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In the late afternoon of Saturday, November 22, 2003, five days before Thanksgiving, 22-year-old Dru Sjodin finished working her noon-4 pm shift at Victoria’s Secret at the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota. After doing a little shopping, she headed to her car & as she did, she talked to her boyfriend on the phone. When their call cut-off mid-conversation, he figured the call just dropped, never imagining that he was hearing the moment his girlfriend was abducted, never to be seen alive again.
Dru Katrina Sjodin, known fondly to her family as Drusie, was born on September 26, 1981 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to parents Allan & Linda. The couple went on to divorce when Dru was five & her brother Sven was seven. The children lived with their mom & stepfather, Sid Walker, relocating to a lake home in Pequot Lakes in the early 1990s.
Dru graduated from Pequot Lakes High School in the spring of 2000. It was no surprise that she was voted Homecoming Queen during her senior year since she was an outgoing, bubbly person that everyone gravitated to. Dru was known as a person who always made others laugh & feel at ease. She was spontaneous, kind, artistic & very creative. She earned the childhood nickname, Doodles, because of her love of painting & drawing. She was also very close to her older brother & the siblings had friends in common.
Dru always had an amazing work ethic, working summers at the Manhattan Beach Lodge on Big Trout Lake during high school. As she moved on to college where she attended the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, she interned through the university’s aviation program & had the benefit of traveling through the program. She was also a part of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority that was housed in a building that resembled a pink castle & here, she worked with underprivileged teens.
On top of being a diligent graphic arts student with a full schedule of classes, Dru somehow managed to hold down two part-time jobs, one at the mall & the other at a popular night spot. With the busy holiday season approaching, she was trying to work as much as possible to earn money for a much anticipated upcoming trip to Australia that was planned for the spring of 2004.
On Saturday, November 22, 2003, after she clocked out of work at 4 pm, Dru headed to Marshall Field’s within the mall & purchased a purse for her mom. On her way to her car, she called her boyfriend Chris Lang at about 5 pm. The couple met while she was in college & Chris was immediately drawn to Dru’s gorgeous smile & they found themselves quickly falling in love. Since Chris was settling into a new apartment over 300 miles away in Minneapolis, they were catching up while Dru was headed back to her on-campus apartment to get ready for her 9 pm shift at her second job.
With it being the end of November, the sun would have already set by 5 pm & Dru would have found the parking lot dark as she made her way to her car. About four minutes into their call, Chris heard a distracted sounding Dru say, okay, okay, before the call suddenly cut off. Just assuming the call dropped, Chris figured Dru would call him back when she was free & moved on with his day, not giving the situation much of a second thought at the time.
However, when an hour had gone by & Dru still hadn’t called him back, Chris began calling & leaving her messages. As his sense of worry crept up, he decided to call Dru’s roommate Meg, to see if she made it home after leaving the mall. Meg told him she hadn’t seen her & his worry began to escalate to panic as he feared that his always reliable girlfriend must be in trouble. Dru was a very scheduled person, someone you could set your watch by.
When his phone rang at 7:42 pm from Dru’s phone, Chris heard the sounds of static coming from the other end of the line followed by the sounds of buttons on the phone being pushed at random as well as the wind blowing in the background. The call lasted twenty seconds until it suddenly dropped again.
Chris called Meg back & suggested she call El Roco Lounge where Dru was scheduled to work that night at 9 pm. This call confirmed that she hadn’t shown up for her shift, something that was absolutely out of character for Dru & with this, Meg reported her friend missing at 11 pm.
Since Dru’s last known location was at the Columbia Mall, officers began their search at that location. Here, they found her red Oldsmobile Cutlass still parked in a by now empty parking lot outside of JC Penney. Her passenger door was unlocked & her wallet with credit cards & cash was inside as well as the Marshall Field’s shopping bag that contained the purse she’d purchased for her mom. Next to the driver’s side rear wheel, investigators found a black knife sheath on the ground.
Despite the fact that there were no obvious signs of a struggle, investigators believed that Dru had been abducted as she climbed into her car. It wasn’t long before word began to spread around campus & that night, Dru hadn’t returned to her on-campus apartment. Her sorority sisters formed a phone chain, calling around to anywhere she could possibly be, but no one had seen nor heard from Dru that night.
When detectives spoke with Chris, they questioned why he’d waited so long to contact authorities & he explained that when they were talking, Dru didn’t scream so he assumed their call had just dropped. During the few minutes they talked, she told him about the purse she’d bought her mom. It wasn’t until he heard from Dru’s stepdad at midnight about her abandoned car being found in the parking lot that he knew in his heart that she must have been abducted. Because Chris was in Minneapolis, he was never considered a person of interest.
Allan Sjodin, Dru’s father, recalls the moment he got the phone call about his daughter’s abandoned car being found at the mall & that fact that she seemed to be missing & may have been abducted. With his heart clutched in his chest, he immediately jumped into his truck & headed over to the mall despite the snow storm that was blowing through. He pulled in & parked next to his daughter’s car as he desperately tried to hope for the best. Dru’s brother Sven was living in California at the time when he got the call from his dad who told him what was going on & that things were not looking good.
As investigators combed through hours of CCTV footage from the mall, they watched as Dru walked through Marshall Fields wearing a bright pink shirt, black pants & a black pea coat. As she left the store at 5 pm, she held her phone to her ear, talking to Chris. There was nothing alarming about the video & no one appeared to be following her as she left.
Because the area beyond Grand Forks is sprawling with vast farmland as far as the eye can see, investigators knew the search was going to be very difficult. Since Grand Forks borders Minnesota, they wondered if she could’ve been taken across state lines, an idea that was confirmed when detectives traced the second phone call that Dru placed to Chris & determined it had been placed in the area of Crookston, Minnesota, 30 miles (48 km) northeast of the mall.
Dru’s phone was pinging in the area of Fisher, Minnesota which is 11 miles (18 km) from where the second call was placed from her phone in Crookston. This gave Dru’s family a sense of hope that she could potentially still be alive while detectives were quickly & tirelessly trying to pinpoint the phone’s exact location. Sadly, the device stopped sending signals on Sunday, suggesting that the battery had died.
Because Dru’s phone proved that she’d been taken across state lines, her case was officially considered a federal crime & with this, the FBI got involved.
Three days after her abduction, on Tuesday, November 25, investigators located one of Dru’s shoes under a highway bridge that crossed over the icy waters of the Red Lake River in Crookston. Divers began searching the river, but found no sign of Dru.
It was a race against time & authorities enlisted the public’s help in hopes of finding Dru alive. In the days after her disappearance, over a thousand volunteers came together in the search efforts as flyers were distributed throughout North Dakota as well as Minnesota in hopes that someone would come forward with information in regards to her whereabouts.
Meanwhile, investigators turned their attention to local sex offenders & four days after Dru went missing, a tip came through about a convicted sex offender who lived in Crookston near where Dru’s second phone call to Chris was placed as well as where her shoe had been found. Not only did this man live in Crookston, but a witness had seen him at the Columbia Mall on the very day Dru went missing. The man in question was convicted sex offender, 50-year-old Alfonso Rodriguez Jr.
With the extensive media coverage of Dru’s abduction, a woman named Shirley Iverson contacted investigators & became a crucial part of this case. Shirley herself had been a victim of a brutal attack in 1974 & urged authorities to take a closer look at her assailant, no other than Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. She knew if the man was not in prison, he was a danger to any female he crossed paths with & he had been released only six months earlier.
Back in 1974, when Shirley was 18-years-old, she was home from college on break & met up with friends at a local bar. When she got back to her car, a man who she recognized began knocking on her window; he was a classmate’s older brother, Alfonso. He asked Shirley for a ride & since she was familiar with him & it was only a seven block drive to his home, she agreed. As they pulled up to the house, Shirley came to find that the man’s family had moved & the house was actually abandoned. It was here, inside the car where he attacked & sexually assaulted her. Two days later, Rodriguez was charged for the attack but allowed to go home. With his freedom, his next attack came only one month later, before he appeared in court for Shirley’s case.
During his second assault, he abducted Shirley’s classmate as she left a local theater. He used a 6” kitchen knife to threaten the woman before he drove her to a rural location & raped her. After this attack, he was charged with rape, kidnapping & assault with a deadly weapon & sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. His sentence was stayed, meaning he wouldn’t face prison time unless he violated the terms set by the judge.
During this time he was sentenced to the Minnesota Security Hospital for sex offender treatment for his attack against Shirley.
In the spring of 1980, while Rodriguez was on leave from the hospital to visit family, he struck again. This time, he attempted to kidnap a woman; he stabbed her twice, once in the arm, once in the abdomen, before she managed to fight him off & flee.
After this third assault, Rodriguez served 23 years in prison & on his release on May 1, 2003, he was labeled a Level 3 sex offender, meaning, he was likely to reoffend.
Alfonso Rodriquez Jr. was the second of five children born in Texas where the family lived for five months of the year between November & April. During these months, they worked twelve hour days in the fields as migrant workers. Between April & November, the family lived in Minnesota.
Throughout his childhood, Alfonso had been very slow to achieve milestones & his mother described him as out of step with other children. Even as an adult, he never lived independently since as of age 18, he had been incarcerated for all but approximately 3.5 years of his life. At age 21, he committed his first sexual assault.
Between 4 & 5-years-old Rodriquez & his older sister, Sylvia, were sent to stay at a camp for migrant children while his parents continued to work. It was during this time when he was first sexually abused by a female, something that Sylvia witnessed. At age six, he was molested by a college-age female during church camp & at age seven, he was molested by a teenage boy.
The family relocated to Crookston, Minnesota when Rodriguez was nine, a time when the children were home alone after school much of the time since their parents were working different shifts. Rodriguez was a target for bullies in school due to his small stature & the fact that children viewed him as an outsider. When he was 18, he was in his second go-around in 9th grade when he decided to drop out of school.
At the time of Dru’s abduction, Rodriguez was living in Crookston with his mother & investigators brought him in for questioning on November 26, four days after she vanished. He confirmed that he had been in Grand Forks on the Saturday in question, but said he never met Dru & had nothing to do with her abduction. He said he was not at the mall during the timeframe of her abduction as he had been at the 4:30 showing of Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
However, when investigators checked his story, they learned that this was a lie since the movie hadn’t been showing at any local theaters that day. He claimed to have gone to McDonald’s after the movie, but after reviewing security footage, this also proved to be a lie.
Investigators were chilled when they found footage of Rodriguez at a Grand Forks Target on the Saturday Dru was abducted where he appeared to be out hunting for his next victim. Footage depicted him sitting on a bench near the exit, following a woman as she left the store only one hour before Dru vanished.
After he allowed investigators to search his 2002 Mercury Sable, they located two knives, one in his trunk & one in his glove compartment. The blade of the knife found in his glove compartment was broken. There were also fishing poles in his trunk & since many locals ice fished during the winter months, finding knives in a car was not unusual.
During this time, crime scene experts were examining the knife sheath that was located next to Dru’s car & determined it was part of a set that came with a folding knife that was sold at Menards. Lo & behold, the sheath belonged to the knife that investigators found in Rodriguez’s trunk. Regardless, the man remained adamant that he had nothing to do with Dru’s disappearance.
When his car was further inspected, investigators located blood specks on the rear window as well as the back seat which, when tested, proved to belong to Dru. Investigators felt this suggested that the young woman had likely been struck in the face.
With this evidence, 50-year-old Alfonso Rodriguez Jr was arrested on December 1, 2003, nine days after Dru went missing, & charged with kidnapping.
Meanwhile, days turned to weeks which turned to months & there was still no sign of Dru despite ongoing searches by police as well as family, friends & volunteers.
It wasn’t until April 17, 2004, five months after Dru vanished, when the frozen Minnesota landscape began to thaw, right around the time she should have been getting ready for her much anticipated trip to Australia, when her family received the devastating phone call that her body had been found.
Dru’s remains were found in a ravine under freshly melted snow just outside of Crookston. Her hands were bound behind her back with 4mm nylon rope & she was lying face down, naked from the waist down. Remnants of plastic were found tangled in a rope that was around her neck which suggested that a plastic bag had been placed around her head at some point. It’s possible that the plastic bag had been used to suffocate her though medical examiner, Dr. McGee could not say for certain. The rope had been wrapped around twice yet there was no sign of manual strangulation
Dru had been beaten, raped & her throat had been slashed. The bruises found on her body proved that she had struggled & tried in vain to fight off her attacker. Her most likely cause of death was asphyxiation or suffocation, blood loss from a slash wound to her neck or exposure to the elements. DNA as well as hair & fiber samples from Dru’s body matched both Rodriguez & his possessions.
Dr. Michael McGee, the medical examiner who’d conducted Dru’s autopsy, indicated that one of the slash wounds to her neck was five & a half inches long while the second was three & a half inches. The longer of the wounds had pierced her internal neck organs using a start & stop method. Dr. McGee believes that these cuts were inflicted at the location where Dru’s remains were ultimately located rather than in Rodriguez’s car as there would have been more blood found in both his car as well as on her clothing. Since she was found face down, it’s likely her blood pooled on the ground below her after her neck was slashed.
Based on the evidence available, she may have died within a matter of minutes or her death could have been prolonged had her cause of death been related to exposure to the frigid temperatures. Had this been the case, death may have taken a number of hours. However, Dr. McGee indicated that this was the least likely scenario.
The bright pink sweater she’d worn to work on the day of her abduction had been torn down the front & pushed over her shoulders. Her pea coat had also been pushed over her shoulders which suggested that she died from homicidal violence during the course of sexual assault. Lab results of a specific enzyme that was found, typically found in the male prostate, indicated that Dru had sexual contact within 24-36 hours of death which made Dr. McGee believe she had been sexually assaulted.
As grief stricken as they were, the Sjodin family were also relieved that they had answers & that her body was able to be found. That very area had been previously searched, but because of the snow that blanketed the ground, her remains hadn’t been found at the time.
Rodriguez was charged federally with kidnapping & killing Dru Sjoden on May 11, 2004 for a trial that would be held in North Dakota. Jury selection began on July 7, 2006 & the trial spanned 21 days.
On August 30, 2006, nearly three years after Dru’s murder, Rodriguez was found guilty in Federal Court of kidnapping resulting in death. One month later, the jury unanimously recommended that he be sentenced to death, the first death sentence to be handed down in North Dakota or Minnesota since 1914. Alfonso Rodriguez offered to plead guilty in order to avoid the death penalty, but that offer was rejected.
In 2013, Rodriguez finally admitted what everyone already knew, that he was responsible for Dru’s murder. He said that he watched her sitting in the driver’s seat of her car, talking on her phone & he swung her passenger door open & held a knife to her throat. This was the moment that Chris heard his girlfriend say, okay, okay before the call suddenly ended.
For fifteen years, Rodriguez sat on death row until a judge overturned his death sentence in September 2021 after a federal judge ruled that the man’s constitutional rights had been violated during his trial. Judge Ralph Erickson, who had been the judge to sentence Rodriguez to death, felt that the medical examiner’s testimony had been misleading, unreliable & inaccurate in terms of Dru’s cause of death. He said that the opinions he gave during the trial were not written in his autopsy report. He also cited failure by Rodriguez’s defense team to pursue the insanity defense. Rodriguez claimed he killed Dru as a result of PTSD after he mistook her for a girl who molested him when he was a child. He claimed to have blacked out which left him with no memory of the actual crime.
In March 2023, federal prosecutors announced that they would not pursue the death penalty as federal executions were put on hold by the Department of Justice. With this, Rodriguez’s sentencing was transitioned to life in prison without parole & he was moved from a death row prison in Indiana to Coleman II, a high-security penitentiary in Sumterville, Florida.
Dru Sjodin never had the opportunity to graduate from college, take her much anticipated trip to Australia, marry the love of her life or become a mother. She had only the opportunity to live 22 short years & her death was an immense loss to her friends, her family & to society.
In July 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection & Safety Act which includes Dru’s Law. Among other things, Dru’s Law changed the name of the National Sex Offender Public Registry to the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website which allows states to share their data.
Six months after Rodrigez was released from custody, he murdered Dru. Prior to his release, both he & his own family members voiced concerns about his upcoming release & the inevitable lack of supervision & guidance that would result when he was set free. He was an untreated level 3 sex offender with a history of violent attacks against women who expressed his fears & anxiety about living in society, but regardless, he was released.
Dru’s father, Allen Sjodin, still listens to the final voicemail his daughter left on his phone. He remembers all the good she brought into people’s lives, what a huge heart & fantastic smile she had & how she was gone from this world far too soon.
References:
- Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website: Dru Katrina Sjodin 1981-2003
- ABC News: Missing from the mall: How investigators nabbed a serial rapist in the death of a college student
- CBS News: Alfonso Rodriguez, convicted of killing Dru Sjodin, moved from death row to Florida prison
- United States vs. Alfonso Rodriguez Jr.
- Chilling Crimes: Dru Sjodin
- Medium: Alone in the dark: The murder of Dru Sjodin
- IMDB: 20/20 – Missing from the Mall: S47.E14
