Sheriff slams Walz, Ellison for freeing convicted murderer: ‘They didn’t care about the truth’

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[00:00:00]Confidence in the criminal justice system on the line. A Minnesota sheriff on the murder of a beloved store owner that's calling into question the conviction review unit that led the man sentenced to life in prison for the crime to walk free. Next, Aken County Sheriff Dan Ga is my guest.

[00:00:23]Thank you for your service, sir. Thanks for being here.

[00:00:25]>> Thank you for your report. You know, despite advocate judges, soft on crime prosecutors, and the lingering consequences of defunding the police, there is still the idea of law and order and basic common sense, especially where you are in Minnesota. But this horrific case of 84year-old Evelyn Men uh highlights all of this. A beloved store owner in your community. For more than 50 years, Min operated the Dollar Lake store in rural Aken County. And it was back in 1998, the morning of February 24th, when Meyn was beaten and strangled in her room in the back of the store where she lived. I know this was a very tragic murder that certainly left a mark on your community, didn't sheriff, what can you tell us about what happened back then?

[00:01:07]>> Uh, it was horrible. It was a scenario that uh made the whole world of ours very nervous about what was going on.

[00:01:15]Nobody knew who the murderer was. Nobody knew what was going on. Um, we didn't have a lot of good evidence. times were a little different back then as far as um you know investigative techniques. We didn't have cell phones. We didn't have all those things that that people depend on now. So um a murder on the loose, you know, or one or more for sure. The uh the community was, you know, try sending out lots of intel trying to get, you know, information from different people.

[00:01:43]They would they would call us and say, "I think it's this person. I think it's this person." Uh they were being very helpful. We live in a community that's um very pro law enforcement. They're friendly. They they love public safety.

[00:01:54]So when this happened, it uh it really left a big mark. A lot of people had been at Evelyn store. Everybody that lived in the region had had known Evelyn. They had known the Dollar Store.

[00:02:04]Um their parents had known the Dollar Store. If they had a cabin on Minihawa, they knew hundreds of stories about them shopping there over the years. Maybe they bought their first six-ack of beer there or something or candy bars. Uh my deputies have all been um at the time had all been there and bought a snack here and there and visited with Miss Mail.

[00:02:22]>> The suspect in this brutal murder was Brian Pippet. Uh he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Three of his accompllices were also found guilty.

[00:02:31]His conviction for the murder of Evelyn was upheld twice by the Minnesota Supreme Court. But in 2023, Pippet, I know, filed a a motion to vacate his conviction. The conviction review units, a fedally funded project under Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's office and with the Great North Innocence Project. They took up the case. Just take us back. What did you think when you first heard about this this motion and this effort to free Pippet for this crime?

[00:02:58]>> Well, I wrote a letter. I submitted it.

[00:03:00]Um the first the first information that we received as we got invited to a meeting at the county attorney's office.

[00:03:07]uh the under sheriff and I and the county attorney uh met with this conviction review unit's uh legal team and had that conversation and they had spent years preparing this case. There's no doubt it was a giant stack information. Um they had fabricated their story. They had taken uh the the ability to just you know backseat or armchair quarterback or however you want to look at it. They taken this and they fabricated the story based on uh what they believed could have happened. Not based on the statements given, not based on the testimony of the people in the trial, not based on anything. They just came up with this fancful idea of this is what happened. They had hired uh investigators to say, could this have happened? They presented them with, you know, pieces of evidence, not the whole evidence, but they presented them with pieces of evidence and they had this giant document that said, "Here you go.

[00:04:00]You can read this and let us know what you and they gave us about a week to read it. The document was unfortunately on a a website where you couldn't really collect it. We didn't think it was going to disappear and they they changed the document and the document actually disappeared. They said things in that document like uh uh impossible. Um lots of different things that about the evidence that couldn't have happened.

[00:04:24]you know, basically making this story up and they had a a very coordinated attack on this case and the the people of Aken County.

[00:04:32]>> So, just to be clear, it's March of 2024. The conviction review unit issues this report claiming that it was impossible for Evelyn's murder to have happened as it was presented during the trial. Not only did they claim that Pippet was innocent, they alleged that the prosecutors, law enforcement, even the defense attorneys engaged in misconduct. So, you're talking about this. You're kept in the dark almost the entire time. Kept out of the loop. Do you think that there's a reason for that?

[00:05:00]>> Oh, for sure. They they didn't want us to give the have the time to be able to defend ourselves. So, they wanted to submit this in a way that, you know, hey, you have one week to look at this and you can either sign and agree to it or um come up with a solution. They've been preparing for years. the the actual document itself um the way that it was presented was we have a couple choices. You can either fight this or you can agree to reopen this case. The attorney general's office will be agree to be the lead prosecutor on this case and then we will dismiss it so that Aken County doesn't look bad.

[00:05:38]That was what was presented to us. They didn't care about justice. They didn't care about what was going on. They wanted perception. They wanted it turned into, in my opinion, it turned into a thing about vote. It's not about doing what was right, not up.

[00:05:50]>> Yeah. This conviction review unit under Attorney General Ellison determined that Pippa's conviction was based on quote perjured, recanted witness testimony.

[00:05:59]Well, that of course has happened in cases across the country. That's not exactly the real story here in this case, is it? You started actually investigating their investigation and their allegations. What did you find out?

[00:06:13]>> Correct. So, I was involved with the case way back when, but I didn't do very much. Um, we had the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension come in and they had an investigative team. Uh, they spent months working this case. There was lots of information. Um, things would come in they had to follow up on.

[00:06:29]We disproved lots of theories. We proved some theories. Um, we finally got a break in the case and then we proceeded to the prosecute. It was like a year after the actual initial case. the the way that we dealt with it and the way that I dealt with this is I looked at this thing and I thought, man, we're already, you know, if if what they're saying is even got a shred of truth that we're biased about this, that the people at Aken County are biased, we have to come up with a clean approach. We have to come up with an audit process. You know, my whole career I've demanded the truth. I want to know the truth. I want to support the truth. I want to know those things. And I'm a church guy, right? So someday we'll all find out the truth. But until then, we got to use the best thing we can to find the truth. So we actually reached out to the BCA again and we had a independent team of auditors, excellent investigators, the top of the state come forward and actually do an independent research analysis on all this evidence. And when they first came, they asked a lot of questions and we provided them a lot of details and we provided them statements. We provide them things in this case that weren't actually even used in trial. We provided all the evidence. We collected all the notes, all those things. And they did a full audit of this process. And by the time they were done, it was a unanimous feeling that everything in this case had done been done absolutely correctly.

[00:07:47]>> And you were surprised to learn along the way, Sheriff, that they didn't do things like go back to the crime scene, it sounds like, or you're actually questioning their experts and the experts were not aware of some of the information. Is that right?

[00:08:00]>> Yeah. So they had used a bunch of the paperwork, a bunch of the reports to kind of recreate some things. And I had a question. I said, "Well, you know, if you say in in the initial report, they said things like it would be absolutely impossible for that to happen, right?

[00:08:16]Absolutely impossible." And I said, "Did you recreate that scenario?" One of the things they talked about was this window. It was a small window in the basement, a crawl space, a small egress window that they had to drop into a essentially a window sill and then go through a frame and down into the basement. And the report said it was impossible to do that for this. One of the co-conspirators or one of the people that testified against Mr. Pippen in the trial was involved in the murder. He he testified that they went through that.

[00:08:44]That was the the way they got in and out of the house, >> right? The the investigation that they had from the CRU was that it was impossible to go in out of that window.

[00:08:54]I asked them, I said, "Did you go in and out of the window?" They said, "They did not." We went back to the scene. We took the evidence from downstairs. We recreated the exact same window frame.

[00:09:04]We put that window frame back in this exact same hole that it was in. And we had people that had the same physical descriptions crawl through that window.

[00:09:11]We had two different people crawl through that window. And they were able to do it in just a matter of minutes. no issues, right? From their statements of it's impossible to do this to us being able to do it, we recorded it and sent it to them saying, "Hey, we thought they were on the same team, you know, hey, here we we want to prove to you that your statement is wrong. This is not an impossibility. Here's a video of two different individuals crawling through that window scene." They changed the report to say it was improbable.

[00:09:38]They didn't care about the truth. They didn't care about the evidence. They didn't care about the facts of the case.

[00:09:42]They just wanted to pick apart the case with the evidence they thought they could slander or change and make it look like Brian was innocent. It's all they cared about.

[00:09:50]>> So ultimately in September of 2025, the Minnesota Board of Pardons voted to commute the sentence of Brian Pippet. He was released from prison then in January of this year. He's now requesting clemency, which among other things could open the door for a lawsuit against the county, the state. But just for some insight here, uh the board of pardons, it's made up of Minnesota Governor Tim Walls, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Natalie Hudson. She voted no.

[00:10:18]But something I think a lot of people don't realize, uh since the DFL trifecta, they changed the law, uh during the legislative session just a few years ago. The law has been the same way on the books for more than a hundred years that required a unanimous vote.

[00:10:33]But her vote of no did not matter since Walls and Ellison voted yes and this law was changed allowing just two votes for this to to go through. But what do you think about uh how they granted Pivot's release and ultimately also how they seem to have changed things uh radically here in Minnesota uh when it comes to the justice system and I think some would say perhaps you know not for the better here.

[00:10:58]>> Yeah, this wasn't a commutation issue.

[00:11:00]That was their way to get him out of jail. It felt like to me it was a promise that they made in 2023 when they changed that legislation that allowed uh a majority versus unanimous role. A lot of people questioned that. Why were they changing something that had been in place for so long? It became clear why they changed it shortly later and when they released Pippet for that incident.

[00:11:22]The the scenario about the laws in Minnesota. What I concern myself with is when our system becomes broke to the fact that the victims are no longer acknowledged or taken care of and the only people that are supported in the system are the suspects in the system.

[00:11:40]We're going to have victims in society that come from outside the system. We're going to have people that take the law into their own hands. And we've been very careful about wanting people to believe in our system. We've done the best thing we can. We do our own audits.

[00:11:52]You know, that's why we have a Supreme Court in Minnesota. That's why we have higher courts in Minnesota. That's why this process was done from the beginning. And now if the process didn't work and the process failed everybody in Minnesota, if the process failed Evelyn Mail and the family of Evelyn Mail and the people of Aken County, what's going to happen next? If you no longer trust in the system, what do we have? Our forefathers did a great job of writing the Constitution. They did a great job of making the laws in Minnesota. Our legislative bodies have done a great job of being balanced and making sure the right things happen. Our legislative process has been slow over the years for a reason. When the trifecta occurred, clearly a lot of big things changed and it was political changes. It wasn't for the best of the people in Minnesota.

[00:12:33]>> With all that in mind, in a 30-page letter to the conviction review unit, you wrote, "The process is flawed." The AG's office has submitted a report that contradicts grand jury decisions, jury verdicts, judges decisions, and two Supreme Court rulings. You also mentioned that in making accusations of misconduct, all of this was just blindly accepted, it seems, uh, by the attorney general, who is leading the conviction review unit project, and again, one of the three members on the board of pardons.

[00:13:01]Does that sound like something that should even be allowed?

[00:13:06]>> I reached out dozens of times to the conviction, new, pal. I sent emails with information. I did everything I could do. I went to the hearings. I reached out to them. my hand delivered things wanting them to open their eyes. This wasn't about people seeking the truth.

[00:13:20]This was about political benefits.

[00:13:22]>> Looking at the bigger picture here, Sheriff, I know you're a lifelong motan.

[00:13:26]What does this say about our attorney general's priorities? Are we really talking about justice or do you think this case is really just more about identity, politics, and more virtue signaling coming from that office? So, as a sheriff, I don't I'm elected official just like judges, just like the attorney general, just like the governor. Um I'm a nonpartisan election.

[00:13:48]I don't have to say I'm a Republican or a Democrat or an independent. Um I kind of joke that I think about up and down, not left and right. I think about good versus evil and what takes over the world and how things worked. Um this is evil. This is evil when they don't support the system. this is evil. Then people are able to do what they want to do and they get the support and the victims don't have anybody to come after to say what happened here. This is evil.

[00:14:15]We're going to continue to fight evil.

[00:14:16]The sheriffs across the state of Minnesota stand strong together. We're going to fight evil. But when the politics get in front of good versus bad, bad things happen. We've seen that in the last year. Public safety suffers.

[00:14:28]um the the the accountability in the system. If it's not there, then what good is the system? It does not work. A failed system is not going to be good for Minnesota. I still have hope. I still have hope that we can fix this. I still have hope. If I didn't have hope, I wouldn't have been sending letters. I wouldn't have been calling people. I wouldn't have been doing the things that I've done. But that's where we're at today. It's going to take a lot of work.

[00:14:51]>> So, it seems there is a lot at stake for Law and Order in this particular case.

[00:14:55]What do you hope will happen here and why has it been so important for you uh to push back on this sheriff?

[00:15:02]>> It's the right thing to do. It's to support the system is to support the people of Aken County and the people of Minnesota. It's to let the system as written work. It, you know, the the the process that we have is not flawed. It's worked for a long time. Justice has been served across the state of Minnesota.

[00:15:20]You know, shortly after this case, uh the the opportunity for pardoning or opportunity for uh release of a life sentence disappeared. Uh Brian Pippet was convicted in a goofy time frame where that was allowed and and who knows what's next. I don't I don't want to see the world get worse for my children or my grandchildren or my great-grandchildren or my neighbors or their kids or their grandkids or any of that stuff. I just uh I really hope we can get back on the on the track and and fight good and evil. Aken County Sheriff Dan Ga. Thank you again for joining me.

[00:15:53]We appreciate it.

[00:15:54]>> You're welcome. Thank you.

[00:15:55]>> That will do it for this episode of Liz Colin Reports. We'll see you next time.