Dru Sjodin’s 2003 Murder Led to the First National Sex Offender Registry

North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley still can’t explain what happened.

Back on August 30, 2006, Wrigley served as the federal prosecutor who’d successfully tried Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., for violently abducting, raping and ultimately murdering University of North Dakota photojournalism student Dru Katrina Sjodin on November 22, 2003. Months later, on September 22, 2006, the same jury that convicted Rodriguez determined the high-risk sex offender—then 50—should die for his brutal crimes.

However, much to Wrigley’s chagrin, Rodriguez is not currently occupying a cell on death row. Instead, Rodriguez, now 73, remains behind bars in a Florida prison, where he will be spending the rest of his life.

In 2021, Rodriguez’s death sentence was overturned, thanks to an appeal that argued he received ineffective assistance of counsel during the penalty phase of the trial and for failing to investigate and present mental health mitigating evidence. Rodriguez’s appeal also challenged the veracity of the testimony offered on his behalf by the medical examiner.

Federal prosecutors filed notice in 2022 that they would appeal the decision to overturn Rodriguez’s death penalty, but they ultimately withdrew the appeal and Rodriguez was resentenced to life without parole in May 2023.

Wrigley told A&E Crime + Investigation Rodriguez’s defense attorneys were “exceptional” and “very effective,” calling them among the best he’s squared off against. Wrigley said he’s “supremely confident we would have prevailed” in court, had the federal government moved to appeal the judge’s 2021 decision to sentence Sjodin’s murderer to life imprisonment.

“I believe the death verdict would have been reinstated,” Wrigley explained, blaming “politics” for the 2023 decision not to appeal. President Joe Biden openly opposed capital punishment before and during his term in the Oval Office.

“I think a real injustice was done, because the jury got it right,” Wrigley said. “They were the ones who saw all of the evidence in this case. Not appealing because you want to be absolved from the responsibility of carrying out a death sentence, that took away the will of the people of North Dakota.”

Sjodin, who hailed from Pequot Lakes, Minn., was known for her artistic abilities and achievements on both the volleyball and basketball courts. The 22-year-old had just finished working her shift at the Victoria’s Secret inside Columbia Mall in Grand Forks and was making her way through the parking lot, on the phone with her boyfriend, when Rodriguez kidnapped her. Forensic experts for both the state and the defense concluded Sjodin’s throat had been slashed, and likely caused her death, though she may have suffocated from having a plastic bag placed over her head or died from exposure to the elements.

Rodriguez was taken into custody on December 1, 2003, a week after Sjodin vanished. After getting a tip from someone who claimed they saw a known sex offender shopping in Grand Forks on the day of Sjodin’s disappearance, local investigators used the sex registries from North Dakota and its neighboring states to identify all of the area’s Level 3 sex offenders—those who’ve been deemed “highly likely” to reoffend. They eventually came across Rodriguez, who had a number of prior convictions for sexual assault.

On May 1, 2003, more than six months before Sjodin was forced into his car and killed, Rodriguez was released from a Minnesota prison, where he’d just finished serving a 23-year prison sentence for aggravated assault and attempting to kidnap a woman.

“He told detectives a string of lies, but ultimately, we found the evidence we needed in his car and his home in Crookston,” Wrigley says.

Inside Rodriguez’s maroon 2002 Mercury Sable, detectives located blood spatter and later used DNA from the Gamma Phi Beta sorority sister’s toothbrush to determine the blood had come from Sjodin. They also found traces of her blood on a knife found in his trunk, according to court documents. Investigators also located rubber gloves, a fishing rod and bleach. On Sjodin’s clothing were red acrylic fibers from a blanket cops seized from Rodriguez’s residence—fibers matching ones recovered from the killer’s car’s trunk.

Then, following an extensive five-month search that involved hundreds of volunteers and multiple law enforcement agencies, Sjodin’s body was finally discovered on April 17, 2004, in a ravine near Crookston, Minn.—once that season’s snowfall had started melting.

According to Eric Beauregard, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Criminology, perpetrators of sexual murders usually don’t have prior convictions for sex-based crimes. “It is rare to see a sexual assault graduate to homicide,” Beauregard explains to A&E Crime + Investigation. He notes recent studies indicate between 1 and 4% of all homicides worldwide are sexually motivated.

Sjodin’s murder inspired her parents, Linda Walker and Allan Sjodin, to campaign for fresh legislation which led to the creation of the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Registry in 2006, established under the Adam Walsh Act. The law called for the creation of a national, searchable public safety resource citizens could utilize to find the most up-to-date sex offender data.

Prior to 2006, states were maintaining their own sex offender registries, which made it complicated to search nationally, according to Elizabeth Jeglic, a psychology professor at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“What we know is, when sex crimes happen, there is research suggesting only 5% of them are perpetrated by people who would’ve been on the sex offender registry,” Jeglic tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “So, 95% are unknown to the system.”

Jeglic cites a 2021 Journal of Experimental Criminology study, as well as a 2018 article from Criminal Justice and Behavior, and noting both contend the national sexual offender registry has been ineffective at reducing offender recidivism.

“People believe it keeps us safer, but there isn’t a lot of research to support that,” she continues. “In fact, some argue it increases recidivism, as it can destabilize individuals as they’re trying to reintegrate, because now, all their information is out there and publicly available.

“As a mother and a citizen, I understand why people want to have this information. But it is unclear to what extent [the sex offender registry] actually helps to prevent sexual violence. Anything which brings attention to this issue, which is under-discussed, is important, and the more we’re aware of how sexual abuse happens, the more we can prevent it.”