Former Sweethearts Bound by Murder

Three times a week, Jackie Hieb walks through the maze of steel-barred prison hallways to the visiting room. There, for two hours, she and Michael Neugebauer think of the places they have been, and the places they would rather be.

Neugebauer speaks first. His eyes never leave Hieb’s as they sit together.

“We’re just good friends,” he says, “who . . .”

Her words overtake his. “I still love him with all my heart,” she says over the noise. “But it’s kind of hard now.”

On a January morning five years ago, Neugebauer, then 15, shot and killed his parents, 16-year-old sister and 13-year-old brother at the family’s farm. Then he drove to his high school in Bismarck, about 10 miles away, and asked Hieb to run away with him.

Their flight ended after a week, when SWAT team members pulled the two at gunpoint from a small poolside motel room in Florida.

And now, five years later, they are still together--though apart.

“They’ve been through so much together, I think they feel bonded,” says Helene Sherman, Neugebauer’s aunt and one of his only other regular visitors. “I know that Mike doesn’t think he’s in love with her anymore . . . but there’s still something between them.”

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The Neugebauers lived in a mobile home just north of Menoken, a tiny farming town east of Bismarck. Ronald Neugebauer, 44, was a farmer and the president of the elementary school board. His wife Maureen, 40, worked at the University of Mary in Bismarck.

There had been reports of problems--of Michael trying to elope with his girlfriend, of his father talking to a juvenile-court supervisor about discipline problems--but no one predicted the events of Jan. 27, 1992.

Ronald Neugebauer was shot in the neck, back and thigh. His daughter, Michelle, was shot twice in the back, apparently while kneeling over her father.

Ryan Neugebauer was shot in the head as he cowered in the corner of his bedroom. His mother was shot twice in the back, perhaps while trying to flee.

The bodies of Maureen and Ryan Neugebauer were moved in an apparent effort to hide them from view. The phones were unplugged.

Michael Neugebauer and Jackie Hieb quickly became the subjects of a nationwide manhunt. He was considered armed and dangerous, but authorities did not know what to think of her.

Had she gone with him of her own free will? Did she even know what he was suspected of doing?

She insists now that she knew nothing about the killings when she agreed to run away. It wasn’t until they stopped at a Wisconsin motel the first night that he told her he had killed his father, she says.

“I didn’t believe him. How are you supposed to react?” Hieb says.

“I don’t blame her,” Neugebauer says. “That’s kind of a shock to hear.”

Despite the confession, Hieb says she never thought about turning her boyfriend in. They were arrested Feb. 8, 1992, at a Sarasota, Fla., motel after the owner recognized them.

That was the last time they were together without the supervision of a prison guard.

Neugebauer, who pleaded guilty to murder and is serving four concurrent life sentences, claims to remember shooting his father but not his mother, sister or brother.

“I hope I never remember,” he says. His hair is shorter now, his build bigger. And his face has lost its adolescent pudginess. “I remember the first shot and that’s about it.”

Burleigh County prosecutor Patricia Burke doesn’t buy it. She notes that Neugebauer told several different versions after his arrest, including one in which he said he killed his father because his father had killed the rest of the family.

“Michael Neugebauer can deal with what he did in the way he sees fit,” she says. “If he wants to say he doesn’t remember, that’s fine with me. All I know is, he killed four people.”

Neugebauer claims his father beat him and says the two had argued that morning about unfinished chores. He was trying to leave, he says, and snapped when his father refused to let him go.

Burke says prosecutors could never substantiate the claims of abuse.

“Let’s assume he was abused, which I don’t believe he was. But let’s assume it anyway. Why did he kill his little brother?” Burke says. “He murdered four people and then he went and played on the beach in Florida. . . . I think he deserves to be where he’s at.”

While Neugebauer faced murder charges, Hieb was labeled a runaway. She was hustled from a psychiatric ward in Bismarck to a group home in Fargo to her father’s home in Texas. Finally, she returned to Bismarck and to Neugebauer.

“I’ve tried to go on with my life,” says Hieb, now 21. “But in a way, our lives stopped back then.”

After a pause, she offers an understatement: “Running away with Michael was probably one of the biggest things that’s ever happened in my life.”

For the most part, Warden Tim Schuetzle says, Neugebauer has been a model prisoner (although he recently was disciplined for threatening a woman prisoner--an offense he describes as a misunderstanding).

He spends most of his time working out in the state penitentiary’s exercise area. He will be eligible for parole in about 20 years, but he isn’t asking Hieb to wait for him.

“I wouldn’t want anyone to put their life on hold for me,” he says.