What a Federal Judge Called Democrat Senate Hopeful Peggy Flanagan’s Grandfather May Have Just Touched Her Chances

Peggy Flanagan is asking Minnesotans to trust her with a Senate seat this November.

Records now show her grandfather once terrified a federal judge enough to demand police protection.

Newspapers from his decades in custody say he was suspected in killings investigators could never prove.

The Newspaper Trail That Followed John Hartmann for Three Decades

John Jacob Hartmann was Flanagan's maternal grandfather, according to an Alpha News investigation built on old newspaper accounts and court and hospital records.

A fire in Hartmann's hospital bed left a Minneapolis man named Theodore Foth dead in 1951, the first killing investigators would ever tie to him.

By 1964, a second patient was dead inside that same state security hospital, and investigators circled back to Hartmann again, this time coming up short on evidence to charge him.

He eventually broke out of custody for good, and New Mexico authorities arrested him on suspicion of killing a man and a woman there, bringing the count of killings investigators linked to him to four.

He was never charged or convicted in any of the four deaths, and Alpha News reports Minnesota's state hospital system held him for more than thirty years, including a 1970 transfer to Anoka State Hospital.

A Federal Judge Decided He Had Finally Had Enough

During one of his stretches on the run from the Minnesota Security Hospital, Hartmann is alleged to have placed a threatening phone call to U.S. District Judge Miles Lord, roughly four years before Hartmann died.

Lord did not stay quiet about it.

He went public, calling Hartmann a "mass murderer" in the press, arranging armed protection for himself, and watching Hartmann get hit with a federal charge over the threat.

Hartmann died on February 6, 1983, and his death notice listed Flanagan, then three years old, among his surviving grandchildren.

Flanagan's campaign did not respond to The Daily Wire's request for comment on the report.

Her Republican opponent, Michelle Tafoya, has not commented either, and the race remains close enough that recent polling has shown Flanagan's lead shrinking as Election Day approaches.

Minnesota has not elected a Republican to the Senate since the 1970s, and Democrats have treated this seat as safe for years, which is exactly why a race tight enough to flip now matters well beyond state lines.

If Tafoya pulls this off, it changes the math in Washington, and that is precisely why every detail about both candidates deserves scrutiny in the final weeks, not just the ones a campaign is comfortable volunteering.

What Minnesota Voters Deserve to Know Before They Vote

Nobody is suggesting Peggy Flanagan did anything wrong here – she had no say in who her grandfather was, and nothing in this record is on her.

But a man a federal judge called a mass murderer, a man investigators tied to four deaths over three decades without ever securing a conviction, is part of the family history of a woman asking to help write the nation's laws.

Minnesota voters found this out from a conservative outlet willing to pull old court and hospital records, not from Flanagan herself or from the Minnesota papers that have covered her career for a decade – the same pattern that keeps a DFL candidate's rough edges out of print until someone outside the usual press corps forces the issue.

Nobody at Flanagan's campaign has disputed a single fact in the Alpha News report – the silence itself is the closest thing to a response voters have gotten.

Voters can decide for themselves how much a seventy-year-old family tragedy should weigh against a Senate vote.

What they cannot do is weigh it if nobody tells them it exists.

Sources:

• Alpha News, "EXCLUSIVE: Peggy Flanagan's grandfather was suspected in serial killings, spent decades in mental hospitals, records reveal," Alpha News, October 18, 2026.
• The Daily Wire, "Democrat Senate Candidate's Grandfather Was Suspected Serial Killer," The Daily Wire, October 18, 2026.
• Just the News, "Minnesota Dem Senate nominee Lt Gov Flanagan's grandfather was suspected in serial killings: report," Just the News, October 18, 2026.
• Newsweek, "Peggy Flanagan's Chances of Losing to Michele Tafoya in Minnesota Polls," Newsweek, 2026.