Articles/ Blue Earth Jane Doe

[Starless]

St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)
August 27, 1989
Edition: AM Metro Final
Section: Metro
Page: 5B



Topics:
Index Terms:
Murder Minnesota




EX-TROOPER PLEADS GUILTY IN 1980 HOMICIDE OF WOMAN

Author: BYLINE: Associated Press

Dateline: BLUE EARTH, Minn.









Article Text:

A former state trooper has pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the death of an unidentified woman whose body was found nine years ago near this southern Minnesota city, authorities said today.
The Faribault County Sheriff's Department said Robert LeRoy Nelson, 43, formerly of the Blue Earth area, entered the plea Friday to complaints issued by Faribault County Attorney Arvid Wendland in district court in Blue Earth.
Wendland said Nelson also pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct involving a family member from 1977 to 1981. The manslaughter charge involved the homicide in May 1980 of a woman approximately in her 20s, he said.
The body, with a nylon cord around the neck, was found on Memorial Day in 1980 in a drainage ditch along Interstate 90 near Blue Earth. Although it was ruled that she had not been dead long, the body was badly decomposed, authorities said. The woman is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Blue Earth as Jane Doe.
According to the sheriff's office, Nelson told Faribault County Sheriff Roger Fletcher and Chief Deputy Jerry Kabe about his involvement in the strangulation of Jane Doe while he was on duty in Faribault County as a trooper in May 1980.
In January 1981, Nelson requested a transfer and moved with his wife and three children to Vergas, where he worked out of the patrol's office in Detroit Lakes. Nelson later joined a religious group and, in 1985, resigned from the patrol and moved to Texas with the group.
Last year, Nelson was convicted in Texas of a sexual assault also involving a family member and was sentenced there to life in prison, Wendland said today.
After his guilty plea Friday, Nelson was sentenced by Judge J.W. Schindler to a total of 16 years in prison to run concurrently with his sentence in Texas, Wendland said.
Nelson was brought to Minnesota for his court appearance Friday, but will be returned to the Texas prison, Wendland said, adding that his Texas conviction is being appealed.

[Starless]

Saint Paul Pioneer Press
September 15, 2003
Edition: City
Section: MAIN
Page: A1



Topics:
Index Terms:
COLUMN MINNESOTA WOMAN RAPE MURDER IDENTITY




VICTIM DESERVES A NAME, DOE GROUP SAYS

Author: Ruben Rosario, Pioneer Press Columnist











Article Text:
She was raped, strangled with a nylon cord and discarded like garbage in a drainage ditch off Interstate 90 near Blue Earth.
The killer's identity is long known. He was an unlikely suspect -- an on-duty Minnesota State Patrol trooper who lured the apparent hitchhiker one late spring day in 1980 and confessed to the crime nine years later.


Yet, two decades later, the murder victim buried in Blue Earth's Riverside Cemetery still remains a "Jane Doe" -- one of roughly 13 unidentified people who have died in Minnesota in recent decades.
But an online community of mostly civilian sleuths, including an unlikely partnership between a Minnesota mom-to-be and a retired police chief -- are trying to help authorities and relatives find a name and a sense of finality for this legion of the anonymous dead.
The Doe Network, launched five years ago by a handful of Internet surfers interested in unsolved mysteries, has grown into what some say is a valuable clearinghouse of information on thousands of unidentified bodies and missing persons reports. There are now hundreds of members, from housewives and case investigators to retirees, sifting through the two massive data files in search of potential matches. They are aided by thousands of other Web site visitors stretching coast to coast, and from Europe to Australia.
"Our motto and our mission is that everybody deserves a name," says Todd Matthews, a Tennessee-based company quality-control manager who helped found the site.
The network is credited with cracking more than a dozen "cold" cases that had stymied law enforcement and relatives of the deceased or missing for years.
One of the more recent successes involved a middle-aged paralegal from Pennsylvania who, in her spare time, was able to match details of a Wayne, N.J., man missing since 1996 to a skull and jaw found by Vermont police authorities two years later in a wooded area. The common thread was the detail in both reports that the victim was handicapped.
"This is the best site of its kind around," says Don Mickelson, a former police chief who retired in 1996 after 33 years with the St. James, Minn., police department.

'SOMEBODY'S SISTER'
Mickelson knew Jane Doe's killer, Robert Leroy Nelson, a trooper assigned to the Mankato State Patrol district.
"He wasn't well liked, and he shouldn't have been in law enforcement," Mickelson said in his most diplomatic, Minnesota Nice assessment of the cold-blooded killer.
Nelson, currently serving a life sentence in Texas in connection with brutal sexual assaults on other victims and his own children, admitted to the murder and under hypnosis provided authorities with some details about the victim, including tossing her black purse into a nearby grain storage facility. The purse was never found.
Mickelson assumed the victim's identity had been learned until he read a profile in a local paper this summer about the efforts of Deborah Anderson, a 34-year-old computer information systems manager at Mankato State University.
Anderson, of Blue Earth, Minn., knows Gerald Kabe, a retired Faribault County deputy sheriff who was assigned the Jane Doe case during the first year of her discovery. Last summer, Kabe informed Anderson of the case that had haunted him for years.
"I can't really tell you why I got so deep into this, except that I kept thinking that this is somebody's sister, daughter or perhaps a mother whose relatives deserve to know what happened to her," says Anderson, who is seven months pregnant with her first child.
In her inquiries, Anderson learned that local law enforcement, some born after the case, did not know about it and that the case was not listed with any known national organization involved with missing persons or Minnesota's own online clearinghouse site on missing persons.
She contacted the Doe Network and was able to post what she knew about the case. Anderson, who has obtained copies of Jane Doe's skull and dental records, and Mickelson have poured through more than 2,000 files maintained by the online site. They have the narrowed the list of potential matches to five. The strongest link appears to be a missing-person case that actually was investigated shortly after the murder.
Kabe says he was convinced Jane Doe was actually a missing New York City woman, after dentists compared dental records of the two women and thought they matched. But the lead was all but dropped when a pathologist from Ramsey County examined the records and concluded that they probably were not the same person.

EXHUMATION PROPOSED
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington, D.C., which deals exclusively with minors, has taken an interest in the Minnesota case. The organization has told Anderson it is willing to foot the estimated $3,000 to $5,000 fee to create a clay facial reconstruction of Jane Doe's face if the body is exhumed. The only image of the dead woman is a sketch recently drawn by a volunteer police artist with the online site's Project EDAN (Everyone Deserves a Name).
Mickelson and Anderson are willing to pay for the exhumation and DNA tests, but they say they are waiting for local authorities to approve the request and obtain a court order.
Faribault County Attorney Brian Roverud said he is not opposed to an exhumation, but needs an approval from County Sheriff Scott Campbell before he approaches a county judge for a court order.
"I would guess that the sheriff would have to be convinced that it would be worthwhile or have a likelihood of success," Roverud said.
Anderson said Campbell has not returned her calls in recent weeks about the request. "I live in a small town, and I don't want to burn any bridges, but I have received far more cooperation from national authorities and cops in New York and other states," Anderson said. Mickelson and Kabe expressed similar frustrations.
Campbell did not return a phone call for comment.
"We have received enormous help from law enforcement in several jurisdictions, but then there are some officers who don't like civilians poking their noses or treading into their turf," said Dana Gonzalez, a New Jersey resident and the online site's assistant media director. "It's mostly an ego thing with some cops."
Mickelson doesn't understand why there would be any opposition to an exhumation.
"There is a sister, a brother, a parent or perhaps a child out there that wants to know what happened to her or where her body is," Mickelson said. "That's good enough for me."

FOR MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about the Doe Network and other related sites, go to: www.doenetwork.org.
To learn more about the case of the Blue Earth Jane Doe, go to http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/bittid/welcome.htm#FACTS.

Ruben Rosario can be reached at rrosario@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5454.

Caption:
PHOTO: JOE ODEN, PIONEER PRESS

Doe Network activists Deborah Anderson, left, and Don Mickelson, a retired police chief, are bent on finding the identity of an unidentified murder victim, buried at Riverside Cemetery in Blue Earth, Minn. The headstone reads, "Unidentified woman found May 30, 1980 near Interstate 90 east of Blue Earth."

DRAWING

This artist's sketch is the only image of a hitchhiker found dead near Blue Earth, Minn., 23 years ago. Though the killer's identity is known, the victim's is not.

[Starless]

St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN)
June 7, 1988
Edition: AM Metro Final
Section: Main
Page: 1A







EX-TROOPER IS SUSPECT IN 1980 SLAYING OF WOMAN

Author: Tony Blass, Staff Writer











Article Text:

Faribault County authorities said Monday that a former Minnesota state trooper who became heavily involved with a religious cult is a suspect in the sexual assault and murder of a young woman whose decayed body was found in a ditch near Blue Earth on Memorial Day 1980.
Authorities said the 43-year-old ex-trooper, who is the only suspect in a baffling murder mystery, was on duty and in uniform when he picked up the woman in southern Minnesota.
The woman's decomposed body was never identified after it was found in a drainage ditch along Interstate 90 northeast of Blue Earth. She was buried in a local cemetery plot under a tombstone marked Jane Doe.
The ex-trooper worked for the State Patrol in Fairmont and Detroit Lakes for about 12 years until 1985 when he resigned to join a religious sect, according to Col. Roger Ledding, commander of the State Patrol.
Ledding said the man lived in a farmstead commune near Fergus Falls and then a short time later he uprooted his family and moved to Texas along with other members of the cult.
In April, the ex-trooper was arrested and charged with criminal sexual conduct in Texas, said Faribault County Sheriff Roger Fletcher. While in jail, he apparently told guards about the 1980 slaying, Fletcher said.
"He got arrested for another charge and started talking about some things he might have done back here in Minnesota," Fletcher said.
Texas police contacted Ledding, who referred the case to Mark Shields, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Investigators for the BCA and the Faribault County Sheriff's office recently flew to Texas to interview the ex-trooper. They described him as "probably mentally disturbed," but his statements about the slaying "have all checked out beautifully," Fletcher said.
"The first time we talked to him he was kind of evasive," Fletcher said. "He was talking more in terms of vision-type things. He visioned this and he visioned that, so it was nothing real concrete. But since then, the discussions have changed."
Fletcher declined to give specifics about those conversations, but he said the ex-trooper has given authorities the name of a woman in her mid-20s believed to be the murder victim.
Fletcher said the victim hasn't been positively identified, but he said she was "from a larger town not far from here" in a neighboring state. He said she wasn't from Iowa.
"I don't want to give this all away," Fletcher said. "But it won't be too long and we should have this thing wrapped up and you can get it all."
Fletcher said the motive for the slaying was apparently rape, although an autopsy on the skeletal remains was inconclusive. Ramsey County Medical Examiner Dr. Michael McGee conducted the autopsy but was unable to positively determine the cause of death, which is believed to have been strangulation.
The woman's body was severely decomposed when it was found after about seven days in the hot sun, authorities said. Unable to identify the body, police had nowhere to begin investigating.
The new developments mark the only bright spots in an otherwise bitterly frustrating case, authorities said. For nearly eight years the case has remained open but inactive, except for unsuccessful attempts at identifying the remains by trying to match dental records.
Ledding said the former trooper was suspended on at least one occasion for purposely bumping into the back end of a woman's pickup truck when she failed to pull over as he was speeding to the scene of an accident.
"He had a relatively short fuse," Ledding said.
Ledding said the man's former patrol partner was recently convicted of a felony.
"We fired his ex-partner down in Fairmont because he had criminal sexual conduct with his underage daughter," Ledding said. "The two guys were working together and I don't know if there's any connection to this thing that he's (talking about) or not."

[Starless]

So, apparently the woman they were looking at was not her ?? And why in the world would he confess to a slaying in another state to get out of a "criminal sexual charge ?" Is it just me, or is this all a little confusing ?