Henry McCabe

Case background and investigation

Henry T. McCabe was a 32-year-old auditor for the Minnesota Department of Revenue whose death after a night out over Labor Day weekend in 2015 has never been explained. A Liberian-American who lived in the Minneapolis suburb of Mounds View, McCabe was married with children and was remembered by colleagues as diligent and generous; his mother lived in Monrovia, Liberia. On the night of September 6–7, 2015, McCabe went out to a bar, Povlitzki's on 65, with an acquaintance. He never made it home, and what happened in the following hours has become one of Minnesota's most unsettling and widely discussed unsolved cases, kept alive online by the eerie recordings from that night.

In the early morning of September 7, McCabe was said to have been dropped off by a man he had been with, William "Papaus" Kennedy, near a gas station in Fridley. The account Kennedy first gave police — that he left McCabe at a Super America station on 73rd Avenue — was later contradicted by electronic evidence pointing to a different (Holiday) gas station. At roughly 2:23 a.m., McCabe's wife, Kareen, received a phone call from his number in which she heard him screaming in apparent distress; family members described sounds of moaning and struggle, and a portion of a call was captured on a relative's voicemail, ending with a voice that seemed to say "stop it."

McCabe did not return home or report to work, and his family, friends and volunteers organized extensive searches around Fridley, Mounds View and New Brighton over the following weeks. On November 2, 2015, a kayaker discovered his body in Rush Lake in New Brighton — several miles from where he had reportedly been dropped off and in the opposite direction from his home. The Ramsey County Medical Examiner's Office concluded that McCabe had likely died of drowning in fresh water but ruled the manner of death undetermined, unable to establish whether it was a homicide, an accident or something else.

The combination of the terrifying phone calls, the conflicting accounts of where McCabe was last seen, and the location of his body left investigators and relatives with far more questions than answers. His family has long argued that the evidence — especially his apparent cries that he had been attacked — points to foul play, and they have accused people close to him of giving inconsistent statements and obstructing the inquiry. No conclusive finding of how he died was ever made public, and no one has been charged. Local police described the matter as an open investigation but later effectively suspended active work for lack of definitive evidence. More than a decade later, Henry McCabe's death remains unresolved, sustained in public memory by the haunting recordings from his final hours.