Joyce O'Kasick

9/17/57

Joyce O'Kasick Had a Dream

By BARBARA FLANAGAN

Minneapolis Tribune

Staff Writer

To Joyce O'Kasick, "the worst thing I know is being locked up."

"I'd rather be dead," she said. "Then I'd be with Roger and Ronnie and mother."

The attractive, 22-year-old strawberry-blond sister of the rampaging O'Kasick brothers was speaking from behind barred doors.

She is being held in the city jail pending her return to the women's reformatory at Shakopee. Joyce, serving an 18-month term for forgery, walked away from the prison Wednesday.

POLICE apprehended her Saturday night shortly after two of her brothers were killed in the manhunt and the third was wounded.

"I knew something terrible would happen," she said. "I had this dream one night about two weeks ago. I saw my mother and Ronnie. I woke up scared.

"The next day I began writing to Jimmie. I told him I just knew that Ronnie was in trouble. But I never got an answer.

"Then Wednesday, I was delivering some laundry. And all of a sudden I was running across a great big field.

"I HITCHHIKED into town, hid in our garage until Richard went to work and the kids were gone. Then I went in, cleaned up and got some clothes. I went to a girl friend's house. When I was picked op Saturday, I didn't know about my brothers."

Joyce-5 feet, 5 1/2 inches tall, and weighing 135 ponds -has clear, olive skin, gray-green eyes and with her hair "touched up," she is a girl likely to attract a second look.

She grew up in the middle of a family of nine children. Her father was a Roman Catholic. "But we were Lutheran like my mother," she recalled. "We used to go to Sunday school."

"WHEN THE OLD man wasn't in the workhouse or in Stillwater, he was home beating up my mother and us kids. Every time he worked, he'd drink up the money.

One time he busted up all the furniture. I didn't like him and he didn't like me. My mother met him up by Brainerd, I guess.

"She grew up on a farm. I never have seen my grandparents. But my mother's two sisters, Aunt Lillian and Aunt Peggy, have been nice to us.

"My mother didn't work. We lived on relief most of the time. She had too much to do with us kids."

THE "KIDS" included Doris, now 32, a divorcee with three children Richard, 29, a chef who had a police record before he "went straight" the past four years; Roger, 26; Ronald, 24; Joyce, Jimmy, 20; and three younger sisters.

"None of us can forget mother," Joyce said. "She died when I was 19. Heart trouble, I guess. Richard has been head of the house ever since and all of us were supposed to help with the bills "

Joyce first brushed with the law at 15. She was sent to the Home School for Girls at Sauk Centre in what she calls a "raw deal."

"I didn't like school very much," she said. (She attended to the ninth grade at Phillips junior high school).

"I SKIPPED once and the truant officer gave me probation. Then I was boiling potatoes one night and spilled some water on my foot. It was burned and the doctor told me to stay home.

"I went out one day to the store and they saw me and so I went to Sauk Centre."

Joyce didn't have any steady boy friends in school. "There was a kid in the neighborhood I had a crush on, but he didn't know it "

Joyce got a factory job for awhile after getting out of Sauk Centre. She met and fell in love with Jerry Eckman, now serving a 10 to 80 year term in St. Cloud reformatory for armed robbery

"MY BROTHERS didn't know him," she said. "I met him through another guy I know." She plans to wait for Eckman and marry him.

Joyce quit her factory job, but didn't tell her brother, Richard. To get money, she wrote checks, signing her own name to them.

And then, with Eckman, she went to California, job hunting. "We lived together. But he's the first and only man I've lived with."

After a quarrel, Eckman left Joyce in California and returned home. When apprehended for armed robbery, he phoned her.

This was in the autumn of 1956.

"HE SAID police had found my checks and to come home and give myself up. I did and they put me on probation.

"Then I needed money so I wrote some more checks for about $200-just signing names I made up. They picked me up trying to cash one at a store on Nicollet Avenue."

Joyce went to Shakopee March 5 of this year.

"Jimmy was still in the marines then. And Roger worked in a factory and Ronnie worked as a painter and wall-paperer

"They bought me a radio and sent me some blue-jeans.

JOYCE, WHO likes nice clothes-"I'd like some nice suits and things, but not a fur coat I don't like them"- recalled her brothers spent most of the money they earned paying family bills "There were always bills. Sometimes they argued about it, but they always paid "

When Jimmy got out of the marines in May, he went up to Shakopee to see Joyce He told her he was going to finish high school.

"My brothers were wonderful. I never saw a gun in the house.

"I think the main reason Ronnie got in trouble is because he was so upset about his wife's divorcing him. He tried to get her back.

"NONE OF THEM drank like dad. Jimmie looked up to his older brothers, but he wasn't a killer.