another older article
Murder case is mired in dilemma; With no body, North Dakota prosecutors face a challenge in proving the charge against a Fargo man accused in Jeanna North's disappearance.(NEWS)
Article from:Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) Article date:September 20, 1998 Author: Meryhew, Richard More results for: Jeanna North
Jeanna North's parents say they're pretty sure they know what happened that summer night five years ago when their 11-year-old daughter went roller-blading and never came home.
Investigators who searched neighborhoods, fields and rivers around Fargo, N.D., looking for the girl seem confident that they know what happened, too.
And last week, after five years of gathering evidence, a prosecutor became convinced enough that he knows what transpired the night of June 28, 1993, that he finally filed murder charges.
But all the evidence and accusations stacked against Kyle Bell, a 30-year-old repeat sex offender who lived across the street from the North family, may not be good enough.
Convicting Bell will be difficult, because Jeanna's body still hasn't been found.
Without a body, prosecutors must work without valuable forensic evidence and potential clues. Without a body, they work without knowing with certainty the cause of death or, in the minds of some, whether a death even occurred.
"The problem is, you have to prove the death beyond a reasonable doubt," said John Goff, state's attorney for Cass County, N.D. "Without the body, that becomes a significant task. Obviously, we think we're in a position where we think we're able to do that and move ahead.
"But it still is a significantly difficult thing to do."
Several cases in Minnesota are proof.
In 1992, Robert Guevara was charged with murder, kidnapping and rape in the disappearance of Corrine Erstad, a 5-year-old girl from Inver Grove Heights who was reported missing that June.
Despite forensic evidence that included a bloody dress with Guevara's and Erstad's hair found in Guevara's storage locker, and a shower curtain stained with semen and blood, Guevara, who denied involvement, was acquitted.
Two jurors said after the trial that the missing body was a key reason for the acquittal. Without a body, the jurors said, the prosecution lacked evidence proving that Erstad was dead and, therefore, that Guevara could have killed her.
In 1988, Cass and Crow Wing county authorities tried Jerome Bye, a Pequot Lakes real-estate agent accused in the death of Charlotte Lysdale, 68, who disappeared from her Pine River home in June 1985.
Bye was accused of murdering Lysdale, stealing the deed to her property on Lower Hay Lake and hiding her body, which was never found. Bye was the last person to be seen with Lysdale, who was last spotted going to a meeting with Bye at his office.
Although a grand jury found enough probable cause to charge him and prosecutors thought they had enough to convict him, a jury acquitted him of murder.
Cass County, Minn., Attorney Earl Maus said last week that he and other attorneys working the case had to "cover all the grounds to get rid of the inference that [Lysdale] may be alive. . . . It's an element of proof. To some, that may be the ultimate one. . . . And in the average homicide case, you don't have that to contend with at all."
Provides clues
Garry Peterson, the Hennepin County medical examiner, said finding the body is the most important element of any murder case, because "it establishes that that individual really is deceased. That sounds so elementary, but you do have occasions where someone disguises a homicide or a suicide and shows up years later.
"Even with a small child . . . they can be kidnapped, taken and put into another family."
Without a body, prosecutors also work without forensic evidence that, in some cases, can break an investigation open, said James Backstrom, the Dakota County attorney and the prosecutor in Guevara's trial.
Even if a body isn't found until years later, or is badly decomposed when found, it "may still have some indications of what the cause of death was," Peterson said. There also may be artificial things there, too - a piece of twine, a piece of tape - that provide a clue, he said.
The outcomes of the Guevara and Bye trials - believed to be the only murder cases brought to trial in Minnesota without a body - have made other investigators and prosecutors leery of charging suspects in similar situations.
Goodhue County Chief Deputy Dean Albers said authorities investigating the June 1995 disappearance of Jessica Swanson, who was 3 when she was reported missing from her home in Cannon Falls, Minn., are almost certain she was murdered, but her body has never been found.
Albers said authorities have cleared nearly every possible suspect in the case, with the exception of Swanson's mother and boyfriend, who were the last adults to see Swanson alive and who have given investigators inconsistent accounts of what happened the day Jessica disappeared.
But without more evidence, or a body, linking someone to the crime, making an arrest - let alone prosecuting someone - is difficult.
It's the same for authorities investigating the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling, of St. Joseph, Minn., and the 1995 disappearance of Mason City, Iowa, TV anchorwoman Jodi Huisentruit. Neither Wetterling nor Huisentruit has been found.
"Without a body, there is an inability to determine the cause of death, which is crucial when you're trying to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt," Backstrom said. "And when you're trying to prove premeditation and intent to kill, that can be very difficult."
The evidence
Goff, the prosecutor in the Jeanna North case, is reluctant to discuss the additional evidence obtained by authorities in recent months that prompted him to finally file charges against Bell.
But family members and investigators say there is strong evidence pointing to Bell's involvement. Among the factors working against him:
- Bell was in the neighborhood at the time North disappeared. "He was the last one to see her alive; he told the media that," said Sue Hurst, Jeanna's mother.
Jeanna's aunt, Connie Holbrook, said one of Jeanna's friends last saw her on a street corner not far from Bell's house, which is just across and down the street from the North home.
Holbrook said she long has suspected that Jeanna, who would have known Bell as a neighbor, probably stopped to talk with him on her way home.
- Bell is a repeat sex offender. He served prison time in the late 1980s in South Dakota for a sex offense and moved to Colorado soon after Jeanna disappeared. Almost two years after Jeanna disappeared, he was convicted in Cass County, N.D., for molesting two Fargo girls inside his home in 1993 and 1994. He is now serving a 30-year sentence in an Upper Midwest prison.
- Authorities say Bell confessed to the crime. The former slaughterhouse and construction worker denied involvement in the North case until January 1995, when he was sentenced for molesting the two girls, ages 8 and 3. Eight hours later - and after Hurst confronted him in the courtroom during his sentencing - Bell told authorities that he had tied Jeanna's body to a cement block and dumped it in the Sheyenne River after she died in his home. He said that the death was an accident, and that North hit her head on the wall.
Bell later recanted, saying the admission was forced. But authorities believe the detail of the confession is strong.
"He even took us out to the spot, and said, `This is where it was,' " said Lt. Rick Majerus, an investigator on the case for the Cass County Sheriff's Department. "Everything led toward him. The only thing he wouldn't go into was the exact way of the killing."
Bell made a case to a federal judge and tried to have the confession suppressed, but the action was dismissed, meaning the confession might be admissible at his trial.
- Authorities found a cement block and rope in the river where Bell told authorities he disposed of the body. Authorities searched the Sheyenne nearly a dozen times. They dammed it up twice, walked the river bottom and called hydrologists and engineers to study every curve and current. In one of the final searches, they found a block similar to the type of blocks Bell had at his house.
Majerus, however, said that there was no evidence that a body had been attached to it.
Despite all that, state's attorney Goff and others know winning the case will be difficult.
"Basically, it's going to be up to our American justice system," said John North, Jeanna's father. "Hopefully, it'll turn out in our favor."
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