Dakota Spotlight S12 – Meanwhile in Mankato: Lies, Silence & Murder in Minnesota

Meanwhile in Mankato: Lies, Silence & Murder in Minnesota is the twelfth season of the true crime podcast Dakota Spotlight — a documentary-style audio series where sound design and storytelling come together with a cinematic feel.

In 1965, 17-year-old Brian Lee Hendrickson walked into a gas station outside Mankato, Minnesota, and shot Ray Dahms of Rapidan, MN twice at close range. He was sentenced to as much as forty years behind bars. He served five.

When host James Wolner sets out to learn what became of the teenage killer, he doesn’t expect to discover that Hendrickson had served only five years for murder. That revelation leads to a larger and more troubling story — one told not only through records and reports, but through the voices of those who still carry its weight. Wolner uncovers how Minnesota’s system of “rehabilitation over punishment” allowed one man to slip, time and again, between the cracks — and how that failure rippled outward to hurt others in ways the state never imagined.

Through rare documents, original interviews, and an immersive cinematic-style soundscape, the Meanwhile in Mankato true crime podcast follows an unbroken chain from a 1965 murder to a later failure hidden within Minnesota’s own correctional system. Decades later, the truth still stuns those who lived it — including a woman who only learned in 2025 that the man who once abused his position of power over her was a convicted killer.

This season is an exploration of truth, memory, and accountability — a story about how buried facts surface, even sixty years later, to find those who deserve to know them.

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Listen to Meanwhile in Mankato

Episode 1: Lies, Silence & Murder in Minnesota

Episode 2: Inside the Murder Investigation