In 1884, 'Moe the Murderer' killed his wife in what he called a plan of ‘mutual suicide’

NORTH DAKOTA — A little more than 141 years ago, a rural North Dakota man labeled a "lunatic" and "insane" after sustaining a head injury about a month earlier turned himself in for the murder of his wife and their unborn child.

Ancestry documents obtained by the Grand Forks County Historical Society identified the man as Knut Anderson Moe, though other archives refer to him as slightly different names, including Knud O. Moe and Knute Moe. Moe moved to the United States from Norway in 1882 and was naturalized in Grand Forks the following spring. A little more than a year later, in early September 1884, the Grand Forks Herald would dub him "Moe the Murderer."

Newspaper archives reported that Moe had been in a fight with three men in Steele County earlier that summer.

The men were identif