—
She wasn’t killedin 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 apenknife 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 scenecrew 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 blocksaway 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 examinerfound 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 sequencewas 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.
