Minnesota's Senate race took a strange turn after reports showed Peggy Flanagan's grandfather spent decades in psychiatric custody, suspected in killings he was never charged with.
Fox News reported that Alpha News dug into old newspaper accounts and court records on John Jacob Hartmann, the maternal grandfather of Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, the Democratic candidate chasing the open U.S. Senate seat. Hartmann spent decades locked in psychiatric facilities, escaped more than once, and was named a suspect in multiple killings. He was never charged in those deaths.
The timing lands just weeks before the midterms. Flanagan is running to replace retiring Democrat Tina Smith and faces Republican Michele Tafoya. Neither candidate has commented publicly since the allegations resurfaced. Fox News Digital reached out to Flanagan's campaign for comment.
Flanagan has built much of her public story around family hardship, identity, and progressive causes. Voters now have a fuller record on the family line she rarely discusses.
A Minnesota Star Tribune article from Feb. 9, 1983, announcing Hartmann's death laid out the core timeline. He was committed on Nov. 1, 1951, after his wife filed a petition claiming he was "mentally ill and dangerous."
"Mentally ill and dangerous."
That commitment followed the discovery of a man named Theodore Foth, whose body was found burning in his room. Hartmann was never charged in Foth's death. The same paper later named Hartmann a suspect in the 1964 murder of a fellow patient at the Minnesota Security Hospital. Again, no charges.
Hartmann died on Feb. 6, 1983. Flanagan was three years old. The death notice listed her mother, Patricia Hartmann, and Patricia's three sisters, Kathleen, Mary, and Margaret, as his surviving daughters. Patricia later married Thomas Flanagan, identified in his own obituary as Peggy's stepfather. Patricia died in 2022. Her obituary listed her maiden name as Hartmann and her father as John.
Flanagan has spoken about being raised by a single mother who relied on SNAP benefits and housing assistance, and about the influence of her indigenous father, a tribal land rights activist. In a Minnesota Women's Press interview, she said both her mother and grandmother were single mothers and described her grandmother as having raised four daughters "at a time when that didn’t happen a lot."
That selective family portrait now sits beside decades of public records on Hartmann that Alpha News brought back into view. Flanagan has also leaned hard into identity claims on the trail, including talk of becoming the first Native American woman senator, a theme already examined when Flanagan's first-senator framing drew comparisons to earlier political controversies.
Hartmann did not stay put. In 1970 he was transferred to Anoka State Hospital, then escaped to New Mexico. A 1973 Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling described how New Mexico authorities picked him up on a warrant issued by Minnesota Probate Judge Melvin Peterson in September 1970. Authorities found he had been living in the state "without incident and without hiding his identity following his escape in Minnesota." A special prosecutor later released him, finding he was "sane and safe to be at large."
"Sane and safe to be at large."
The 1973 ruling did not mention the alleged murder suspicions that newspapers had attached to him. The next year, he was apprehended in Colorado on a misdemeanor charge and returned to Minnesota.
In April 1979, Hartmann failed to return from a visit pass at the Minnesota Security Hospital and fled to Missouri. There he allegedly threatened U.S. District Judge Miles Welton Lord during a phone call. Federal authorities charged him for that alleged threat. Lord had earlier handled Hartmann's federal challenge to his involuntary return from Colorado and had initially dismissed claims against several Minnesota officials.
Minneapolis newspapers covered these episodes through the 1970s and early 1980s. The pattern was long custody, repeated flight, and serious suspicions that never produced homicide charges, only the federal case tied to the phone threat.
Flanagan's campaign has emphasized biography, heritage, and progressive priorities while she serves as Tim Walz's lieutenant governor. That record includes moments when she shifted fraud scrutiny toward Walz even after years as his second-in-command. The newly surfaced Hartmann file does not charge Flanagan with any crime. It does test how completely a candidate controls the family story sold to voters.
Social media reaction was swift. Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet highlighted the "violent mental illness in Minnesota Democrat Peggy Flanagan's family" in an X post that included a photo of Flanagan wearing a shirt reading "Protect trans kids." Town Hall columnist Dustin Grage wrote that the report "adds up."
Tafoya, a former television sports reporter, has attacked Flanagan's focus on identity politics and questioned her progressive platform. The Hartmann records arrived as that contrast was already drawn. Flanagan's primary victory came with hard-left promises, including a vow to rip ICE apart, the kind of plank that energizes activists and alarms voters worried about borders and public order.
Clinton's early backing only raised the stakes. The former president's move to deliver a prominent Senate endorsement to Flanagan cast her as a national Democratic bet in a state where accountability questions keep multiplying.
Alpha News, the Minnesota-based outlet that drove the reporting, tied the old clippings and court papers directly to Flanagan's maternal line. The Star Tribune death notice, the 1979 escape-and-threat coverage, the Eighth Circuit description of the New Mexico period, and the obituaries for Patricia and Thomas Flanagan all sit in plain sight. Hartmann was suspected in serial killings and spent decades in mental hospitals, yet homicide charges never came.
Flanagan has not addressed the material in public. Tafoya has not either. The race continues with the lieutenant governor still presenting a curated upbringing narrative, single mother, public assistance, indigenous activism, while the grandfather's file shows commitment papers, escapes across multiple states, a federal threat charge, and repeated murder suspicions that prosecutors never took to trial.
Other Flanagan-adjacent controversies have followed a similar pattern of distance and deflection, including scrutiny of a hijab-video ally now under state fraud investigation. Voters can decide how much weight a grandfather's record deserves. They cannot decide if the documents exist. They do.
Campaigns built on identity and selective memory eventually run into archives. Minnesota's Senate contest just did.
