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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Nursing Home Sought For Elderly Con

Associated Press

Howard Christensen is considered the nation’s longest-serving inmate, a slightly demented, cantankerous killer jailed in 1937 when he was 17.

After 58 years, prison officials have had enough. They want to put him in a nursing home but are not sure whether they can find any takers.

Christensen, 75, has spent most of the past six decades in the South Dakota State Penitentiary and in hospital psychiatric wards.

He is now in a cell in the prison’s wing for mentally disturbed inmates, where his care costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Medicare could pay the bills if he lived outside prison, but Christensen has a long history of being obnoxious to his visitors and fellow inmates, said Rich Wiese, the penitentiary’s spokesman.

“The world has changed a lot since 1937. He’s a difficult person, and with the notoriety of the case,” finding a nursing home willing to take Christensen will not be easy, Wiese said.

Even if a nursing home is found, officials would have to determine that he is not a threat to society and Gov. Bill Janklow would have to reduce his life sentence to time served, Wiese said.

Christensen and another 17-year-old hitchhiker, Norman Westberg, shot and bludgeoned 28-year-old school-teacher Ada Carey in a robbery.

The murder remains one of the most notorious in South Dakota history. Westberg hanged himself in 1943.