The Neighborhood Monster

On the morning of 5 January 2007 Cindy Sanderholm came home from work to help her nineteen-year-old daughter Jodie with a contact lens. Jodie was the youngest of Cindy and Brian Sanderholm's three children, born in Arkansas City, Kansas, on 26 September 1987, and her family had lived in the town for three generations. Her parents ran Ark City Glass. Jodie had graduated from Arkansas City High School in 2006 as one of four valedictorians, had captained the dance team and was voted best dressed in her class. She was a freshman at Cowley College, a mile and a half from home, on a dance scholarship, studying pre-pharmacy with a 4.0 average and dancing with the Tigerettes. She also taught dance to children at weekends. Her father later said she was careful and always on the phone telling her parents where she was. She drove a 2003 black Dodge Stratus.

That morning Jodie left for a late practice with the Tigerettes. She never came home. Her phone went unanswered, which was completely out of character, and her parents went straight to the police, who knew the family and took the report seriously. As officers searched the town and spoke to the dance team, a picture emerged of a man who had been stalking the Tigerettes. One dancer had found a note and a rose on her windscreen; another had been followed by a light blue car and had seen its driver sitting outside practice. Female students had found their tyres slashed and their cars keyed. Jodie had been getting hang-up calls. On 4 January Jodie's best friend was followed and drove to the police station, and the man drove off, only for her to find her tyre slashed afterwards.

details of the account remain covered until revealed Born in 1984, he had been mocked at school as Monkey Boy from the sixth grade and had answered cruelty with cruelty, once chasing a child down the street with his belt. At thirteen he had hidden behind the Sanderholm house and watched Jodie and her sister through a window as they changed. He had worked at KFC and Subway and played at being a bounty hunter, claiming to work as a bail bondsman without a licence. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it His girlfriend of three years, Alexis Swartzwell, had ended the relationship that month and described sex with him as violent, saying he was aroused by resistance and had once told her a remote spot near the Kaw Wildlife Area would be a good place to hide a body.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed In the summer of 2001 he pulled a sixteen-year-old KFC co-worker through his car window and held her for three hours, repeating it three more times that month. In December 2001 he followed a teenage girl seven miles home from a video shop. In July 2004 he left a note requesting sex in a young woman's unlocked car. None of it was serious enough, as the law then stood, to keep him locked up.

On 5 January 2007 he was seen at the college in his Cadillac between 10.18 and 11.48 in the morning. Shortly after noon Jodie's friend Carrie Morris saw Jodie in the passenger seat of her own car as it headed east out of town, driven by a large white man. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Jodie had been taken as she collected the post at the end of her driveway. She was held in the car for four to five hours before she died.

this part of the story is covered for now That evening his father Kevin picked him up along US-166, wet and muddy, a little over a mile west of the Cowley County State Fishing Lake. details of the account remain covered until revealed He claimed he had been driven around by strangers, had got stuck near Cedar Vale and had walked for six hours before calling his father. He could not find the spot when detectives took him out to look.

At 2.30 the next morning police searched the empty trailer where he had lived with Alexis. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now

details of the account remain covered until revealed Stopping at the fishing lake on the way home, they found her clothing, wallet, leotard, Tigerette jacket, one flip flop, a floor mat and a piece of car seat around the public toilets. On 9 January divers saw tail lights in eight feet of water and recovered her car, with the matching flip flop inside. Her naked body was found the same day in a wood pile near the Walnut River, about eleven miles away.

The autopsy found that she died of strangulation, with blunt force trauma a contributing cause. She had been beaten from head to toe, strangled repeatedly over five to twelve minutes, and sexually assaulted while still alive. The prosecutor later described the injuries in detail: a blow that snapped her head back and tore an artery, abrasions from being dragged thirty feet, and a wooden stick and debris forced into her body. Her clothes were taken and the car driven into the lake with the transmission in drive.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it A hair from the driver's seat could not exclude him or his maternal relatives, with 99.77 per cent of the population excluded. Other samples from her right breast, right hand and fingernails could not exclude him either, and one Y chromosome profile matched him with 99.99 per cent certainty. His alibis fell apart. Jodie's family said the police had not been negligent; the law had simply given them no power to act. Kansas passed a new anti-stalking law, Jody's Law, in 2008.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now In 2010 he wrote to the newspaper claiming hidden evidence would free him. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it