Cold Case Files - Office Politics

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

In 1989, 38-year-old Sharon Bloom disappears. A week later, her body is discovered. In the initial investigation, police have a suspect: a jealous coworker with a motive and blood evidence in his home, but investigators struggle to make the case stick. Check out our great sponsors! SuperBeets Heart Chews: Get FREE Shipping and Returns, a 90-day money-back guarantee, and a free THIRTY DAY supply with your first purchase at SuperBeets.com/coldcase  Ready to awaken your inner detective? Download June’s Journey free today on the Apple App Store or Google Play! LifeLock: Join now and save up to 25% off your first year at LifeLock.com/coldcase  Download the free LendingTree app NOW to get started and see why thousands of people turn to LendingTree every day for smarter, easier finances! Get a quote today at Progressive.com - It’s one small step you can do today, that could make a big impact on your budget tomorrow. 

Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production, available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One. An A&E original podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Use your best judgment. In 1989, 3M Worldwide was the largest employer in the state of Minnesota. One employee, 38-year-old Sharon Bloom, was working hard to make her way up the corporate ladder. After a promotion, it became clear that it wasn't only Sharon's superiors that had noticed her work. And she became the victim of office pranks that escalated into harassment. Personal items like her keys or glasses would go missing, only to show up a few days later.

Some presentations and documents that Sharon was working on were taken from her desk, and a pot of coffee was even dumped onto her chair. This is Sharon's boyfriend, David Kofod. One day she came home and was in tears, and her reaction was, what could I have done to somebody that could cause them to hate me so much? On November 2nd, after her commute from her suburban home in Woodbury, she arrived at the office around 7.30 a.m. She worked until around noon and then was seen with her coat on, likely going to get lunch.

That afternoon, none of the calls to her cubicle were answered, and Sharon didn't make it home for dinner. Her body was found a week later. Sharon had been murdered. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. When Sharon didn't get home at the usual time, her boyfriend David started to worry. So at about 7, I started to call her friends. There was only two places I thought that she might have gone to, and she wasn't in either. Sharon hadn't been

missing long enough for the police to start an investigation, so David called Sharon's company and asked the night shift workers if they could take a look in the employee's parking lot. And at 11 approximately, I got a call back. They told me her car was still in the parking lot.

I found that you can get really no information from anybody. You can't call the highway patrol. You can't call hospitals. You can't call anyone. He waited up all night by the phone, hoping to get a call from Sharon. But the phone didn't ring. In the morning, David filed a missing persons report with the Woodbury Police Department and reported that her car was still in the company's parking lot. The case was signed to investigator David Hines. For her to leave that behind, that was the

first strong indication, from my perspective anyway, that there was something else involved here. Investigator Hines checked with the ticket agents at bus and train stations, and also at the airport. He also spoke with car rental agencies, but none of them had any record of Sharon Bloom. We were quickly getting to the idea that she had definitely disappeared from the workplace. It didn't take us very long to kind of zero in on the fact that we don't think she was ever back at work

after the lunch hour. Hines talked with Sharon's co-workers and learned about all the harassing pranks that Sharon had been a victim of. There was quite a series of incidents and it was quite clear that this was not just the usual workplace prank kind of thing. This was somebody who was definitely zeroing in on her and harassing her with a purpose. Hines discovered that all of Sharon's co-workers had come back from lunch and worked through the afternoon. Except for one man, named Stephen Zanter.

He offered us an alibi right away, but it was an alibi that wasn't alibying him. It was an alibi that made no sense, in fact. Zanter told the investigator that he had left the office around 11 a.m. and ate lunch at a fast food restaurant. After that, Zanter said he had car trouble and went home for the rest of the day. Hines felt like his story was a little too convenient. He didn't see anybody that he knew. There was nobody that he knew of that could verify any of it. It was really a accounted for his time,

but it was in a way that he almost went out of his way to let us know that no one could verify this. Because of his questionable story, Hines looked further into the working relationship between Sharon and Zanter. Hines discovered the two of them had been up for the same promotion, and Sharon had been the one who got it. We have a guy who's a problem.

We have a guy who others think could be capable of harassment. He's given us an alibi that is just really, you know, lame. Eight days into the investigation, Hines called the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the state's premier investigation agency, for reinforcements on the case. Agent Ray DiPrima reviewed the case file provided by Hines and agreed that Zantra's behavior was suspicious.

This is Agent DiPrima. There were just gaps in his story, and so we wanted to really zero in on that and nail him down because he had left 3M about the same time as Sharon Bloom, and no one had seen him. The investigators questioned Sharon's co-workers about Zander's office behavior. Steve was always the type of guy that felt that he was smarter. He always felt that he could do a job better. But yet, we found out that he was totally isolated at 3M,

and that everyone thought of him as an incompetent. Hines and DiPrima visited Zanter at his home to give him a chance to better explain his story. Zanter talked a lot, but didn't provide any new information. And he states that his car breaks down, and that some good Samaritan came along and opened the hood, jumped his car, and that he went home. In order to verify Zantor's story, Investigator Hines asked for information about the person who jumped the car,

a possible alibi. And we said, well, what guy? And he said, I don't even know what he looks like. He was a guy, though. He was a man. He said, I think so. Okay. What kind of car did he have?

I don't know. And we told him, you know, your alibi, this is a bad alibi. An alibi like that kind of says to us that you're trying to hide something. Three hours into the interview with Zanter, Agent DiPrima received some news about the case. And as we're conducting the interview, my pager went off, and I was informed by my supervisor that Sharon Bloom's body had been found in a cornfield. Fifty miles south of the Twin Cities, near Northfield, David Sutter had just started harvesting the corn in his field. He hadn't been to that particular area of his farm for over a week.

The body was about 20 feet from the dirt road north of the field. Sutter called the Rice County Sheriff's Department immediately. Sergeant Barry Cummins was assigned the case. She obviously had trauma, and beyond that, there was no sign of any struggle. It had looked as if she had just been placed there. Her body was naked from the waist down, which suggested that Sharon had been sexually assaulted.

Seeing someone that way, partially clad, bra pushed up, it had appeared she had been raped. Sharon's body was taken to the St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center for the autopsy. Biological samples were collected from her body. Human hair had also been found at the dump site that didn't belong to Sharon. Agent DiPrima shared the news to the man he suspected might have killed her, Stephen Zanter. He fell to pieces. He just sort of dropped.

We were in his family room, and he became catatonic. He started crying, became almost convulsive and he was on the floor. He went all the way around his family room on his knees. Agent Hines, who was also present, found Dancer's behavior unusual. Then he got up and walked into the living room. His wife kind of was at his side helping him along, and he sat in one of these big wicker rocking chair things that you can kind of put your whole body in.

He sat in there, closed his eyes, pulled his legs up to him in the fetal position and rocked back and forth on this thing and just moaned. The investigators were unsure of what to make of Xantra's reaction. They hoped that the biological evidence from the autopsy would help provide some answers. But the following day, the coroner informed detectives that the biological samples they thought might be semen were not.

And he told us, what I thought was seminal fluid was not. It was premenstrual discharge. Without physical evidence, the investigators weren't sure how to connect Xanter to Sharon's murder. And the case went cold. Two years later, Agent DiPrima decided to reopen the case. My personal theory on this case is that he was so enraged that he didn't get that promotion, and that this, what a woman that he perceived as below him, that she got it, that that caused him to act. This time, DiPrima took a different approach to his investigation.

He decided to focus on Zanter's wife, Barbara, who worked as an elementary school teacher. This is Jo Sorensen, one of Barbara's co-workers. Barbara and I were good friends. Jo remembered a meeting at the school where the conversation went from school-related topics to more personal topics. At that meeting, she brought up the fact that she wanted to know if anyone knew how to get blood out of their new carpeting because they just moved into this new house and Steven had an accident or something and he got blood all over and she wanted to know if we knew how to remove it.

According to Barbara, the blood trail went across her new carpet, up the stairs, and into the bathroom on the second floor. She didn't give a lot of detail about the way it looked except she did use the word splattered. Sorensen made a note in her date planner to look up tips on removing blood. The date of that entry was November 3rd, 1989, the day after Sharon Bloom had disappeared. Here's Agent DiPrima again. I'm thinking that we're very, very close

because if what they're saying is true, Sharon Bloom has been killed in that house. In order to verify Joe Sorensen's story, he asked if she and other co-workers of Barbara's would be willing to tape conversations with her. He asked if we would be willing to tape conversations with her. He asked if we would be willing to tape conversations with Barbara.

Barbara's co-workers didn't like the idea of betraying their friend. But they liked the idea of a murderer roaming free in their neighborhoods even less. Here's Agent DiPrima again. They felt very guilty that they hadn't come forward because, you know, they had... This had passed their mind back in 1989, that they should call the police, but they didn't. And they sat on this, and so, you know, they were feeling sick

that they hadn't called the police. What we really felt is we were worried for Barb, because if Steve was capable of doing something like this once, what if he could do it again? That was Joe Sorensen, who arranged a get-together at Barbara's house with a few co-workers. Everyone but Barbara knew the conversation was being recorded. Here's some of the audio from the teacher's get-together. You know, you've shared a lot of stuff with with us at the time, all of this chaos. And I don't know, do they know all of that?

What kind of things? Well, tell me what you're thinking of. Well, I think the one thing, and I brought it up a little bit when we went for our walk, was the cough and the blood that you found in the house. It was real close to the time when Sharon little disappeared. Yeah, and that bothered me too. And I questioned Steve about it a couple times. And he told me that what happened was he hit me.

I frustrated trying to work on the car. And he just lost it. Whacked his hand down, and he cut his wrist. And he didn't, you know, he wasn't thinking clearly. He ran up in the house, and he went upstairs, because that's where we keep our medical supplies, so he could bandage it up. And he said, when I reached for the railing,

I think I must have felt faint, and I reached for the railing, and that's why the blood is at the top of the stairs. We didn't tell the police about all that. Joe believed that Barbara was in denial about the situation, because she didn't want to believe her husband was capable of murder. I guess I really think that she wanted so much to believe him and to believe in their life that she was trying to convince herself. It was that very definitive, he didn't do this, and they're out to get us. Here's some more audio from the tape. Why didn't you tell the police about the gun? Because I just didn't, I didn't want to give them any more to dig at us with.

The conversation at the table provided enough probable cause for a search warrant. On March 4, 1992, the investigative team searched the Zantres' house. Here's Agent DiPrima again. We go in this time with our forensic lab, and we take the banister apart. We take up the carpet, and we bring the luminol. We get this great fluorescence, and we knew that we had blood. The luminol reacting to what was likely blood was a good evidence find. But they found something in the basement that directly connected Zanter to Sharon Bloom.

This is Sergeant Cummins again. The other search teams in the basement did locate a set of keys that were later identified as keys belonging to Sharon Bloom. Agent DiPrima left the house feeling like he had finally solved the case. As we left that day, I felt the case was solved. Got the blood. We'd got the keys. As it turned out, it was only the beginning. On October 23, 1992, a grand jury indicted Stephen Zanter on a charge of murder. Three years later, however, the case had still not gone to trial. Here's Agent DiPrima.

His defense attorney submitted a motion to suppress the evidence, especially the keys. It went to the Minnesota Supreme Court, and they threw the keys out, claiming that we had overstepped our bounds, that we didn't have probable cause to seize the keys, that we only had probable cause to seize the blood. Without the keys, the prosecution had no direct link between the blood found on the carpet and Sharon Bloom. Here's Sergeant Cummins. Basically, at that point in time, DNA was not as sophisticated as it is now. The blood evidence

in the carpet had been diluted with a number of chemicals to clean the carpet, and they could say it was consistent with, but they couldn't say that it was specifically Sharon Bloom's blood. Unwilling to risk a possible acquittal, Rice County's prosecutor reluctantly dropped the charges. Sharon's boyfriend, David, had serious doubts about the case. In my mind, it was never going to be carried to conclusion. That might have been the conclusion. We know who did it, and we know where he lives, and we know how he did it, and we know why he did it. And that's as far as it could ever go.

By 1999, forensic technology had significantly advanced. Here's Anne-Marie Gross, a forensic scientist at the Minnesota Bureau of Apprehension. Well, we're able to do more types of samples. For example, we do cigarette butts and envelope flaps and sweat. So it kind of has opened the door to really the types of evidence that we receive. Gross was asked to look at the section of carpet pulled from Stephen Zantra's home. Even though cleaning products used on the carpet had degraded the bloodstains, she was still able to create a genetic profile.

The blood then on the carpeting matched the DNA profile from the blood of the victim. In addition to the blood evidence, a hair found at the body dump site was linked through DNA to samples provided by Stephen Zanter. Faced with the physical evidence, Zanter confessed to the crime in April of 2003 and was sentenced to 25 years at Minnesota's Stillwater Penitentiary. For Sharon Bloom's family and friends, the sentence came with mixed emotions. I've never met someone without a conscience until I met Mr. Zant. And I've been brought up to not believe in revenge and to believe in justice.

And if this was the justice, then I will have to accept it. It doesn't mean that I sometimes feel it still falls short. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Delamater. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz and Ted Butler. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions

and is hosted by Bill Curtis. You can find me, at Brooke Giddings on Twitter, and at Brooke the Podcaster on Instagram. I'm also active in the Facebook group, Podcast for Justice. Check out more cold case files at AETV.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at AETV.com slash realcrime.