Solved cold cases in Minnesota
6 documented cases.
Heidi Firkus
Heidi Firkus, 25, was shot in the back in the entryway of her St. Paul, Minnesota home at about 6:30 a.m. on April 25, 2010. Her husband, Nicholas Firkus, 27, told police an intruder had burst in and that the shotgun went off twice during a struggle, hitting her and, in the thigh, him. Police found no forced entry and nothing packed, though Nick said the couple was to be evicted the next day. A sketch of the intruder produced no usable leads, and the case went cold. In 2019 Sgt. Nichole Sipes took over, reviewed the file with FBI help, and found that the couple had lost their house to foreclosure, that Heidi apparently did not know, and, prosecutors said, that the 911 recordings and an FBI 3-D model of the entryway did not fit Nick's story. He was arrested on May 19, 2021 and indicted for first- and second-degree murder. A Ramsey County jury convicted him on February 10, 2023, after four hours, and on April 13, 2023 he was sentenced to life without parole. He maintains his innocence. In February 2026 the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the conviction.
Jacob Erwin Wetterling
Jacob Wetterling, 11, was abducted at gunpoint near St. Joseph, Minnesota on the night of October 22, 1989, while biking home from a convenience store with his brother and a friend. The case haunted Minnesota for 27 years until 2016, when Danny Heinrich, who had been linked by DNA to a 1989 assault on another boy, admitted in federal court that he had abducted, assaulted and killed Jacob, and led authorities to the remains near Paynesville.
James Sackett
Just after midnight on May 22, 1970, a woman telephoned St. Paul police to say her sister was in labor at 859 Hague Avenue, in the Selby-Dale neighbourhood. Patrolman James Sackett, 27, eighteen months on the force and the father of four, the youngest three weeks old, arrived with his partner four minutes later. While he knocked at the front door and his partner went around the back, a single rifle shot came from the dark across the street. Sackett was hit in the chest and died at the hospital. No gun and no casing were ever found. The call was traced to a phone booth a block away and, by voice print, to the 18-year-old girlfriend of a local activist named Ronald Reed. She was tried for murder in 1972, acquitted, and jailed for contempt when she refused to say who had told her to make the call. Reed and his friend Larry Clark were questioned and let go. In 1994 the caller admitted on television that she had made the call and that Reed had been with her at the booth; police reopened the file, and in June 2004 she told detectives that Reed had asked her to make it. Other witnesses then broke their silence: a man Reed had tried to recruit to "bring down the first pig", a man who had carried a bolt-action rifle for Reed and Clark, and a federal inmate who said Reed had confessed in the 1980s. A grand jury indicted both men in January 2005. A jury convicted Reed of first-degree murder and conspiracy on March 1, 2006, and he was sentenced to life. Clark was convicted that May, won a new trial in 2008, and in 2009 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder.
Jeanne Ann "Jeanie" Childs
Jeanne Ann "Jeanie" Childs, a 35-year-old woman, was found stabbed roughly 65 times in her south Minneapolis apartment on June 13, 1993. The case went cold for more than two decades until investigative genetic genealogy traced unknown crime-scene DNA to Jerry Arnold Westrom, who was arrested in 2019 and convicted of first-degree murder in 2022.
Marlys Wohlenhaus
Marlys Wohlenhaus, 18, who worked at the restaurant in Afton, Minnesota, was found by her mother at about 3:30 p.m. on May 8, 1979 in a downstairs room of the family home, beaten about the head; a neighbor had seen a car fishtail out of the driveway fifteen minutes earlier. She died in hospital without regaining consciousness. The night before, a friend said, a man had unsettled her at the restaurant and followed the two women on a motorcycle. The Washington County sheriff looked at several suspects and charged no one. One man checked and cleared was Joseph Ture Jr., a drifter believed to have been at work at the Ford plant in St. Paul that afternoon. In 1981, while jailed for the murder of waitress Diane Edwards, Ture told a county attorney's office employee that he had killed Marlys with a hatchet after she refused him, and had a fellow inmate write out a confession that he signed. Nothing happened until BCA cold case agent Everett Doolittle reopened the file in the early 1990s and found that the Ford alibi belonged to Ture's father, who had the same name. A 1996 broadcast of 48 Hours brought forward dozens of women who said Ture had attacked them, and the 1981 witness called Doolittle. Ture was indicted in 1996 and, after a 1998 trial in which five more former inmates described his admissions, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, consecutive to his existing term. In 2000 he was convicted of the 1978 Huling family murders. The Minnesota Supreme Court affirmed the Wohlenhaus conviction in 2004. He maintains his innocence.
Michelle Busha
Michelle Yvette Busha, an 18-year-old from Bay City, Texas, was hitchhiking along Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota on May 26, 1980, when she was picked up, sexually assaulted, and strangled; her body was found four days later in a drainage ditch near Blue Earth in Faribault County. For years she was an unidentified Jane Doe and the killing went unsolved. The case broke not through forensics but through a confession: in 1988, Robert Leroy Nelson, an on-duty Minnesota State Patrol trooper at the time of the murder who was by then imprisoned in Texas, admitted to the killing. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in 1989. The victim herself was not positively identified until 2015, when DNA from her exhumed remains matched a family sample, prompting the local sheriff to call it not a question of who done it, but who she was.