Page 3

3

Back in the Day

The morning after the body was discovered, two very large BCA investigators, both new to the organization, stood back and watched. Their names were Jenkins and Shrake. They had first names, of course, but nobody used them. Jenkins had been a homicide investigator for the city of Minneapolis before moving to the BCA. Shrake had been an investigator for the city of Duluth.

Although both were smart, hard-nosed cops with enough experience to become cynical about the possibility of progress in human nature, none of the big guns at the BCA trusted them to work a high-profile, media-sensitive investigation like that of the murder of Doris Grandfelt. She was the prime example of the Hot Blonde Syndrome: if you want to keep your murder quiet, kill a Black woman. Or a Mexican or a Palestinian.

You do not kill hot blondes, whose ghastly deaths make the top of the ten o’clock broadcasts, and get away with it.

Unless you do, of course.

In which case, the Jenkinses and Shrakes of the business will be brought in when it’s too late to do any good, hopefully to take the blame for the lack of results.

—

The two new investigators had known each other from police department golf events and were becoming friends, as they eased into the chill waters of the BCA. They were allowed to go to the scene of the murder, and ask questions, as long as they didn’t get too close. Shrake caught a crime scene investigator sitting on a bench behind a softball backstop, eating a cheese sandwich, and said to Jenkins, “He’ll speak to us if we’re nice.”

“Or we could beat it out of him,” Jenkins said.

“I like the concept, but I want him healthy enough to talk.”

All they knew about the CSI was that his name was Larry. They sat on either side of Larry, who looked at them warily and asked, through a mouthful of cheddar cheese, “Wut?”

“Tell us about it, Lare,” Jenkins said, leaning close. He was perhaps a hundred pounds heavier than Larry, most of it muscle, so Larry swallowed and told them.

The scene, he said, had been frozen for a hundred yards around, but not before a half-dozen Woodbury cars had come and gone, followed by four more BCA vehicles that tracked over the earlier tracks. The crime scene investigation had begun the night before under portable lights, but nothing was disturbed until morning, when the scene was fully sunlit.

“We’re about to move the body over to the medical examiner. We did the inch-by-inch stuff around the body and now we need to see what’s under it.”

“What have you detected?” Shrake asked.

“We may have some footprints.”

“Footprints?”

“Maybe.”

“Will that amount to anything, Lare?”

“Uh…who knows?”

—

Jenkins and Shrake hung around the investigation when they could get away from their own routine assignments, picking up bits and pieces of the BCA investigative culture. The woman, they were told, had been dead for roughly thirty-six hours by the time the medical examiner got to her. Investigators believed she’d been killed the night before she’d been found, which would have been a Wednesday night. She wasn’t killed earlier than that, because she’d been at work on Wednesday. She hadn’t been killed later than that because she hadn’t shown up for work Thursday morning.

“That’s some fancy detectin’, right there,” Shrake observed.

—

She wasn’t killed in daylight hours, because the park was somewhat busy and there was a neighborhood on its south side, making it difficult to drive across the open playing fields in daylight without being seen. The body could have been carried—the victim was small—but a vehicle delivery seemed more likely.

The murder weapon had been sharp, with a blade that was narrow but inflexible, something like a boning knife. If the knife had been a penknife with a three- or four-inch blade, then the murder could have been spontaneous. But it wasn’t a penknife. The blade was long enough that it would have been awkward to routinely carry, except in a sheath. That meant, investigators believed, that the murder had been planned, and the knife deliberately carried to that end.

“Unless it wasn’t planned,” Jenkins said. “I had a guy, stoned on some kinda weird shit, stab a guy outside a taco shop with a knife he found on the sidewalk like one minute before. Unfortunately for him, he was standing under a video camera when he did it. No previous contact between the two, no motive…the stabber wasn’t even a religious nut and was from out of town. We never would have caught him without the video. He was identified by his mom, who saw him on TV.”

—

The crime scene crew determined that the murder had been committed elsewhere, but found multiple foot tracks around the dump site. The killer had been wearing size ten-and-a-half Nike Air Force 1’s.

“What size are your Nike Air Force 1’s?” Jenkins asked Shrake.

“Fourteen.”

“Okay, you didn’t do it.”

No identifying material remained on the body, with one exception—a dry-cleaning tag on the hem of the woman’s skirt. BCA investigators quickly identified the victim as Doris Grandfelt, an accountant at Bee Accounting Corp., with headquarters in the Lowertown section of St. Paul.

The identification was confirmed by the victim’s twin sister, Lara Grandfelt. Bee Accounting was a twelve- to fifteen-minute drive from the park, depending on traffic. Grandfelt’s car was found a few blocks away from Bee, near a bar known as a meeting place for singles. There was no blood in the car. A once-over at Bee Accounting found no sign of the attack there.

Although Grandfelt had been a pretty, vivacious woman, none of the bar employees remembered seeing her there the night she was murdered. A presumption developed: Grandfelt had been grabbed after work, on the street, probably on her way to the bar, and had been taken somewhere else and was killed, wherever that was.

“That’s possible,” Shrake said.

“If unlikely,” Jenkins observed. “I’ve been there a few times. There are always people on the sidewalk when the place is open.”

“You ever get lucky?”

“One time I thought I had, but it turned out a week later, I hadn’t.”

“What happened? I mean, you didn’t…”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

—

The medical examiner found that the victim had had a sexual encounter before her death. A rape kit was done and the DNA results were preserved forever in the BCA’s computers. The perpetrator—or, at least, the last man to have sex with her—had not used a condom, nor had he made any effort to avoid leaving traces of himself.

The autopsy revealed that Grandfelt had engaged in sexual activity at least twice the day of her death, and that the first case of intercourse involved a condom that used a spermicidal lubricant. Traces of the lubricant were recovered from deep in her vagina, but no DNA was recovered from that first sexual contact. There was no way to determine whether the sexual contacts were with one man, or with two different men.

Some investigators questioned the idea that she’d been raped, because there’d been no vaginal bruising or tears, or signs of an involuntary, violent penetration. The investigators couldn’t tell whether the woman had fought against an attacker. She had none of his blood on her fists or in her mouth, and none of his skin under her fingernails.

One of the investigators, a woman named Maria Jimenez, told Shrake, “Doris had some muscle. She grew up on a farm down by Lakeville, threw hay, worked out here in the Cities. No ligature marks, no sign she was tied up, no signs of resistance. Nothing. I don’t believe she was raped.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” Shrake said.

“What?” Fists on her hips.

“Wait. That didn’t come out right. You’re smart. And you look great. Really great.”

“Go away, bozo.”

—

The attack sequence was developed by the male investigators, who argued that Grandfelt had been raped and stabbed between eighteen and twenty-one times, in what appeared to be a psychotic frenzy. Most of the stab wounds were in the areas of her face, chest, and throat, with two more in each of her eyes. One wound went through her back and into her heart.

A psychologist employed by the BCA suggested that the eye wounds, which were postmortem, were intended to keep the dead woman from seeing her killer in death. The cops took that with a grain of salt the size of a basketball.

Sometime after she was dead and her arteries had stopped pumping out blood, she’d been cut open, and some of her internal organs dragged around with the knife blade.

The killer was nuts.

“We can all agree on that,” Jenkins told Shrake, who nodded.

—

Grandfelt shared an apartment with another Bee employee, a woman named Stephanie Brady. Brady had been away, in a Duluth motel, consulting on a tax return. She was in Duluth for several nights before, and the day the body was found. She told the investigators that Grandfelt had not been involved in a steady sexual relationship, as far as she knew. She had been involved in a sexual relationship that ended the summer before, Brady said.

The man, named Jeremy Williams, had both an alibi and volunteered for a DNA test that indicated that he was not the last person to have had sex with Grandfelt. His alibi had been checked and found solid, if not perfect, which was good for Williams, because cops were suspicious of perfect alibis. Williams was an assistant coach at Cretin High School in St. Paul. He said he’d never visited Grandfelt at work and had never visited the park where the body was found. The investigators couldn’t break that down.

There had been another relationship before Williams, which the BCA traced to a man named Clifton Howard (also incorrectly referred to in several reports as Howard Clifton), but he had moved to Seattle two years earlier, having broken off the relationship. He had established alibis there for the period around the murder and also volunteered for a DNA scrub.

Her twin, Lara, a bank employee in St. Paul, told investigators that Doris had had an off-and-on sexual relationship in college with a boy named Christopher Schuler. She said that Schuler was “odd.”

Schuler was found working in Salt Lake City as a waiter, and the restaurant staff confirmed that he had been working the night of the attack, and the days before and after. Schuler wrote an angry letter to Lara Grandfelt about pulling him into the case, and Grandfelt called him to apologize.

A review of Doris Grandfelt’s employment status revealed that although she had graduated from Manifold College, a small church-linked school in southern Minnesota, with a major in accounting, she was not employed as a supervising accountant at Bee—she was more like a skilled clerk and was paid as a skilled clerk. Two dozen male Bee employees were interviewed and asked for DNA swabs, which they provided, to no effect.

Despite a low salary, Grandfelt dressed well, and had a collection of designer shoes—Chanel slingbacks, Louboutin stilettoes, Blahnik pumps, Gucci horsebit loafers. Jimenez, the investigator who didn’t think Grandfelt had been raped, looked at the shoes and said, “She wasn’t going to the state fair in these things. I smell money coming from somewhere.”

Grandfelt’s parents were affluent but provided no significant post-college support for their twin daughters, believing hard work would teach them the value of a dollar.

Further interviews with her roommate and with friends revealed that Grandfelt had an active club life in Minneapolis and was known by a number of bouncers and bartenders as a welcome regular. After doing the interviews, one of the investigators confidentially suggested that Grandfelt might have been involved with sex-for-pay, to fund the expensive wardrobe and clubbing lifestyle. There were hints that she was not unfamiliar with cocaine, although no signs of the drug were found in the autopsy or in her apartment.

When word of the sex-for-pay and cocaine discussion leaked to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune , Lara Grandfelt went ballistic and tried (unsuccessfully) to sue both the BCA and the paper for defamation. Can’t defame a dead woman, she was told.

“What do you think?” Shrake asked Jenkins. “Was she on the corner?”

“Those shoes…there was no way she was buying them on her salary. She wasn’t on the corner, though. Too conservative for that. Probably working for someone over on Hennepin, who’d set her up with dates, maybe provide some protection.”

“Anybody talk to Minneapolis vice?”

“Jimenez called over, but they’d hadn’t heard of her. Grandfelt, not Jimenez. Never been busted for anything. Not even a speeding ticket.”

“We need a survey of Hennepin Avenue bartenders, see what they know.”

“I could sign up for that. I’d need some expense money.”

—

Doris Grandfelt, as a clerk-level accountant, was responsible for overseeing the packaging and the signing in and out of confidential tax and financial information, using both FedEx and UPS couriers. She sometimes stayed after dark to do that. Eight different UPS and FedEx drivers were interviewed and eliminated as suspects.

In the days and weeks following the murder, frustrated BCA investigators were unable to find anyone who admitted having sex with the woman on the day she was killed, or any other day, other than acknowledged sexual partners. None of those admitted to having sex with her in the months before she was murdered.

In the end, the cops did 336 separate interviews. They had unidentified DNA; had evidence that the killer wore Nike Air Force 1’s, size ten and a half, as did a million other American males; had evidence that the killer owned a knife with a blade at least six inches long of unknown make, but probably good quality—the knife hadn’t bent or deflected when hitting bone. And they had a great collection of footwear, locked in an evidence room.

If there had been any reason to do a full forensic examination of the third-floor women’s room in the first hours after the discovery of the body, investigators might have found stray blood cells that could have been traced to Grandfelt, and thus pinned down the scene of the crime. But there was no reason to do that, and after a few daily applications of restroom floor cleaner by the janitors, the possibility was gone.

There was never exactly a final conference about the murder, and the case didn’t become “cold”—although it definitely became cool—but there was a big get-together at which all the investigators were invited, including Jenkins and Shrake.

Their opinions were not solicited, but Shrake gave them anyway.

“You oughta…we oughta…get every single ambulatory male client of Bee’s, and every male Bee employee, and make them take DNA tests. Jenkins and I believe that we would at least find out who was having sex with her, that last time.”

DNA tests were expensive, there were hundreds of male clients, blah blah blah. It wasn’t done.

That was about it.