FOLEY, Minn. — Roger Vaillancourt spent his last night alive dancing in an old barn called The Kitten Club in Long Siding, Minnesota.
At 1:30 a.m. that night, Oct. 6, 1957, Norman Sebeck, of Foreston, Minnesota, ran 17-year-old Vaillancourt over on Highway 169, two miles north of the club. He reported the incident to police. Sebeck didn’t see him. The teenager was lying on the road.
Rumors began circulating soon after the young, “fun-loving” teenager was killed, according to the Star Tribune. Nobody could answer questions as to why Vaillancourt was on the highway in the middle of the night.
Was he beaten before being run over? Mille Lacs County Sheriff Bruce Milton thought so. He told the St. Cloud Times in 1957 that arrests were going to be made. He was looking into accusations that a beating and liquor law violations occurred.
Initially, investigators were also looking for another hit-and-run driver who struck Vaillancourt before Sebeck did, according to the Albert Lea Tribune.
“The sheriff emphasized however, that the cause of death was accidental and that the youth did not die of injuries resulting from the suspected beating,” the St. Cloud Times reported.
The investigation didn’t pan out, however. Nobody was arrested. There wasn’t enough evidence to pursue the case, and Vaillancourt was buried without having an autopsy performed. His case was closed as a tragic accident.
Vaillancourt’s death shocked the quiet town of Foley.
“Roger Vaillancourt was the kind of young man everyone seemed to like… many people who considered themselves the young man’s good friend,” the Star Tribune reported in 2005.
Pat Fouquette worked with Vaillancourt at the Foley bowling alley, and told the Star Tribune that “as long as there was fun, he was happy. We all kind of chummed together. He was just a happy-go-lucky type of character. We just spent a lot of time having fun; there’s nothing to do for teenagers in that little town.”
Foley, Vaillancourt’s hometown, population 2,666 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was much smaller in 1957. Sometimes referred to as “Foleyland,” the town took the title of the Benton County seat from Sauk Rapids in 1901 after the Foley brothers, lumber barons, petitioned the county government.
The local Catholic church — and even the courthouse — were built solely with donations from John Foley.
Only 45 years after the town’s incorporation, Foley had a bustling downtown area, lined with storefronts. Industry evolved from lumbering into farming. The town had a bowling alley, the Foley High School, which offered baseball and softball events, and 17 miles away, The Kitten Club.
For 48 years, Vaillancourt’s death was shrouded in mystery, but the townspeople eventually stopped talking about the incident.
“There was a lot of controversy about it back then and people wanted to know what happened, but after a while, it just kind of died out,” Fouquette said.
In 2005, the mystery was resurrected, and Vaillancourt’s body exhumed, after Charles Kunkel, a Crosier priest, disputed the notion that Vaillancourt was killed by a car. He published a book about his findings titled “Raising Roger’s Cross.”
Kunkel spent four years researching Vaillancourt’s death. He interviewed more than 100 people and concluded that there might have been more to Vaillancourt’s story.
A native to the area, Kunkel gave fictional names to the people included in his book, naming three of them: “Mack,” the man Kunkel suspected was the killer, “Dewey,” and “Cindy.” They told Kunkel that Vaillancourt had been tortured and castrated before he was hit by the passing car, according to the Duluth News Tribune.
Kunkel’s investigation led the family to discuss the investigation with the Mille Lacs County Sheriff’s Office and coroner Janis Amatuzio, who agreed to exhume Vaillancourt’s body, according to the Star Tribune.
“There was no autopsy done back then, so by conducting an autopsy now, we will be able to use some 2005 science to confirm or dispel those speculations,” said Brent Lindren, the Mille Lacs County sheriff in 2005.
The exhumation reopened Vaillancourt’s case and brought his name back into the limelight. Originally intending to write a book about human struggles, Kunkel told newspapers at the time that he eventually focused on telling Vaillancourt’s story.
“Every human story has suffering, struggles, the human element that makes life difficult. Most people have something of the cross in their lives,” Kunkel said about his book.
He pieced the story together with bits of information from his interviews, but no one had the full story, according to the Star Tribune.
“How do you bring truth out of the darkness into the light? That’s what the book tries to do without being overtly religious,” Kunkel said.
Nearly two years later, however, Mille Lacs County Attorney Janice Kolb decided that even though some of Vaillancourt’s injuries indicated an assault, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone in the death.
The autopsy reported that Vaillancourt suffered skull fractures from about five impacts from a blunt object and rib injuries that were unlikely to be the result of being run over by a car. The skeletal remains could not answer the question of whether he had been castrated, according to newspaper reports.
“Based on the autopsy, it appeared that there was an assault, but we couldn’t link that assault to his death or to any one person,” Kolb told the press in 2007.
“It’s a very difficult case to solve,” Vaillancourt’s sister, Judy Fernholz, told The Forum in 2007. “We knew that going into this. We feel there are a lot of people who are hiding things.”
At about the same time as the autopsy report’s release, “Mack,” “Dewey” and “Cindy” filed two separate defamation suits against Kunkel, publisher AuthorHouse, and the Crosier Fathers and Brothers. They sought damages of more than $50,000, according to the Duluth News Tribune.
Kunkel settled the suits for an unknown amount of money, according to the Duluth News Tribune. The book is no longer distributed by the publisher, but the paperback is available on Amazon for $67.
With the defamation lawsuit, a lack of evidence, and lingering unanswered questions, Vaillancourt’s story has returned to mystery. The Mille Lacs County Sheriff’s Office did not reply to phone calls or an email from Forum News Service for additional information.
