Kuntz murders, trout, mountains shown at Beartooth Museum

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The Museum of the Beartooths in Columbus tells the story of Stillwater County.

If you drive the dirt road from Molt to Rapelje, you’ll think you’re in heaven.

Especially this time of year, when the rolling hills glow verdant, there's something serene to the place. The tourist brochures will always show off the mountains and wild rivers, but the true magic of Montana is in places like these, where you can cruise for miles without ever seeing another person. It's just you and the wide expanse of the world.

These ruins mark the spot of Wheat Basin.

But for one night on Nov. 26, 1937, that heaven turned into hell. It was there in the small town of Wheat Basin — about equidistant between Molt and Rapelje, just north of Big Lake — that one of the most heinous murders in Montana history took place. Mike and Frieda Kuntz, who managed the grain elevator in Wheat Basin, were shot by enraged, penniless and desperate man named Frank Robideau. After shooting the couple, Robideau turned his ire onto their 5-year-old son Larry, pistol whipping the boy into unconsciousness.

The "Terror in Stillwater County: A Young Boy's Story Finally Told" exhibit at the Museum of the Beartooths.

Robideau, whose real name was Joseph Liberty, had escaped from the New York State Prison 15 years before the Wheat Basin murders. He’d left a trail of fake names and suspected murders across America, but by the time he got to Wheat Basin, Robideau had started a family, with a wife named May and a several children including a young son, Richard, who was one of Larry Kuntz's favorite playmates. May Robideau was pregnant, with Frieda Kuntz set to be her midwife.

Frank Robideau was executed for the murder of Mike and Frieda Kuntz in January 1938.

The killer made the Kuntz family drive out halfway to Columbus before he shot them. He then loaded Larry's seemingly lifeless body back in the car, pushed Mike Kuntz's corpse out of the way, and drove the car back to Wheat Basin, locking it in the Kuntz's grain elevator.

The handgun that Frank Robideau used to kill Mike and Frieda Kuntz and pistol-whip their son Larry is on display at the Museum of the Beartooths.

But Larry woke up. Caked in blood, in a dark room alone with his parent's lifeless bodies, he crawled out onto the freezing November plains, managing to get to Wheat Basin's lone store. There, to a cadre of townsfolk, including Frank Robideau, he announced that his parents had been murdered and then passed out.

A notch from the grip of Frank Robideau's pistol was later found embedded in Larry Kuntz's skull.

The next few months took Wheat Basin by storm. A series of faulty checks signed by Mike Kuntz that Robideau cashed drew suspicion, and Larry eventually accused Robideau of murdering his parents. A sliver of wood was found embedded in Larry's skull. It fit perfectly into the pistol grip of a gun owned by Robideau.

Robideau confessed and was sentenced to die just over two weeks after the murders. He was hanged in Columbus on Jan. 15, 1938, in front of a crowd of 375 people, with another 400 craning to see from outside the shed where the gallows were erected.

That's the story. It's been told a number of places, in newspapers both during the event itself and the decades since, and in a book, "Death Ride," by Time and Becky Hattenburg.

But the best way to learn the story of Robideau's murders and Larry Kuntz's incredible survival, is to visit the Museum of the Beartooths in Columbus. And in an exhibit called "Terror in Stillwater County: A Young Boy's Story Finally Told," the museum tells the story of Robideau and the Kuntz family using a variety of methods.

They’ve got the crime scene photos blown up large, showing bullet holes in the glass of the Kuntz's car, and the bodies of Mike and Frieda Kuntz covered in blood and slumped over across the seats. There's a shot of Robideau in his coffin, alongside the invitation to the hanging that were sent out to prominent people in Stillwater County.

Larry Kuntz and his father Mike in a grain elevator in North Dakota, similar to the one they ran in Wheat Basin.

There are archival photos of a happier time, too, showing Mike and Larry sitting in a grain elevator in North Dakota, and several shots of little Larry, proudly dressed in a smart hat and a sweater, standing in front of his Wheat Basin house, alongside the car his parents would be murdered in.

The rope that hung Frank Robideau is on display at the Museum of the Beartooths.

And in the museum, a short half mile walk from where Robideau was hanged, they’ve got the rope he swung from, still tied in a noose. Next to that is the .38 Smith and Wesson he used as a murder weapon. Look close and you’ll see the notch missing from the handle after it broke off on Larry's head.

It might be the single most arresting display in any Montana museum, a portrait of absolute terror. But the thing that really catches you isn't the photos of Larry as a child. They’re of him as an old man. After his parents’ murder, Larry moved in with family. He eventually settled in Spokane, with a successful career as a pharmacist. In 2010, after his grandson had started researching their family history, Larry and his family visited the museum. They opened special for him on a Sunday, keeping it private.

Penny Redli, who has been the museum's executive director for 15 years, met Kuntz and his family and showed them the crime scene photos. Larry had never seen them before. In Columbus, he reopened a part of his life he’d long held shut.

This photo from the Museum of the Beartooths shows Larry Kuntz and his wife Janet viewing the crime scene photos for the first time, along with museum director Penny Redli.

Photos from Kuntz's visit are now displayed in the museum's exhibit. He also provides a voiceover that's played on a hidden speaker in the display. You can look at the crime scene photos and hear Kuntz's voice as he describes seeing his parents slouched over bodies, his mother's halfway into the backseat, trying to protect him.

Also on the audio track is an interview with Cassandra Norman, Robideau's great-granddaughter. She came across the story at about the same time Kuntz was rediscovering it. The pair met, and roughly 80 years after the murders, they bonded.

"I just instantly felt at home," Norman says on the interview that plays in the museum. "I can't imagine my life without Larry and Janet in it."

Larry died in 2017, but his wife Janet is still a member of the Museum of the Beartooths.

In the exhibit, the story of the Kuntz's murder and Robideau's survival isn't just presented as a tragedy, but as a story of survival, of overcoming unimaginable trauma and living on. Larry Kuntz was left for dead, but he crawled out of that grain elevator and raised four children.

Good museums tell history, great museums decontextualize it and tell it in a way it's never been told before.

"When I came here, the story was about the hanging," Redli said. "Now it's about the people… And the hanging."

But on the other side of the wall as the exhibit about the Kuntz murders, there's a glass case containing a giant mounted trout. It's now an ugly thing, yellowing in its old age. But the plaque on it explains the tale. It was caught in a channel of the Yellowstone in 1912 by a 9-year-old boy named Milo Potter. Potter, without a fishing pole, beat the nine pound trout to death with a stick. Dragging it through Columbus, a local banker offered to buy it for $2. Potter got his money — worth about $60 today — and the banker had the trout stuffed and displayed.

A display of baseball memorabilia at the Museum of the Beartooths, including a Nye Butterfingers jersey.

These guns were donated by artist and collector Forrest Hill, who also designed the display.

Throughout the museum there are pieces of the history of Stillwater County, which is oblong and leans to the front like the forward slash on a keyboard. There's a collection of old guns curated by a local artist. One, a heavy duty 1884 Winchester with an octagonal barrel, has the homesteader's named carved into the stock. Columbus’ history as a railroad town is examined, complete with a photo from when President Theodore Roosevelt visited in 1904. They’ve got a jersey from the Nye Butterfingers, the baseball team organized in the little mining town south of Columbus.

This Model 1984 Winchester was owned by Alfred Richard Mendenhall, who carved his initials into the stock.

Theodore Roosevelt visited the young town of Columbus in 1904.

The Museum of the Beartooths also houses a giant relief map of the Beartooth Mountains. It was carved by Fred Inabnit, an early Stillwater County resident who loved the mountains because they reminded him of his birthplace in the Alps in Switzerland. He built the map himself, using clay and wood to capture the landscape he so loved, with glass representing the surface of the alpine lakes. He completed it in 1925 to display at the Outdoor Life Exposition in Chicago. It was at the Yellowstone County Museum for years, and came home to Columbus in 2009. Today, a mountain in the Beartooths is named for Inabnit.

Fred Inabnit carved this topographical relief map of the Beartooth Mountains in 1925. From here, you can look up the North Fork of the Shoshone River from Cody into Yellowstone National Park.

That's the value of these small town museums. It's here that curiosities and carnage mingle, where you can see an incredibly curated exhibit about absolute evil next to small town quirkiness. There's really no other place like it.

The donation jar at the Museum of the Beartooths is in the shape of Stillwater County.

If you drive the Molt-Rapelje road, you could go right past where Wheat Basin was and miss it. There's nothing there, just some old foundations and the depressions in the grass where the streets used to be. The grain elevator burned down in 1995.

Streets in the former town of Wheat Basin can be seen in this aerial view.

But the story of what happened there lives on. That's thanks to people like Redli, and the Hattenbergs, who wrote "Death Ride," the first book-length version of Larry Kuntz's story. When it was published in 2015, Kuntz and the authors signed books at the museum.

The Museum of the Beartooths is in Columbus.

After Robideau's hanging, a lot of the crowd congregated at the Atlas Bar on Columbus’ main drag. When the book signing ended, Redli, Kuntz and the Hattenbergs went to the Atlas. Times change, buildings decay and fall. But stories live on, as long as there's someone to tell them.

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