One day in March of last year, I got a call from a Twin Cities woman who told me that when she was 13 she babysat for the children of T. Eugene Thompson’s mistress. She had just read Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson, my book about the 1963 homicide of Thompson’s wife, his trial for murder, and the subsequent lives of the Thompsons’ four children. In her call, and then in a detailed e-mail message, the woman said that even now, nearly 45 years later, she dreamed about the case and remembered as though it was yesterday how shocked she’d been to discover that the “charismatic and charming man” whose name she learned from a newspaper headline was accused of arranging his wife’s death.

I’d been pretty sure a book about the Thompsons would kindle memories among some number of Minnesotans who lived here during the 1960s. After all, the long, lurid drama that began with the brutal attack on the 34-year-old housewife in her Highland Park home and concluded nine months later with the first-degree murder conviction of her husband—an up-and-coming attorney whose motives, according to the state, included a million-dollar life insurance payout and desire for another woman—was riveting. Virtually every day for nearly a year, the story had been top-of-the-fold, front-page news in all four Twin Cities dailies.

Still, the woman’s call surprised and touched me. Maybe I believed I’d already talked to every survivor who had a stake in the long-ago events. Maybe, as a journalist with “objective” presumptions, I had underestimated the case’s residual emotion.

As it turned out, the former babysitter was only the first of many dozens of people, mostly here but also from around the country, who told me about their personal connections with the Thompson case after I’d written my book. Many of the individuals I heard from lived, or had lived, in Highland, and many had in one way or another intersected the Thompsons’ large social circle or had been classmates of the Thompson kids in Highland schools. Some were retired judges and lawyers who had known T. Eugene professionally, or 1960s police officers, reporters, or medical professionals who’d been present at the Hillcrest Avenue crime scene or at old Ancker Hospital, where Carol died four hours after the attack. Whatever the connection, what impressed me was not that the callers remembered the case, but how vividly, and in such tangible detail, they remembered it, and how important their recollections seemed to be to them today.

A man who knew the Thompsons from their undergraduate days at Macalester College told me that at Carol’s funeral T. Eugene, not yet publicly a suspect, had fervently grasped his hand and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get the guy who did this.” A man named Jim Adams, e-mailing from Los Angeles, identified himself as “the guy who wrote and sang ‘The Ballad of T. Eugene.’?” I had heard there was such a recording but didn’t know, until receiving Adams’s message, that for a short time during the middle sixties the song was “No. 1 in metered jukebox play in the five-state Midwest area.” A retiree calling from his cabin in Wisconsin wanted me to know he’d been a rookie stenographer at the Hennepin County courthouse in November 1963. His first assignment had been to fill in for the court reporter handling T. Eugene’s trial, and it had fallen to him to record hired killer Dick W.C. Anderson’s account of the murder. When he read the graphic description he’d taken down verbatim more than four decades earlier, the hair, he said, stood up on his arms.

At least a dozen people told me they hadn’t been allowed to play outside for weeks after the murder, so great was the fear of a homicidal maniac roaming the streets. One woman said that after March 6, 1963, her mother forbade leaving cutlery on the kitchen counter, convinced that Carol’s murder had been facilitated by a knife left thoughtlessly (or not!) in plain sight in her kitchen. (In fact, Carol’s killer had rummaged through a drawer for the knife he used.) And, if we can credit the anecdotal testimony, the habit of locking doors at night dates locally from that snowy March morning.

How to explain the lasting fascination with this particular local murder? In the words of the late Ramsey County prosecutor William Randall, the case had the three essential components of a classic murder case: blood, money, and sex. For more than three months, the Thompson story was, at least in the public’s mind, a whodunit. (The police, who usually look first at the husband, knew better.) Then there was the large, bizarre cast of noirish characters (hard-drinking “stumblebums,” a cantankerous Irish homicide chief, a “Lincolnesque” county attorney), and a six-week-long trial replete with an attractive “other woman,” a spellbinding hit man, and a cocky, voluble defendant insistent on his own innocence.

More to the point, there was both novelty and proximity. For all the horrors in the world, we’re quite capable of being shocked and mesmerized when something awful happens close to home, in familiar environs, to people like us. For most of “us,” that meant, then as now, middle-class white families living in comfortable, middle-class white neighborhoods such as, well, Highland Park. Murder didn’t happen to “us” very often 45 years ago (nor, for all our current jumpiness, does it happen to us much more frequently today). If and when it did—and if it involved the betrayal of those closest to us, and if the place where we feel safest turned out to be not safe at all—we sat up and paid attention, at least for a while. We did when Anne Barber Dunlap was murdered in a not dissimilar setting in Minneapolis in 1995, and we did, more recently in the California case of Laci Peterson.

Then there’s this: The Thompson case, as brutal as it was, seems almost quaint in hindsight. Check out the clippings and the black-and-white news film. All the men wore hats and the women pretty dresses, and everybody smoked in the courthouse hallway. The same “family” newspapers that reproduced entire pages of Dick Anderson’s testimony also dutifully included the dress size and measurements of T. Eugene’s girlfriend. The paradigm of the American “homemaker” could have been June Cleaver—or Carol Thompson. So we view Carol’s murder and its aftermath as we would an exotic period piece, through a telescope, on the far side of the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Manson slayings, Jonestown, Jacob Wetterling’s abduction, O.J., Columbine, 9/11.

Meanwhile, we continue to live in a middling community in which “six degrees of separation” seems overstated by a factor of two or three. We seem to stay put longer than people in other parts of the country, so our chances of rubbing up against each other or at least knowing someone who knows somebody are probably greater than in a lot of other places. Few of the people who contacted me appeared, so far as I know, in any of the police files, newspaper clippings, or trial transcripts from the case. Nonetheless, they believe their roles—babysitter, college friend, court reporter, et cetera—were and are important. At least a brief portion of their lives overlapped community history, and though my version of that history had been written, they wanted me to be aware of it.

“Even the most ordinary life makes a terrible noise . . . when it’s broken off,” Anatole Broyard wrote decades ago. When that life belongs to a neighbor—when the victim, the perpetrator, and their family live down the block or just across the Ford Bridge—we take it personally. And, obviously, it’s not something we quickly forget.

William Swanson (B.A. ’68) is a senior editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson was a finalist for a 2007 Minnesota Book Award.