Photo

T. Eugene Thompson, right, was escorted to prison on Dec. 6, 1963, minutes after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder in the hiring of an inept hit man to kill his wife, Carol, for $3,000.Credit Gene Herrick/Associated Press

T. Eugene Thompson’s paid obituary on Tuesday nebulously described him as “a multifaceted person” and concluded with a quotation from Oscar Wilde: “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

The death notice, placed by Mr. Thompson’s family in the Minneapolis and St. Paul newspapers, ended with one word, “Amen.”

What the notice failed to mention was the facet of Mr. Thompson’s story that seized the nation’s attention and induced his Minnesota neighbors to deadbolt their doors and demand the restoration of the state’s death penalty for the first time since 1911.

On Dec. 6, 1963, after deliberating for 12 hours, a jury of six men and six women convicted Mr. Thompson, a leading local criminal defense lawyer, of first-degree murder after a bungling hit man killed his wife, Carol, in their St. Paul home.

At the trial, the prosecution convinced the jury that Mr. Thompson, then 36, had arranged what turned out to be a gruesome contract killing so that he could collect nearly $1.1 million in life insurance benefits. The prosecution, quoting him, said he had promised his 27-year-old former secretary, Jackie Olesen, that the proceeds would provide “enough money for us to live on.” Many Minnesotans came to believe that the case had been an inspiration for the 1996 movie “Fargo.”

After serving 19 years of a life term, Mr. Thompson was paroled in 1983. He died on his 88th birthday, Aug. 7, at his home in Roseville, a Twin Cities suburb. His son, Jeffrey, a former defense lawyer and prosecutor who was 13 at the time of the murder and is now chief judge for the southeastern district of Minnesota, confirmed the death.

Mr. Thompson had remarried (his second wife died of natural causes), sold real estate and re-established equivocal relationships with his son; three daughters, Patricia, Margaret and Amy; two sisters; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren, all of whom survive him.

“He always insisted he was innocent,” said William Swanson, who wrote a book about the case, “Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson,” published in 2006.

Tilmer Eugene Thompson, nicknamed “Cotton” for his white-blond hair, was born in 1927 in Blue Earth, Minn., about 120 miles southwest of Minneapolis. He was the son of a chicken farmer, also named Tilmer.

He dropped out of high school in Elmore (where he played football with Walter F. Mondale, who would become a United States senator and vice president), also in Minnesota, to enlist in the Navy. He served on a minesweeper in the Pacific during World War II.

Mr. Thompson and the former Carol Swoboda were classmates at Macalester College in St. Paul. After graduation, Mr. Thompson enrolled in St. Paul College of Law (now William Mitchell College of Law).

The Thompsons became pillars of the community, regular Sunday churchgoers for Presbyterian services.

On March 6, 1963, Ms. Thompson, 34, made bacon and eggs for breakfast for her husband and four children, ages 6 to 13, in their comfortable brick home in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood, and then went back to bed.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Thompson had hired Norman J. Mastrian, a college friend and former boxer, for $3,000 to bludgeon his wife with a rubber hose, place her naked in the bathtub and make the death look like an accidental drowning.

Mr. Mastrian subcontracted the killing to Dick W. C. Anderson, a roofing salesman and Marine veteran. Mr. Anderson hid in the basement and then attacked Ms. Thompson, leaving her for dead. He was tidying up when she regained consciousness.

“She managed to get out of the tub,” he testified, “so I knew I had trouble.”

Mr. Anderson tried to shoot Ms. Thompson, but the pistol, a stolen Luger, was loaded with the wrong ammunition and misfired, so he smashed the butt into her head. To be doubly sure, he grabbed a paring knife from the kitchen and plunged it into her neck, breaking the handle.

Ms. Thompson nevertheless managed to stumble out of the house, bloody and begging for help. Mr. Anderson fled. Ms. Thompson died hours later at a hospital.

The police initially suspected that an intruder, a homicidal maniac, had killed her. But they became suspicious when they learned that Mr. Thompson had recently given away the family’s dachshund and that, after arriving at his office unusually early that morning, he had instructed his secretary to call his wife at home on a pretext. She answered the phone. Prosecutors said he had staged the call so that he could say she was still alive when he left for work.

“The trouble was that he had thought of everything,” Joe Healy, an insurance investigator, told The New York Times in 1972, “and everything he thought of made him that much more suspect.”

Mr. Thompson, who was then the chairman of the criminal law committee of the Minnesota State Bar Association, was arrested on June 21 at his summer home in Forest Lake, Minn. Bail was set at $100,000, the highest in state history at the time.

Mr. Anderson, a petty thief, confessed that he had carried out the crime for $2,300, suggesting that Mr. Mastrian had intended to pocket the other $700. Mr. Anderson and Mr. Mastrian were also given life terms, and they, too, were later paroled.

The case attracted national attention, and Minnesotans suspect that it left an impression on the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who were growing up in a nearby suburb at the time of the murder and trial. Their film “Fargo” was about a car dealer who hires a couple of inept criminals to kidnap his wife for ransom.

The opening credits say that the film is “a true story” and that the events “took place in Minnesota in 1987.”

“This, however, is not the case,” Joel Coen said in an interview on Friday. “It’s completely made up. Or, as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it’s a story.”

As for Mr. Thompson, Mr. Coen insisted, “Never heard of him.”

Like many of Mr. Thompson’s colleagues and neighbors, his son, Jeffrey, originally believed that someone else was to blame for his mother’s murder. He visited his father at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater and pleaded for his early parole.

“It’s very hard for a child to have a parent in prison, but once he got out, we never had much of a relationship,” Jeffrey Thompson said in an interview. But Mr. Swanson, the author, said, “As Jeffrey matured and eventually studied law and reviewed the voluminous files, he came to the conclusion that his dad had been lying.”

Jeffrey said, “He never admitted doing it.”

In 1986, Mr. Swanson said, Jeffrey Thompson “convened a family court, and they brought Eugene in and said: ‘We are going to presume you’re guilty. You convince us otherwise.’ He failed to do that.”

Still, Mr. Thompson attended his son’s swearing-in as a judge, and Jeffrey sent him birthday cards. Mr. Swanson asked Jeffrey once to explain his ambivalence.

“He teared up and said, ‘He’s my dad,’ ” Mr. Swanson said.

Wilde’s redemptive quotation, the one in Mr. Thompson’s paid obituary, is also posted in Judge Jeffrey Thompson’s courtroom in Winona.

He declined to classify his father as a saint or a sinner, but said, “I think, based on my experience with Minnesota’s criminal justice system, that the jury did the right thing.”