A decades-old chapter involving the late grandfather of Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan has become an unexpected topic in the final weeks of the U.S. Senate race to replace retiring Democrat Tina Smith.
Flanagan, a Democrat, is running against former television sports reporter Michelle Tafoya for the seat. This week, the Minnesota-based outlet Alpha News published a report detailing the troubled history of Flanagan’s grandfather, John Jacob Hartmann, drawing on old newspaper accounts and court records.
According to those records, Hartmann spent decades in and out of psychiatric custody, escaped twice, and was suspected by authorities in connection with multiple killings over the years, though he was never charged in any of those deaths.
Flanagan was three years old when Hartmann died on Feb. 6, 1983. A death notice published at the time in the Minnesota Star Tribune listed Flanagan’s mother, Patricia Hartmann, and her three sisters — Kathleen, Mary and Margaret — as his surviving daughters. Patricia Hartmann, who died in 2022, was identified in her own obituary by her maiden name, with John listed as her father.
Flanagan has spoken publicly in the past about her upbringing, including being raised by a single mother who relied on SNAP benefits and housing assistance, and about her late father, an Indigenous land rights activist whose work she has credited with shaping her own advocacy for Native American communities. In an interview with the Minnesota Women’s Press, Flanagan also described her grandmother as a single mother who raised four daughters “at a time when that didn’t happen a lot.”
What the records show
According to a Feb. 9, 1983 article in the newspaper now known as the Minnesota Star Tribune, Hartmann was first committed on Nov. 1, 1951, after his wife filed a petition stating he was “mentally ill and dangerous.” That commitment followed the discovery of the burning body of a man named Theodore Foth in Hartmann’s room. Hartmann was never charged in Foth’s death. The same article named him as a suspect in the 1964 killing of a fellow patient at the Minnesota Security Hospital, a case in which he also was never charged.
Hartmann was later transferred to Anoka State Hospital in 1970 but escaped to New Mexico, where the newspaper reported he was suspected in two more deaths. A 1973 Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, however, makes no mention of those alleged killings. Instead, it states that New Mexico authorities detained Hartmann on a warrant issued by Minnesota Probate Judge Melvin Peterson in September 1970, after finding he had been living in the state “without incident and without hiding his identity following his escape in Minnesota.” A special prosecutor subsequently released him, determining he was “sane and safe to be at large.”
Hartmann was arrested again the following year in Colorado on a misdemeanor charge and returned to Minnesota. In April 1979, he failed to return from an approved visit pass at the Minnesota Security Hospital and fled to Missouri, where he allegedly threatened U.S. District Judge Miles Welton Lord by phone. Lord had presided over an earlier federal case Hartmann brought challenging his involuntary return from Colorado to Minnesota. Federal authorities charged Hartmann over the alleged threat, according to a 1979 Star Tribune report.
No comment from either campaign
As of this report, neither Flanagan nor Tafoya has publicly addressed the resurfaced history. The story has nonetheless circulated on social media, with some conservative commentators pointing to the family history online. Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to Flanagan’s campaign for comment.
The Senate race remains close heading into the midterm elections, with Flanagan seeking to hold the seat for Democrats as Smith departs after declining to seek re-election.
