Links to 'serial killings' began with the murder of Pamela Sweeney

ANDOVER, Minn. — Two hundred feet above Pamela Sweeney’s house, hovering in a Highway Patrol helicopter, Gary Kreyer took in the bird’s-eye view of the murder scene on June 12, 1991. Nearly two weeks earlier, 35-year-old Sweeney had been brutally murdered in her home on Sycamore Street, and he needed pictures from the air.

Next to him, Bruce Hatton, of the county’s crime lab, aimed his Canon T-70 toward the nightmarish scene, where the home, like a two-story cedar-lined chateau, jutted from an idyllic prairie.

As a lieutenant with the Anoka County Sheriff’s Criminal Investigations Department, or CID, Kreyer could plainly see a tractor and a shed, behind which the murder weapons, a kitchen knife and a blue .22 caliber revolver, were found by the Anoka County Ranger Unit.

The sun was shining as Kreyer rose to 600 feet, unlike the night of Sweeney’s murder when a torrential rain soaked the soil, miring the killer’s 1976 Chevrolet pickup and two other cars in mud. A block down Sycamore Street was Sweeney’s neighbor, Delaine Kirkeide, where the boyfriend, Lawrence Fleck, ran to call 911 around 3:21 a.m. June 1, after finding Sweeney's torn body wrapped in a blanket on her bed. Initially considered a suspect, Fleck’s alibi checked out.

The main suspect, Patrick Walsh, was arrested at the scene and was behind bars, but Kreyer and other investigators still had to prove Walsh was the murderer. And as the investigation dragged on, the case became more complicated.

Kreyer’s main job was to collect evidence. He found Sweeney’s keys with a picture of her 4-year-old son and an empty Farley’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fruit snack wrapper inside Walsh’s truck, a match to candies found inside Sweeney’s kitchen. Grass seeds and leaves taken from Walsh’s shoes were being matched by Anita Cholewa, curator for the University of Minnesota, to the area where the murder weapons were found.

Blood splatter on Walsh’s clothes showed he was in close proximity to Sweeney when she was killed, and his initial statements to police contradicted the evidence.

Hoping to find blood in Walsh’s hair, Kreyer met with the suspect in the holding area of the Anoka County Adult Correctional Facility the day he was arrested. He ordered Walsh to be photographed, and for his head and beard to be shaved by a licensed Anoka County barber, Marvin Hoffer. All the trimmings were bagged and taken to the crime lab for inspection.

Kreyer was also tasked with finding out how Walsh — a felon with a violent past who was not supposed to have guns — obtained a pistol, which he traced to a dead man in Arizona.

So far, all the evidence pointed to Walsh as Sweeney’s killer, but as headlines of her murder began to circulate around the state, additional clues and tips linked him to other violent crimes, and to the theory that Walsh was a serial killer, according to the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office case files obtained by Forum News Service through an open records request.

On June 4, lead investigator for the CID, Tony Helgesen, received an anonymous phone call from a co-worker of Walsh’s wife, Janet Walsh.

“CID Helgesen,” he said when he picked up the receiver.

“Ah, yes, I, I, you’re concerned with the Sweeney case,” a female voice on the other end said.

“Hm hmm,” Helgesen said.

“I just have some information that I thought you should maybe be aware of,” the caller said, adding that a few years before, there was another unsolved murder with a connection to Walsh’s wife, Janet Walsh.

She spoke of the 1984 unsolved murder of Cindy Gerdes in Minneapolis, a case that closely resembled the modus operandi in Sweeney’s case, according to the police case file.

Both Gerdes and Sweeney were violently killed with kitchen knives. While both women were not sexually assaulted, they were stabbed repeatedly, and Sweeney was also shot in the head four times, according to the Anoka County’s coroner’s report.

Helgesen also linked Walsh to the 1966 beating of Bruce Veranish, the stabbing of 12-year-old Viola Newman in Duluth, and a nurse at the mental hospital he was sent to. Helgesen found records of the 1970 attempted homicide of Janice Olker in Duluth and the disappearance of Cindy May Brown, a soldier in the U.S. Army National Guard from Roseville, in 1980, according to the police case file.

Alerted, Helgesen sent out a statewide teletype requesting any further information regarding unsolved homicides, saying, “We have a suspect in custody who may be involved in serial killings over the last 15 years.”

He then turned to Minneapolis Police Lt. William Bothma and Lt. Bernie Bottema for help in the Gerdes connection, and the department reopened the case after Walsh’s arrest.

“Information surfaced regarding Ms. Gerdes that she was the former roommate of Pat Walsh’s current wife. Discussing the two cases we found that there were remarkable similarities between the two methods of operation in the two homicides,” Helgesen reported.

A dozen additional tips about unsolved stabbings of women from Minnesota counties St. Louis and Sterns, and the cities of Crystal and Bloomington, poured in, but the evidence didn’t appear to be enough to file charges, according to the police case file.

Other investigative officers put together a timeline that showed Walsh was typically punctual for work at Unisys Corp., a technology services company, until 1984, when he did not show up the day Gerdes was killed. In the months prior to Sweeney’s murder, he called in sick and injured, sometimes taking long unexcused absences from work, and did not show up on May 31, the day Sweeney was killed.

Walsh, who worked as a computer operator, was described as a fairly steady individual who had a “dead-pan” sense of humor, and wasn’t prone to anger, according to Unisys co-worker Paul Bagley.

His longtime friend James Carlson told Mike Sommer, a CID investigator who worked with Helgesen, that Walsh had two brothers and two sisters, and had a normal family with normal parents.

Sometimes, however, his conversations were anything but normal.

“Deer are a lot like people, when you stick a knife in their lungs, the air blows back your hair,” Walsh reportedly told Unisys co-worker Gene Hommes in 1984, shortly after Gerdes was murdered.

Sommer focused on interviewing people from Walsh’s past, like his wife, Janet Walsh, who later divorced Walsh in 1993, according to Minnesota court records.

Janet, however, refused to cooperate, saying “this was too emotionally traumatizing for her,” Sommer stated.

Sommer also learned that Walsh had strangled a woman named Susan Claffey “suddenly while in the middle of a conversation with her,” in 1976 in Mankato.

Most of Walsh’s co-workers at Unisys Corp. said he was a normal guy with occasional outbursts, and that he liked to hunt. He was meticulous, and always kept careful notes.

Joayne Dana, a co-worker, told Sommer a different story, saying she had many problems with Walsh, who was “psychotic, bizarre,” and was “not surprised when she heard he was arrested for murder.”

“Pat Walsh would get very angry if things were not done exactly the way he wanted them done. He made frequent statements that women were worthless when they were pregnant and should not be allowed to work,” Sommer reported.

By 1990, Walsh’s “normal” behavior took a turn. His supervisor at Unisys Corp. told investigators that his habit of constantly writing everything down had worsened, and that he was frequently seen tearing paper into small quarter-inch bits.

The first sign John Breen realized something was wrong with Sweeney at her workplace, Unisys Corp., occurred when she came back from a vacation and didn’t open his door to say hello.

As her boss, he asked her what was the matter.

“I lost, I can’t find my keys,” Sweeney told him. The keys had a large picture of her son sealed in a plastic cube.

Her keys were found on the front seat of Walsh’s pickup truck two days later after her murder.

At the same time, photographs of female employees pinned to a tack wall began to disappear, which after Sweeney’s murder worried Unisys employees.

The day before Sweeney was murdered, Karen Schoenbauer had lunch with her. They talked about vacation, and that Sweeney’s son had broken out with chickenpox. Sweeney hinted not everything was going well: she wanted to move and find a new job.

The working environment at Unisys appeared to be toxic in the early 1990s; whispers of affairs were rampant, and it was a place where “everybody stares at everybody, all the guys here do,” Schoenbauer said.

Although Sweeney told close friends, her mother, even Pastor Tom Braun at her church that Walsh was stalking her, she didn’t file any reports with her supervisors, said Fleck, the fiance.

Sweeney believed that if she told her superiors she would lose her job, Fleck told Helgesen.

“They’re all afraid. Their jobs are on the line. She just wanted to get out of there. Today, we talked about it, she [said], 'I can’t take any more of this place,’ ” Fleck said.

Betty Ponder, Sweeney’s mother, told Helgesen that her daughter was scared weeks before her killing. Even though she was divorced, she put her wedding band back on her ring finger hoping Walsh would leave her alone, Ponder told Helgesen.

“She just said that this person, this man, was approaching her … he was harassing her and he wouldn’t leave her alone on the job and she was scared,” Ponder said.

“Did she say who this was?” Helgesen asked.

“She just used the first name. She said Pat,” Ponder said.

Sweeney was someone who rarely complained, and tried to solve her own problems, Ponder said.

In 1989, the Sina family purchased a condominium from Walsh. The transaction was normal, but in the fall of 1990, Walsh stopped by at a time when Raymond Sina would not usually be home and asked his wife, Candy, if her husband was there.

He was home, and the encounter was awkward, the Sinas told Sommer.

Candy talked to Walsh in the entryway before he left.

“He knows that her name is Candy, but he had called her Cindy, a couple, three times in this conversation so it was just strange because he comes knocking on our door in the middle of the day … for no apparent reason,” Raymond Sina told Sommer.

Before the harassment began, Sweeney carpooled with co-workers, including Walsh, for about two weeks, and stopped because Walsh “made a pass at her,” according to employees.

Sweeney and Fleck first met at a friend’s wedding around 1983. He was the best man, she was the maid of honor, the police case file reported. They didn’t begin dating until about a year before her killing.

“She loved everybody. She’s just that kind of person. She loved everybody and everybody that I knew liked her. I can’t believe anybody would do this … I just can’t. There’s no reason for it. I love her and her kid. I loved ‘em both. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me in the last 12 years,” Fleck said.

Eventually, prosecutors won the case against Walsh and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The murder of Cindy Gerdes and the disappearance of Cindy May Brown remain unsolved.

Walsh is being held at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater. Forum News Service reached out to Walsh through the Minnesota Department of Corrections for an interview, which he declined.

Sweeney’s murder was one of the cases that prompted new anti-stalking laws in Minnesota.