12 October 2024
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn — Out of the 379 murders that Tony Bouza oversaw while chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, one cold case troubled him until his death in 2023, and haunts the department there to the present day.
On his website, Bouza described Cindy Gerdes as a “beautiful young woman … cruelly slain by what was very likely a sex fiend.” Despite a long list of suspects, after 40 years, the Gerdes’ murder has never been solved.
“The spirit of Cindy Gerdes hovers over the Minneapolis Police Department demanding justice,” Bouza wrote on his website, Southside Pride, in 2021, two years before his death.
Calling himself a “police misfit,” Bouza was once the police chief of the Bronx. He was “colorful and controversial” for his aggressive tactics fighting crime, and he saw the Gerdes murder case as a terrible indictment against society’s indifference.
“Unfortunately, Cindy Gerdes had no champions — press or family — clamoring for results. These interventions can matter,” wrote Bouza, Minneapolis chief from 1980 to 1989. “My guess is that her killer has been collaterally arrested many times in the intervening decades — yet there is no evidence of any police interest. This is a tragedy and an outrage.”
Gerdes’ murder didn’t make the front pages of The Forum in March of 1984. The story of battered wife, Lusile Tisland, acquitted of murder for the death of her Baptist minister husband, Robert Tisland, in Brainerd, Minnesota, took precedence. In-depth coverage of the crime appears to have ended in Minneapolis newspapers in 1991.
At a time when DNA evidence was coming into vogue, Bouza pushed for its collection, and with the results eliminated and found, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Minneapolis detectives, Sgt. Jack Kulseth and Sgt. Bernie Bottema, uncovered suspects but never enough proof to convict.
“No eyewitnesses, no evidence other than a little blood that might possibly be the suspect’s, no fingerprints. No weapon. Not much of anything. I don’t know if it’ll ever get solved even though we think we know who killed Cindy,” Kulseth told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1984.
“We are preparing ourselves for failure. We don’t have enough evidence, we don’t have much of anything and the only thing we can hope for, I think, is a confession from the man,” Bouza said in 1984.
FBI agents and Minneapolis police combed the crime scene thoroughly, using all the available tools of their trade in attempts to find any evidence, including: an autopsy; taking samples of blood, saliva, hair, carpet, fingerprints and clothing; vacuuming dust; blood splatters in a hallway leading to rear entrance; spraying the walls with ninhydrin, and interviewing dozens of tenants and people.
For the first time since Gerdes’ murder in 1984, case information and the names of the suspects, including one man who fit a psychiatric profile outlined by special agent Brent Frost, of the FBI’s Fargo, North Dakota office, will be revealed after Forum News Service obtained the police case file from the Minneapolis police.
Who was Cindy Gerdes?
Cynthia “Cindy” Anne Gerdes was slim, about 120 pounds, had curly brown hair and was 28 years old when she was viciously murdered around March 8, 1984, in the bedroom of her Northlynn Apartments, 3030 Irving Avenue South in Minneapolis.
She lay on the carpeted floor for nearly two days before her roommate, Sheri Systrom, found her near-naked body. The roommates rarely spoke; Gerdes was a quiet, wary woman who never let strangers into the apartment. At times, she worked from home, and Systrom usually didn’t disturb her.
After finding her roommate, Systrom called the police, who arrived on Saturday, March 10, to discover “a presentation to shock anyone who walked in,” Kulseth said in 1984. Gerdes had been stabbed repeatedly around her neck, chest, back and had a long open wound leading to her sternum, from what appeared to be from a missing French chef’s stainless steel knife out of the kitchen’s butcher’s block.
Gerdes, with makeup on her face, had just taken curlers out of her hair. There were defensive cuts on her hands and palms, as if she tried to knock aside the attacker’s knife. She suffered a wound to her lower back, which indicated that she fled the attacker or was stabbed from behind.
She still had a footie sock on her right foot. Her blue sweatshirt, checkered blouse and bra were soaked in blood. She had two metal chains around her neck with charms of an eclipse and the man in the moon. On her right hand she still wore her Class of 1974 Shanley High School ring; a yellow metal love knot ring was on her left hand.
Some of her nearby clothing had been used by her attacker to wipe blood away, and ultraviolet light discoveries led to a theory she had been raped, though the theory was later disproven.
Investigators believed Gerdes was killed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Thursday, March 8, when the apartment caretaker knocked on the door to deliver a package, and received no response.
Gerdes was from Moorhead, Minnesota, a devout Catholic family with eight siblings. She graduated from Shanley High School, a private school in Fargo, North Dakota, and worked as an editor with the school’s yearbook “Reminscor” as well as helping design sets for school plays.
Lloyd Gerdes, the father, was a pipe fitter at the coal gas plant under construction in Beulah, North Dakota. Gerdes’ mother, Jane, was a secretary, and they lived in north Moorhead, according to records found within The Forum archives.
The Gerdes children grew up with daily family devotions, and each child received a blessing, a hug and a kiss from father and a glass of milk from mother before going to bed each evening, according to The Forum’s archives.
In 1979, she graduated from North Dakota State University with a degree in design and a minor in architecture. She met her boyfriend, Kenneth Steven Hammer, while working as a cashier at a local grocery store. Hammer, a few years younger, was a bag boy.
Gerdes dated Hammer — who was a member of the Jesus People Church — for nearly seven years. Although she was Catholic, their religious differences were minor, and they both agreed in the sanctity of marriage, so they refrained from having sexual relations, according to the Minneapolis police case file obtained by Forum News Service.
They planned on getting married in the fall of 1984.
Profile of a disorganized killer
Gerdes’ murder was classified as a “lust murder,” which depicted the killer as disorganized, and that he did not initially intend on killing her. He took a weapon of opportunity — the missing knife from the butcher’s block — and “commenced with a frenzy attack of the victim,” the FBI profile found within Minneapolis police case file reported.
“Something happened between the victim and suspect in the apartment that set the suspect off, possibly he was belittled by Gerdes,” the FBI predicted, adding that Gerdes and her attacker knew each other as there was no sign of forced entry and she rarely let anyone into her apartment.
The killer was determined by Frost to be a single white male, 25 to 35 years old, sexually and socially inadequate, who lived close to Gerdes and knew her schedule and habits.
“This was probably his first murder and may not kill again as he [has] satisfied some inner needs and feelings. He is fearful of women and has many doubts about himself. He is what is commonly referred to as a WHIMP,” the FBI profile stated.
The suspect was further described as having a latent homosexual drive, with a minimal criminal record including, perhaps, a juvenile record of voyeurism or fire setting.
With a weak or absent father and a domineering mother, the suspect was intelligent, but an underachiever, and was also quiet, not athletic, kept a low profile, but was not irrational.
After the murder, the suspect may have moved locations, lost weight, taken extended time off work, become more religious, either increased or stopped drinking, attended the funeral or memorial services, proved cooperative with police, but would not confess to the murder and may talk about dreaming a person was killed.
Weeks into the investigation and suspects began to become clear, some more than others, and police followed at least seven leads including a family member, the boyfriend, the roommate, a strange man who showed up at the memorial service, and a downstairs neighbor, who was dreaming of killing Gerdes and “oceans of blood and the streets running full of blood.”
NOTE: This is the first story of the two-part investigation into the 1984 unsolved murder of a Cindy Gerdes. Numerous attempts were made to contact family, former suspects and people who may have known Gerdes, but no calls or emails were returned.
]]>