Gathering for 'Gitchie Girl'

Community comes together for stories, answers and healing

 

It all started as a dare, of sorts, on Facebook.

Marissa Gnadt left the Gitchie Girl  book signing at the Brandon Community Library on June 8 and immediately posted a video on Facebook urging people to read the book.

“If you haven’t read it, I will personally come over and read it aloud to you,” Gnadt said in her post.

Her friend, Nancy Longhenry, took her up on the offer.

Gnadt accepted. It would be the two of them, maybe her mom, Marcia, maybe some wine.

Before long, the event grew from two women to dozens of people and another guest of honor: Sandra Cheskey Chrans, who messaged Gnadt on Facebook after seeing the video and asked if she could come.

That’s how more than 50 people came to gather in the community room above Family, Floors & Furniture last Monday night to hear Gnadt read Gitchie Girl aloud to her friend.

But it was much more than a reading. Gnadt began by talking about all of the texts and emails she’d gotten from people intrigued by why she was holding the event. Was she related to Chrans in some way?

“While we’re not family, I feel in some ways like we are,” Gnadt told the crowd.

Then she told her story.

Gnadt grew up with a childhood fascination and morbid curiosity about the 1973 murders at Gitchie Manitou State Preserve – and not just because of the proximity between her home and the crime scene in Lyon County, Iowa. Her uncle, Don Foster, testified for the prosecution in the trial that put the Fryer brothers behind bars, and her cousin watched the arrest from atop a windmill next door.

The night of Nov. 17, 1973, Foster met the Fryer brothers on their way to the park. He sold them beer and gas. Something didn’t feel right, so Foster asked them where they were going. They said they were rabbit hunting.

“I come from a storytelling family,” Gnadt said. “For years my mom preached to me that the only thing that’s truly yours is your name. It’s time for Sandra to be in control to define what ‘Gitchie Girl’ means.”

To Chrans, she said, “All those years you didn’t talk – we thought about you and we cared about you.”

Gnadt began with chapter one. The room was quiet. Several had copies in their laps and were following along. Sitting up front next to Longhenry, Chrans was hearing the book aloud for the first time.

After the reading, she told her own story.

The only survivor of the mass murder that left four of her friends dead at Gitchie Manitou State Preserve, Chrans helped authorities apprehend and sentence David, Allen and James Fryer. Posing as police officers, the brothers brutally murdered four Michael Hadrath, Stewart and Dana Baade, and Roger Essem – and kidnapped and raped Chrans, then 13.

For four decades she was silent about that night, silent about her life – until she shared her story with Gitchie Girl authors Phil and Sandy Hamman. Since the book’s release in 2016, she has appeared at events throughout the area.

Many in the room had questions: Had she been in contact with any of the Fryer brothers in the past 40 years? Had she forgiven them? What was her life like now?

Chrans spoke at length. As she told the crowd, Gitchie Girl  has helped her heal when nothing else could.

“You have to read it slow after you read it fast,” Gnadt said of the book. “You’re going to devour it and see her in a whole new light.”

There was one more question: Will there be a sequel?

Indeed there will. Stories of Gitchie Girl, Chrans confirmed, is due out next year.