Eden Young (3 of Hearts, Minnesota)
2023-11-01 00:25:56
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is Eden Young, the Three of Hearts from Minnesota. 31-year-old Eden and her boyfriend were new to the North Star State. They'd only lived there about three months when, in September 1992, Eden was seen riding away in a mysterious blue van, never to be seen again. Now, more than three decades later, present-day detectives are traveling down some winding roads that previous investigators never explored, in hopes that it will lead them to the truth. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.
I don't know about you, but when I think of teenagers tossing out newspapers just as the sun's rising, neighbors still in robes, drinking coffee, waving Good morning from their front porches. I think of Midwest suburbia, I think of somewhere safe. That's why, shortly before 6 a...m. on September 28, 1992. A paperboy out on his usual route wasn't at all concerned when he spotted a pile of women's clothing on the side of the road on Lansing Avenue. In fact, he thought it was a little amusing.
There was a shirt, pants, bra, there was a purse. It was funny, he even said in the statement. He goes I thought it was odd because who's ever missing this? Clothes must be running around naked because it was just like a full outfit worth.
That was Detective Nick Sullivan, or Sully, as his buddies over at the Washington County Sheriff's Office call him. The Paperboy was in Grant, just about five miles east of Delwood, a small, ritzy lakeside city north of St. Paul. It was a safe community, all things considered. So not thinking the pile of clothes on side of the road could mean anything nefarious. He picked up the seemingly lost belongings, threw them in his car and continued his route.
Later, when he had a free minute, he started looking for an ID amongst the items so he could try and track down their owner. And that's when he saw something that actually changed the way he viewed these items, something that cast them in a much more sinister light. On the shirt, he saw what looked like blood, so he booked it to a phone and called the sheriff's office. When authorities arrived on scene, deputies were quickly able to identify a woman's name on a motel receipt found inside the purse.
Eden Young That gave them a solid place to start. But little did they know as they were trying to figure out if these were even Eden's clothes and if she was okay. Authorities in St. Paul had just gotten a missing persons report for none other than Eden Young. The report came from a man named Ricky Williams, who called himself Eden's boyfriend. He told police that they had first met back in Philadelphia and had just moved to Minnesota together a few months ago.
That's when they appeared to have officially become a couple. He was also well aware that Eden was a sex worker. He even admitted that he would often walk the streets with her, watch her make her dates, and sometimes he'd even cash in on some of her earnings. So, you know, maybe more pimp than boyfriend, though. I don't think Ricky ever used that term to describe himself.
But I think it's fair to say that, at the very least, to some extent. This dude was controlling what Eden was doing, and he wasn't denying that fact either. But what Ricky was to Eden wasn't the pressing question to police in that moment, they were more focused on the immediate issue of when he last saw her. Ricky said that that was around three o'clock in the morning that same day, September 28th, which would have been just a few hours before the paperboy spotted her belongings on the side of the road in Grant. At that time, they'd been hanging out with their friends, Stephen and Letia, at Stephen's house in St.
Paul Ricky said that he watched Eden get into a dark blue van just around the corner from Stephen's place. He remembered some distinctive observations about this van, like it had a loud muffler, round headlights and square taillights. And there were only windows in the front of the car on the driver's and passenger side, none in the back of the van.
He also caught a glimpse of the driver, a man in his maybe 30s or 40s.
He described that he was a white male. I don't think he knew the man or the van. He had even made a comment in his interview that he didn't think Eden knew who it was either. Just based on how she approached and how she was talking to the person. Because he said that if it was a known customer that she approaches differently, she talks differently. So, based on his observation, that's what he reported to the sheriff's office, that he didn't know who it was. And neither did she.
Ricky told police that he knew something was wrong when Eden didn't return home after a few hours because she never spent the night with clients. Plus, the two stayed together, usually hopping from motel to motel. But, he says, before he called the police, he went back to Stephen's house first, the same place they'd all been hanging out the night before. When Eden left in that unknown van with that unknown client, he wanted to make sure she hadn't just maybe gone back there.
But after he went back and she wasn't there, it appears that he did call the police later that same morning. Once they took the report, the first thing investigators did was interview Stephen and Lettia. These friends weren't considered suspects, but Detective Sullivan noted that Lettia seemed to be a close confidant of Eden. And knew a lot about her day-to-day life, including the men she hung out with for work and her relationship with Ricky.
Ricky was very physically abusive towards Eden. That was very well known by all of the people that were interviewed. I think it was Lettia that said that Eden never cried. She never got emotional about it, it just it was what it was. But that she would come around, she would be purple, she would be bruised up.
They knew that Ricky was super abusive towards her. Now that I think about this, I think Mom actually knew that as well, that there was physical abuse there. But again, I don't ever remember Mom coming forward and saying, like, you know, he probably killed my daughter. It was just like, this is the life she lives, this is who she lives it with and how it's been going type thing.
Whether Eden's mom thought of him as a suspect in her daughter's death or not, Ricky became a suspect for investigators from the get-go. Because even though he was being cooperative, police say that his original story quickly started to waver.
I think his story changed a little bit in terms of the timing, in terms of where he went. After she got into the van, I think that there were some inconsistencies there. They interviewed him so many times and he eventually came back to his original statement, so the timing and all that stuff ended up breaking itself up. But ultimately, we have his statement.
We don't have camera surveillance, so does this blue van exist? Maybe maybe not, we don't know.
Detective Sullivan said he doesn't get hung up on the time discrepancies. Witnesses often mess up when it comes to recalling what exactly happened, during what hour. He is alarmed by how, in some versions of Ricky's story, there was a total change of his whereabouts after Eden supposedly got into that blue van like.
First, he initially said he went back to Steven's place, then it changed to. He went all the way back to his house in Minneapolis. And these two places aren't like close, you wouldn't mix them up.
Eden got picked up on the street, right outside the corner from the friend's house in St. Paul. But then saying that he went back to Minneapolis, stayed the night and then came back, you'd think he'd remember something like that. Ultimately, Ricky was the last person to see her alive, and to this day, detectives still have questions for him.
Now, St. Paul Police had already entered Eden into the National Crime Information Center's Nationwide Missing Persons file. And since Washington County, investigators had already found her name on a receipt with her stuff. They were able to connect the clothes that they had found to the missing woman out of St. Paul as soon as they got wind of that report. But the most critical question remained.
Where was Eden? Little did authorities know she was less than five miles down the road from where her belongings had been found.
The evening of September 29th, Washington County deputies received a 911 call from a resident on Many Levels Road in Delwood. That resident said he'd just found the mutilated body of a young woman. Deputies rushed over to the neighborhood, which is about 15 miles away from where Ricky said he last saw Eden in St. Paul. The guy who'd made the call and the neighbor who let him borrow his phone to do so, were waiting outside for police at the house and took them to the area where her body was discovered.
That's when investigators learned that it was technically the man's dog who first spotted her body. He told police that he had been walking his dog off leash at around 6 p..m, not uncommon for that area. Back in those days, it wasn't like a super suburban neighborhood like you might be picturing. These houses are on larger lots with bigger yards, plus it's wooded things like residential, but spread out with lots of trees. So this guy told the cops he's taking a short stroll with his dog around the block, and he says that his dog normally just stayed right alongside him.
But suddenly, the dog broke heel and just took off, running up a small embankment nearby, the owner said. He casually followed behind him, probably just assuming that this good old boy was chasing after some small critter. But to his horror, his dog was standing over something far more sinister than a squirrel. To detectives, this situation, or where they were at, seemed like a body dump. Due to marks on her arms, it appeared that the woman had been killed elsewhere and then dragged up this hill.
The other injuries on her body were severe, isolated to her face and head, and it included obvious blunt force trauma and sharp force trauma. Despite the brutality of her facial injuries, though, there wasn't much blood or really anything left with her body. They spotted two beer cans and some red fibers near the scene, which they collected that night just to be safe. But Detective Sullivan told us these items were likely unrelated, and later testing of those items would confirm that the results revealed nothing.
With the reports of the blood-stained clothes found on the side of the road, the missing person's report, and now an unidentified body. Police were pretty certain they knew who this was. And the next day, September 30th, the medical examiner's office used fingerprints to confirm their suspicions. It was Eden Young. Outside of her visible injuries, the autopsy revealed that she had also been strangled and that there was no sign of sexual assault.
Investigators canvassed the neighborhood where her body was found, and they learned that no one saw or heard a thing. Not super surprising, though, considering how spread out the properties were. Police also set up roadblocks at two different intersections on Highway 96 and handed out flyers to see if anyone who was typically traveling that route saw anything. Between 3 and 6 a.m. That would have been the time when Ricky said that he last saw Eden getting into that van. And when the paperboy found her clothing and purse along the road.
They collected all of her belongings at her motel. They pulled her phone records from the motel, and they started talking to other people that were somehow associated with those motel stays or the phone records. The cab company, I mean, everything they could look into, it appears they did.
Detective Sullivan told us those motel and phone records brought two possible clients of Eden's on the radar as potential suspects after this initial follow-up investigation. Employees at the Twins Motor Inn, which is no longer around today, also confirmed Eden was seen frequenting both rooms rented by these two men. Now we'll call the first guy David. David wouldn't admit to being Eden's client.
He just claims that he partied and did drugs with her, and Ricky and David also didn't have the best alibi. He said that he was with his girlfriend. But when detectives met up with her to confirm this, she said David had been with her that night. And then, in the same breath, admitted she would totally lie to protect David. And I'm not even kidding.
Our reporter literally thought this was a joke. But there are records of her interview in the case file. So I don't think we can necessarily confirm David's alibi for those early morning hours when Eden was killed. Detective Sullivan's commander, Sarah Helverson, also has knowledge of this case and was in the room during our interview. And she had some thoughts about David. Because he's the only suspect mentioned in the case files that has ties to Washington County.
There's just, I get this gut feeling, that, and I can't quite articulate it. But it's just too. Where she was located and where he lives, and that he knows her and that he has frequented, utilized the company of prostitutes in the past. His telephone number was on the call records from her hotel room. On 4-29-93, he was administered a polygraph examination by the BC.A. who's the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension? Here. In summary, the BCA agent believed that, due to the discrepancies, that David may have further knowledge of the death of Eden Young and was withholding information.
There was a lot making David look suspicious, but there was one big glaring problem. Ricky knew David. Like the two were buddies, they would party and do drugs together. So if David was the one who drove off with Eden in the blue van, Ricky would have recognized him.
So let me tell you about this second guy that police looked into, who we're going to call Brian. Investigators requested records from the various motels that Eden would frequent, and they found out that Brian had rented a room for him and Eden on September 20th. So this is just about a week before she was killed. Even though he was married at the time, he seemed to be more forthcoming compared to David, even admitting to authorities that he was in fact a client of Eden's. He was a bit reluctant, though, to reveal who he was with the night that Eden was killed because it was someone who had a restraining order against him. But eventually, he told police the deal and they were able to verify his story. So it seems like after that, Brian was placed low on their suspect list.
After the investigation into David and Brian kind of fizzled, Eden's case just stalled. Investigators did, however, continue visiting with Ricky for follow-up interviews off and on over the next several years. And then, finally, in 1997, there was another significant lead that looked good, and that one took the investigation down an entirely different road.
It was that Eden was involved in some, again, this is just a report, but Eden was involved in some drug trafficking type thing. And because of that behavior, it could have led to her death. So that was this theory that was out there and the story that was being told. I'm not going to go into it further because there are significant avenues we can still pursue on that one. But there is a whole other side of this other than just strictly the.
She's a commercial sex worker, and one of her Johns killed her. You know what I mean? There may be this whole other avenue that doesn't appear was ever pursued.
Disappointingly, Detective Sullivan said, it doesn't seem like much was done to follow up on this lead at the time, though we're not sure why. For 11 years, Eden's loved ones and the community were left wondering who could have committed such a heinous crime and gotten away with it for so long. And then there was this glimmer of hope. In 2008. That's when an inmate at Oak Park Heights, which is Minnesota's only level five maximum security prison, put Eden's name back in the spotlight.
This prisoner, a man who we'll call Sam, made a confession. He said he's the one who murdered Eden. But when investigators asked him for details regarding the facts of the case, surprise, surprise, he couldn't give them any. Detective Sullivan didn't have too many details about this lead. He wasn't the one who was looking into it back in 2008. So he's not sure what Sam's motive was for making this false confession. Maybe he was looking for a reduced sentence for whatever he was already in there for, or he was just looking to get out of his cell for a day or two.
Or it's possible that maybe he was dealing with mental health issues and was just confused at that point. They really had no reason to believe this guy, but they still did their due diligence and took his DNA. And why, you may ask. There's been no mention of DNA in Eden's story thus far. Well, we have a bit of a reveal for you, and it involves some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that Detective Sullivan told our reporter Jacey that there is in fact DNA. In this case. There was a partial male DNA profile taken from the crime scene that investigators can use for comparison. But they won't say whether the DNA was blood or semen or what. When we asked, Detective Sullivan kept it super vague. But he would say that the DNA they have is not something that could have accidentally been left behind, and that the DNA came from Eden and was from her person. Whatever was left behind was enough for investigators to rule out Sam, the false confession guy. They've also been able to compare it to the three major suspects that we've covered in this episode so far Ricky, David and Brian.
But now comes the bad news. None of them came back as a match, though. Detective Sullivan says that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't guilty. I mean, we know Eden had some kind of relationship with Ricky and David and Brian, so a DNA match there wouldn't have really been a slam dunk anyway. Now. We tried to get more details from investigators about when the male. DNA found at the crime scene was eventually tested, and when they were able to compare it to DNA collected from each of the suspects. But Detective Sullivan didn't give us much additional information.
When we followed up to ask, he did say that he knows. The male DNA found on Eden was ran against the Minnesota Convicted Offender database to see if there was a match there, which there wasn't. But, he said, it's unclear how long it's been since that was last done. So, you know, sounds like it could be time to try again. Every so often, the Washington County Sheriff's Office likes to switch up. Who's looking into what cold case is, sometimes even physically, having investigators draw a cold case card out of their deck?
Because it can't hurt to have a different set of eyes on a stack of old files. So that is how Sullivan got the case in 2017. He spent the last few years going over all of the old files. Which can be extremely difficult to decipher. By the way, especially since so much of old case evidence is made up of photocopies from original handwriting. Like, not even digital. Our reporters sometimes even get asked like, can you read what this says? And we even find ourselves here at AudioCheck, attempting to enhance old documents to try and make some of them more legible.
So what he's doing is not always the easiest task, trying to pick back up where someone else left off years ago. But Sullivan is trying, and of everything he's been able to decipher, he says, David is the one who still stands out as suspicious. He's one suspect. Detective Sullivan wants to follow up with himself now that he's on the case.
He also thought Steven might have some crucial information in his brain. Remember, he was one of the friends that Eden and Ricky were hanging out with the night before she went missing? And Detective Sullivan doesn't think he was a suspect, but he does think Steven may know more than what he told investigators back then. The problem is he has since passed away. So Sullivan is trying to find other avenues to pursue that drug trafficking theory. Since there wasn't much done with it back in the 90s.
He told our reporter Jacey that there's a man in prison in Florida who's associated with this tip, who he wants to talk to. Once all the resources allow. And he says, there is one more potential suspect also down in Florida. This is a person who was mentioned earlier on in Eden's case files. But for some reason, no one's bothered to speak to him until now. We're going to call this guy Chris, and investigators are comfortable labeling him as a serial killer.
Even though he's only ever technically been convicted of murdering one woman, he is associated with several other homicides that are oddly similar to Eden's. So we're using a pseudonym because investigators say that they don't think this guy has any idea that he's even on their radar for Eden's murder. Since no one's ever spoken to him about it before, Detective Sullivan is trying to keep it that way until he has a chance to visit him in prison himself. Now, all the other women believed to be the victims of this guy are in Florida, where Chris lived for a long period of time and is currently in prison for attempted murder. But get this. At the time of Eden's murder, Chris was living in none other than St.
Paul Minnesota.
One of his pieces that he did with all of them is he either left their socks or their shoes on. And Eden had her white socks was all she was wearing when she was found. So like, they were putting that together with Okay, we have a Black female prostitute. Blunt force, trauma to the head, strangled. And so I think that's why they really got onto Chris.
And they were like, Ooh, this guy could be good now. They may not have pursued that because he did get out of prison, he got off death row and got out. Maybe they just couldn't find him or didn't know where he was. That could be another piece of it.
But he did end up trying to kill another female, and then he's currently in prison for that for attempted murder.
Detective Sullivan's got to hurry, though, because Chris is getting older and this guy is up for parole in 2024.
The way she died was horrible and to really try to give her some justice.
She deserves it after all these years, you know, I think people that kill so many, they're too narcissistic not to admit to it. At some point. I just feel like eventually their truth will come out. I think there's a lot of very interesting and very good leads in Minnesota that I want to chase first. But Chris will never be off that radar.
Detective Sullivan told us Because their department no longer has the funding or resources for a cold case unit, our podcast has been helpful. Preparing for his interview allowed them to dig deep into Eden's case files again and look at things in a new light. One thing that he's now certain of whoever did this to Eden, it seems to be intimate. Like Detective Sullivan said, her injuries seemed personal, even as a seasoned investigator. Detective Sullivan found the crime scene photos particularly hard to stomach due to the disfigurement focused on her face.
So for him, it's become personal, too. It's the reason why his colleagues say that he was assigned this case. During our interview, Detective Sullivan said he can't help but get emotional when it comes to the cases he works on. That's why he already has a long list of what he plans to do next when it comes to the pursuit of justice for Eden.
We have search warrants for DNA that we're going to write, we have interviews that are going to be done. We are obviously going to try to get down to Florida. I think those are important, at least to get an initial statement, even if it's all just BS from him, we can get a statement and then get his DNA.
And then just cleaning up this case file. We would never want to talk bad about the people that came before us because I think they did a great job. Like, they were very, very thorough for that time period leading up to when it stopped. I just I think there's work that can be done. And I think we can find some closure for Miss Young, obviously elder now, and she's getting up in age, and it'd be nice to find closure before her time passes.
It's been more than 30 years, so honestly, at this point, Detective Sullivan says he is desperate for any leads at all, even if they may seem insignificant. He says their office receives regular tips regarding the county's other cold cases. But sadly, when it comes to Eden Young and this one other case from 1987, involving the murder of another Black female sex worker named Darcelle Hopkins. Nothing new ever comes in for them to follow up on. So if you have any information about the murder of Eden Young, you're urged to call the Investigations tip line at the Washington County, Minnesota, Sheriff's Office. That number is 651-430-7850..
The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast..com. So what do you think, Chuck, do you approve?
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