Editor's note: This story is part three of an eight-part series examining the killings of Gilbert Fassett and Eddie Peltier on the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota. Veteran reporter Patrick Springer examines both cases and considers a sobering question: Were the men convicted of these murders guilty?

DEVILS LAKE, N.D. — A gruesome double-murder of an elderly couple who lived near Minot played an unexpected role in Werner Kunkel’s conviction years later for the murder of Gilbert Fassett.

Charles and Cora Abernathy were murdered in their rural Ward County home in 1985. Both had been shot in the head, their throats slashed. Their house was ransacked and about $300 was stolen.

Kunkel was serving time in the North Dakota State Penitentiary, where he met Kevin Austin, a suspect in the Abernathy murders. Kunkel said Austin confessed to him that Austin had committed the murders.

Alarmed by the heinous crime, Kunkel wrote the prison’s security chief to report what he’d been told and testified in a preliminary hearing. Austin’s accomplice confessed to his role in 1986. Charges against Austin were dismissed — but reinstated six years later, thanks in part to Kunkel.

While Kunkel was in prison for assault, his former girlfriend, Sandra Kjosa, with whom he had a five-year relationship and who was the mother of his two young sons, married Austin in June 1992.

Law enforcement officers visited Kunkel in prison and persuaded him to wear a recording device and talk to Austin, also in prison. He agreed to try to coax Austin into repeating the confession he’d allegedly made to Kunkel years earlier.

On three occasions in September 1992, Kunkel visited Austin at his prison work station. The conversations focused largely on difficulties Kunkel was having in arranging visitation of his two children.

Kunkel expressed concern for the boys’ safety and, in a few instances, vaguely threatened Austin with physical harm if he harmed or used drugs in front of the children.

Although Austin didn’t directly admit his involvement in the Abernathy killings, according to court records, he didn’t deny his involvement when Kunkel repeatedly asked him about it.

That evidence buttressed testimony from Austin’s accomplice, and Austin was convicted in 1993 of the double murders.

On Oct. 1, less than two weeks after Kunkel wore the wire and prodded Kevin Austin with questions about the Abernathy murders, Sandra Austin told the FBI that she had information to provide about Kunkel’s responsibility for the 1986 murder of Gilbert Fassett.

In April 1991, the relationship between Kunkel and Sandra Austin was deteriorating. “We had a — it was a physically violent relationship,” she would testify in Kunkel’s trial. “He was abusive towards me.”

Kunkel also was having an affair with another woman, Austin said. She told Kunkel that she was going to leave him, and Kunkel became upset.

Although Austin said Kunkel had previously always denied having anything to do with Fassett’s murder, she told the FBI he told her, “I am capable of more than you realize,” then began to discuss the murder.

She said Kunkel and Fassett had quarreled at the Sportsman’s Bar on the night of Aug. 1, 1986, the night Fassett was last seen alive.

The two went driving, then stopped. Kunkel was standing with his back to Fassett, who grabbed Kunkel and held a knife to his throat. Kunkel managed to break free and pry the knife loose, using it to repeatedly stab Fassett, she told the FBI.

Then, according to Austin’s FBI statement, Kunkel put Fassett’s body in the trunk of his car and drove to his mother’s house, where he entered by the back door and went down to the basement to change his bloody clothes, which he hid in the woods behind her house.

Afterward, according to Austin’s FBI statement, Kunkel drove around the city of Devils Lake, where he picked up a girl and continued driving and was stopped by a state trooper south of town. Kunkel later dropped off the girl and disposed of the body at “Ski Lift Hill” on the Spirit Lake Reservation, covering it so it wouldn’t be found until spring.

She said she was in shock after hearing Kunkel describe the murder. The conversation then shifted abruptly, Austin told the FBI, to Kunkel saying he wanted custody of their two sons.

The North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which was working on the Fassett murder investigation with the FBI and other agencies, obtained a search warrant based on Austin’s statement.

On Nov. 2, 1991, the BCI searched Kunkel’s mother’s backyard in Creel Township, south of Devils Lake. Snow covered the ground, so firetrucks hosed areas down to melt the snow to help the search.

Investigators swept the backyard, backed by a wooded area, with metal detectors and probes.

Marita Lien, Kunkel’s mother, came home and found the search in progress.

“They found something with the metal detector,” she said in an interview. “Then they dug that up. It was his puppy he buried back there,” she added, referring to the remains of a dog that belonged to Kunkel’s younger brother.

“And the only thing that was left was the bones and the collar,” she said. “That was pretty sad.”

Sandra Austin told the FBI that Kunkel told her he “got rid of” the car he was driving when he chauffeured Fassett on the night of Aug. 1, 1986.

Investigators managed to find the 1977 Plymouth Gran Fury — ironically, a former police car — in Minnesota and towed it into North Dakota for analysis.

On Nov. 20, Aaron Rash, North Dakota’s forensic science director, examined the burned remnant of the car. His report noted three areas of intense heat: the passenger front seat area, engine compartment and trunk.

Charred debris included carpet and possible fibers. “The fibers could not be associated with the clothing of Gilbert Fassett,” Rash wrote.

Kunkel, who didn’t testify at his own trial, said in an interview that he was driving the car on Highway 2 when the engine caught fire. He pulled over and asked a passing motorist to call the fire department and the Highway Patrol, and both came to the scene.

The car was towed to a service station in Petersburg, where it sat for months, Kunkel said. He was transporting personal belongings for a move, some of which he said were burned in the fire.

If his intention was to try to destroy evidence, Kunkel said, why would he ask for the police to respond to the fire? He added: Why would he do it in such a public place? And why would he burn up many of his personal belongings?

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Kunkel said.

In her statement to the FBI, Austin also recounted an incident she said happened involving a quarrel at a party between Kunkel and a man named William Jetty. During the confrontation, Kunkel grabbed Jetty and demonstrated how Fassett had attacked him from behind, according to Austin.

When investigators interviewed Jetty, however, he told a different story. He said he confronted Kunkel at a party at Kunkel’s residence in Bismarck about the Fassett murder.

“Kunkel said he didn’t do it,” Jetty told authorities. “Kunkel said, ‘You should know better than that.’”

Jetty then challenged Kunkel to a fight, and the two men went outside, where Kunkel hit Jetty twice in the lip.

“After that they hugged and Jetty says they have been friends ever since,” wrote a Todd County deputy sheriff, who interviewed Jetty in jail. Austin wasn’t present when the argument happened in the kitchen, Jetty said.

“Jetty was cooperative during the interview and says that he believes Kunkel did not do the killing,” the deputy wrote.

A federal grand jury that investigated Fassett’s murder heard testimony from Austin and other witnesses, but did not issue any indictments on Jan. 20, 1995.

The investigation appeared to have reached a dead end. Then, six months later, another witness emerged, again claiming to have heard a confession from Kunkel.

And investigators’ theory of the murder radically changed. The premise was no longer that Fassett had been killed where his body had been found with more than 100 stab wounds on Ski Jump Hill on Spirit Lake Nation, where federal officials had jurisdiction.

Instead, the theory of the murder was that Fassett had been killed somewhere in Ramsey County, outside the reservation, the jurisdiction of state authorities.

So the door that slammed shut on the federal investigation soon swung open for a state investigation and trial.

And, once again, the chief suspect was Werner Kunkel.