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Criminal justice forensics professor teaches Jeanie Childs murder case: "You have to look at everything"
It's been 32 years since the brutal murder of Jeanie Childs in Minneapolis. The case went unsolved for decades until DNA and new technology led cold case investigators to her killer.
The crime is the subject of "A WCCO Original: Footprint to Murder," and it's a case that also caught the attention of college professor Lisa Andrews, who teaches forensics in criminal justice. Senior investigative reporter Jennifer Mayerle uncovered why this case is a good study for students.
Andrews is a hands-on professor in forensic exploration at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota, teaching students about evidence collection and preservation. Part of that is introducing students to real cases, like Childs' 1993 murder.
"If you can give them something local, then they go, 'local cops worked on this, local cops solved this,' then that's what I try and do and show them how it starts from scene all the way to courtroom," Andrews said.
Jerry Westrom's bloody footprint from the 1993 crime scene, and Jeanie Childs.
WCCO
When investigators arrested hockey dad Jerry Westrom in her killing decades later, Andrews took notice. She was familiar with the case from her 25 years working as a death investigator with metro medical examiners' offices.
"The way they're able to solve these with DNA is because some cop or some crime scene person packaged that evidence so well all those years ago that it didn't deteriorate. So that's kind of was my interest initially," she said. "But we also have this footprint, which is very rare. So I teach that in my class, so I'm like, 'here's a real-life case that we'll probably never see again like this,' and how our footprints are just as unique as our fingerprints."
In "Footprint to Murder," WCCO takes viewers through the case, talking to investigators who uploaded unknown DNA from the crime scene to a genealogy website. A hit led them to Westrom, whom they followed to a hockey game and fished a napkin he wiped his mouth with out of a garbage can to get his DNA.
Investigators arrested Westrom in 2019 and were able to match his footprint to a bare, bloody footprint at the crime scene.
"It's good for me for printing and for DNA, but it's also important because the convicted killer is local, and it's good for us to know this could be somebody that's nearby you," she said. "And going back to Jeanie, the victim herself, I think it's good to show that cops don't give up on these cases."
She encourages students to go to court to watch a case in person. Some did watch testimony in Westrom's murder trial. In class, Andrews says she routinely uses WCCO's interview with jury foreperson Derek Fradenburg following the guilty verdict. He says it all boiled down to Westrom's police interview, the DNA and the bloody footprint.
Jerry Westrom during his murder trial in 2022.
WCCO
"[Westrom] said he wasn't there, his DNA proves that he was there. His footprint puts him there at the time of the murder," Fradenburgh said.
"Here he is telling exactly what it took for them to come to that decision," Andrews said. "That gives them a little light bulb, right? Like, OK, if I'm a crime scene person, I collected this evidence, now I'm seeing the result of this."
And the ability to collect evidence meant everything in Childs' case.
"This floor is almost kind of a perfect ... what if she had had carpet? What if there hadn't been this floor?" she said. "I mean, this is like a perfect setting point for it: nice, hard, firm, smooth."
She hopes her class opens students' minds.
"You have to look at everything. Everything is not always how it appears to you at first, so you need to be that person and make those calls as to which way you're going to go," she said. "And I hope this opens their mind to that."
Andrews also teaches at Hennepin Tech. She says those students are new officers learning skills like booking, fingerprinting and crime scene investigation.
You can watch the full documentary, "A WCCO Original: Footprint to Murder," here.
