By  Seamus McGraw

August 29, 2006

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FARGO, N.D. (Crime Library) —  She was nude from the waist down when they found her, and her hands were tied behind her back with a rope and the remnants of a plastic bag, the medical examiner said, and though there were two deep stab wounds in her neck, there was, of course, the possibility that she had died, gasping, inside that plastic bag, of suffocation.

Regardless of the precise cause of her death, prosecutors insist, there is little question that Dru Sjodin, the 22-year-old co-ed abducted in November 2003 from a Grand Forks mall and found dead months later, died at the hands of Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a 53-year-old convicted sex offender from Minnesota, now on trial for his life in federal court in Fargo.

Prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty against Rodriguez, plan to wrap up their case against him today, a day after what may have been the most highly anticipated and hotly contested testimony in the case thus far.

Michael McGee, the Ramsey County medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dru's remains, has maintained that the evidence collected from her body and in the remote Crookston, Minn., ravine where she was found indicates that the young woman died perhaps hours after the ordeal began, not in North Dakota where she was abducted, but in Minnesota. In testimony Monday, McGee told jurors there also was evidence that Dru had been sexually assaulted and that the assault could have taken place as much as 36 hours before, or even after her death.

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