Reporter on Congdon case still gets tips

Gail Feichtinger grew up on the East Coast and was living in Texas when she landed the job as the night cops and courts reporter for the Duluth News Tribune & Herald back in 1984.

“I left Dallas and moved to Duluth in January,” Feichtinger recalled. “I had never been there. I knew nothing about it. … I had to go to the library just to find out where I was going. My interview for the job was over the phone. ... They were taking bets in the newsroom that I wouldn’t last through the first winter.”

By John Myers jmyers@duluthnews.com

But she did last, and Feichtinger, then in her 20s, went on to cover one of the most famous legal dramas in Duluth history: the Congdon murders.

On June 27, 1977, one or more intruders entered the Glensheen mansion in Duluth. They used a satin pillow to smother Elisabeth Congdon, 83, and also bludgeoned to death Congdon’s night nurse, Velma Pietila, 66. Congdon was the last surviving child of Duluth mining and timber magnate Chester Congdon who, when he died in 1916, was thought to be Minnesota’s richest person.

Investigators immediately focused on Marjorie Caldwell, one of Elisabeth Congdon’s two adopted daughters, as the mastermind of the murder, and her alcoholic husband, Roger Caldwell, as the person who carried it out.

Feichtinger missed out on the 1978 trial of Roger Caldwell in Brainerd (he was convicted of the murders) and the 1979 trial of Marjorie, in Hastings, Minnesota, (she was acquitted) but she did cover several of the case’s major events that happened soon after. That includes the civil wrongful death lawsuit brought by Marjorie’s own family claiming she was responsible for Elisabeth Congdon’s death and thus shouldn’t get any of the $11 million Marjorie stood to inherit.

“When it came time for me to cover some of these hearings, there was so much energy in the newsroom I knew it was a big deal. … I had to go back and do some research because I had never heard of the Congdon murders before,” she said. “Then it hit me that this was a big deal for Duluth.”

Feichtinger recalls the eventual guilty plea made by Roger Caldwell in the Duluth courthouse as the most memorable moment on the job as a News Tribune reporter. The plea hearing was held under almost total secrecy.

“I was the only person not involved in the case who was in the courtroom,” Feichtinger recalled. As the only reporter there, she got a front-row seat to one of the biggest legal events in Duluth history.

Caldwell’s conviction had been overturned by the Minnesota Supreme Court and, to avoid another costly and exhausting trial, investigators and prosecutors agreed that if Roger Caldwell, who was ailing, pleaded guilty to the murders he would be set free — his only punishment being time already served in prison.

“I got a tip from Gary (Waller, the police investigator and later St. Louis County sheriff) that something big was going to happen and that I should be there. He wouldn’t say what it was,” Feichtinger recalled. “So I sat in the courthouse. ... And when I saw Doug Thomson (Roger Caldwell’s famous Twin Cities defense attorney) show up, I knew what was going on.”

Feichtinger said she had developed a close professional relationship with both Waller and John DeSanto, the prosecuting attorney in the case who later became a district court judge, and said that relationship continued even after she left Duluth