Child Returns From School To Find Mother Dead

Helen Ruth Bohn was born on May 9, 1927, in Tiskilwa, Illinois. She married Otto Dyck Klassen in 1948 and the couple eventually settled in a ranch home in Elkhart, Indiana.

The couple had four daughters: Ruth (16), Frieda (14), Bess (13), and Suzy (11). Otto was a child psychiatrist and was the medical director of the Oaklawn Psychiatric Center. Meanwhile, Helen was a housewife and often did volunteer work. The family were Mennonites.

On March 14, 1969, 11-year-old Suzy returned home from Elkhart Concord Elementary School around 4 PM. She entered her house to find her mother murdered in the hallway. Suzy ran to the neighbors’ house and they called the police.

41-year-old Helen had been attacked and raped in the sewing room. The assailant then strangled her to death with her bra and shot her four times with a .38 caliber gun — twice in the chest, once in the leg, and another time in the rib. Helen’s killer then dragged her nude body to the hallway.

It is believed that the attack took place around noon. Helen had been alone in the house since 10 AM.

Otto had been in a meeting in Ohio when his wife was murdered. He received a call from authorities and immediately returned to Indiana. He has never been considered a suspect. The couple’s three other daughters had been at school.

There were no signs of forced entry and the house had not been ransacked. Despite authorities conducting an extensive search of the home and the area around it, the gun has never been found.

The family’s home was located in a rural area and the houses were several hundred yards apart, therefore no one heard or saw anything suspicious.

Hours after Helen’s body was found, authorities questioned 23-year-old Jerry Wayne Fulk. Jerry, one of Otto’s patients, had been committed to a psychiatric ward after being charged with his father’s murder 12 years before. Although it was later deemed that he was unlikely to have killed his father and released, he voluntarily had appointments with Otto.

Three days before Helen’s murder, Otto tried to get him committed at the Oaklawn Center but it was too full. The day before Helen’s death, Jerry caused a disturbance at the Center. He wanted to see Otto but he was too busy.

Following the police interrogation, Jerry was recommitted to a psychiatric ward due to the possibility of him being “incompetent and dangerous”. However, authorities stated that it was merely coincidental that he was being committed and asserted that there was no evidence that he was connected to Helen’s murder.

Anna Klassen, Suzy’s daughter, wrote an article for Bustle in 2017 after the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In the article, Anna explains that her grandparents, Helen and Otto, were proud supporters of the civil rights movement. As a psychiatrist, Otto was passionate about helping those less fortunate, particularly the African-American community.

On one occasion, Otto invited civil rights activist Medgar Evers to speak at the Oaklawn Center. After this event, Otto was labeled as the most dangerous man in Elkhart County by the John Birch Society — a popular far-right group.

The family often received aggressive telephone calls. Anonymous callers would threaten to kill Otto, his wife, their daughters, and the Oaklawn Center’s staff. Otto even discovered that his phone had been tapped once. As Anna wrote,

“The man or men who orchestrated the killing of Helen, my grandmother, were never found, but the KKK, who had ties to the police force at the time, will always be suspect in her murder.”

Notably, after Helen was killed, there was a lot of fear among the staff at Oaklawn Center. They had reportedly been threatened and were provided with police escort. Authorities had previously received reports of threats to the staff.

Some people believe the authorities focused on psychiatric patients and the possibility of the perpetrator being a transient in order to deviate from the Ku Klux Klan.

Otto remarried in 1973. He died in 2009 at the age of 81. Helen and Otto’s daughters have never stopped looking for answers. They are a part of the Journey of Hope, a group of family members of murder victims who are working to end the death penalty.

Helen Klassen’s murder has remained unsolved for 51 years.