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It’s almost too easy to quote Bob Dylan sometimes but this sprang to my mind throughout the preparation of this interview:
When you're standing at the crossroads that you cannot comprehend
Just remember that death is not the end
And all your dreams have vanished and you don't know what's up the bend
Just remember that death is not the end
It’s not unusual for me to be curious. What is unusual is this particular story—the story almost read like a recap from a television movie: a small-town priest investigating a 48 year-old murder of a 17 year-old Foley, Minnesota youth named Roger Vaillancourt apparently gathered enough evidence to have the body exhumed and the case reopened. My first reaction was simply: what kind of person does that? Was he from the community or had he entered the community and somehow become embroiled in this story? My curiosity was subsequently kicked into overdrive as other little tidbits and news articles started to appear; they only raised more questions, not the least of which was a simple “why?”
I’d be the first to admit that this is not generally how I find interview subjects but I started looking for a way to track down this man and ask him some questions. After a bit of detective work I came home one day to find a voice mail from Father Charlie. After a bit of phone tag we finally managed to connect and I got the opportunity to talk to the man himself. Below is the transcript of that conversation.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to learn (breaking the first rule of how you’re supposed to interview folks); however, what I learned ended up being considerably more complex than the “movie of the week” sensationalism that the early reports often seem to dwell on. So, without further ado, the Joe-Mammy.com interview with Fr. Charlie Kunkel
*****
Joe Mammy: Let’s start out with a little background information on you—where you grew up, how you ended up in the ministry and how you ended up being in the position to do this investigation
Fr. Charles Kunkel: I came from a little farming village—Pearl Lake, Minnesota, just 16 miles southwest of St Cloud, Minnesota—part of a large family on a dairy farm. When I was in Catholic grade school I got the vocation for the priesthood and came here to Crosier Seminary which was operating still at that time at Onamia, Minnesota. That’s where I’m living now.
I arrived here the same year that Roger was a freshman in high school at Foley High School. So we were the same age in the same grade but I didn’t know him. We just drove through the town on the way to Onamia back and forth coming to school and coming home for vacations. That’s a coincidental thing.
I finished my six years here: four years of high school, two years of college and then I spent a year in Nebraska in novitiate—which is a boot camp or a training year for living Crosier religious life. Then I spent six years in Ft. Wayne, Indiana to complete my studies, two years of philosophy and four years of theology. Then I went to work in a school in Indiana that the Crosier’s had. I spent a lot of my years first teaching high school and then out on the road as a recruiter and then development director. Over the years I spent a lot of time in different places as a leader of Crosier communities and then I also participated in some of the closings of these communities as our situation changed over the last decades. I spent fifteen wonderful years in a large mega-parish in the metropolitan area of St. Paul, Minnesota and then I was off to Phoenix, Arizona for five and a half years and then Nebraska for half a year and then back here to Onamia.
I felt like I was coming to the end of this kind of leadership in parishes or leadership in communities, so I wanted to find something else to do. People had told me I should be writing—after writing a Christmas letter or something like that, they would say “you should write.”
Well, I’ve always felt like I wanted to write and I decided I really needed to write a book about the cross because that’s what I am, a Crosier—a member of the Order of the Holy Cross. I felt like that was something that we ourselves, as Crosiers, don’t understand as well as we should and so we’re not able to articulate this for other people and I thought “well, maybe I’ll make this effort.” I got busy on a book and outlined it and got four chapters done and it was becoming more and more scholarly/academic. The basic insight was that within our personal or individual human narrative we can find the presence of—the solidarity of—the risen Lord as crucified, the risen Lord who has the ability now through the Holy Spirit to connect with—to be in solidarity with—the sufferings or the cross that’s in people’s lives and to gradually find a way to lift them up, to raise them up, to bring them to healing, to bring them to life, to bring them to truth and whatever is needed. I decided finally that I wasn’t going to write another scholarly book; there’s too many of those already. That’s when I made a turn and I said “I’m going to find a story that will be full of the cross—reality cross—and I will write that story. I will find that story and let the story itself drive me to the finish line so that I don’t get interrupted or distracted along the way.” And I just knew that if it was a good story it would do that.
Well, within three weeks, I mentioned this within a circle of friends someone said: “When I was 8 years old, my mother came home from Foley and said to us kids, ‘It’s a shame what they did to that boy from Foley. They put corn cobs down his throat and up his rectum. They stabbed him and they threw him on the road and ran him over with a car.’” And I said, “That’s my story.”
Then it was the starting up process of finding out the name of that person—which was not known yet—then the death date and then the newspaper articles that were run in the newspapers back in ’57. I found that the newspaper article said nothing about these three little tidbits, and I said “There’s something wrong here.” And therefore it was more engaging for me.
So then I started the research process starting with the family, and I’m glad I did, I’m glad I went straight to the family and got connected to them. The next category was the friends of Roger, and there were a lot of them all holding little pieces of the story and no one knowing the whole story, no one knowing how it all fit together. They were all puzzled by it. There was always the strong sense of some anger over the fact that the story was never dealt with—that the authorities never dealt with it at the time and that they had to carry this burden all these years. So they really took on the role of being strong supporters and encouraging me.
At some point in those early days when I discovered I was probably dealing with, in reality, major crimes I decided, “Well maybe this is not what I want to get in to,” and I was ready to step back. Then I got the word from these folks I already talked to that there’s no way—that you can’t open the door to all these painful memories and then back out. You’ve got to follow it all the way. You’ve got to go the distance.
So then I went to an attorney. I said “I gotta find out what’s my legal obligation if I come into information that points to major crimes.” The attorney was very careful; he checked with other attorneys around the state and he came back to me and said, “You have no legal obligation to report.” He said “you might have a moral obligation,” but I decided at that point that the spiritual point of the project was bringing people—as many as possible, everyone involved, if possible—bring them to a place of forgiveness and reconciliation with the family. It was maybe a bit naïve, but it was nonetheless what my objective was and so I decided, “I’m moving forward. The spiritual purpose of the mission of the cross in this story is what I’m going to focus on.”
That’s what I did. I went from one interview to the next and almost everybody that I interviewed—these were long interviews, 2-3 hours apiece—and I told everyone the same thing at the beginning: I’m writing a book, I’m taking notes and this is not an investigation. This is the recovery of a story for the sake of illustrating how the cross of Christ, how Christ as the risen crucified one, actually works within our lives of suffering to bring us to healing. Lots of these storytellers had names for me to connect with. So every interview I did, I ended up with a longer list of names and I think I interviewed, I don’t know, 20-30% of the people recommended to me. The trajectory and the dynamic of the research process required me not to get lost—for instance just interviewing more and more friends of Roger I got to the point where I felt like I had completed that even though there was a long list of friends still to be seen. I had to move on to the people that were allegedly there, that were part of the experience, that were referred to in newspaper articles as “the Foley youth.”
That was my next process. That took some prayer and some thinking; and every time I tried to get ready to call one of these folks, it was a long process of sitting by the phone and saying, “Can I really do this?” Eventually I had to put aside all those feelings and say, “Darn it, there’s only one way to do it, and that’s to do it.”
I found everyone ready to speak to me—these folks I call the key players. They were all willing to speak with me and tell their version. So in the book, “Raising Roger’s Cross,” the effort is made to prepare the story by writing about Roger: his background and all the significant things that were impacting his life and how it was possible that this young man got into a situation where he was found dead on the road north of the Kitten Club Dance Hall across the street from Long Siding on Highway 169.
It was a great privilege to be brought into the memories of so many people including 
the people who were allegedly on the scene, even though each one shared what they were willing or capable of sharing under those circumstances. It was a privilege to get to know so many interesting people. Without a story to pursue, without an excuse to do a research project, I would not have met these 120-150 people along the way. That was an extra sideline blessing. But in the process I was always continually trying to deepen my own sense of how the Lord works in raising up the cross of people’s lives. It was a reality check at one point where I discovered that I am not just involved in writing a book as someone who is separated, uninvolved, on the sidelines looking at a story and writing it from a distance. At a certain point I discovered I was in the middle of the story. I was in the middle of this community of people. I was participating, I had to participate in everything that was being shared and become part of the story that became part of a ministry of how to bring this community of people to a place where the healing can happen. It wasn’t just writing a book. It was being back into ministry—back into helping a community of people move towards a closure or to a healing of a great wound.
Joe: So you had two separate stories: you had the historical investigation you began with and then you found yourself in a more immediate kind of context.
CK: Right, I knew that was a likely part of it, but it takes me a while to get in touch with reality sometimes. (chuckles) Getting in touch with reality with this kind of story is an experience of going through layers of consciousness and awareness and I think it’s just part of the nature of a story—another person’s story is not yours; it’s their story and the people’s in that story and to enter into that narrative you just can’t take one giant step and you’re into it. It’s a gradual process of people letting you in and it’s a gradual process of becoming conscious of what’s happening. That’s precisely the theological and spiritual element of the spirituality of the cross that I was trying to get in touch with and to illustrate by writing a story of the cross—a reality cross.
Does that sound mysterious? (chuckles)
Joe: To a degree. I think it’s interesting from a literary standpoint—I always like it when something starts as one thing and turns into another. It sounds like you went through various stages of that going from a scholarly work that evolved into a—
CK: Human narrative story.
Joe. Right, human narrative. And even that took a similar turn from the historical to realizing that by learning the story you become part of the story.
CK: That’s right, that’s exactly true.
Joe: That kind of journey just on a literary level is interesting, but when you add that spiritual element where the end result is not necessarily to find who’s responsible as much as it is to take care of the damage the community sustained in the process, I think it makes it a lot more interesting than just standard literature, but also I think ideologically it’s a lot more rewarding.
CK: That’s a very fine description of what the actual experience was. I was constantly brought back to that focus in meeting people. People, as they told their story or their little piece of the story or what they remembered, it was clear that they were looking for that great healing experience that could only happen if we all moved forward together towards a new spiritual moment. I told everybody I interviewed at the beginning—I made sure that was one of my introductory comments: I am not doing an investigation, that’s somebody else’s business; that’s not my business. I am recovering a story for the sake of writing a book to illustrate how the mission of the cross actually works in a real-life situation that is filled with the cross.
People understood that without having to explain it. It was clear to people. So this great mysterious spirituality of the cross that’s so hard to write about on an academic level, when you get down to the actual stories of people’s lives, it’s clear. There’s a sense of reality to it that they can see the connection between themselves and the story. The only one who can bring this to a new place and that is the Risen One who is risen as the Crucified One who continues to be deeply connected to the crosses in our lives which is the fullness of His own cross. Bringing this great story of suffering to healing is not the work of an author. It’s not the work of a family. It’s not the work of a reporter and it’s not the work of a sheriff’s deputy or a coroner. We all are partners; we all have participation in the process but we are participating in something that is greater than what we can do. We are players—I don’t like the word play—but we are collaborators in something much larger.
I became conscious of it even before it was pointed out to me—that there was something or someone guiding me in this process. It almost felt like a hand on my shoulder. It was almost like pushing me when I had to make a decision where next to go, what interview is next, what is the right thing to do so that I get a piece of the story that helps explain or interpret what I’ve received so far and there was a gentle nudge. One of Roger’s sisters said “the hand on the shoulder” that put it into words for me, and so from there on I said “You know, that’s the way it feels.” The hand on the shoulder and the hand of God which is scripture—which is sometimes, not often, but there’s an occasional reference in scripture, to the hand of God which is a reference to the Spirit of God. So the hand of God and the hand of Roger together nudging me along, meaning someone greater can see where this is all going to come. I still am amazed at what is still to come. I can’t see the end result. I can start imagining some things. The full unfolding of this is still to be revealed.
Joe: Actually someone I interviewed in the past had a nice turn of phrase that they liked to refer to as “when a project is done with them” instead of them being done with the project. It sounds like parts of this are still ongoing even though the book itself is done. How do you think this has changed you individually? Obviously your journey into this is what we follow as readers and there’s a pretty significant evolution from beginning to end.
CK: I feel that I have a clearer experience of the reality of the cross—how the spirituality of the cross works in the concrete real human experience and for a Crosier that’s a big step for me. I know the experience and now at some point I have to write articles or need to write something that says, “This is how this experience can be translated into some kind of theological expression so it can be shared with others, and what are the guiding principles and the guiding steps for letting this reality of the cross work its miracle in our lives in all sorts of situations, in all kinds of family situations and communities.” I feel more connected to that deeper experience of the mystery of the cross and I feel very good about that. If I had to get up and give a major lecture on this I would still be struggling to find the right set of words. I’d have to go back and put together all those layers of steps of what I’ve experienced and try to translate that into language that helps other people dive into that same process.
I am committed to writing another story. I think I have to write a sequel to this book. Only part of the story came to light. The rest of the story is still to be revealed and I think that means a sequel has to be written. It would be irresponsible, I think, not to write the rest of the story once it all comes together so I’m committed to that. I have a folder on my computer called “Sequel,” so as little things come forward I put them there and someday I’ll be trying to write the rest of the story. But I know that there are many, many stories like this around us in our lives. It might not be as virulent as this one but there are lots of stories. I’ve been introduced to stories already in this research—people saying “Would you consider writing the story of such-and-such.” And I say, “Well, make sure that I find out about it when I get this done. I don’t want to get too wrapped up in that because I’ve got to stay focused.”
So the mission of the cross is there wherever there is a story. I’d like other Crosiers and other people who have a charism for the cross to enter into this same process with me.
Joe: Of course this is speculation on some level, but would you consider a resolution for the sequel to be something along the lines of the investigation eventually having someone prosecuted or named as a suspect?
CK: Well, if that happens—and that’s somebody else’s business—I would instantly try to connect with that person or those people and try to bring them into the process of the fuller story of Roger and find a way to bring their human experience into the story—a human experience which preceded the event 48 years ago and that has continued to be part of their human story. That would be part of it.
Joe: Obviously the thrust of this kind of supersedes the legal structure we have, but I was curious if that was something—
CK: I respect that and I’ve had to be very careful. I was very involved in working with the family of Roger and they were very involved in working with me and, in a sense, a lot of this is done for their sake, but not only. It’s for the larger message and the larger purpose.
The family has its agenda. The media has its needs and agenda—its need to establish truth for the public. That’s their role, to get the truth out into the public where the public needs to know. Then the authorities have their responsibilities and I want to help in any way I can with any of that, but at the same time the spiritual role is unique.
Joe: It strikes me that there might some tension there by the way the legal system is set up and how the media responds. They seem to be more geared to respond in a—
CK: Sensational?
Joe: Well, sensational but their end goal is more about justice and retribution where that seems almost contrary to what you’re trying to establish. Your goal doesn’t seem to be to ostracize and punish those responsible, but to bring the community as a whole back together. Is that something you’re wary of or frustrated with?
CK: People have asked me directly, “Are you not concerned by issue of justice?”
I said, “I am. I know that truth and healing, the healing that comes from within the truth, cannot arrive until there is a sense of right order or a sense of justice where clear consequences have been established for something a major mistake or injustice of the past.”
Knowing that and respecting that but not letting that be my primary focus. That’s not my primary focus—that’s somebody else’s primary focus and I have to respect that.
Joe: I guess that’s what I’m impressed with what you’re doing. The legal system is set up to kind of balance things out, but in the end no one is really any better off for it. The hurt is still there and that’s not something the legal system can address.
CK: One of the things that was part of my first book writing effort was trying to establish that the individual human story, no matter how off the track it gets or how loaded down with terrible stuff it gets, that the individual human story is where you discover the close presence of God working with an individual or within an individual’s life. No matter what’s happened to the individual or what the individual has done, the individual still requires in God’s design reverence and respect as someone involved in a human story that is revelatory—revelatory of something greater. The evil that’s part of our lives doesn’t destroy the deeper dimension of an individual person. Sometimes the evil is very destructive, but evil is part of everyone’s story, actually. Learning from other people’s stories we learn more about our own human story and the mixture of good and evil. It’s a humbling process. Working with other people’s stories is a humbling process.
Joe: That’s an interesting way of putting it.
CK: There’s a strong part of contemporary theology that is focused on narrative. It’s called narrative theology or narrative spirituality. Some of the scholars are trying to rearticulate the religious traditions that have been articulated in more academic or scholarly principles and language into the human narrative dimension—knowing the human narrative is something that is more helpful to large numbers of people than the more esoteric language.
Joe: The idea of the living parable instead of the sermon.
CK: Whenever you use a homily in a sermon, whenever you use a good human story, people tell you it was a great homily. When you don’t use a good human story and you just talk about the scriptures and the implications of that for our lives it’s called preaching. People hear it and they say “Those were nice words.” They might not tell you that, but you can just see that you haven’t connected. You haven’t connected to the reality. The human narrative, the human story is where God reveals himself to us. And no matter what the story looks like.
Joe: From all accounts this is an ugly one.
CK: This has ugly dimensions to it, absolutely.
Joe: Were you surprised that there seemed to be something good that could come arise from something so horrible. There was a community there that’s been holding on to very strong feelings about this for nearly half a century.
CK: That’s very true. What was in a sense unspeakable at the time remained a strong presence in their life. They could not let it go. They could not separate themselves from that experience. As soon as they were given freedom to open the door the conversation has been liberating. I’m hearing that people in these various communities around here said, “You know, back then we were all wondering about that and all of a sudden it didn’t go anyplace and we’ve wondered about it all these years.”
It seems about one month after the tragic death of Roger the community went silent. The people didn’t walk away from it. They didn’t know what to do with the unspeakable gruesomeness involved with Roger’s death and the stories that they heard. There was nothing coming from the officials and there were no other newspaper articles other than the article in the St. Cloud Times a couple weeks after the funeral that the Sheriff in Mille Lacs County, Bruce Milton, was continuing the investigation; and even though he still asserted that it was a traffic fatality but there may have been some contributing factors such as a fight, a beating at the Kitten Club and some underage drinking. So he brought it down to a lesser kind of problem, and that he was interviewing all the individuals that were there with Roger and that there would be arrests, it was just a matter of time. Well, people waited and nothing happened. Another week passed, another week passed, soon it was a month, again another month and then it started to disappear and the people’s memories had all the virulent, violent stories that were on the street and part of their memory bank now and part of their consciousness, and nothing else was happening so they gradually just stored it away. Nothing was ever said officially after that.
People had to live with that experience. They talked about it occasionally. One of the things that happened—I’m not sure if I mentioned this—one of things that happened to the family because of the gruesome nature of the death of Roger and the unspeakable qualities of it because it involves apparently some aspect of sexuality, when family members found themselves in a social circle and somebody asked, “Are you a sister or brother or relative of Roger Vaillancourt?” and they would say yes, they said they constantly experienced people backing away and disappearing. It was a way of shunning—a way they felt shunned. People were probably not doing that intentionally, but they were backing away from something that they didn’t want to think about or didn’t want to talk about. So it was a strange experience that happened for all those years and it indicates something of the suffering, something of the unnerving reality that simmers in the soul.
The process of coming out of that darkness into the light is what we’re really trying to accomplish by “raising Roger’s cross” in the book. To do this for the family of Roger—the mother who’s 87 years old and has nobly and courageously stared these realities in the face for the last three years, and her other children—for most of those years they simply had to live with the unknown and now they’ve had to look at it in all of its terrible starkness, and they’re done with that I think. Lots of people are turning this over in their minds and their memories and trying to work with it. I had conversations yesterday with people who I had never interviewed who wanted to talk—they need to talk.
Joe: Is that one of the biggest surprises for you, the sheer number of people that this has affected? The people who have come out of the woodwork and come seeking you out to speak about it—it’s got to be a little humbling.
CK: They feel like I might have more information or can make sense of what little piece that they I have, I suppose. And maybe they don’t yet feel comfortable talking about it with others.
The community I think has made great steps forward in having conversations with each other. I am told that everybody is talking about it in Foley. This man I talked to yesterday, he’s from Foley and he really could not talk to anybody else. He didn’t feel comfortable talking to anybody else about what he remembered. So we met in an undisclosed place to hear something of his story and some of his anxiety or suffering that he has carried with him. It’s a ministry situation as well as a background story.
Another story maybe for the sequel (chuckles)
Joe: Do you have any closing thoughts?
CK: One of the things I’ve found in some of the interviews with some of the people I’ve started telling the story to is they’ve started to express their fear that if something so terrible could happen back then, in the “good old days” (which never existed) what could happen now to their own children? Could their own children be overcome by something so terrible? Could their lives be cut away? So facing and confronting, staring in the face of evil is one of the things that people experience; that life could be cut short, could be cut away, could be taken away from them so quickly, so easily. It seems so dangerous. It adds to that level of risk. When they’re facing evil, people have to learn to see that evil is a part of this world. Evil just in the sense of wiping away a whole history of an individual just like that, without a second thought, wiping it away so it doesn’t exist anymore in their midst except on their memories and their heartaches.
It’s important to have that in the background but then to not be overwhelmed by that but to focus on the preciousness of life, the gift of life—that life is a gift that is not going to be swept away, no matter what. And that the individual’s life that is swept away, like Roger’s, it will be continued; it will unfold. It will be brought to its fullness. I definitely believe Roger is part of this process completing his journey, completing his life bringing his life to its fullness. That’s one of the reasons for doing this work. It’s to help Roger who helps us to complete his life so that other people who are in this story can complete their life journeys and so on.
*****
Father Charlie’s book, Raising Roger’s Cross, is currently available through AuthorHouse and will shortly be available in the Joe-Mammy.com Store. Also watch for continuing coverage of the case through local and national news outlets and, someday, the sequel.
