From his vantage point as a lawman for 40 years, retired Dakota County Sheriff Don Gudmundson gathered story after story about people and humanity. He used those tales to share his experience with others in law enforcement.

Beyond that, Gudmundson wrote newspaper columns and newsletters for the public, and to this day he talks to various groups about the management lessons he's learned.

He's the only Minnesotan who's served as sheriff for two counties and also as a police chief.

Gudmundson, 62, chronicled his career from when he left small-town southern Minnesota to work in Detroit and later Chicago law enforcement, through tenures as Fillmore County sheriff and Lakeville police chief, and finally, as Dakota County sheriff for 15 years. He retired Feb. 28.

With eloquence, he's conveyed the range of emotions in police work: horror at the handiwork of a serial killer; an officer's angst at delivering a death notice. And the frustration of seeing and hearing abused women defend their assailants.

"In another place and time, in the most rural of Minnesota," he once wrote, "she sits in my sheriff's office, looking like a boxer who had lost every round she ever fought.

"Her skin is translucent. Her skull looks larger than normal. Zipper scars cover her face. Her nose has been broken and several teeth are missing. She is defending her husband, who we have charged with assaulting two of her children. Later, we also charge him with sexually assaulting a daughter. I feel a slow burn in my stomach as I think about what the man has done to the woman and her children. ...

"How can you defend him?!" I yell. I feel ashamed as she looks at me with the only normal feature on her face, her eyes. I tell her I am sorry and I will be there if she ever needs me."

'The Front Row'

Gudmundson calls policing "a front-row seat to the Greatest Show on Earth," and that show, he likes to say, is about people. That's why he and Chief Deputy Dave Bellows, now sheriff, named their weekly newsletter "The Front Row." Bellows continues to produce the newsletter.

Jim Franklin, executive director of the Minnesota Sheriff's Association, calls it a "unique and special" approach that gives the public a peek at what it's like to work in the Sheriff's Office.

"He's a very good storyteller," said Apple Valley Police Chief Scott Johnson, who is among several south-metro police chiefs who followed Gudmundson's example and began their own newsletters.

Johnson said Gudmundson also has spoken annually at a training center for police chiefs on how to run an efficient law enforcement agency and build community relations.

"He always tells stories," Johnson said. "Don has a wonderful sense of humor."

Gudmundson learned early on that he had writing talent.

"When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who was blind -- the first blind teacher to teach in Minnesota -- and he would always tell me, 'You have some ability to write. You work on it.' "

So Gudmundson did that, tapping into his experiences, including in Detroit, where he was one of 12 detectives investigating about 125 deaths a year and other violent crimes.

'The hand of God'

It was there that he witnessed one of the most astounding events he's ever seen, which Gudmundson said he can only deduce was "the hand of God."

The bodies of an elderly couple had been found, each bayoneted more than 50 times by a serial killer. The killer stole the couple's yellow Dodge Coronet and smashed it into a tree.

Police had not yet figured out the killer's identity when Gudmundson was riding one day with a detective a couple of miles from the murder scene.

Inexplicably, the detective pulled over, got out, walked up to a porch and spoke with two young men and a woman.

He came back and, based strictly on his intuition, said, "I just talked to the killer of those two old people," Gudmundson recounted. Gudmundson and the other cops laughed about that.

But later, he heard the detective field a call from the man's neighbor, who had seen the detective go to the suspect's porch. The neighbor wanted police to know they had "the right man," and told of seeing his neighbor wearing gloves on a warm day, taking garbage bags out of a yellow Coronet.

A serial killer confessed

Confronted, the killer confessed to that double slaying -- and about 15 other homicides. Gudmundson said he still believes that God helped reveal that killer.

"How else will you account for it in a city of a million and a half?" he said.

Over the years, Gudmundson wrote of the friends he made, including Gideon Hershberger, the Amish father of 10 who went to jail for a week in a fight over whether the Amish should have to post orange triangle "slow-moving vehicle" signs on horse-drawn buggies in Fillmore County.

Gudmundson has delivered hundreds of death notices, each one more difficult than the last. He delivered many in southeast Minnesota, in the heart of Amish country in Fillmore County, and later wrote of being unable "to catch the stunned faces in the flickering light of lanterns."

"A lot of times," Gudmundson wrote, "the stories are the ones where you bolt awake in the middle of the night and stare at the ceiling" thinking about them.

Another death notice he's written about involved a traffic fatality he handled as Lakeville police chief in the early 1990s. He described going to a home where three teens lived:

"I knock loudly, but it is a big house and perhaps no one can hear. I try the door, and like many homes in small towns, the door is unlocked. I walk onto the porch, open a door into the kitchen and feel for a light. As the light comes on, a man in a bathrobe comes down the stairs.

"He looks at me and asks, 'Which one is it?' "

Joy Powell • 952-882-9017