The Bully of Toulon

From our September 2002 issue: For years, a rough-hewn man named Curt Thompson threatened and intimidated his neighbors in the small farming community of Toulon, Illinois. Many complained about him, and a few filed charges, yet little was done, and residents learned to alter their lives to avoid him. Then one night, authorities say, a newcomer paid him a call, and the town’s worst fears came true

By Robert Kurson

(page 4 of 4)

Lights still flashing, Thompson drove the now-damaged squad car west to the intersection of Commercial and Franklin Streets. There, he spotted a pickup truck being driven by his young neighbor Jason Rice, with whom he purportedly had been feuding. According to the indictment, Thompson rammed the pickup. Rice, believing he had been struck by a deputy, approached the squad car to offer help. Thompson pointed the shotgun. Rice ran from the scene.

At the Giesenhagen house, Ardelle still waited for an ambulance as Janet clung to life. It had been, by her estimation, several minutes since she had called the sheriff's office. She called again. "I need help now!" she told the dispatcher. "Where is the ambulance?" Ardelle says the dispatcher told her, "You have to call it yourself." Incredulous, Ardelle found the number to the local ambulance, located just blocks away, and called. Ardelle believes "at least" 15 or 20 minutes passed from the time she first called the dispatcher until the ambulance arrived.

By now, calls for help had been broadcast to officers in two other Stark County towns—Wyoming (six miles away) and Bradford (15 miles away). Sources say that the Toulon city policeman, Bob Taylor, was not on duty, but he raced to the scene upon learning what was happening.

Thompson was now pointed south on Franklin Street. Backup law enforcement was still minutes away. One witness says that Thompson approached another house, this one belonging to Joe Tracy, Jim Giesenhagen's best friend.

* * *

As Thompson drove past Tracy's house, Tracy's telephone rang furiously inside. By now, friends and family had heard word that Thompson had done something terrible, and they were desperate to warn Tracy. The phone kept ringing. Tracy and his wife had eaten dinner at the Barn House in Kewanee that night, and had stopped to talk to Joe's stepdaughter. Their house was empty.

By about 8:15 p.m., squad cars from Wyoming and Bradford, along with Bob Taylor in the Toulon city police car, had converged, sirens blaring. Thompson turned east on Thomas Street, then south on Miller Street, lights still flashing. He was within a block of his own house, where the slain deputy still lay.

The Bradford policeman, driving north on Miller, came head to head with the stolen squad car. Thompson stopped. The Wyoming and Toulon cars, which had gone first to Thompson's house, now came racing around the corner onto Miller and stopped behind the stolen vehicle. Thompson was surrounded.

The police aimed their weapons at Thompson. Still seated in the deputy's car, the indictment alleges, Thompson reached for a shotgun and fired through the windshield at the officers. The officers returned fire. Then, nothing moved. The only sounds in Toulon that moment were the officers' heaving breaths, and the whine of distant sirens racing to save the town.

Then more shots rang out, so many and for so long that some, describing it afterward, would liken it to the grand finale of a fireworks display. Then, another, longer silence, this one crushing in its implication—it was time for the officers to approach the stolen vehicle.

The police moved in, their lives thrust up against the crescendo of a 30-year rage. Nothing moved inside the squad car. They stepped closer. Toulon's lone traffic light, blinking a block away on Main Street, lit the scene in uncertain yellow. Thompson had been shot in the face. He appeared unconscious. Police dragged him from the car, handcuffed him, and continued to point their service revolvers at him. A medevac helicopter landed on the nearby high school football field and airlifted Thompson to a Peoria hospital.

Janet Giesenhagen was rushed to the same football field, where a helicopter awaited. She was pronounced dead on the field. That night, ten-year-old Ashley took her suitcase and slept at her grandmother's house.

* * *

Thompson was placed on life support at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Pe-oria. His condition improved over the course of the next week. On April 1st, ten days after the murders in Toulon, he was transferred to the Peoria County Jail, and placed in a cell by himself. A few days later, he appeared in court in Toulon and demanded to represent himself, saying his court-appointed attorneys in previous cases had not been "worth throwing back." He finally consented to a public defender—Matthew Maloney, an attorney certified to handle capital cases, from Princeton, Illinois, northeast of Toulon.

There are people in Toulon—and they do not make themselves loud or visible—who knew another side to Curt Thompson. They speak of a farm boy who lost his father at an early age, who had to work for room and board in grade school, who was bright and well read and married a lovely woman to whom he stayed married and with whom he produced three children. They know that Thompson will be remembered in Toulon as a monster. They say they will remember more than that.

"Curt was probably born 100 years too late," says one of Thompson's neighbors. "He butchered his own meat. He lived frugally and was a very intelligent person. He knew the biology of livestock and was well read in politics and life events. He was very capable. I would have hired the man in an instant if not for his temper."

"If you needed anything, Curt and his wife would come," recalls Mary Jane Swank. "When I came home from the hospital, they fixed us a complete meal, and I mean complete: chicken, pork chops, corn, potatoes, everything. Just a few days before [the shootings], Curt brought us some meat he'd butchered.

"I knew he had problems with people. But if anyone treated him fair, he'd treat you fair back. Curt had so much to give—that's the part that hurts me a lot. If he was treated decent . . . you know how small towns are—they have to pick at somebody and never let up."

"I felt bad for him sometimes," says a friend of Thompson's. "He never drove a fancy truck. A lot of his life was spent not having more than minimum finances. He always had two big black Lab dogs—salivated all over, but very nice, never growled or snapped. He'd bring the dogs along sometimes. About ten years ago, I noticed that he had only one of the dogs. He told me he had to put the other dog to sleep because it had heartworms. I asked if heartworms couldn't be treated. He said, 'Yeah, you can treat it, but I did not have enough money.' You should have seen his face. I thought he was going to cry. To me, it showed that he had a heart like anyone else."

* * *

Shortly after Jim and Janet Giesenhagen died, Toulon united to throw several fundraisers for Ashley. In a candle sale, citizens collected $3,500 for her future education. It had been the kind of gesture instinctive to the town since before Lincoln's speech on the courthouse lawn.

When asked about Thompson, many in Toulon do not want to talk. They are polite about it, all of them. And they are consistent in their reasoning.

"I don't want to think about it," one resident says. "I wish this would all just go away."

* * *

A month after the murders, Curt Thompson was taken to the Stark County courthouse to enter pleas in the 30-count indictment against him. Under heavy guard and wearing an old-fashioned gray-and-white-striped prisoner's jump suit, he walked deliberately into the courtroom, making eye contact with no one. Ashley Giesenhagen, seated in the back of the room, began sobbing at the sight of Thompson.

As the prosecutor read the indictment, questions wafted out the open courtroom window, through Toulon's two coffee shops, past Casey's gas station, and into the fields that frame Stark County. Why hadn't the sheriff's dispatcher called an ambulance immediately? Why had a rookie deputy tried on his own to serve a five-month-old warrant on a Friday night to a man known to be violent? Why hadn't law enforcement prosecuted Thompson if he had violated court protective orders? Had police been afraid of Thompson? Had the state's attorney done enough to stop him?

And, most important: Had the beauty of small-town life—that shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to everything and everyone—become its ugly undoing?

Thompson, through his lawyer, pleaded not guilty to all charges. The proceedings lasted about 30 minutes. After he was unshackled from a table, Thompson walked toward the door as he had entered—slowly and without expression. Just before leaving, he turned briefly toward the public who had packed the courtroom, and stared.