You could go out late at night, sit in your yard, and now it's too scary. It's just too scary. And while most people were watching that violence unfold at a distance, one Minneapolis woman, the danger wasn't out there somewhere. It was about to come crashing into her own home. It was June 13, a Sunday. The air was warm but comfortable. It was the kind of ordinary summer day that couldn't have hinted at the horror unfolding inside a high rise in south Minneapolis, that behind one of those apartment doors, someone's life was ending. Her name was Jean Childs. Jeannie to almost everyone who knew her. She was 35 years old. And by nightfall, she was gone. That fact alone is chilling. But what's haunted me since I first came across her case earlier this year is that the place where this all unfolded. It's here in my hometown. I've seen it dozens of times. Walked by it, driven past it, never knowing about what happened there until I did. The building is tall and narrow, a beige concrete slab rising above south Minneapolis. In the daylight, though, it just blends in. Looks like any other apartment building. But now I can't see it without thinking about that day in 1993, without picturing the people who went inside, saw what was there, and carried that image with them for the rest of their lives. What they found was brutal. But in the middle of all that chaos, investigators collected evidence that didn't quite add up. At the time, they didn't know if it would lead anywhere. For decades, it didn't. But years later, those same clues would become the threads that. That unraveled everything. And how. Well, that's what I was about to find out. This is the story of Jeannie Childs, Part one. I'm Celisia Stanton, and you're listening to Truer crime. Just after 5:30pm on Sunday, June 13, 1993. On Thursday, on the 21st floor of Horn Towers, an apartment complex in south Minneapolis, a resident noticed water seeping into their apartment. It was coming from next door. They reported it, and soon the building's caretaker and a security guard headed up to check it out. They knocked, but when there was no answer, they let themselves inside. Water spilling into a unit is definitely urgent. The living room looked normal. Lived in a little clutter, but nothing alarming. Bottles on the coffee table, dishes in the sink. The TV was on some sitcom rerun. Reading about all this, I kept imagining that laugh track echoing through the still apartment. How out of place and eerie it must have felt. They followed the sound of running water into the bathroom. The shower had been left on. One of them reached in, twisted the knob, and shut it off, and then they stepped into the bedroom. It wasn't clutter or noise this time. It was blood. Pooled on the floor, splattered up the walls, soaked into towels and bedding. A woman lay partially under the bed, motionless and pale. She'd been stabbed again and again, the violence almost impossible to take in. She was completely nude, except for a pair of socks, now dark with blood. Her name was Jeannie Childs, and honestly, it's pretty impossible to reconcile that image with the woman her family remembered. Jeannie was the kind of person who'd walk into a room, snapping her fingers, ready to dance to whatever song was playing. She loved Lionel Richie, loved riding motorcycles. There's this wonderful photo of her I can't stop picturing. In it she's on this big red bike, wearing a leather jacket with fringe down the arms and a bandana on her head, her bright blonde curls spilling out, reaching toward the world. She looks confident, at ease, alive. But there in that apartment. That light was gone when investigators arrived. They moved through the room, looking for anything that might explain it, until, on the side of the bed, something caught their eye. A bloody footprint. Not a shoe print, a bare footprint. It was immediately strange. Jeannie was wearing socks, which meant the print couldn't be hers. It meant it had to belong to the person who killed her. Years later, one of the detectives who saw those footprints for the first time would tell WCCO that he still remembered the jolt of possibility it gave him.
Celisia Stanton (10:18)
By the time Jeie's body was carried out of Horn Towers, the reporters had already gathered, filming for the evening news. I've seen the footage myself. It's grainy. The colors are slightly washed out, like so much early 90s tape. In it, there's this white van which sits outside of an apartment complex. Two men can be seen wheeling out a stretcher, a white body bag strapped to it. They guide it into the back of the van and close the doors. Somewhere across town, a woman named Betty Ekman was working a hospice shift. Her patient asked to watch tv, so she turned it on. And suddenly there it was. The beige building, the van, the body bag. The anchor said a woman in her 30s had been killed in a south Minneapolis apartment building. Betty froze. Because that building, she recognized it. And in the space of a single breath, dread began to flood in. She called her husband. I think something happened to Jeannie last night, she said. Jeannie was her oldest child. You need to call the mortuary, her husband told her. So she did. She recalled what happened next in horrifyingly vivid detail.
Betty Ekman (Jeannie's mother) (11:38)
The gentleman on the phone said, are you all alone? And I said, well, I'm in a client's home right now taking care of her. He said, well, I think you better get somebody with you. He said, what is your daughter's name? And I said, jeannie Childs. And he says, I'm sorry, ma', am, but that was your daughter.
Celisia Stanton (11:59)
Betty started to scream. The room felt like it was closing in around her. Her mind flashed to the day before to their last conversation, Jeannie had had a tooth infection, and Betty urged her to go to the clinic for medication. Betty even offered to come with her to sit beside her to make sure she was o. But Jeannie had waved her off, insisted that she'd be fine. That was the last thing Betty ever heard her daughter say. From the time she was young, Jeannie had a strong, independent streak. But her childhood also carried a much darker weight. When she was a little girl, her grandfather abused her. Betty would later tell WCCO that something in her daughter shifted after that. It was a wound Jeannie carried quietly, one no child should ever have to bear. Her father, too, had barely acknowledged her, uninterested in raising a girl. But still, Betty doted on her daughter, and Jeannie managed to hold on to her warmth. She was affectionate, good with kids and older people alike, and that love for children stayed with Jeannie later in life, when she learned she couldn't have kids of her own. It devastated her. By the time Jeannie reached her teen years, the family was facing a lot. Betty was no longer with Jeannie's father and was in a new relationship. The two got married and had another daughter, Cindy. But tragedy struck when Cindy's father was murdered, leaving Betty young and alone with three kids to raise. Around 13, Jeannie began running away. Betty remembered crying herself to sleep at night, praying her daughter would walk through the door. Each time there was a knock. She braced herself. Was it Jeannie or terrible news? Jeannie had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Drugs came first, and eventually, sex work. Betty tried desperately to bring her daughter home. Some nights she even walked the streets with her Great Dane and a gun, searching. She pushed for counseling, too, hoping it might help. But Jeannie couldn't stick with it. Even in the chaos, though, Jeannie's love for her family did break through. Some nights she called home crying, wishing things could be different. Genie, her mom would ask, is there something wrong with your brain? I don't understand how he could be doing these things. Maybe Jeannie didn't either. She adored her little sister, Cindy, though she wrote her letters hoping to steer her away from the path she herself had ended up on. Here's Cindy reading one of those letters in an interview with wcco.
Celisia Stanton (15:45)
Eventually, Jeannie married a man who had children. And knowing she couldn't have kids of her own, these kids became hers in basically every way that mattered. Even after the marriage ended, they stayed in touch. I do remember she tucked me in when I was a little girl, her former stepdaughter Amber, told Fox 9. She was mom to me. She was my mother. Once upon a time, Jeannie struggled, yes, but she was happy. She was finding meaning. And it's so hard to reconcile that image, this woman who poured herself into mothering and big sisterhood, with the reality of what came Next. Because in 1993, Jeannie's family would be seeing her for the last time. And this time, it would be under the worst circumstances imaginable. Betty wasn't allowed to see her daughter's body until the funeral. When she finally did, she barely recognized her. Jeannie had been stabbed 65 times.
Celisia Stanton (17:43)
So often when I'm telling these stories, I am reminded of the simple truth that everyone is someone's baby. Everyone is somebody's whole world. Betty knew she needed answers. She knew there had to be justice. But knowing that and getting it were two very different things. Because when investigators walked into that apartment, we what they were left with wasn't some clear story. It was these fragments, all these clues that didn't fit neatly together. One of the first people to examine those fragments was forensic scientist Bart Epstein. He went through the apartment piece by piece, looking for anything that might explain Jeanne's last hours. There were no signs of forced entry, which left investigators with a few possibilities. Maybe Genie knew her attacker well enough to let them in. Maybe she opened the door without realizing the danger. Or maybe the door had just been left unlocked. Epstein later told 48 Hours he'd noticed a knife resting in the drying rack among other dishes. It could have been the murder weapon, but with no visible blood on it, investigators didn't collect it. And no murder weapon meant they had to look elsewhere. So Epstein turned to the blood. And there was a lot of it. He documented splatter and stains on the walls, the surfaces, the floors, mapping them like puzzle pieces. He was really trying to recreate Genie's final movements near the bathroom. The pattern suggested she'd been attacked while standing close by. But inside was even worse. Blood covered the sink, the walls, the floor. The sheer spread of it made one thing absolutely clear. Jeannie had been moving, struggling, fighting to get away. When investigators found her, Jeannie's body was on the bedroom floor, partially tucked beneath the bed. The mattress above her was so saturated with blood, it had seeped through the bedding and into the padding below. Which meant that after being stabbed, she must have been on the bed for a while before ending up on the floor. But the blood, it wasn't only inside the apartment. In the stairwell of the building, investigators found two distinct samples. One matched Jeannie, and the other belonged to someone else. The second sample pointed to a possibility investigators knew they had to tell the public.
Celisia Stanton (20:37)
When investigators learned that Jeannie was a sex worker, it shifted the scope of the investigation a bit. If her attacker had been a client, it was possible that semen or some other DNA may have been left behind in the apartment. So detectives sent a range of items for testing. A washcloth, a red T shirt, a bath towel, the comforter, a pair of purple underwear. Anything that might preserve a trace of who had been with her. But here's the thing. In 1993, DNA analysis was still brand new. Just five years earlier, in 1988, it had been used in criminal court for the very first time. At that point, there was no national database, no CODIS. In fact, it wouldn't be until 1994, a full year after Jeannie's murder, that Congress passed the DNA Identification act, which created the FBI's database. But in 1993, when investigators collected DNA from Jeannie's case, they didn't have any of the systems we take for granted. Now, still, investigators saw its potential. So they collected and preserved what they could, cataloguing the results to be compared against future suspects. And even without a national database, they did find a match. There was this piece of hair collected from Jeannie's hand, and it turned out that that hair belonged to Jeannie's boyfriend, Art. It was suspicious, but also not entirely surprising. A hair on her hand could suggest that there had been some kind of struggle between the two. But Jeannie had been killed inside Art's apartment, the same place where she sometimes stayed and met with clients. Of course, his DNA would be there. And as Betty told wcco, for her, it just didn't add up.
Celisia Stanton (22:45)
But investigators weren't so sure. According to the Star Tribune, Art may have also acted as Jeannie's pimp. Police records documented a history of physical abuse between them right there in the same apartment where she was found murdered. And now his hair was in her hand. It didn't look great for Art, but this was far from a slam dunk. DNA can tell you that someone was present, but it can't tell you exactly when. To tie Art to the murder, investigators needed more. They needed evidence that placed him at the apartment not just as someone who lived there, but as the killer. That's where the bloody footprints came in. Jeannie had been wearing socks when she died, so the bare footprints left in the apartment almost certainly belonged to the attacker. Investigators photographed and preserved them, noting that, like fingerprints, footprints are unique. If they found a match, it wouldn't just prove presence, it would prove presence at the time of the crime. But when investigators compared the prints to Art's, they didn't match. Art also had a solid alibi. A motorcycle trip in Milwaukee on the day of the murder, corroborated by multiple witnesses. So investigators considered a few other early suspects. One was a client of Jeannie's, someone nicknamed Fatal Attraction. He had been scheduled to see Jeannie that day. But when investigators examined his footprints, there wasn't a match. And then there was another man. Someone they never identified. A witness had seen Jeannie carrying a case of beer with a tall man in a trench coat outside Horn Towers just hours before the murder. Later, that same man was spotted running from the building. But despite the description, investigators never found him. With the last lead gone, Jeannie's case joined rows of unsolved murders gathering dust. It would stay that way for more than 20 years.
Celisia Stanton (27:44)
The grief in her voice is still there decades later, dense and unmoving. And why wouldn't it be? It never had anywhere to go. But Betty's persistence meant Jeannie's name never really left the files. And In March of 2015, the case landed on the desks of two men who would look at it with fresh eyes. MPD Sergeant Chris Caracostas and FBI Special Agent Chris Bokers. They were a part of a team tasked with reviewing unsolved homicides across Minnesota. Jeannie's case was one of the first. They pulled, and it immediately stood out. Part of it was the sheer violence. The scene was saturated with evidence of what Jeannie had endured, and part of it was the pattern. In the early 90s, Minneapolis had seen this wave of killings targeting women, many of them sex workers, which, tragically, is not rare even today. Sex workers are far more likely to be murdered than the general population and far more likely to be targeted by serial offenders. That reality gave the case this sense of urgency. And if advances in DNA technology could solve any cold case, this was it. The original investigators had been thorough collecting and cataloging every piece of potential evidence they could find. But in 1993, as we've discussed, forensic science had its limits. Much of what they gathered had been preserved. Waiting for this day. Waiting for a time when science might finally catch up. Now, more than two decades later, that day had arrived. So Sergeant Kerr Costas and Special Agent Bokers started going through it all, box by box, photo by photo. And for the first time, they weren't just staring at the same dead ends. They had these new tools. Tools that might reveal what had always been there in the case file. One of the first things they retested was the blood sample from the stairwell. The one that investigators had collected back in 1993 but could never match to anyone. But this time, it hit. The match's name was John Eswine. John was in prison at the time for violating probation on a drunk driving charge. Detectives brought him in, hoping that they would finally be able to put a face to the mystery that had haunted the case for more than 20 years. But when they confronted him with the results, he didn't give much.
Celisia Stanton (30:27)
According to 48 Hours, John admitted he had been inside Horn Towers once before, but that was back in 1991, two whole years before Jeannie's murder. Still, John allowed investigators to analyze his DNA and footprints. Eswine's name had been the first real hit in decades. But those results they got back, they didn't hold up. His DNA matched the blood in the stairwell, but not any of the samples from inside the apartment. His footprints weren't a clean match either. The results had come back inconclusive. In the end, the scientists couldn't connect him to Jeannie's murder. And without Moore, they didn't have a case. So investigators turned back to the evidence again. And that's when they decided to retest several items from the bathroom inside the apartment. And when those results came back, there it was. A single male DNA profile appearing on a shirt, on a bloodstain in the sink, and on a blue washcloth. And it didn't stop there. That same profile matched items tested years earlier. A comforter and a blue towel. So there was one man's DNA all over the crime scene. But even with that consistent profile, the trail went cold again. Codis, the national database came up empty. Whoever had left their DNA in Jeannie's apartment had never been arrested or swabbed. So the profile sat there, complete but anonymous, until April of 2018, when a headline across the country caught investigators attention. We found the needle in the haystack.
Celisia Stanton (32:31)
It wasn't Minneapolis. It was California. After 40 years of hunting, investigators had finally unmasked the man known as the Golden State Killer. He was this serial rapist and murderer who'd terrorized the state in the 1970s and 80s. And his identity had remained this huge mystery until detectives tried something brand new. Forensic genetic genealogy. In the Golden State killer case, crime scene DNA was uploaded to a public genealogy site. And this is the same kind of site that people like you and I use to trace our family trees. Once they did that, a genealogist began building a family tree branch by branch, until the trail led to one man, Joseph DeAngelo. Investigators followed him, collecting DNA from some trash he tossed. And they confirmed their match. They solved the case. And for investigators back in Minneapolis, hearing about this case on the news, it was like watching someone pick a lock that they'd been jiggling for decades. They had DNA, too. What they didn't have was a name. And suddenly, there might actually be a way to get one. Special Agent Chris Backers picked up the phone and called one of the California investigators who cracked the Golden State killer case. He laid it all out, all the details that they had this preserved DNA profile from the crime scene, that they found the same profile all over the apartment. And the answer he got came without. If you use our method, you're going to identify who did this. It was the kind of certainty you almost never get, especially not in a cold case. So they did what they had to do. The preserved DNA profile from Jeannie's case was uploaded directly into a public genealogy database.
Celisia Stanton (34:31)
And to guide the process, they called in the same genealogist who had helped crack the Golden State killer case. She started with partial matches, distant relatives of the person that they were looking for, and began building out those family trees, connecting the lines, filling in the names, tracing branches forward until a suspect began to take shape. And then, almost as soon as the process had began, the breakthrough arrived in the form of an email. After 25 years of silence, the case finally spoke back. They had a match, a name. Not the whole story, not yet. But for the first time in decades, investigators knew who they were looking for. Now they just had to find him. That's next time on Truer Crime Time. Before we wrap up today's episode, we want to connect Jeannie's story to the present. Like so many women whose lives have been marked by violence, Jeannie's story is also about survival, resilience, and the need for communities that listen and care. And that's why today we're highlighting Thistle Farms, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction find healing and hope. Through safe housing, meaningful employment, and a strong community of support, Thistle Farms provides women with a path to recovery and lifelong freedom. Their motto, Honestly says it best. Love heals. If you'd like to honor Jeannie's story in a tangible way, consider supporting Thistle Farms. You can shop their line of handcrafted products from candles and bott body care to home goods, all made by the women they serve. Every purchase helps provide shelter, job training, and a second chance to learn more. Or to make a donation. Head to thistlefarms.org and before we go, I just want to add a special thank you to WCCO and journalist Jennifer Meyerley, whose tireless reporting brought new attention to Jeannie's case. Her work and the WCCO team's documentary Footprint to Murder were invaluable resources for this episode. You can watch the full documentary for free on YouTube and I highly recommend it as always. You can also find a full list of today's sources and action items@TrueOrKrimePodcast.com and if you want to keep in touch between episodes, you can find Truer Crime on Instagram and xreorcrimepod and you can also find me on Instagram and TikTok lisastanton and through my weekly newsletter Sincerely Slicia at Sincerely. True Crime is created, hosted and written by me, Celisia Stanton, and is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Additional writing, research and production by Olivia Husenfeld. Executive producers are myself, Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Editing by Liam Luxon, artwork by Station 16, original music by Jay Ragsdale and makeup and vanity set mix by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at uta, the Nord Group, and the team at Odyssey. For more podcasts like Truer Crime, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us@Tenderfoot TV. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of True or Crime. If you want an ad free version of the show, plus early access to every episode for this month's case and tons of other great Tenderfoot podcasts, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. It's a small way to support the work and it makes a big difference.
