Murder of Dru Sjodin

On the evening of November 22, 2003, Dru Katrina Sjodin, a 22-year-old student at the University of North Dakota and member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority, finished a shift at a Victoria's Secret store in the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota. After making a purchase at another store, she walked to her car in the mall parking lot while speaking to her boyfriend by cell phone. The call ended abruptly, and a second, garbled call came through roughly three hours later. When Sjodin failed to show up for her other job, concern grew for her safety.

A week later, on December 1, 2003, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., then 50, was arrested in connection with her disappearance. Rodriguez had recently been released from prison after serving 23 years for rape, aggravated assault, and kidnapping, and was classified as a Level 3 sex offender considered highly likely to reoffend. Investigators found inconsistencies in his account of his whereabouts, along with knives purchased at a nearby store, one of which was found submerged in cleaning solution in his car, and another with blood matching Sjodin's DNA. A woman's shoe was also recovered from the vehicle.

Sjodin's body was found on April 17, 2004, in a ravine near Crookston, Minnesota — the town where Rodriguez lived with his mother — after snow drifts melted. Her hands were bound, and she had been beaten, stabbed, and sexually assaulted, with a severe neck laceration and a rope tied around her neck; remnants of a shopping bag suggested it had been placed over her head. The medical examiner determined she died from the neck wound, suffocation, or exposure.

Because Sjodin had been transported across state lines, the case was prosecuted federally under the Federal Kidnapping Act, making Rodriguez eligible for the death penalty despite neither North Dakota nor Minnesota having capital punishment. On August 30, 2006, a federal jury convicted Rodriguez of kidnapping resulting in death. He was formally sentenced to death on February 8, 2007, by U.S. District Judge Ralph R. Erickson.

In 2021, Judge Erickson, by then serving on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, overturned Rodriguez's death sentence, citing misleading and inaccurate testimony from the medical examiner and limitations placed on mental health evidence during trial. In March 2023, prosecutors announced they would no longer pursue the death penalty, and on May 18, 2023, Rodriguez was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Sjodin's case drew national attention and led to the creation of the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Registry, established by legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006. A scholarship in her name was established at the University of North Dakota, and memorial gardens were created in her hometown of Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, with another planned for the UND campus.