HUDSON (WI)
Pioneer Press
BY EMILY GURNON
Pioneer Press
HUDSON, Wis. — Dan Klatt has a photo in his office at the Hudson Bowl that he looks at every day.
It shows the bowling alley owner with his longtime friend, Dan O'Connell, ice fishing with their children at Balsam Lake — a place they'd been going to since they were kids themselves.
O'Connell's violent death at a local funeral home more than three years ago shook Klatt, 43, to the core. And Monday's determination by a judge that the evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the Rev. Ryan Erickson did little to ease Klatt's pain.
"It doesn't make it feel any better," he said Monday afternoon. "I thought it would."
Evidence shows that the 2002 shooting deaths of O'Connell, director of the O'Connell Family Funeral Home in Hudson, and James Ellison, a University of Minnesota intern from Barron, Wis., were carried out by Erickson, St. Croix County Judge Eric Lundell said Monday.