2024-03-27 09:45:47
FARGO — A man convicted of
killing and dismembering
a musician more than 20 years ago is appealing his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dennis James Gaede, 60, of Gardner, North Dakota, told The Forum this week in an email that he filed a petition with the highest court in the country. The petition, filed Feb. 27 by Gaede, questions whether his rights were violated when the North Dakota Supreme Court denied him the right to post-conviction relief and when prosecutors didn’t use a grand jury to indict him on the murder charge.
“Gaede believes that if a state grand jury would have been convened he would have been charged correctly … or possibly not at all, as well as the state’s No. 1 witness against him, the confessed murderess Diana Gaede/Fruge,” Gaede wrote.
The Cass County State’s Attorney’s Office filed a waiver that said it didn’t plan to respond to the Supreme Court filing.
The U.S. Supreme Court could decide whether to take on Gaede’s case as early as Thursday, March 28, though the odds are stacked against him. Of the more than 7,000 cases submitted each year to the highest court in the land, the justices hear fewer than 150, according to the Supreme Court’s website.
A jury found Gaede guilty of murder in April 2006 in connection to the December 2001 death of
Timothy Wicks,
a 48-year-old man from Hales Corners, Wisconsin. Prosecutors said Gaede fatally shot Wicks at Gaede’s home in Gardner because Wicks found out Gaede stole his identity.
Gaede promised Wicks, a musician who wanted to be a jazz drummer, a music gig in Winnipeg, according to media reports. Prosecutors alleged Gaede dismembered Wicks, whose decapitated body and head were found in January 2002 in a river that flows between Michigan and Wisconsin.
His severed hands were never found.
Gaede maintains in the Supreme Court brief that he did not kill Wicks. He claims in the petition his late ex-wife, Diana Fruge, was the real killer but blamed him under threat of facing the death penalty.
Gaede claims in the filing that he should have been convicted of being an accessory to the crime at most.
However, he confessed to the murder to two jail inmates, according to Forum archives. He also persuaded his ex-wife to confess to the killing,
The Forum article said.
Gaede became the first person in Cass County to be sentenced to life without parole for murder. He has challenged the case multiple times over the years through appeals and applications for post-conviction relief, and all attempts to overturn the conviction have failed.
He’s serving his sentence at the North Dakota State Penitentiary.
Gaede is representing himself in the U.S. Supreme Court case. The 39-page petition lays out his fight against the conviction over the last two decades.
In the filing, he explains his latest failed appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court. Gaede made numerous claims in the 2023 filing that asked the state Supreme Court to overturn his conviction.
State justices denied a request to reverse a Cass County District Court’s decision to refuse him post-conviction relief, which allows a defendant to bring forth newly discovered evidence in a case after they are sentenced.
Gaede claimed prosecutors shielded Fruge from prosecution in exchange for testimony at the trial. He also made claims in court filings that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which could have impacted the results of the case.
Gaede’s ex-wife, Fruge, testified at trial that he was panicking after he shot Wicks, according to the petition. A doctor told the North Dakota Supreme Court in a 2021 evidentiary hearing that a diagnosis of PTSD had no bearing on Gaede’s crime in relation to his competency, the petition said.
Gaede claimed in the U.S. Supreme Court petition that the doctor was prepped by prosecutors and provided false testimony. He said in the filing that he suffered from PTSD long before Wicks’ death.
At the time of Wicks’ killing, Gaede could not have “rationally or coherently committed a homicide” because he was having a panic attack from his PTSD, according to the petition.
Gaede said he wasn’t treated for PTSD until 2018, and prosecutors refused to admit that he suffered from that disorder, the petition said.
He also claimed a North Dakota law that says post-conviction relief must be sought within two years of a conviction for a crime becoming final is unconstitutional. A conviction becomes final after time for an appeal expires, according to North Dakota law.
Limiting post-conviction relief to two years violates the Eighth Amendment, Gaede said in the petition, because it is designed to keep people in prison without the ability to challenge their cases out of malice and “to punish the offender to an excessive degree.”
He said there were thousands of discovery documents in his case, and it took longer than two years to go through them.
“As most inmates are untrained in the law and are therefore at a handicap when performing legal work, the laws like the above assure that these individuals will never win in court, even with meritorious claims,” Gaede wrote in the brief. “Then with newly discovered evidence … one cannot get back into court at all, unless you are claiming complete innocence and can then prove it within the first two-years.”
His last argument focuses on the use, or lack thereof, of a grand jury in his case. A grand jury typically hears evidence to determine whether charges are warranted.
Grand juries are rarely used in North Dakota but are allowed. A grand jury was not used in Gaede’s case, which he claims violated his right to one.
“Therefore, by this process being taken out of the hands of the true ministers of justice, the petitioner’s rights were violated from the onset,” Gaede said in the petition. “This would undoubtedly have changed the outcome of the trial.”
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