Taken

Dru Sjodin

Around 4 p.m. on November 22, 2003, twenty-two-year-old University of North Dakota student Dru Sjodin left her job at Victoria's Secret at Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, North Dakota to go home. She had just finished the morning shift and she was looking forward to getting to her dorm room to take nap before starting her second job later that evening at El Roco nightclub, where she worked as a waitress. At 5 p.m., after temporarily stopping at a store in the mall to purchase a purse, Dru headed out to the parking lot where her red, two-door 1994 Oldsmobile Cutlass was parked.

While walking to her car, Dru talked with her boyfriend, Chris Lang, on her cell phone for some ten minutes before their call was abruptly interrupted. Suddenly she said something like "no, no, no, OK, OK, OK" before the line went dead, according to the family web site.  Some published reports claim she said "Oh my God!" Later that evening at around 7:42 p.m., Chris received yet another phone call from Dru's cell phone but he heard only static and "tones, as if random buttons were being pushed," Bill Bickel reported on the family's website www.Drusvoice.com. The second call lasted less than a minute and was later found to have been made at a rest stop near Crookston, Minnesota.

Concerned for Dru's welfare, Chris called Meg Murphy, Dru's college roommate, to find out if she was there. Murphy hadn't heard from Dru and when she learned that she didn't show up for her shift at the nightclub that Saturday evening, she called the police at around 9:30 to inform them that she was missing. It became increasingly clear as the night wore on that something was terribly wrong.