RAMSEY COUNTY, N.D. -- Thirty-six years after a young man's mysterious death, some still believe there's a killer who hasn't been brought to justice for their crime, and likely never will.
Prior to his death, Kenneth "Kenny" Engie had been living in the small town of Edmore, North Dakota, for just a few years, working at his uncle Richard Nygaard's body shop, where he proved to be a natural.
"He was one of the best I've ever seen," Nygaard recently told the Grand Forks Herald.
Engie had a turbulent childhood, according to Herald archives. He was on his own from a young age, and, at 25, seemed much older, according to friend Donavan "Duff" Diseth.
"He never got a break in his life," Diseth told the Herald. "Within a couple years working in the body shop there, he was probably the best body man around. There was little or nothing he couldn't do."
Engie helped his uncle's business grow, building up a reputation that brought people to Nygaard's Body Shop asking for Engie by name. He had a bright future ahead, and was liked by everyone, though some were envious of his abilities -- including Diseth, he said.
Another friend, Rick Knoke, said in the five or so years he knew Engie, the two became like brothers. They shared a lot of interests, from working on cars to shooting darts at the local bar.
"We'd sit around and B.S., and talk cars and drink a few beers -- like buddies do," Knoke said.
On the afternoon of Oct. 4, 1988, Nygaard went looking for his nephew, who hadn't shown up for work, according to Herald archives. The young man was found dead, lying in a puddle of blood, on his garage floor.
When Knoke heard the news, he just couldn't believe it.
"We were together almost every day," he said. "Nothing in my life has ever hurt that bad."
On Oct. 2, 1988, Diseth, Engie and Knoke were at a hobby car race in Hamilton, North Dakota. Diseth was the driver of the group, and when he rolled his car with a few laps remaining in the race, he suspected it was done for.
"Kenny was 10 times better than me at working on cars," Diseth said. "I mean, he was good. He said, 'I can get this going.'"
Engie asked Diseth if he would participate in a Bemidji, Minnesota, race scheduled for the next week.
Diseth responded, "Yeah, if you can get it going, we'll go down and see how fast those boys are."
He said Engie was really excited on the journey home.
"Things were going good -- because the guy never had a break in his life, you know," Diseth said. "And he said, 'Duff, today was the best day of my life.' And the next day he died."
The three young men were planning to work on the car the following evening, but other things came up and they weren't able to get together.
"We couldn't make it in there, and I've kicked myself ever since for not making it in that night," Knoke said. "Because maybe this stuff wouldn't have happened, if (even) one of us would have been there."
Herald archives say that night, Oct. 3, Engie was drinking beer at Kunkel's Bar in Edmore.
"I can't say what happened that night, because I wasn't in the bar or anything like that," Diseth said. "It's just something that shouldn't have happened."
Around 1 a.m., a man came to pick up the barmaid for a date, but Engie asked her to leave with him instead, according to the archives.
"She was nice to him, and he thought that she was going to be his girlfriend," Knoke said. "He never had a girlfriend in his life. He had never been in love in his life -- and he was falling in love with her."
But she refused to leave with Engie, instead leaving with the man, who Knoke said she'd been involved with for years.
The man said Engie began yelling and pushing the woman, so he stepped in. The two exchanged blows, Engie falling to the ground, getting up and continuing to swing at him, he said.
"Kenny was not a violent person," Diseth said. "I never heard of him getting in a fight. But, like I said, I wasn't there."
He was sure that if a fight did occur, it was the first and only of Engie's life. Knoke agreed.
"We'd argue about cars and stuff once in a while, but it was all in good nature," he said. "I'd never seen him mad."
After Engie left the bar, a crash was heard outside. It was reported that he'd run his Ford Bronco into the man's pickup, rendering it inoperable.
Then he went home.
"It certainly wasn't like Kenny," Diseth said. "Kenny spent countless hours working on that vehicle. His vehicle was nice, (and the other guy's wasn't)."
The man from the fight said he spent an hour trying to get his vehicle started before heading over to Engie's property, according to archives.
He kicked in the doors of Engie's Bronco, figuring if he was going to have to fix his vehicle, Engie would have to fix his own.
Then he found Engie lying on his side on the garage floor, moaning, archives said. He thought Engie was drunk and, though he wanted to help, thought it would just make Engie angry.
"I figured I'd let him lay there and sleep it off," he told the Herald a couple months after the death. "Now I know differently."
Before leaving, he said he asked Engie, "You know you totaled out my truck?" and Engie responded, "Yeah."
The man was the last known person to see Engie before the following afternoon, when Nygaard found him dead.
Diseth suspects an injury sustained during the bar fight -- particularly one to the head -- could have caused Engie's death. Maybe he went home, started working on the car in his garage, and had an aneurysm.
"If that's all that happened, fine," Diseth said. "Two guys get in a fight in a bar, and one leaves and something happens to him after that -- that was not an intentional death. If you get beat up again, it probably could be, but nobody knows if that happened."
Nygaard believes that's exactly what happened.
"It was done on purpose," he said. "The guy who beat him up before, he came back and did it again."
Nygaard said his nephew was trying to get a vehicle he was working on -- Knoke's -- started so he could move it out of the garage and put his own vehicle inside. Knoke suspects this as well.
"It had probably run for a little while; I don't think it ran very long, because the key was in the off position," Nygaard said. "He was trying to get it running so he could move it."
But Engie was interrupted, he said.
Because Engie was found with blood coming from his mouth and a gun lying near his body, law enforcement initially suspected suicide, but his family was adamant that wasn't the case.
Diseth and Knoke, too, were certain there were no signs -- Engie was coming into the prime of his life.
Further investigation revealed that the gun was fully loaded and had not been discharged, and no shell casings were ever found, archives said. Diseth suspects Engie had the gun with him because he was scared.
Ramsey County State's Attorney Lewis Jorgenson was reported saying there was insufficient blood for a gunshot wound. It was later determined that the blood came from Engie's lower lip. He'd either been struck there, or bit down, breaking the skin.
A preliminary autopsy indicated that Engie suffered a seizure before his death, which could have caused him to bite down on his lip, Dr. R. A. Gallo was reported saying.
The time of death was estimated to be between 2 and 3 a.m., according to Gallo's preliminary report. There was a bump on the back of Engie's head that was not serious enough to be the cause of death, and no gunshot wound, it said.
The report said Engie had 55.6% carbon monoxide in his blood. Gallo indicated that 40-50% could be fatal.
Jorgenson was reported in Herald archives saying that, as best as investigators could tell, Engie came home, loaded his gun and waited for the man he'd been in a fight with, but died after he got cold and started up the pickup he was working on in the closed garage.
"For one thing, the heater core was bypassed," Knoke said. "Kenny knew that, because he helped me do it. My heater core was leaking, so we just ran the hose back to the motor again and bypassed it so it wasn't working. And then, he wasn't stupid enough to start a vehicle in a closed garage. With his house right there?"
Herald archives also said temperatures were in the 40s that day, which Knoke referred to as "t-shirt weather."
Over the years, he's come to believe Engie probably was killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, but he wonders whether his friend was knocked out and couldn't turn off the vehicle, and that's how he died.
"I've gone over this stuff so many times in my head, for so many years," Knoke said. "I don't know. ... That's the only conclusion I can come to that makes any sense."
Strangely, the vehicle was found shut off. It hadn't run out of gas. Could Engie have shut it off if the carbon monoxide emitting from it was killing him?
"There are definitely unanswered questions," Diseth said.
He only spoke to the man who got into the bar fight with Engie once afterwards.
"'Duff,' he said, 'I did not kill Kenny.' I said, 'OK, I hope they can prove it.'"
Arguably, nothing was ever really proven -- Engie's cause of death was ultimately ruled "undetermined." Months later, Jorgenson said there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone with murder.
In the 1990s, the death was covered in an "Unsolved Mysteries" television segment, and aired again under a different narrator in the 2000s. Little has been published about Engie's death since, and it is not considered a cold case.
The Herald attempted to get in contact with the man who many suspected of causing Engie's death, as well as the woman believed to be the barmaid at the scene of the initial bar fight. Two sources said they'd heard the man died from health issues in recent years, and the Herald was unable to find accurate contact information or any record of his death.
The Herald reached the woman, but she declined to speak.
The Herald reached out to the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, Ramsey County State's Attorney's Office and Ramsey County Clerk of Courts Office for this story. None had any records from the death.