LINO LAKES, Minn. — Nearly 30 years had passed, but Gilbert Peppin knew the rumors would not die, the talk would not fade away and he might never clear his name--and prove he did not kill his wife.
No one dared accuse him to his face. But every now and then, friends would tell him they had heard others gossiping about how Gib, the barber, had gotten away with murder.
Phyllis Peppin was killed in June 1972. There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing was taken from her home. So even her husband understood how, at first, the cloud of suspicion would hang over him.
Police questioned him. They watched his barbershop. They played good cop-bad cop, with one investigator befriending him and the other needling him to come clean and confess because they were onto him.
Peppin protested his innocence. And since police had no evidence, he was never charged. But he was never cleared, either.
Like so many other unsolved crimes, the murder of Phyllis Peppin faded from the news. Investigators moved on to new cases; police reports were filed away, then eventually lost.
Peppin married again, had two children and resigned himself to believing Phyllis' murder would remain unsolved and doubts about him would linger.
"I had given up hope," he says. "After 10, 15 years, I never thought they'd find anyone."
Then, last spring, Peppin got a call while cutting hair in the same barbershop he was working in when his wife was murdered.
"Are you the same Gilbert Peppin who lived in Arden Hills 27 years ago?" the police officer asked.
"Yes," he said warily. Then came the thunderbolt of news:
"We've got new information that may solve your wife's homicide."
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Sgt. Lucienne Mann had never worked a "cold case" before.
Tenacious and methodical, the Ramsey County sheriff's investigator knew unsolved murders were puzzles and now, all of a sudden, there was a new piece for an old case: An unidentified person wanted to talk to police about a 1972 homicide.
That person was represented by Deborah Ellis, a lawyer, who told Mann and the county attorney's office that her client had been 17 at the time and the victim was Phyllis Peppin. Ellis wanted to talk about a deal.
"Obviously the case was ice cold for them," she says. "On the other hand, there was no upside for my client to come forward. I was looking for a way to give everyone some peace."
