![]() ![]() Not until his defense team released in 2011 details of his interviews with a psychiatrist did he say he killed Sjodin, but he said he confused her with a childhood abuser and lashed out at her. Rodriguez never admitted any involvement in Sjodin's death before or during his trial, or at his sentencing. Her body was found in a ravine near Crookston five months later. Sjodin would have experienced the desperation of trying to stay alive, before sustaining her fatal injuries." ![]() At the point in which he had hold of her neck, Ms. "Two and three-quarter hours passed between 5:00 (and) 7:44 p.m., when Mr. "This life and death struggle for Dru Sjodin may have lasted for quite some time," Welner wrote. The boyfriend, Chris Lang, got a call from Sjodin's phone at 7:44 p.m., with no one at the other end. "I was going to leave and then something, I don't know, something clicked and I looked at her and then I told her to put her hands behind her back." ![]() "When I looked at her, I sort of came back to my senses, the first thing I said, 'That ain't her,' " he said. and Sjodin was in her car talking on her phone with her boyfriend when Rodriguez said he appeared and displayed his knife. Her appearance and clothing reminded him of the girl who allegedly molested him when he was a boy, he said, so he panicked and walked away.īut outside of another store, he encountered her again, and this time he decided to follow her, he said. Rodriguez said in the interview that he had seen Sjodin at the mall some time before he abducted her. But by Rodriguez' own detailed account of strangling Sjodin while she fought back over a period of time, including stopping and starting, "his determination would have to be that much more to overcome her," Welner wrote. Rodriguez asserts that he 'never decided to take her life,' " Welner wrote. Unlike interviews with the defense's experts, these were recorded. Welner wrote that he interviewed Rodriguez on June 28, giving Rodriguez "the opportunity to advance his complete version of events." Seward interviewed Rodriguez in July. Michael Welner, head of the New York consulting firm, The Forensic Panel, and James Seward, also from the firm. The death row interview, submitted by prosecutors as part of the motion, was conducted Dr. government - and the burden of proof is on Rodriguez to make his case, Reisenauer said. In fact, it's no longer a criminal case, it's now a federal civil case - Rodriguez vs. It's a lawsuit by a prisoner claiming he's being wrongfully held. But under what is considered a death row prisoner's last appeal, Rodriguez, with a new set of attorneys - one in Philadelphia, one in Chicago and two in the Twin Cities - is making a habeas corpus appeal. Rodriguez's appeals have been denied all the way to the U.S. He is the only person sentenced to death in North Dakota in a century. Now 60, Rodriguez is on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind. Rodriguez was convicted in 2006 of the kidnapping leading to the death of Sjodin and sentenced to death in early 2007 by U.S. Attorney Keith Reisenauer said the two medical experts who interviewed Rodriguez concluded he is not mentally disabled, wasn't insane when he killed Sjodin and, by his own account, didn't kill her by accident as he has maintained for the past two years in his appeal. Sjodin was a 23-year-old University of North Dakota student at the time and he a convicted sex offender from Crookston, Minn. He is shown describing in his own words chilling details of his encounter with Sjodin in the parking lot of Columbia Mall on Nov. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Fargo released documents containing transcripts of the interviews as part of the government's reply to Rodriguez's last-stage appeal of his sentence. Alfonso Rodriguez was not insane when he deliberately killed Dru Sjodin 10 years ago after kidnapping her from a Grand Forks mall, according to the prosecution's medical experts, who interviewed him on death row this past summer. ![]()
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