Christmas was coming and, for Minnie and Ed Maurin, that meant having dear friends over for lunch on December 19.
The season’s festivities occupied the elderly couple more than most. As Christmas tree farmers, it was also their livelihood, and they loved showing off a beautiful tree in the window of their home on their 120-acre farm.
But when their friends turned up on the day, they were shocked. Minnie, 83, and Ed, 81, weren’t home and it was odd that their front door was locked. And they knew the couple would never have closed the curtains on their Christmas tree.
After more than a few concerned phone calls, Ed and Minnie’s family arrived, and soon after that, so did the police.
After getting into the house, officers found a shoebox and some bank statements scattered on the floor, and Minnie’s bag oddly hidden behind the sofa. She’d never have left home without it.
With the couple’s green car also missing, the question was, where were they?
The very next morning their vehicle was spotted in a local car park.
Shockingly, police found the front seats were covered in so much blood it was leaking through the door gaps, and the dashboard was peppered with shotgun pellets. But much worse was to come.
On Christmas Eve, Minnie and Ed’s bloodied bodies were found near a forest road
On Christmas Eve, Minnie and Ed’s bloodied bodies were found by a logger near a forest road.
The whole town was devastated.
‘When this happened, Christmas just became sad,’ James Shriver, a family friend, told Oxygen.
‘It changed everyone’s life. They were such nice people.’
At the crime scene, investigator Roger Ely found the couple had both been shot in the back with a sawn-off shotgun, while sitting in the front seats of their car.
Bloodstains, along with the position of their clothes – Ed in a shirt, jacket and pants, Minnie in her housecoat – indicated they had been pulled from a car and dragged along the ground by their legs.
Shot in the back
An autopsy later revealed Ed also had head injuries, indicating he’d been beaten before he’d been shot.
In the crucial days that followed, police learned Ed had visited the bank on the morning of their disappearance. He had withdrawn $12,300, saying it was for a relative.
And witnesses reported seeing the pair with two men, brothers Rick and Greg Riffe, but no-one was prepared to go on the record.
‘If anyone says they were not afraid of the Riffe brothers, they are lying because they (the Riffes) were bad people. They were enforcers. They threatened people,’ James explained.
Sadly, without being able to identify the men, the investigation into the 1985 double murder stalled. Two years later the Riffes skipped town, and by the early ’90s the case was stone cold.
Then in 2010, a new local prosecutor – who’d been 14 years old at the time the Maurins were murdered – was put in charge.
First-degree murder charges
The investigation ramped up and, in July 2012, police arrested Rick Riffe, then 53. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of kidnapping and robbery. Each charge came with special allegations of lack of remorse, deliberate cruelty and acting against vulnerable victims. In a twist of fate, his brother Greg Riffe had died just a week earlier.
The arrest was a relief to Dennis Hadaller, one of Ed and Minnie’s children. ‘It has been 26 years and seven months,’ he said.
‘I thought about it at least three or four times a day,’ he told chronline.com.
He’d even hired private investigators and offered a reward to find the killers.
Describing the murders as ‘brutal and heinous’, Judge Richard Brosey sentenced Riffe to just under 103 years in jail.
At Rick Riffe’s six-week trial in October 2013, 90 witnesses testified about the horrific events of December 19, 1985, and many identified the Riffe brothers.
A former drug dealer told he court that every local involved with drugs knew that the brothers, who were also dealers, committed the murders.
James Shriver said he’d been in a car with his mum when he’d seen the Riffes with Ed and Minnie in their car. Aged 17 at the time, he’d been terrified when the brothers had later threatened to kill him, his mother and the rest of his family if he told anyone what he’d seen.
Haunted by this, he told the court, ‘It was 28 years of looking over my shoulder.’
But after his mother died in the early 2000s, James contacted the police and told them what he’d seen, chronline.com reported.
Prosecutors said the brothers had forced the couple to withdraw the cash from the bank.
Other witnesses testified the brothers had used a friend’s shotgun, and had openly talked about the abduction and the killings.
‘Never give up’
The jury found Riffe, then 55, guilty on all counts. At sentencing, prosecutor Jonathan Meyer said, ‘It is through his depravity and his (Riffe’s) acts that Ed and Minnie’s lives were ended.’
Describing the murders as ‘brutal and heinous’, Lewis County Superior Court Judge Richard Brosey sentenced Riffe to just under 103 years in jail.
After the trial, Dennis was grateful to finally fulfil a vow made to his mother at her funeral. He’d promised to ‘never give up’ trying to find the killers.
After 28 years, the verdict ‘took a big load off of my shoulders because I made that promise, and I was getting worried as I got older that maybe I was going to fail’, he said.
