Documents shed light on cold case

ORD, Neb. — Interviews with new witnesses, including his ex-wife and a cellmate, were part of the evidence that helped law enforcement authorities get an arrest warrant for John Oldson, 45, charging him with murder in the 1989 slaying of Catherine Beard of Ord.

Beard disappeared May 31, 1989, leaving behind her keys, cigarettes and jacket at the bar where she was a part-time waitress. Her body was found three years later, in April 1992, when a rural Ord woman found a skull while picking up trash along a minimum maintenance road five miles southeast of Ord.

Oldson was arrested Jan. 24 and was being held in the Hall County Jail. He is charged with first-degree murder and is scheduled to appear in Valley County Court on Monday.

An affidavit for Oldson's arrest, filed in Valley County on Jan. 23, says investigators interviewed Minnie Oldson in October 2010. Several witnesses who saw Beard leave the Some Place Else Tavern with Oldson the night she disappeared also were reinterviewed.

An arrest affidavit presents probable cause that a specific crime has been committed by the individual named in a warrant.

The investigation had remained open, and for years local and state investigators continued to meet to discuss the case.

The cold case murder was brought to light again in May 2008, when newly elected Valley County Sheriff Casey Hurlburt was directed by County Attorney Glenn Clark to fully review the matter and conduct an extensive investigation to try to determine who committed the crime.

Clark said he will not comment about the case, including why he directed Hurlburt to review it, until a conviction has been obtained.

At the time of the arrest, Hurlburt said new evidence and witnesses led to the arrest, but he did not elaborate.

According to court records, Minnie Oldson was married to John Oldson from 1992 to 2001. When he was arrested on suspicion of child abuse, she told investigators that her ex-husband told her that he had wanted to have sexual relations with Beard, but "she turned him down that night."

Minnie Oldson said he also told her that he was mad when Beard rejected him and that Beard had laughed at him.

Minnie Oldson said her ex-husband "had a temper and trouble controlling his emotions" and liked to "control and manipulate people."

Others interviewed between 1989 and 2011 included Beard's best friend and employer, two people who were in the bar the night of Beard's disappearance, one person who was driving down the alley behind the bar, a woman whose husband occasionally worked for the construction business owned by John Oldson's father, the woman who found Beard's skull and John Oldson himself.

Two other patrons of the bar that night, Lawrence Kittinger and Diane Fischer, reported having seen Beard leave by the bar's back door with Oldson. Beard was wearing blue jeans, blue tennis shoes and a white sweater with pink and gray stripes.

In June 2011, Rhonda Donnelson was interviewed and said she saw a woman matching Beard's description and wearing blue jeans and blue tennis shoes get into Oldson's pickup with him on May 31, 1989, and drive out the end of the alley. Donnelson said she could not recall what color shirt the woman was wearing.

That contradicts what Oldson told police in 1992, when he said he left the bar with Beard and asked her to have sex with him. He said that she refused him and broke free when he tried to grab her and that she went to another pickup in the alley and rode away with the two men inside the pickup.

Barbara Dasher said she would often meet her husband as the Oldson construction crew met at the tavern after work. During one of these gatherings at a bar in North Loup, after Beard's disappearance but before her body was found, Oldson whispered in her ear that "Cathy got what she deserved."

Dasher said Oldson also told her that he "knew where Cathy was at" and that she "would never be found."

Part of the interviews in the affidavit focused on Oldson's sexual fascination with women's midsections or abdomens. One paragraph in the court record points out his conviction of an assault on a Burwell convenience store clerk about two months after Beard's disappearance. Oldson lifted up the clerk's blouse, touched her stomach and drove away. He was sentenced to a year in jail for the incident.

Minnie Oldson told investigators that her ex-husband was "sexually turned on" by the stomach. During an investigation that eventually led to John Oldson's conviction on child abuse charges it was revealed that he had stuck needles into the stomachs of his two stepdaughters and that police found pornographic photographs of women in which daggers or arrows had been drawn on the midsections of the women pictured.

The autopsy on Beard's body showed that besides severe blunt force trauma to Beard's head, there were marks indicating blunt force trauma to her ribs and cuts to the abdominal region of the spine and vertebrae.

Minnie Oldson said John Oldson used to repeat a saying when he was mad at someone: "You're lucky I didn't dump your guts on your shoelaces."

Danny Denhart, who had been interviewed in January 1993, also was interviewed in October 2010. He told investigators that while he and Oldson were incarcerated together, they would watch television together. Denhart said that when a female in a bikini walked across the screen, Oldson said he should cut her "like Cathy."

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