An Real American Rambo

In 1981, an action movie premiered based on The Mad Trapper of Rat River. It was called Death Hunt. The Mad Trapper is the subject of the biggest manhunt in Canadian history and nobody knew who he was. Most people call him Albert Johnson, a pseudonym he picked up in 1931 when he was mistaken for someone else. In 1982, we had First Blood which had a similar storyline with similar scenes, such as jumping off a cliff into a tree, which Rambo does just like Albert Johnson, played by Charles Bronson.

Bronson’s Albert Johnson, like the real-life one, is a mysterious character, a complete unknown, who is hunted down for questionable reasons, which makes him a possible protagonist. He may or may not be a man known as The Mad Trapper, whom they are already looking for, who kills other trappers and steals their gold teeth. There were similar suspicions with the real Mad Trapper because he had a jar of gold teeth. He was suspected of possibly being the Northwest Territories Headhunter who allegedly kills trappers and leaves them headless.

Death Hunt’s director, Peter Hunt, and the writers, Michael Grais and Mark Victor, do a good job of making you sympathize with the character and, at the same time, wonder if he’s secretly a serial killer.  We are left wondering if Bronson’s Albert Johnson is a good guy or a bad guy. Mad Trapper researchers have the same conundrum.

So, who was Albert Johnson? And was he a criminal or a victim? These issues and the identity of the fictional version are all dealt with in the film in less than two hours. That’s the good thing about a movie or a TV show. The case is solved in no time. That, of course, rarely happens in real life. But life was about to imitate life as I started researching The Mad Trapper closely for four months from September 2019 to December. Then on December 19, I tried Google Books and I typed in “Mad Trapper”, but without “Rat River”, along with “North Dakota”. And that’s when Christmas came early.

 November 2019

Now I was into my fourth month of research and I had to throw out everything I’d done up until then and started from the beginning with no given or family name. I was back to the drawing board and I decided to help myself by doing a profile of the UNSUB, or unknown subject. This is what I came up with in December of that year:

Some Xtreme Psychological Profiling of the Mad Trapper might be in order now.

Starting with the obvious:

The officially unidentified subject known as the Mad Trapper and by several aliases is a Spectacle Criminal/Killer. His crime was spectacular in nature like a mass murder or a terrorist act or Spectacle Killings in general so he would have a similar profile as mass murderers, spree killers, spectacle serial killers and terrorists.

• first of all, he would profile foremost as an Outsider. This is already assumed since he said he was Scandinavian and from the United States.

He likely didn't have a good, strong father figure and gravitated toward his mother. He likely immigrated with a parent, possibly mother.

He was likely a mid-westerner growing up on a farm, as he said, having no problem with winter boredom and cabin fever, definitely able to make good money through hard work and had at least some big city exposure like Chicago or Seattle at least.

He was a good builder and navigator, with interests in railroads, boats, and maybe even aircraft, and also exploration and adventure. Jobs that would interest him would be anything to do with transportation, the outdoors, and the creature comfort and aesthetics fields, like trapping furs or prospecting gold.

He was likely just a high strung person who had problems socially in the modern society, feeling he had no place there, and that's why he chose the solitary wilderness life.

He was a single-minded visionary who probably had a dream that he'd make it big in the North, probably by finding a lost gold mine.

I left out whether I thought he went to war or evaded the draft, because I was undecided. It could have gone either way, although I leaned toward participation in the war. I doubted a draft-dodger would be that territorial although Mark Fremmerlid’s great uncle Sigvald was one, and he seemed to have barricaded himself in his cabin as well. I decided to play it safe with that one.

But I think I was really going out on a limb with that Aviation profile. This was very early in the Age of Flight, only 14 or 15 years after Orville and Wilbur Wright and Kittyhawk. But I had confidence even then about the Aviation indicator. Only a year earlier, a survey of serial killer professions had listed Aircraft Mechanic and Assembler as the number 1 skilled job of serial killers. So it wasn’t that big a leap.

As for the military records go, the Draft Records had physical descriptions, and The North Dakota Military Men records had service records. You could determine a possible match through their profile if you know what to look for. There were even other ways to narrow down the search. I’d say he has more in common with Wop May than Snidely Whiplash! Wop May was the WWI aviator who helped catch the Mad Trapper.

Although I didn’t post it at the time, I also thought the likelihood was that he was a Norwegian. Most of the Scandinavian isotope results put him in Norway, but that wasn’t the only reason. At least one Canadian, who was born in Sweden and knew the Mad Trapper, thought he was Norwegian. All the major Trapper candidates that fit the profile were Norwegian outlaws like Johnny Johnson and outcasts like Sigvald Haaskjold.

So, I’d say it’s safe to say the Mad Trapper was Norwegian but his having a Swedish ancestor would explain the uncertainty among the Scandinavian witnesses and why he was able to get away with saying he was Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Johnny Johnson, who was Dick North’s candidate, was born in Norway but also considered to be Swedish. He became a bank robber and horse thief, eluded the law like the Mad Trapper and disappeared. So Swedish. Norwegian. Both. Whatever. Everything was still on the table. But Norwegians, front and centre.

Either way, I looked at all the Swedes and Norwegians who registered for the draft in North Dakota in 1917/18 but nothing came up, or there was no one who stood out. Unfortunately, little did I know about the North Dakota Military Men 1917/18 records which was compiled in 1931 and gives a record of their service. Of the 32,000 men named, there are 2000 men born in Sweden and Norway but, with their service record, I would have had a better chance to try out my profile and find him that way. I also didn’t know that not all the North Dakotan draftees registered for the draft and enlisted in their home state. Some registered and enlisted out of state. So they wouldn’t be the North Dakota Draft Records. They’d only be in the home state Military Men records.

But I didn’t know about that, so I obviously believed I had hit a dead end even with my profile, and I had to start all over again and look for a clue, any clue, by scouring the web. That meant doing internet searches and looking at all the hits I got and trying not to leave out anything that could be a clue. I was anxious to get another working suspect and I looked with anticipation.

I didn’t mind putting in the work which was not hard for me, but there was always the inherent risk, which I didn’t like, of finding what I was looking for by serendipity rather than deduction.  In my case, it was more like inductive reasoning. So far, that hadn’t gotten me anywhere, so it was back to Google to start my search from scratch, with only North Dakota and the Corn Belt states as my only possible lead.

So, I was surfing the web, doing searches, using the basic search terms, like Mad Trapper of Rat River and the names of various Midwestern States, and I went deep into the pages of hits. Most of the hits with North Dakota were about Johnny Johnson from North Dakota. DNA had already disproved that theory which was doubtful to begin with. DNA debunked all the candidates that were written about in books. So, let’s just say, I had begun to doubt the value of True Crime books as a source of information.

I didn’t put too much stock in the books, but I still scoured Google Books because that was all I could do and, of course, it has more than just True Crime Books. It’s the most comprehensive index of full-text books and magazines with all kinds of titles and they’re fully searchable. Once you get a hit on a search, you can either read the full text or a preview or a snippet.

There were plenty of sources I never looked at because the hits I got on them were way down the chart. There were quarterly magazines from the Midwest and even books on flying that talk about Wop May and the Mad Trapper, and there were genealogy books. But you still have to use the right search terms. I always used Mad Trapper of Rat River and North Dakota with quotation marks. One time, I left out Rat River and just wrote “Mad Trapper” “North Dakota”.  That’s when this happened, as documented on my deleted forum.

Click on Cover below to read the whole story on Kindle.

Book now titled Metasearch: Hunting the Mad Trapper Online.

Includes picture of Ben Larson

Paperback available.