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Obituaries

Lawyer convicted in wife-murder said to inspire 'Fargo' movie plot dies at home at 88

A Minnesota lawyer convicted of first-degree murder in one of the state’s most notorious crimes died at his home last month.

T. Eugene Thompson was 88 years old.

He served nearly 20 years for the 1963 slaying of his wife, Carol Thompson, who was fatally beaten and stabbed by a small-time thief in the couple’s St. Paul home, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Prosecutors said Thompson arranged the hit, through another man, in order to collect $1 million in life insurance and free himself for another woman.

The bungling murder is said to have inspired part of the plot of the award-winning movie Fargo, the newspaper notes.

Convicted hit man Dick Anderson, who confessed to committing the crime for $3,000, knocked Carol Thompson out with a rubber hose and unsuccessfully tried to drown her in a bathtub in the home. When she regained consciousness, his pistol wouldn’t fire, so he beat her with the gun butt and stabbed her in the neck.

He then went to wash up, but when he returned to the bathroom she was gone—still alive, she had fled to a neighbor’s home. But, fatally wounded, she died in a hospital hours later.

In a 2013 interview, the couple’s son, a Minnesota district court judge, told the Star Tribune his father still maintained his innocence.

A teenager at the time of the crime, Jeff Thompson testified at the high-profile trial. (A Life magazine feature story didn’t run only because of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.)

Although the son believed his father guilty, he made his peace with the crime, which he compared to losing an arm, and said he had done what he had to do to adjust to the loss and go on with his life.

“It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around the fact that people who have done bad things are still multidimensional. They have good aspects,” Jeff Thompson told the newspaper. “T. Eugene can carry on a good conversation, he has perceptive insights, he taught us a number of very good things when we were children. But he did something that was unforgivable. That’s true of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis.”