker 4: I think he wanted the center of attention to be on him and not Noel anymore. 00:47:52 Speaker 1: That might go a long way towards explaining Greg's statements, but Pam had one more story to tell. When Knoll's case was reinvestigated in 2004, detectives interviewed Pam again. We don't have a direct transcript of this interview, but we do have a detailed summary written by agents with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The report reads, Pam talked about finding what was described as a camo-colored face mask in the glove box of Greg's truck. When she asked Greg what it was, he stated it was Knoll's. She stated that Greg explained that he had found it, but she could not remember where he said he found it. She did know that he was very upset about the fact that she had seen it in the glove box of his pickup truck. When asked about this again later in the interview, she said she doesn't remember Greg keeping other hunting gear in that truck. She said the face mask was gone the next time she checked the glove box, and she felt that Greg attached some kind of sentimental value to that item. Why Pam failed to mention this incident in 1987 is a mystery. It's possible she didn't realize the importance of that face covering. It's also possible her stories are the exaggerations of an angry ex-girlfriend. Pam told investigators in 2004 that Greg was abusive, and she believed he stalked her even after she was married to her then-husband. We reached out for clarification, but she didn't respond by the time of this recording. Greg was also interviewed by two deputies on January 14, 1987. The interview was contentious, and the deputies were clearly suspicious. They were especially interested in asking Greg whether he knew the whereabouts of Noel's 20-gauge shotgun. Noel was supposedly lost while carrying his 12-gauge shotgun. but his father said he also owned a. 00:49:40 Speaker 2: 20. 00:49:40 Speaker 1: The deputies believed Greg knew where it was. Greg admitted that Noel had loaned him the gun in the past, but claimed that Noel must have taken it back. He reiterated that his friend only had one gun with him on that trip, and the detectives weren't able to get him to change his position. When the detectives expressed disbelief that Greg and Noel were good enough friends to loan guns back and forth, Greg said this, quote, Noel was a likable guy. If you knew him more, if you had a chance to talk to him like how you're talking to me right now, you guys would like him. And then you'd be able to understand and realize. The media reported later that Greg had at first agreed and then refused to take a polygraph test. His psychologist had put him in touch with someone in the law firm of Ron Meshbesher, one of Minnesota's most famous defense attorneys. Greg stopped talking to law enforcement after lawyering up, and he never took a polygraph. In the end, the Aiken County Sheriff's Office failed to find Noel's remains or prosecute anyone for his disappearance. On January 15, 1987, one day after interviewing everyone involved, Deputy Harold Lucht wrote in a report, If Noel did drink as much as the others said he did and sniffed as much cocaine as they said, it is my opinion that Noel would have had enough drugs and alcohol in his body to wander for miles before he would have passed out or died. I do not think Noel was in the area that everyone thought he was. And if there was an accident and Noel did die, someone did get rid of the body. If this did happen, I don't feel that anyone will say anything, even if they do know anything. I do have mixed feelings on this case, and I do not know which way to turn or what else I can do. Luck's conclusion is shocking, both because he admits the search didn't extend far enough and that he is powerless to do anything about his suspicions. Part of that powerlessness was due to the fact that the criminal investigation was virtually non-existent for days, if not weeks. Deputies asked most of the boys in their January interviews if they knew the location of Noel's extra clothing because it had apparently disappeared from the cabin. That and other potential evidence was never collected. 00:52:00 Speaker 2: Here's Steve. 00:52:01 Speaker 6: You're talking about a small town department. If that would have been in a metropolitan department, shit would have been locked down faster than You could snap a stick at it. That cabin would have been a crime scene immediately, if not very shortly afterwards. It was a podunk deal. 00:52:14 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:52:15 Speaker 6: Even after the fact, you know what I mean? It was, you know, the most that ever happened to, you know, to kind of pursue any more of any story was when we got back and Maplewood brought us in and had us, you know, do a tape deposition. That was it. And it was like, okay, where's more? You know what I mean? There's got to be more here. This doesn't just fall off. 00:52:43 Speaker 1: Part seven, two hunters and a station wagon. The sheriff's office may have failed to find Noel in 1986, but in 2004, they hoped to make a break in the case by working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. 00:52:59 Speaker 3: And the theory they told us about reopening that investigation was maybe there's somebody out there that has something on their chest they want to get off after all these years. 00:53:08 Speaker 1: When we reached out to the BCA, they directed our questions to the Aitkin County Sheriff's Office, and you already heard how they responded. But I was able to get in touch with a former BCA investigator named Paul Girardi, who worked on Noel's case. 00:53:23 Speaker 10: There was really nothing more investigative that we could do. There was no physical evidence to test. We interviewed everybody that was there that night. Nothing really changed from their story. You know, there's only three ways to solve crimes. You know, the suspect confesses, there's an eyewitness, or there's physical evidence. We didn't have any of those. 00:53:52 Speaker 1: Comparing the old statements to the new ones, most are roughly the same, with a few small differences that can be attributed to the passage of 18 years. All except one. Greg agreed to be re-interviewed, and the investigators met with him at a restaurant in Hinkley, Minnesota on January 12, 2005. They note in their report that Greg appeared relaxed, made eye contact, and answered their questions directly. He reiterated most of the details you already heard, with one major addition. He claimed that while he and Darren were looking for Noel, they came across two other hunters. They appeared to be living in a makeshift tent or lean-to and had food cans strewn across the campsite. Greg told investigators that at the time, his impression of these guys is that they were poachers or up to no good. He even thought these poachers might be responsible for Noel's disappearance. That's the kind of information you might expect deputies to chase down. The problem is, there's no record of Greg saying anything about these hunters in 1986 or 87. What's more, Darren, who Greg says was with him at the time, also didn't mention these guys in his interviews with law enforcement. He mentioned looking for Noel in a lean-to, but never says anything about anyone else being out in the woods. We don't know why Greg didn't mention this detail in 1986. He claimed in 2004 that he told either a deputy or another employee at the sheriff's office, but there isn't any record of this in the case file I received. I asked Paul whether Greg's new statement raised any red flags for BCA investigators. 00:55:31 Speaker 7: It's hard to say. 00:55:33 Speaker 10: Did he not volunteer that information because no one really asked him or pressed him about it? Is he making it up to deflect off of him? 00:55:45 Speaker 6: It's hard to say. 00:55:47 Speaker 1: Whatever the reason for Greg's inconsistency, his claims represent another major theory about what could have happened to Knoll. Knoll's hat, found along the road at the end of the driveway, points to this possibility. 00:55:59 Speaker 3: That's why we wondered if maybe he was abducted at one point. 00:56:03 Speaker 1: There were other people in the woods that weekend. Darren told deputies in 1987 that he'd spoken with someone driving a station wagon down the road that led to the cabin. When Darren was re-interviewed in 2004, he said he always thought this station wagon had been driving suspiciously slow. About a month after Noel disappeared, he and some friends returned to the area to try to identify the owner of that vehicle, but they couldn't find it. Jim Riley recalls hearing these rumors in the months after Noel disappeared. 00:56:32 Speaker 2: There was a couple sketchy people and, you know, the station wagon or that they could literally, you know, pull up and take him. Hey, are you okay, buddy? Yeah, right. No, man. Well, get in. Yeah. Let's go party. And then the next thing you know, but. He was not going to be, I don't think he was in a great state of mind, maybe alcohol, maybe some sort of drugs, that he was going to fight off abductors. 00:56:58 Speaker 1: The abduction theory is possible, and my mind goes to that single shot the boys heard shortly after Noel walked away. What's more, Noel wasn't the only teenage hunter to go missing in Aiken County. Jim remembered hearing about this other hunter in the early 90s, but he always assumed they found his remains. He looked up an article during our call And you can hear his disbelief in real time. 00:57:21 Speaker 2: It says he entered the Savannah State Forest with his father on October 15th, never to be seen again. 00:57:28 Speaker 1: No kidding. How far away is that from where Noel was? 00:57:33 Speaker 2: Not far. Really? 00:57:35 Speaker 1: 18-year-old Jamie Tennyson went missing in 1992 during a hunting trip in a state forest just 30 miles from where Noel went missing. A search was launched, but neither Jamie nor any of his possessions were ever found. Jamie's family doesn't suspect foul play. His father told the Duluth News Tribune in 2024 that he believes his son tried to take shelter from the sudden snowstorm by digging himself under some tree roots or an embankment. But he was overcome by the cold, went to sleep, and never woke up. It's a reasonable theory. Still, as in Noel's case, it's tough to understand why they never found any sign of the missing hunter. It's also troubling in light of Noel's disappearance just six years earlier. There aren't any known kidnappers who were operating in Aiken County in the late 80s and 90s, but it's possible someone flew under the radar. This possibility is part of the reason Matt, Aaron, Jim, and the others agreed to talk to me. 00:58:35 Speaker 2: If someone out there You know, heard a story about someone that abducted a kid and says, God, I might know something. Or if it finally cracks, you know, someone that may have been involved, that would just be amazing. 00:58:48 Speaker 1: On April 14th, 1987, Noel's mother, Judy Hansen, wrote a letter to Sheriff Sobey. She asked whether Greg had been scheduled for a polygraph, whether the dogs had been dispatched again, and whether divers would search the deeper sections of the bog. She concludes, I hate to keep bothering you, but this matter cannot go unresolved. I know that it is important to you also in maintaining the perfect record in Aiken County thus far, that you do not give up on this until every possible approach has been exhausted. I can't recall a more tragic sentiment than a mother apologizing for bothering a sheriff about her missing son. In the end, she never got a chance to learn what happened to her youngest child. 00:59:43 Speaker 3: My dad went to his grave without knowing. My brother went to his grave without knowing. My mom went to her grave without knowing. I don't want to do that. I would like to know what happened. I still feel like somebody knows something. whether it be one of those theories, and I do believe that there was some cover-up of some sort. 01:00:02 Speaker 1: It's hard for either Matt or Aaron to believe that anyone would have wanted to kill Noel intentionally. Greg's temper makes him an easy suspect, but none of the boys reported that he harbored any animosity towards his teammate. Instead, Aaron thinks there was an accident, and one or multiple of the boys covered it up. 01:00:21 Speaker 4: Either they shot him by accident, shot him on purpose, or... Somebody OD'd on drugs, which would be probably Noel, obviously Noel, and then whoever brought the. 01:00:31 Speaker 7: Drugs or the cocaine, they're all going to be in trouble. 01:00:35 Speaker 4: So they're scared young kids, and I believe that one of them knows, or many know, and that they covered it up. 01:00:42 Speaker 1: No one I spoke to thought it was likely that all nine boys were in on a cover-up. Someone would have said something by now. 01:00:49 Speaker 10: Every case that I've worked on, when there was multiple people involved, the truth ultimately comes up. Someone that's least culpable is going to talk. One of those boys would have talked probably that day or soon after. 01:01:11 Speaker 1: The fact that Steve and Bob agreed to talk to me all these years later also speaks to their innocence. And for the boys who were innocent, this experience has never left them. 01:01:21 Speaker 5: You know, I didn't want to go to school. I wanted to go back up there all the time and help look. It was tough losing somebody and then not knowing what happened to them. I do think about them quite often. There's been times, too, it's almost kind of like you see somebody that you kind of recognize, but you don't. But then you kind of think the renderings of him being right now, maybe that was the guy. When I was younger, it was pretty traumatic. 01:01:54 Speaker 1: Steve told me he had an opportunity some time ago to help search for an autistic man who'd gone missing from a hunting camp in Wisconsin. Steve had just worked a 24-hour shift at his job, but he and some friends decided to go help. 01:02:07 Speaker 6: This is a chance to go get closure. He walked away from a camp on his own and they couldn't find him. They had the same kind of a situation, hundreds of thousands of people looking for him for days and sure as shit. They called the search off and said, that's it. We said, no, we need one more pass. And we found them. So to say that it doesn't follow you, it's something that, yeah, you're searching for. I thought that was going to help. It did, but not completely. 01:02:36 Speaker 1: One of the hardest things for a family in this situation is letting go of the belief that their loved one is still out there. Matt doesn't believe Noel would have wanted to run away from his family. His parents were divorced, but Noel was by all accounts a happy kid. Still, rumors persisted that Noel had run off somewhere and started a new life. That hope is a double-edged sword, but Matt says he now believes his brother is no longer on this earth. 01:03:02 Speaker 3: When my dad was in hospice, he was on his deathbed, and Aaron and I sat next to my dad the entire time. In the end, you could tell he's kind of in between here and his next life, and He's kind of just looking up with his eyes closed. He's going, oh, oh. And he did it for a few hours or whatever. And at one point I said, I just walked over to him and I just said, what is it, Dad? Do you see Noel or something? What is it? And he goes, oh, oh, like pointing like he's right there. 01:03:31 Speaker 2: Duh. 01:03:33 Speaker 3: So I do believe he's probably with my dad at this point. 01:03:40 Speaker 1: Knoll disappeared in Aiken County, Minnesota, 115 miles north of Minneapolis-St. 01:03:45 Speaker 2: Paul. 01:03:46 Speaker 1: He was last seen leaving a cabin around Dam Lake on November 1, 1986, around 5.45 a.m. If you know or know someone who might know anything about Knoll's disappearance, get in touch with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension at 1-877-996-6622. 01:04:08 Speaker 4: I would love for someone to come forward and say, we screwed up. This is what happened. 01:04:14 Speaker 7: We know what happened. Here he is. And we can. 01:04:18 Speaker 4: Celebrate him and move on with our life and know that he's in heaven. 01:04:23 Speaker 7: As we believe that's where he is. 01:04:25 Speaker 3: It's been 40 years, right? And we don't have closure yet. I go on a fishing trip. We toast to Noel every fishing trip I go on with my buddies. They were all up there looking for Noel and they're still going on a fishing trip with me. So they would like closure. They would like to know too. Bottom line is just like to know what happened. 01:04:54 Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you'd like to see images from this case, including photos of Noel, portions of the case file and a map of the area, head on over to themeateater.com slash bloodtrails and click on the case file for this episode. You can also watch a video version of this podcast by going to YouTube and searching for Blood Trails. Huge thanks to everyone who agreed to talk to me for this episode. Matt and Aaron Daluj, Bob Galbraith, Jim Riley, Dr. Oliver Grundman, and Steve. These aren't easy memories to relive, so I especially appreciate Noel's friends and family coming forward to tell me more about him. If you have any thoughts or opinions about this episode or know another case you think we should cover, send me an email at bloodtrailsatthemeateater.com. See you next time and stay safe out there.