Cassie Hansen: Abducted in Church

Taxi Driver Stuart Knowlton Spontaneously Kidnaps a Child
(‘Church Disappearance,’ Forensic Files)

If you watch enough Forensic Files, you learn that even the most unlikely places are settings for tragic crimes against children.

It happened when Lisa Manderach and her baby daughter entered a kids clothing store with a depraved killer working the register.

Gone too soon. And it happened when 6-year-old Melissa Brannen ducked out of her mother’s sight for 30 seconds at a Christmas party filled with neighbors. A married maintenance man no one knew was a pedophile grabbed her and fled.

Likewise with first-grader Cassandra “Cassie” Lynn Hansen: She vanished from a well-attended church function.

For this week, I looked for a bit more information about Cassie and her short life and also searched for epilogues on killer Stuart Knowlton as well as Dorothy Noga, who nearly lost her own life in a bid to help solve Cassie’s murder case.

So let’s get going on the recap of “Church Disappearance” along with research from the internet:

Bookish girl. On November 10, 1981, Ellen Hansen and her two daughters, Cassie, 6, and Vannessa, 4, went to family night at the Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Up until that evening, Cassie, born on Jan. 20, 1975, had led a happy life. She attended St. Columba Grade School and enjoyed ice skating and creating art projects.

“Cassie was just learning to read and loved it,” her godmother, Kathleen Schuba, told the Winona Daily News. “She’s been interested in books and magazines for years.”

People described Cassie as warm and affectionate and able to make friends easily.

Frantic search. But she would never get a chance to go out on her first date or read Jane Eyre and Of Mice and Men for English class.

On that November 1981 evening, sometime between 6:50 p.m. and 7 p.m., Cassie got her mother’s permission to leave the church’s auditorium, where a scavenger hunt was about to begin, and go to the restroom.

The blond-haired blue-eyed little girl never returned. A search of the church yielded Cassie’s coat but no sign of her.

The police swooped in immediately and scoured the surrounding area for Cassie. Volunteers joined in the effort. The authorities quickly sent her picture to publications and news shows.

Lifeless body. But the search concluded the next morning. Cassie’s body turned up three miles from the church in an Auto Clinic dumpster in St. Paul’s Crocus Hill area. Someone had strangled her, possibly with a belt. The attacker left semen on her pleated blue skirt, but an exam showed no signs of penetration, according to court papers.

Church member Lynette Pederson remembered seeing a white-haired man outside the church as well as inside near the restrooms around the time Cassie vanished, according to reporting from the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Pederson also saw Cassie heading downstairs toward the bathrooms — making her the last person, except the killer, to see her alive.

Another witness recalled a man carrying a motionless little girl near the dumpster the night of the murder, and others remembered seeing him lurking around the crime scene. Their descriptions of him matched the one Pederson gave.

Awesome tip. The police department assigned six detectives to the case. They went door to door searching for witnesses, and ultimately interviewed 633 potential ones. They also considered 108 suspects, according to the Star-Tribune of the Twin Cities.

An FBI profiler suggested that the killer was a white male loner with a nocturnal lifestyle and a history of child sex offenses. And he’d probably feel compelled to talk about the crime.

Sure enough, Dorothy Noga, who Forensic Files described as a massage parlor employee, went to the police with a terrific lead.

Daring proposition. A 50ish taxi driver named Stuart Willis Knowlton came to the Comfort Massage Studio the day after Cassie disappeared — and requested that Dorothy tell anyone who asked that he’d been with her the night before.

Under police questioning, Knowlton denied he murdered Cassie and said he was busy driving his cab on the night she died. He felt sorry for her family, he offered.

Dorothy Noga volunteered to secretly tape her conversations with Knowlton, but police declined because it was too dangerous.

Untaped confession. Next up, another great tipster came along. Janice Rettman, head of St. Paul’s public housing, told police that she had received complaints about Stuart Knowlton making advances toward children. Investigators accepted her offer to secretly record a conversation between her and Knowlton.

On the tape, Knowlton didn’t confess, but he did mention that Cassie had been beaten about the face, a detail police hadn’t made public.

In the meantime, Dorothy Noga went rogue and tried to get Knowlton to discuss the murder — and he allegedly did confess to her, but not on tape, she said.

Horror scene. Shortly after that admission, a mystery man waited for Dorothy outside the massage parlor at closing time and stabbed her 32 times. He slit her carotid artery and jugular vein.

The blood “just poured like a faucet, like a garden hose,” Noga told the Pioneer Press. Fortunately, patrol officer Pat Scott, who had just gotten coffee at a Flame Burger — 125 feet from where Dorothy lay praying for help — quickly arrived on the scene.

Scott used a towel and applied pressure to her neck in an attempt to stop the bleeding and would later recall that her blood soaked his pants “from his thighs to his boots,” according to the Pioneer Press story from Dec. 12, 2017.

Against all odds, Dorothy survived.

He’s with the band. The next part of the story sounds like a daytime soap opera, but apparently it really happened: Dorothy underwent hypnosis to help her remember who attacked her. She identified Stuart Knowlton as the man who told her, “Take a look because it’s going to be your last,” as he pushed his face into hers and began using his knife.

Minnesota doesn’t allow evidence influenced by hypnosis, but it gave more affirmation to the case against Knowlton.

Police got a hair sample from him that looked similar to some strands taken from Cassie’s clothing. They also found one hair with a hairshaft abnormality, “banded” hair. Knowlton’s hair bore the same pattern.

Life and limb. He was also seen eating at an Arthur Treacher’s restaurant near the Auto Clinic around the time of the murder.

The investigation lasted 10 months.

Then there was a shocking development that had nothing to do with the case: A vehicle struck Stuart Knowlton as he crossed a street in downtown St. Paul. Doctors had to amputate his leg below the knee.

Story unfolds. Knowlton’s misfortune didn’t stop police from arresting and jailing him in September 1982. Apparently, he spent a little too much cash at the massage parlor because he couldn’t come up with $75,000 in bail.

He waived his right to a jury trial, leaving his fate in the hands of Judge James Lynch.

In court, Dorothy Noga testified that Knowlton said that on the night of the murder, he entered the church to use the bathroom and asked Cassie if she’d like to play a game and then led her to his taxi. Cassie started to scream, so he choked her with his belt and disposed of the body and left her shoes in two different places. (But he kept the little buckles — he supposedly had a foot or shoe fetish.)

Fishy behavior on the job. Rettman testified that Knowlton told her he couldn’t remember where he was on the night of the murder.

Two taxi dispatchers who worked with Knowlton said that he normally checked in with them frequently throughout the evening, but on the night Cassie disappeared, he didn’t communicate with them after 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. He also never turned in his trip sheets for the night; Knowlton said a passenger stole them. When Knowlton began work the next day, he rattled on about the murder so much that the dispatcher had to cut him off.

Knowlton’s defense lawyers had a few salvos to launch. They found some witnesses who said they’d seen a girl matching Cassie’s description in other parts of St. Paul the night she went missing.

Oddball turn. They also introduced a signed confession to Cassie’s murder from a 25-year-old Texan named Bondell Kvanli.

But on the witness stand, Kvanli denied committing the murder and said she was struggling with alcohol problems and schizophrenia.

After the three-week trial, Knowlton was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree misconduct and given a life sentence.

Solo actor. At a parole hearing in 1997, Cassie’s father, Bill Hansen, asked board members to not let Knowlton’s age or missing leg arouse their compassion. “His physical condition would lure sympathetic children into his lethal grasp,” Bill said, as reported by the Star-Tribune of the Twin Cities.

Previously, 1,500 members of the community had written letters to urge the board to keep Knowlton behind razor wire.

Knowlton, without any defense lawyers accompanying him, told the panel members that he was innocent, and pleaded for release.

Final exit. They denied him parole, and noted that his next hearing would take place in 10 years.

“This in no way is to be construed that Mr. Knowlton will be released at that time, only that he will be afforded another review before the Commissioner of Corrections and the advisory panel,” a statement from the Minnesota Department of Corrections said, as reported by the Star-Tribune of the Twin Cities.

It mattered little because Stuart Knowlton died of natural causes in prison in 2006.

Beastly man. Not that his death made anyone in the community forget what happened to Cassie.

“I had a little girl at the time, and she was my firstborn,” Don Gorrie, Ramsay County medical examiner’s chief investigator, recalled in an Albert Lea Tribune story about his retirement in 2013. “It was just hard to not carry that case with me.” 

In 2017, Pat Scott recalled, “It shook us to our core [that] a monster who walked among us, impersonating a human being, took her from her family and took her from all of us.”

Award received. That year, on the 36th anniversary of Cassie Hansen’s death, the St. Paul Police Department gave the Chief’s Award for Merit to Dorothy Noga, Pat Scott and retired officers Rick Klein and Jim Groh for helping to convict Stuart Knowlton. (Others involved in the case had been honored decades earlier.)

Pat Scott called Dorothy Noga the real hero of the effort. “Without her, who knows how many little girls that monster would have gone on to kill,” he said, according to a CBS News story from 2017.

Ellen and Bill Hansen, who had since moved out of state, attended the award ceremony along with Vannessa and their other two daughters, who were born after Cassie died.

A life changed. As for Dorothy Noga, no one was ever charged with the knife attack, but she received $50,000 to settle a claim that police failed to protect her.

Noga, who had moved to Florida and was no longer a massage parlor professional, said that the profound physical trauma she suffered “was an act of God to get me out of that line of work.”

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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