13 October 2024
MINNEAPOLIS — Kenneth Steven Hammer fell in love with Cindy Gerdes while they were living in Moorhead, Minnesota, in the late 1970s.
Gerdes, in her early 20s, was a cashier at a local grocery store, earning her way to a bachelor’s degree in interior design at North Dakota State University. Hammer, a few years younger, was a bagboy, and he later followed her to Minneapolis, finding work at the Satterlee Company, a tool manufacturing company, according to the police case file obtained by an open records request by Forum News Service.
For nearly seven years, they remained a couple, and were making plans to get married in the fall of 1984, according to stories found within Forum archives and the police case file.
And then on March 8, 1984, 28-year-old Gerdes was murdered in her Northlynn Apartments in Minneapolis. Her death destroyed Hammer’s world, while the police described it as “one of the worst recent homicides,” according to news reports at the time.
Hammer became the police department’s natural first suspect. In some ways, detectives believed that Hammer fit the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s profile of the killer, written by special agents Brent Frost and Roy Hazelwood of the bureau’s office in Fargo, North Dakota. The FBI’s profile, among other descriptions, predicted the killer was a young white male, and someone she knew. As the crime was classified as a “lust murder,” the killer did not initially intend to murder her, according to the police case file.
Both Hammer and Gerdes were religious; he, a member of the Jesus People Church, and she, a devout Catholic who graduated in 1974 from Shanley High School, a private Fargo, North Dakota school. They believed in the sanctity of marriage, and refrained from a sexual relationship, according to police files.
The boyfriend’s whereabouts
The day before Gerdes was killed on March 7, Gerdes picked Hammer up in her car, a blue/green 1981 four-door Honda Accord, and went to eat lunch at The Hamburger Joint. The next day, she called him at work to tell him about a job prospect in Houston, Texas, according to police.
Hammer had to end the call early because he was clocked in at work. Customers were waiting. He told her he would call her later, but when he went home he discovered his telephone service had been disconnected. His roommate forgot to pay the bill.
Hammer tried to call from a different phone on Friday morning between 8:30 and 11 a.m., but nobody answered. He drove by the apartment around 10:30 p.m. and saw her car in the parking lot. He tried using the apartment’s security phone; nobody answered. Gerdes’ Honda was cold; freshly-fallen snow had collected on the bumpers and there were no tire tracks.
Later that night, he went to check on Gerdes again. Light seeped through the drawn bamboo shades of her bedroom, so he threw snowballs at her the glass. The shades stayed down. Since her car was still parked, he thought maybe she had gone shopping on foot.
The next day, on Saturday, March 10, Hammer’s home phone was still not working, so he drove back to his girlfriend’s apartment and found police. Her car was gone. Worried, he called again from a nearby store, and an officer picked up, according to the police file.
Police leaned heavily on him, saying that they had never seen anyone show such little emotion during a murder investigation, according to the Tribune.
Hammer responded by saying his religion had a lot to do with his lack of emotion, and he had nobody to get angry at.
But he had trouble sleeping. He grew apprehensive, afraid that police would pin the crime on him or someone he knew, according to an article published by the Minneapolis Tribune.
Eventually, Hammer’s alibi checked out and police eliminated him as a suspect. “They were planning on spending the rest of their lives together,” the police case file reported.
Suspects that led nowhere
Police tracked down every tip and clue, including a social dinner engagement Gerdes, who worked at Office Interiors, had with a client. Although not technically a date, Gerdes told friends and a colleague that an unnamed client made sexual advancements toward her and that “she was greatly disturbed by that.”
Investigators attended Gerdes’ funeral service at St. Frances de Sales Church in Moorhead and trailed one man who acted strangely. One set of blood splatters in the hallway outside of Gerdes’ apartment led to tenant named John Burns, but he was in prison when she was murdered. They followed up on an anonymous telephone call from a woman who said she had a brother “who was capable of killing his sister.” Investigators also looked into Gerdes’ roommate.
All leads and tips led nowhere.
A second set of blood splatters, however, and two tips led police to look into a single white man living one floor below Gerdes.
‘Oceans of blood’
The neighbor, which Forum News Service isn’t naming because he was never charged, became a suspect in April 1984 when his former girlfriend told police that she suspected him of being the killer.
“She believes (the neighbor) killed Cindy Gerdes. She told us that since the killing, he had been in a deep depression,” the police case file stated.
More than being depressed, the neighbor was telling people that he was dreaming about watching Gerdes die “and he could not stop thinking about it,” the police file reports. The girlfriend “further stated that (the neighbor) was very upset about women who wore makeup.”
Investigators tracked down the man’s therapist, who confirmed that the man was having dreams about killing Gerdes and had a prescription for a mental illness.
“He had been having very violent dreams wherein he dreamt about oceans of blood and the streets running full of blood,” the therapist told police.
At night, Gerdes’ neighbor paced his room. He walked the streets at night to watch women standing at bus stops. They reminded him of Gerdes, the therapist said. At times during therapy, he wept uncontrollably, and said “I know you think I killed her.”
Once, the man told his therapist: “It didn’t hit me until then — what I had done (hesitation) I mean, what I had seen and about how I had acted,” which to the therapist felt like a confession.
“We have a suspect that fits this (FBI) profile in almost every category,” the police case file reported.
When the man was brought in for questioning, he cooperated, just like the FBI’s profile said he would. He agreed to give samples of hair, blood and fingerprints.
Emotional, at times breaking down to weep, he told investigators that he had gone to see a hypnotist on the day of the murder and then visited a bookstore, but felt poorly and went back to his apartment.
During the interview, Gerdes’ neighbor said he had homosexual relationships, that his father had spent time in a federal prison for tax evasion and his family considered him a failure. He had also told his therapist that he was sexually dysfunctional, according to the police case file.
More and more, the neighbor fit the profile, and investigators thought the case was solved when a friend volunteered information.
Gerdes’ neighbor had acted strangely since the murder, and the friend wrote a poem based on a conversation with him. “This poem talked about killing of an image and several mentions of blood. The innuendo expressed a theme of murder and violence.”
From April 11 until June 5, 1984, investigators waited on lab results, which determined blood 20 feet from Cindy’s apartment door belonged to the neighbor. Police brought him in for questioning again, but this time he was more confident.
“We asked him if he killed Cindy Gerdes and he said that he did not,” the police case file stated.
“We told him that we knew of a statement that he made to his therapist, specifically relating to the Gerdes murder, and he stated that his therapist had misinterpreted what he had said,” the police case file said.
He agreed to take a polygraph test, adamant that the blood was not his.
Days after detectives set up an appointment for the polygraph test, Paul McEnroe of the Minneapolis Tribune wrote a lengthy newspaper article containing graphic details of the murder and most of the investigative material. The man retained a lawyer, Phillip Cole, halting the test, and outside of a confession, police did not have enough evidence to support a murder charge.
“We were never able to interview him again,” according to the police case file dated May 11, 1986. “The evidence in this case has been exhausted. The FBI has examined the vacuum dustings and hair and we have come up with nothing.”
Investigators kept an eye on the man, who by May 1986 had moved multiple times across the country from Vermont to California to Texas and then back to the Minneapolis area.
An unusual suspect
The last suspect in Gerdes’ murder didn’t turn up until 1991, after the murder of a Roseville, Minnesota woman. Patrick Thomas Walsh fell for Pamela Sweeney, 35, a coworker at Unisys Corp. in Roseville, Minnesota, who rebuffed his romantic advances, according to reporting by the Minneapolis Tribune. And then he killed her, according to court documents.
But Sweeney’s case opened up connections to other mysteries, such as a 1976 conviction for choking a woman in her apartment; a “creepy” encounter with a waitress at a bar the night of Sweeney’s murder, and the 1980 disappearance of Cindy M. Brown, 22, who reportedly left him to head west with two men and a woman, according to court documents and the Tribune.
Brown lived with Walsh at the time, and authorities discovered she had told her supervisor at a Kmart store that she planned to leave town. Foul play was suspected, and Brown has never been found.
Walsh was sentenced to life imprisonment for Sweeney’s murder in 1991, which was when Minneapolis Deputy Chief Ted Paul told the Tribune that Walsh knew Gerdes, and was a person of interest in her killing.
But the police, once again, could not fit the pieces together. Walsh is still serving a life sentence at Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater.
Gerdes’ murder haunted former Minneapolis Police Chief Tony Bouza until he died in 2023.
“Left unaddressed, the searing murder of Cindy Gerdes stands as a damning indictment of our indifference to our neighbor’s plight,” Bouza wrote on his website.
NOTE: This is the second 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.
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