How DNA technology broke open the cold case in Minneapolis woman’s 1993 murder

By Jennifer Mayerle

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    MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (WCCO) — More than three decades ago, police found Jeanie Childs brutally killed in her south Minneapolis apartment. Betty Eakman learned the victim was her daughter.

“I was doing hospice at the time and the lady decided she wanted a television on, and they said there had been a body taken out of the building that was murdered. And I looked at the building, and I said, ‘Oh, my God,'” Eakman said.

June 13, 1993 is a day that lives in Eakman’s mind.

“I know that my daughter was crying for me. I know she was. That hurts the most,” Eakman said.

Someone stabbed the 35-year-old roughly 65 times.

“What makes you kill someone and afterwards cut their stomach open to the point where your intestines are showing after a person’s dead, you got to be really angry,” Childs’ sister Cindy Blumer said.

Childs led a troubled life, but her family loved her and said she was happy. She started running away at 13 years old and later worked as a sex worker.

“She made some bad decisions in her life, and we all have, but she didn’t deserve to die that way,” Blumer said.

Bart Epstein responded to the scene at the Horn Towers in 1993. At the time he worked as a forensic scientist for the BCA.

“It was a scene that had, you know, a lot of blood distributed, and there was some movement around and pretty brutal,” Epstein said.

Crime scene investigators collected what would become key evidence, including Items to be tested for DNA. The science wasn’t widely used in 1993.

Initial evidence included a bloody footprint

“One of the reasons DNA makes a difference in these long-term unsolved cases is witnesses are sometimes unavailable or have changed, but DNA is a compelling piece of evidence in that it can put somebody at the scene,” FBI Special Agent Chris Boeckers said.

Bloody footprints were also left behind. A bloody footprint would become the footprint to murder.

“That’s significant, because clearly it wasn’t coming from her. She had socks on. And if this is an identifiable footprint, just like fingerprints, you could identify what would appear to be the perpetrator that was there,” Epstein said.

Investigators tracked down leads in the years after the murder, but the case went cold. Eakman always held onto hope her daughter’s killer would be brought to justice.

“And I was not about to sit back. I had to know why and who did it,” Eakman said.

“And I give my mom a lot of credit, because she never gave up,” Blumer said.

Cold case investigators reopened the case in 2015. Another case halfway across the country gave investigators an idea.

“In April of 2018, we heard and read and followed the Golden State Killer case in which investigative genealogy was used. It was really striking when we called out to California. He immediately said, ‘You are going to identify who did this using this technique,'” Boeckers said.

DNA technology, napkin’s role in breaking open case

The team used DNA and forensic investigative genetic genealogy to identify a suspect. It led them to a hockey dad with a checkered past. Investigators followed Jerry Westrom and eventually obtained his DNA by grabbing a napkin he threw away in a garbage can after eating a hot dog at a hockey game in Wisconsin.

“He sat at a table, and he ate it, and when he finished, we could see that he wiped his mouth with the napkin. He reached up and wiped the left side of his mouth. He walked over and he set the napkin in a container, in the garbage can in the lobby, and went back into the arena for the second period of the game,” FBI Special Agent Chris Boeckers said.

The DNA from the napkin matched the DNA left at the crime scene. Police arrested Westrom in February 2019. During an interview, he denied ever being in the Horn Towers. They got known samples from Westrom, which BCA Forensic Scientist Andrea Feia tested.

“The known sample from Jerry Westrom ended up matching the semen that was identified on the comforter and the towel in the bathroom. It was clear that he was part of a mixture that was in on the washcloth. And then there was a DNA profile that matched him on the red shirt and on that blood on the sink. It was the first suspect that we had developed in the state of Minnesota, using forensic investigative genetic genealogy,” Feia said.

Minneapolis Police Supervisor of Forensic Science Mark Ulrick got footprints from Westrom and did the analysis, saying he’s confident Westrom’s footprint matches the bloody footprints left at the crime scene.

“The science of friction ridge skin doesn’t change between fingerprints or footprints or palm prints. It stays the same. It’s friction ridge skin, just in a different place,” Ulrick said.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged Westrom with second-degree murder a few days after his arrest.

“Sometimes speculation about why the person did it, or why here, or why then, is of great interest, but it’s not key to us, because our job is to pull together the facts to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said at the time.

After Westrom’s murder charge, his attorney Steve Meshbesher told WCCO, “They picked the wrong guy.”

WCCO learned the hockey dad had multiple convictions for DWI, along with two arrests for soliciting a prostitute. One was dismissed.

A grand jury would later indict Westrom on first-degree premeditated murder.

The case went to trial in August 2022. A jury convicted him after two hours of deliberations.

“Very disappointed. The jury did not see all the evidence. We had presented all the evidence, but then the judge said no. Whatever happened was brutal. It’s a question of who did it,” Meshbesher said.

Jury foreperson Derek Fradenburgh said everyone came to the same conclusion: Jerry Westrom was guilty.

“What ties him to the scene and why we convicted him is the bloody footprint, in conjunction with his DNA being found at the scene,” Fradenburgh said. “She was a sex worker, there’s plenty of reasons why anyone could have left DNA there. There was obviously, there was DNA from her live-in boyfriend. There would have been her DNA. There’s DNA from other people there. But that bare, bloody footprint that you know is that we had three different people say, this is for sure, Jerry Westrom’s footprint. We know he was there, kind of indisputably. We know he was there at the time when she was murdered.”

“She was still a human being”

“I just hope that he can close his eyes at night and see her face every night. That’s how I feel. I want him to suffer. And I really don’t want her being blamed for what happened, because his choice was the wrong choice,” Eakman said.

Blumer says some people probably think that about Childs.

“They’re like, well, she lived a lifestyle that led to, unfortunately, her fate. But I don’t believe that,” Blumer said.

“She was still a human being. Did not deserve to be slaughtered like an animal. I want people to know that he could have left the apartment, and my daughter would still be here,” Eakman said.

Westrom is eligible for parole after 30 years in 2052. He will be 86 years old.

Westrom appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The court upheld first-degree murder, but vacated the second-degree murder conviction.

U.S. Supreme Court justices declined to hear his case.

Westrom asked the Great North Innocence Project to take his case. In an email, Westrom said he’d sit down with WCCO after his conviction is overturned.

Childs’ family is finding more peace while still feeling the loss.

“When you lose a child, part of your heart leaves with them,” Eakman said.

“You don’t really recover from that,” Blumer said.

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