Dru Sjodin

Case background and investigation

Dru Katrina Sjodin was a 22-year-old University of North Dakota student from Pequot Lakes, Minnesota, working her way through college with several jobs. On November 22, 2003, she finished a shift at a Victoria's Secret store and was abducted from the parking lot of Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in the late afternoon. She was on her cell phone with her boyfriend when the call abruptly ended, and she never returned to her car. Her disappearance triggered a massive, weeks-long search across the Grand Forks region and drew national attention.

Investigators soon focused on Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a Crookston, Minnesota man who had been released from a Minnesota prison on May 1, 2003, roughly six months earlier, after serving 23 years for offenses including rape, aggravated assault, and kidnapping. He had been classified as a Level 3 (high-risk) sex offender. Rodriguez was arrested on December 1, 2003. Physical evidence, including a knife sheath and blood recovered from his car, linked him to Sjodin. Despite an extensive search, her body was not found during the winter. On April 17, 2004, her remains were discovered in a ravine near Crookston, showing evidence of assault and stabbing.

Because the abduction crossed state lines, the case was prosecuted federally under the Federal Kidnapping Act. On August 30, 2006, a federal jury in Fargo convicted Rodriguez of kidnapping resulting in death. In the penalty phase, the jury recommended capital punishment, and on February 8, 2007, U.S. District Judge Ralph R. Erickson formally sentenced Rodriguez to death, marking one of the few federal death sentences imposed in a state that had abolished capital punishment.

The murder spurred federal legislation. On July 27, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, which incorporated a provision known as Dru's Law. It established and named the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW), a U.S. Department of Justice-operated tool that lets the public search for registered sex offenders across state, tribal, and territorial jurisdictions.

In September 2021, Judge Erickson, by then serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, vacated the death sentence in a habeas proceeding. He found that Rodriguez's constitutional rights had been violated by misleading and inaccurate testimony from a medical examiner and by his trial lawyers' failure to adequately present mental-health evidence and the possibility of an insanity defense. Prosecutors initially sought to reinstate the death penalty but ultimately announced on March 14, 2023, that they would no longer pursue it. On May 18, 2023, Rodriguez was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He remains incarcerated in federal custody.