On August 2, 1994, Michele "Shelly" Julson dropped her young son off at his grandparents' house in Bismarck, North Dakota, and told everyone she was going to pick up her paycheck. She was twenty-six. She never picked up that check, never picked up her son, and was never seen again.
More than three decades later, her case remains one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in the Upper Midwest, and it's the subject of a new documentary, "Call Me Shelly," screening Friday, September 18, at 7 p.m. at the Fargo Theatre. After the film, audiences will have the rare chance to hear directly from the people who made it: podcast host and narrator James Wolner and director Derek Fletcher, both of whom will take part in a live Q&A.
Wolner is the creator of "Dakota Spotlight," a North Dakota true-crime podcast that has covered thirteen seasons of cold cases and forgotten mysteries across the region. The Julson disappearance was the subject of Season Seven in 2022, and the new film is an adaptation of that investigation, built on Wolner's exclusive access to the Bismarck Police Department's cold-case file.
"I find it to be one of the oddest mysteries I ever worked on," Wolner said this week.
The story has all the elements of a classic unsolved case, plus a few that feel almost cinematic. Authorities recovered Julson's blue Ford Thunderbird six days after her disappearance, parked at a Comfort Inn in Bismarck. It had been wiped clean of fingerprints. But weeks later, when the car was returned to her father, Wes Julson, he spotted something under the hood: a fine red dust, the kind of crushed red clinker, commonly called scoria, used as gravel on rural roads across western North Dakota.
That clue, and the questions it raises, sits at the center of the documentary. Could the dust tie Julson's car to an early, almost forgotten reported sighting of her vehicle in rural Burleigh County? A retired sheriff's deputy and a local geologist weigh in. As the deputy, Ray Dingeman, put it: "That is mostly farmland and pasture land up there... I would say there would be plenty of places that something could be hidden."
But the red dust is just one thread in a tangle of unresolved questions. Who was harassing the young mother in the months before she vanished? Julson had reported vandalism and strange encounters. Who were the two mysterious men she met days before her disappearance, and why are 104 pages missing from her police file?
Wolner and Fletcher don't solve the case, and they're upfront about that. Instead, the documentary presents a handful of possible scenarios, some of them deeply troubling, and lets the facts breathe.
Fletcher, who listened to the entire podcast season before agreeing to direct, said the story was impossible to shake. "I listened to the whole season, and I could see it all in my head," he said. "If it's a great story, you're just gonna be locked into it. What was peculiar was just how she was gone, vanished and never appeared again."
He was equally drawn in by Wolner's approach to storytelling. "He really takes his time to, not make you believe, but to entertain that idea. It's a very objective approach," Fletcher said. "I saw the structure from his podcast, the way it was told. I knew it would translate to film for different acts."
The two filmmakers previously collaborated on "The House on Sweet and Seventh," a documentary about the murders of Gordon and Barbara Erickstad at the hands of their eighteen-year-old son Brian. That film won an Upper Midwest Emmy Award, and the pair went looking for another Dakota Spotlight case that would translate to the screen. Wolner suggested Julson. Fletcher agreed immediately.
The filmmakers interviewed officials involved with the case, along with Julson's family and friends. Her parents, Wes and Linda Julson, still hold out hope for closure, and they appear in the film. Fletcher said the family's trust was essential. "You don't want to be exploitative, but you also want people to understand what happened and the impacts that this had and why this is important," he said. "They fully understand that more than I ever will because they've been living with this for 30 plus years now."
Fletcher also took pains to distinguish the film from the sensationalist strain of true crime that dominates television. "There's a lot of true crime like 'Dateline' and that stuff. I feel we toe the line," he said. "I feel we take a more journalistic approach. There is a little bit of that entertainment aspect, but there's a lot of things in it that are really sobering."
Wolner doesn't expect the documentary to crack the case open on its own, but he hopes it might jog a memory. "I hope that it encourages somebody who knows something about what happened to come forward," he said.
The screening at the Fargo Theatre is part of a regional tour that includes stops in Bismarck, Sioux Falls, Jamestown, Aberdeen, and Carrington. Tickets are $19.28, a modest price for an intimate evening of true crime with the people who made it.
The venue itself adds to the occasion. The Fargo Theatre opened in 1926 as a vaudeville and cinema house. On opening night, roughly 1,100 people packed in to watch "The Man on the Box" starring Sydney Chaplin, brother of Charlie Chaplin. The building was designed in Art Deco style, and its centerpiece was a Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ, installed by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company of North Tonawanda, New York, catalogued as Opus 1255. The organ fell silent in 1948 with the rise of talkies, but it was later restored and is still played at special screenings today. The theater survived a series of owners and near-demolitions, and today operates as a nonprofit independent cinema, showing mainstream films alongside festival fare, foreign cinema, and classic series.
There is something fitting about a documentary about a cold case from 1994 playing in a theater that has been showing films for a century. The Fargo Theatre has seen everything from Babe Ruth and Tom Mix appearances to the Coen Brothers' "Fargo," the 1996 film that put the city's name on screens worldwide. On September 18, it will host a smaller, quieter kind of story, one that is local, unresolved, and waiting for someone to remember something.
Wolner, who grew up in California's wine country and lived in Sweden for over twenty years before moving to North Dakota in 2013, found his calling in the region's forgotten cases. It started with a barstool conversation in 2018 about a suspicious death in western North Dakota. That conversation became the first season of Dakota Spotlight. Now, years later, he's bringing shelved mysteries to the big screen.
The film contains adult themes and language, and seating is limited. Advance tickets are recommended. For those who go, the evening offers more than a screening. It's a chance to look at a thirty-year-old mystery through fresh eyes, to hear the questions that still haunt a family, and perhaps to carry a piece of the story home with them, the way the red dust clung to Shelly Julson's engine block.
Somewhere in that dust, and in the missing pages of a police file, may lie the answer to what happened to a young mother who simply went to pick up her paycheck and never came home.