Horrific Kunz Families Murders: It Made Detectives Cry

The man investigators believe was behind the sudden loss of four members of the Kun’s family had done business with them only weeks before. He had stood in their farmyard. He had shaken hands with one of the men he is accused of targeting. He had walked away with a car, a bill of sale, and police would later argue a clear look at just how much cash a houseful of reclusive old people kept lying in the open.

 On the night of the 4th of July 1987, someone the Kun’s family had led onto their land came back. There was no forced entry, no broken window, no splintered door frame. Whoever walked into that farmhouse outside Athens, Wisconsin, walked in because the people inside let them. By morning, four of them were gone.

 A fifth was gone without a trace, and it would take investigators the better part of a year. two separate trials, a fight that went all the way to a federal appeals court, and a lie that finally cracked before anyone was held responsible for any of it. Even then, no one was ever convicted for what took place inside that house, only of what happened to the one Coons who vanished that night.

 This is the story of the Coons family, a name most of their neighbors barely knew before the 4th of July, and one Marathon County has never quite been able to forget since. Kenneth Coons was 55 years old, and for as long as anyone in Athens could remember, he had been the only member of his family anyone actually spoke to. He worked the same job for decades, running the pasturizers at a cheese factory a few miles from home.

 He was quiet, painfully so, and locals who crossed paths with him at the plant or at the bar down the road would later struggle to describe him as anything but polite and a little sad. He was by 1987 one of six people living on 108 acres his grandparents had settled at the turn of the century.

 The land had passed down to his uncle Clarence, who by then was 76 and shared the farmhouse with his sisters, Irene, 81, and Marie, 72, along with Kenneth’s mother, Helen, who was 70, and Kenneth’s younger brother, Randy, 30. Kenneth had a trailer of his own on the property. Everyone else slept under the same roof. No running water, no furnace, a single wood stove that cooked their food and heated the house at once.

 The people of Athens knew the Kunes mostly by reputation. Hoarders, some called them. Old vehicles and farm implements piled across the yard, purchased and resold in a kind of endless private commerce that kept a little cash moving through the family. Helen rarely went anywhere alone. Randy drove her into town for groceries and errands and waited in the car while she did her shopping the same way he had for years.

 She dressed, neighbors said, like the decades outside the farm gate had simply never happened to her. What almost nobody in Athens knew. What would not surface until investigators started asking questions nobody wanted to answer was what the Kun family had been carrying for over 80 years before that July night. In 1905, back in Manitook, the family patriarch’s own mother lost her life at the hands of one of her sons.

 A man later found to be suffering from severe mental illness and placed in state care. It was not, investigators would later learn, the only time mental illness had touched that branch of the family. It was the kind of story a family moves away from and buries. The Kunzas moved to Marathon County the following year and built a new life on land six miles outside a town that would come to know almost nothing about where they’d come from or what waited quietly beneath the surface of the family that farmed it.

 For a paper covering rural Wisconsin, a story like the Coons Farm was rarely headline news before 1987. This was dairy country, a place where a reporter’s biggest weekly assignment was more likely to be a highway expansion than a crime scene. A major crime case, let alone one of this magnitude, was the last thing anyone in Marathon County expected to be covering that summer.

 The 4th of July in a town the size of Athens, just over a thousand people, was not a day anyone stayed home for. There were fireworks. There was a fair the town had held for over a century. For one evening a year, the Kun family did something almost nobody in town expected of them. They showed up.

 Helen and Randy went into town together that Saturday evening, the way they always traveled and stayed to watch the fireworks with everyone else. They left for home sometime around 10. Clarence had already gone to bed hours earlier. Irene sat up in the living room with the television on. Marie was somewhere near the back porch.

 Kenneth spent that night apart from the rest of them. He’d worked in the garden earlier in the day, tilling a patch of soil he’d never had reason to touch before. In the evening, he drove to the cheese factory to wash his truck, something he did often enough that nobody thought twice about it, bought himself some fireworks, had a few drinks at a bar nearby, and made a decision that would end up saving his life without him ever knowing it.

 Rather than drive the 6 mi home that night, he stayed in his car at the factory lot until morning. Investigators would later place the time of the killings between half 10 and 11:00 that night, the same narrow window in which Helen and Randy were making their way home from the fireworks. Whoever came onto the property that night walked through a door that was never locked to begin with, into a house where visitors, rare as they were, had never needed an invitation twice.

 There was one more thing Kenneth did that night that would matter later, though nobody understood why yet. Somewhere between the cheese factory and the bar, with more cash on him than usual, he stopped and bought a large amount of fireworks, enough that the seller would remember him afterward. Where that cash had come from was a question investigators would spend months trying to answer, because Kenneth Coun was the only member of his family with a steady paycheck, and $22,000 was about to turn up inside a house where almost nobody worked at all. By the next

chapter of this story, four members of one family would be dead, and the fifth would already be gone. Kenneth came home a little before 5 in the morning on the 5th of July. He was quiet about it, the way he always was, easing back onto the property so he wouldn’t wake anyone. Two things struck him as wrong before he’d even reached the house.

 Ry’s car wasn’t parked where it should have been, and the radio inside was blaring loud at 5:00 in the morning in a house where nobody was usually even awake yet. He found his aunt Marie first just inside the back door, then his brother Randy in the kitchen, then his uncle Clarence still in bed. His aunt Irene was in her chair in the living room where she so often sat.

 All four had suffered fatal gunshot wounds. Investigators would later recover eight shell casings inside the home. Evidence of an attack that was swift and left almost nothing to chance. The county coroner, who responded that morning, had never worked a scene like it. He would later describe walking through that back porch door and finding Marie first, then moving deeper into a house so cluttered with belongings that investigators could barely move through the main room.

 Ry’s injuries told their own story. A struggle had clearly taken place before he died. Evidence investigators believed that at least one member of the family had fought back. Kenneth’s mother, Helen, was nowhere in the house. He ran to a neighbor’s place and asked them to call for help. When the sheriff’s department arrived, Kenneth told them there were three people dead inside and two missing.

There were actually four dead and one missing. And that single miscount, oddly enough, is part of what convinced investigators early on that Kenneth himself hadn’t done this. A man covering up his own crime, they reasoned, does not miscount the victims to the people he’s begging for help. Inside the house, investigators found something that had nothing to do with who pulled the trigger and everything to do with what kind of home this had been.

 Alongside a small television and VCR sat a large collection of explicit mature publications kept openly in the family’s living room, and scattered through drawers, envelopes, and cabinets around the squalor of the house, investigators found roughly $22,000 in cash. Whatever had happened here, it did not look like a robbery gone right.

 The money had been left behind. Outside near a garden Kenneth had tilled fresh just the day before, Ry’s car sat parked in a place it had never been parked before. Tire tracks nearby didn’t match it, or Kenneth’s truck, or anything investigators could immediately account for, and Helen Kun, 70 years old, a woman who by all accounts rarely left that farm without her son beside her, had simply vanished.

The community of Athens did what small towns do. They organized search parties. They combed the woods and fields around the couns where’s Helen printed on buttons and t-shirts handwritten passed hand to hand around town. The FBI brought in planes with heat sensing equipment. Weeks passed, then months. Nothing.

 What investigators would learn next about the Coon’s family would overshadow the murders themselves in the community’s imagination for years, and it would very nearly convince the sheriff’s department they already had their answer, sitting right there in the missing woman’s own words.

 3 weeks before the murders, Helen had gone into Wiler’s hardware store in town to order a toaster. While she was there, she also bought a box of 22 caliber shells, the same caliber later used in the killings. She told the store’s owner, Gail Wiler, that the bullets were for Randy to deal with blackbirds that had been getting into the property.

 It was what Helen said next that investigators couldn’t let go of. She told Gail Wiler she was upset with her family over the inappropriate materials kept around the house. She didn’t raise her voice. Gail would later describe her as seeming, if anything, hungry for someone to talk to. But the anger in her words stayed with the store owner long enough that the Monday after the murders made the news, she called the police herself.

 For a while, investigators had to consider whether Helen had fled the property or met a tragic fate somewhere in the surrounding woods. A rifle of the right caliber was found in the house, though cobwebs inside its barrel suggested it hadn’t been fired in some time. Underneath the investigation into the shooting itself, a much older story was surfacing, one that had followed the Kun family for over 50 years, and that almost nobody outside the family had ever spoken about out loud.

 In 1933, when Helen was just 15 years old, she became pregnant with the child who would grow up to be Kenneth. She said a neighboring farmer had harmed her. He was convicted of a serious offense against her and served time in prison for it, but rumors in the family and the community had long pointed elsewhere toward Helen’s own brother, Clarence, as the child’s actual father.

 During questioning, Kenneth told investigators plainly that he had grown up believing Clarence was his father and that he had observed family dynamics that supported that belief. Ry’s birth certificate, investigators found, listed no father at all. None of it proved who had taken four lives in that house, but it gave a small, tight-knit farming community a version of the Kun’s family that was far stranger and far easier to gossip about than the actual open question sitting at the center of the case.

 Who had walked onto that property on the 4th of July and why? There was a third theory investigators couldn’t ignore, one that had nothing to do with Helen or with family secrets at all. Randy Coons, some in the community whispered, had been quietly involved in illicit trade. A small-scale operation, investigators believed, feeding off a growing problem moving out from Wisconsin’s larger cities into towns like Athens that had no real way to police it.

 If Randy owed money to the wrong people, and Kenneth, the only coons with regular income and regular customers, had somehow failed to deliver a payment on the very night suppliers expected it, investigators had to at least consider whether four people had died over a debt instead of anything the family itself had done.

 No evidence of contraband was ever found in the house. nothing beyond rumor and one witness who later claimed to have conducted illicit transactions with Randy days before. It was a theory that explained the cash left behind and explained nothing else. And it would resurface again and again, every time the case seemed close to an answer.

 Nine months after Helen vanished in March of 1988, two boys out fishing in a swamp in neighboring Taylor County, nearly 20 m from the Kun farm, made a discovery that would answer at least one of the questions hanging over Athens, Wisconsin, even as it opened up several more. Helen Kun’s remains were found in that Taylor County swamp, having met the same tragic fate as her family.

 Whatever else had happened to her, she had not run. She had not survived. And with her death confirmed, the theory that Helen herself had been responsible collapsed for good. Investigators had in fact already turned their attention elsewhere. In the community, the Kun’s family had almost no contact with outsiders.

 But there was one person who did have a documented recent relationship with them. A 21-year-old local farmer named Chris Jacobs III, known around the area as something of a troublemaker, a man with a reputation for being dishonest and not entirely trustworthy. He had a history of minor trouble with the law even before 1987, and neighbors who knew him described him less as dangerous than simply unreliable.

 The kind of young man people did business with carefully. Jacobs had purchased at least one vehicle from Randy Coun in the weeks before the murders. A transaction that prosecutors would later argue gave him a firstirhand look inside a house that kept thousands of dollars in cash lying in plain sight, and required him to come back to the property again to finish the paperwork.

Jacobs was arrested and briefly held in late January of 1988, months before Helen’s body had even been found, but was released without charge days later. It took until August of that year, after investigators tied him more directly to physical evidence, for prosecutors to formally charge him.

 Five counts of first-degree murder as a party to the crime. The case against him was built entirely on circumstance. Tire track impressions near the freshly tilled garden were said to match his car. Spent shell casings recovered from his bedroom were said to match casings found at the Coon’s house. A handheld spotlight found in Jacob’s car matched an account from a neighbor who told investigators that on the night of the murders, a car she passed near the entrance to the Coon’s farm had blinded her with a light before following her

briefly down the road. What investigators never found was a body of physical evidence tying Jacobs directly and unambiguously to the scene. No fingerprints, no blood in his car, no murder weapon ever recovered at all. Jacobs went to trial in October of 1989. It lasted a month in front of an outofcount jury brought in specifically because of how much the case had saturated local news.

 The defense leaned hard into the same rumors that had already consumed the town, suggesting Helen herself might have taken her family’s lives before dying by her own hand, or that the murders were tied to whispers that Randy had been dealing drugs and owed the wrong people money. Jacob’s own mother testified that he’d been home with her that night helping deliver a calf.

 After 8 days of testimony, the jury deliberated for 4 hours. Not guilty. on all five counts. For the investigators and prosecutors who had spent two years building the case, it was, in the words of one reporter who covered the verdict, a devastating loss. For the town of Athens, it meant the person responsible for the Kun family’s deaths, if the jury had gotten it wrong, was still walking free among them.

 And under the law, having already been tried once for the murders, Chris Jacobs could never be tried for them again. or so everyone assumed. For nearly 4 years after the acquitt, the Kun’s case sat exactly where the verdict had left it. Jacobs went back to construction work. The farmhouse outside Athens sat empty.

 The file, as far as most people in Marathon County understood, it was closed, a family destroyed, and no one ever held responsible. For Kenneth Coons, those four years meant continuing to live alone on the edges of a farm that had once held his entire family in a trailer a few hundred feet from a house that now sat empty. He kept working.

 He kept mostly to himself, the way he always had. The case that had defined the worst morning of his life had gone quiet, and there was no indication from where he stood that it would ever move again. Then in 1993, one day before the statute of limitations was set to expire, prosecutors filed new charges against Chris Jacobs. Not murder.

 They couldn’t touch that again. This time they charged him with the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Helen [ __ ] specifically. A separate crime, they argued, from the deaths of the other four, and one the original jury had never actually been asked to rule on. Jacob’s lawyers fought it immediately, arguing the new charge was nothing but the same case wearing a different label, a clear violation of his constitutional protection against being tried twice for the same offense.

The fight went to the Wisconsin courts and eventually to the federal 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges at every level reached the same conclusion. Because the original jury’s verdict never specifically addressed whether Jacobs had abducted Helen Kun, prosecuting him for that alone did not amount to trying him twice for the same crime. The new case could proceed.

 What had changed to make prosecutors confident enough to try again wasn’t new tire tracks or new casings. It was a person, Chris Jacob’s former girlfriend, a woman named Stacy Weiss, who came forward with an account that would become the entire foundation of the second case against him. According to Weiss, she and Jacobs had been driving home one night from a bowling league when he turned to her and asked, almost as a hypothetical, what she would think of him if he told her he was the one responsible for what happened to the Kun

family. She said he didn’t stop there. She told investigators he drove her out to the old Kun’s property, showed her the garden where the car had been left, and later took her to the exact stretch of swamp where Helen’s remains had eventually been found. He told her, she said, that he had done it to prove something to himself, that he was capable, that he was a man.

 It was a devastating account, if true. It was also on paper an easy one to attack. Weiss herself had an outstanding charge for robbery in another state at the time she came forward. And in exchange for her cooperation and testimony, she received a plea deal, a detail Jacob’s defense would use to argue she had every reason to tell prosecutors exactly what they wanted to hear.

 The second trial began on the 8th of June, 1998, and ran for two weeks. Prosecutors combined Weiss’s testimony with the physical evidence from a decade earlier, the tire tracks, the shell casings, the spotlight, and asked the jury to do what the first jury had refused to do. Hold Chris Jacobs responsible for what happened to the Coon’s family.

 Jacob’s defense worked to dismantle Weiss on the stand almost the same way they had dismantled the state’s case 9 years earlier, pointing to her outstanding charge, her plea deal, her motive to tell prosecutors whatever would keep her out of a cell of her own. It was on its face exactly the kind of testimony a defense attorney dreams of cross-examining.

a bitter ex-girlfriend, freshly in legal trouble herself, suddenly remembering a confession nearly six years after the fact. But this time, jurors had more than one voice to weigh it against. They had the tire tracks. They had the shell casings. They had the spotlight. And they had a decade old case file that, however circumstantial, had never actually pointed anywhere else.

 This time the jury came back with a conviction, not for murder. The law had never allowed that question to be asked again, but guilty on the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Helen Kun. In August of 1998, Chris Jacobs was sentenced to 31 years in prison. Not for the deaths of Randy, Clarence, Irene, and Marie Coons, all four of whom he had already been acquitted of causing the deaths of, but for what a jury now believed he had done to their mother and sister afterward.

 It was in its own way the only form of justice the legal system had left available and it left the actual murders of four people permanently technically unsolved. No one has ever been charged in the deaths of Randy Clarence Irene or Marie Coons. Legally that case remains open to this day. When a reporter asked the Marathon County Sheriff’s Office decades later whether they considered the case closed, the answer was simple.

 Yes, they said they were confident they had the right man. He was already in prison. There was, in their view, nothing left to solve. Chris Jacobs served his sentence and was released on the 4th of February, 2020. The same day he was immediately taken back into custody in Marathon County. In June of that year, rather than accept the terms of parole, Jacobs voluntarily returned to prison.

 He had refused to sign the paperwork or report to a parole officer, reportedly because he believed doing so would amount to admitting guilt for a crime he has always denied. Under the terms of his original sentence, that decision keeps him in custody until the year 2029, 31 years almost to the day after the sentence that was handed down for a crime that was never on paper a murder at all.

 Kenneth Coons, the man who found his family’s bodies, who was cleared within days because his own account to police was too imperfect to be a lie, who lived out the rest of his life carrying what he’d walked into that morning, died in 2001. He never saw Jacob’s release or his return to prison or the case’s strange, unresolved ending.

 Milwaukee Sentinel reporter Crocker Stevenson would go on to write the only booklength account of the case published in 1993 drawn from autopsy reports, court transcripts, and the family’s buried history stretching back to 1905. What makes the Coon’s case difficult to sit with even decades later is not just the violence of that one July night.

It’s the fact that the people responsible for investigating it were never able to separate the crime from everything else the family had spent a lifetime hiding. The inappropriate media collection, the money left untouched, the rumors that had circulated about the family for half a century before anyone in it ever lost their life.

 All of it became part of the story the jury heard in 1989. And by most accounts, it worked against the prosecution as much as any gap in the physical evidence did. Welden Nelson, Jacob’s defense attorney, told the jury directly they would hear about a house filled with explicit material, a filthy house, rumors of a family relationship most people found repellent.

 And then he told them the thing he needed them to believe above all else, that whatever else this family had been, they had never hurt anyone, and there was no solid proof his client had either. It worked the first time. A jury looked at circumstantial tire tracks and matching shell casings and decided it wasn’t enough.

 Not when the case came wrapped in so much else that had nothing to do with who fired eight shots inside a farmhouse outside Athens. It would take another 9 years, a change in the charge itself, and one person finally willing to repeat what she said Jacobs had told her before any jury was willing to hold him responsible for any part of what happened to the Kun family that night.

 Chris Jacobs has always denied any role in their deaths. He remains, as of this telling, the only person the state of Wisconsin has ever formally connected to what happened on that farm. convicted of taking Helen Coons, never of ending four other lives in that house before he allegedly did. There is something particularly unsettling about a case built on a purchase.

 Jacobs didn’t need to break in, didn’t need to stalk the family, didn’t need to plan an entry point because the Kunzas had already opened the door themselves over a car, a bill of sale, an ordinary transaction between neighbors in a county full of people who bought and sold from each other constantly. If prosecutors were right, that single visit was enough.

 He’d seen what there was to see, and 3 weeks later he came back for it. The Coon’s farmhouse is gone now, long since torn down or lost to fire, depending on who in the area you ask. There is nothing left standing on the 108 acres to mark what happened there. The family is buried together in a small cemetery not far from where they lived their whole private lives.

 A family that almost nobody in Athens truly knew, even after their deaths made them the most talked about name in Marathon County for over a decade. No DNA test has ever settled the question of who Kenneth Kun’s father really was. No one ever will. Now, Kenneth died in 2001, and with him went the only living link to a rumor that had shaped and arguably overshadowed one of the most violent nights in the county’s history.

The people who might have anchored this story with some kind of ending, a survivor demanding answers, a mother refusing to let the case go cold, never existed here. Helen Kun never came home to fight for her family. Kenneth carried what he found that morning for 14 more years and then died with it.

 What’s left instead is a town that still without much hesitation says they know who did it and a legal record that on paper says otherwise. Even the physical landscape of the case has a strange unresolved quality to it. The Jacob’s family farmhouse a few miles north still stands today, and locals who drive past it still slow down out of habit decades later. The Coon’s farmhouse does not.

What was once the most talked about property in Marathon County simply isn’t there anymore. Nothing to visit, nothing to point to, just an empty stretch of the same land the family settled in 1906 when all any of them wanted was somewhere quiet to disappear into. Think back to that garden, the one Kenneth had freshly tilled the day before the murders.

 soft, disturbed ground that should have told investigators nothing at all and ended up telling them almost everything. A car parked where it never should have been. Tire tracks that didn’t belong to anyone who lived there. It was the first physical thread connecting an outsider to a house four members of one family would never leave alive. It took a decade.

 It took a second charge the law almost didn’t allow. It took one woman finally repeating what she said a man had told her on a dark drive home from a bowling league. And even then, it was never enough to answer for everyone who died in that house on the 4th of July. Four members of the Kun family lost their lives that night.

 And to this day, no one has ever been convicted in their deaths, only of what happened to the fifth. Some cases end with a name finally spoken in a courtroom. A family exhaling after decades of waiting. This one ends somewhere stranger. A man in prison for one crime the state could prove. Walking free in the eyes of the law. From four others it never could.

 If this case has stayed with you, you’re not alone. It stayed with an entire county for almost 40 years.