Sometime after she was dead and her arteries had stoppedpumping 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 anapartment 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. Shehadbeen 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 thatDoris 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, tofund 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 MinneapolisStar-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, asa 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 thanacknowledged 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.
