The Deck - Deana Patnode (4 of Diamonds, Minnesota)

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Our card this week is Deana Patnode, the 4 of Diamonds from Minnesota. In 1982, Deana Patnode, a vibrant 23-year-old, disappeared from a Minnesota bar without a trace. Decades later, a deck of cold case playing cards would ultimately lead to some closure in her case — but leave everyone with far more questions than answers. If you know anything about the murder of Deana Patnode, or if you remember seeing her at the Buck Board bar on Concord Boulevard in South St. Paul on October 26th, 1982, please call the Wabasha County Sheriff’s Office at 651-565-3361 and ask for Chief Deputy Warren. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org Follow The Deck on social media and join Ashley’s community by texting [phone] to stay up to date on what's new!

Our card this week is Diana Patnode, the Four of Diamonds from Minnesota. In 1982, 23-year-old Diana disappeared without a trace from a bar in South St. Paul, Minnesota. Decades later, a deck of cards would lead to some closure for her family. But ultimately, leave everyone with more questions than answers. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. In February of 2006, Jim Warren was taking on one of his first assignments after being promoted to detective at the Wabshaw County Sheriff's Office in Minnesota. He was tasked with cleaning the evidence room. It's not hazing, it's just maybe though, it's rookie, you know, you can clean that up for us at your first job.

So I was cleaning it out in evidence and I slid this box out and it had a white cover and I don't know what it was so open the box. I tell you the truth, I don't know why I opened the box, I just did it and looked down and saw a skull, some bones and some clothes and I'm like, what the heck did I? What's going on here, you know? It took kind of caught me off guard. Detective Warren turned the box around and read Bones Case, scribbled across the back, meaning that the remains were unidentified. He continued with cleaning the evidence room, but something wasn't sitting

right with him. The thought of a person with a whole life and a family just held in a box in some evidence room, this is something Detective Warren couldn't get off his mind. So he decided to ask to work the case. Sheriff Rodney Barch remembers his interaction with the newly promoted detective well. Jim here brought the remains into me and said can I work on this? And my response was what would you possibly do different than what they did back then? And he said well there's some new technologies. Not only had DNA improved leaps and bounds since the Jando was found in 1989,

but Detective Warren reminded Sheriff Barge that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension or BCA was working on coming out with a brand new tool that other states had been using, a cold case playing card stack. Detective Warren got the green light from Sheriff Barge so he dove in head first, reviewing all of the information in the case file.

But like most other doe cases, there wasn't much for him to review. With the information he did have, though, this was the narrative he compiled. On the morning of May 20, 1989, a group of three men were out in rural Wabusha County hunting for mushrooms. For some reason, they chose to scour a heavily wooded steep slope that was the median between the north and southbound lanes of Highway 61, just a few miles south of Kellogg. It's a real heavy wooded area where nobody would go in there because you'd have to cross lanes of traffic, even for the mushroom hunters, to go down there because you'd have to cross lanes of traffic even for the

mushroom hunters to go down there and look. So I'm guessing that no one has been in that area before the mushroom hunters. The mushroom hunters are looking for signs of mushrooms from different types of trees that are dead so hard to say why they even went and looked there when there's so many other places to look but we can't say. It was there that the mushroom hunters found something that stopped them in their tracks. About 60 feet away from the southbound lanes wrapped around the trunk of a tree in kind of a U shape, was what appeared to be a human skeleton. The hunters immediately contacted authorities who confirmed that the remains were human.

We had a full skull, full of both shoulder blades rib cages, both the femurs, so three-three-quarters of it was recovered. It was immediately clear that the remains had been there for a while. The bones were clean like they didn't have any tissue on them, and some had vegetation growing over them. It was also obvious right away that it wasn't by accident that the body ended up in this median, about 60 feet away from the roadway. It felt like it had been carefully placed there. Once the corner was called to the scene and collected the remains,

investigators continued searching the area for anything else that might give them a clue as to who this person was or what happened to them. I know that they were out there with metal detectors looking for possible jewelry or any type of fillings that might have shown up that might have come out of the from the jaw and they didn't find anything else other than skeletons that we ended up recovering and then some clothes. The clothes found were an off-white sweater with a collar covered in white buttons and off-white striped knee-high socks.

Once the corner examined the bones, he concluded that they belonged to a young woman, 20 to 30 years old, standing around 5 feet, 1 inches to 5 feet, 5 inches tall. And because of the bleaching of the bones and the fact that vegetation had grown over them, the coroner estimated that they had been there, hiding on that median for about five years. Sheriff Barch remembers there was evidence of blunt force trauma to the skull, but the coroner couldn't rule that as the cause of death.

Actually, he wasn't able to rule any cause of death because he had so little to work with, which also meant that he couldn't rule a manor of death, like homicide, accident, or natural causes. But there was something he could tell from the skeleton. The woman had been attacked, or maybe in some kind of accident, either at the time of her death or shortly before she died. She had a severe fracture of the upper right arm and a hip injury, both of which appeared to be untreated. Again, the coroner couldn't determine if those injuries were something she received as she was killed, like if she had been beaten or hit by a car, or if they

were something suffered before her death that just went untreated. Authorities got to work right away trying to figure out who she was. They compared the remains with missing person's reports from all over the state, but nothing was matching up. They even tried expanding their search, to North and South Dakota, even Wisconsin and Iowa, but still, there was no one reported missing who matched their Jane Doe. The only resource investigators had at their fingertips was the local media. The Sheriff's Office put out a sketch done by an artist of what the woman may have looked like in life hoping to jog someone's memory.

When nothing really came of that, investigators then sent the school off to state authorities to have a clay composite made, which would be a bit more life like than the artist's rendering. Once completed, a photo of the clay composite was shared with the public. I'll put a photo of it in the blog post for this episode of the DeckPodcast.com.

But even with the more realistic rendering of what the woman probably looked like, still, no one was coming forward saying that they recognized her. While they would give you a pretty realistic look, you'd have to use your imagination a little bit to put that clay structure to a real face. And I think that was some of the problems back then. Although investigators didn't know who this woman was, what caused her death or even if there was foul play involved, they wanted to cover all of their bases. So they began questioning people.

The BC, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for the State of Minnesota, and our investigator, and then the sheriff investigated these three mushroom hunters and did backgrounds, and to make sure that he is a slugit or do we need to look into it. Investigators determined that the hunters weren't suspicious and didn't have any more information to offer. They truly just stumbled upon the woman's body and there was nothing more to it. Police also questioned some people who'd been working on Highway 61 and others who'd worked on the nearby railroad.

But they didn't know anything either. After that, the case just went cold. For 17 years, this woman sat in a box on a shelf, waiting for the right person to come along. Detective Warren knew he was that person and he was ready to spring into action. I immediately jumped to this new technology of maybe sending in the skull out because I looked at the clay composites and said, well, the technology is a lot better today than it was, so that's the first step I did.

Warren did some digging and found that Louisiana State University was renowned for the work their anthropology unit was doing, so he got in contact with them to see what options he had. They said that they could make a realistic computer-enhanced clay facial reconstruction, and all they would need to do that was the skull. So Detective Warren sent it off to be examined. While he was waiting for the facial reconstruction results, he also looked into other ways of figuring out the woman's identity, including getting her on the new Cold Case playing cards deck

that the BCA was putting together. It proved to be a bit of an uphill battle, though, because Wabusha County already had a face on the deck, Donna Ingersol, who we actually did an episode on last year. You see, most of these decks aren't made up of just one department's cold cases. It's usually a statewide thing in different agencies will submit the cases that they need help with most.

So for a county inhabited by a fraction of a percent of the state's population, it seemed like a stretch for them to get two of the 52 cases featured. But Detective Warren was persistent and he convinced the BCA to put the Wabashaw County Jango on a card. He was hoping to have the new and improved facial reconstruction back from LSU before the cards were printed, but the turnaround time was too tight.

They ended up having no other choice but to put the old, original, clay reconstruction on the card instead. In 2008, the playing cards were finally released. They were handed out to 515 police departments and 75 jails. And according to Pioneer Press, 10,000 decks were distributed to inmates at state prisons. In addition to all of that, PDFs of the cards were posted online on the Minnesota Department of Public Safety's website, so anyone could see the cases featured. To everyone's surprise, soon after their release, the playing cards generated a promising tip. Just a few weeks after the launch, a man was surfing the internet when he stumbled across

the playing cards on the department's website. And that's when he saw the Four of Diamonds, the Wabusha County Jane Doe. Here's a snippet from a press conference held by the BCA and the Department of Corrections. He recognized the photo that was on the card as appearing to be similar to a neighbor up here as when he was growing up. This neighbor disappeared when he was about 10 years old.

He relied on stories from his own family to kind of piece a few things together and he called in with this tip. The neighbor he named was Deanna Patnode from Invergrove Heights, Minnesota, which is a southern suburb of St. Paul. BCA assistant superintendent Dave Birga said one of their agents, quote, took this thing and ran with it. End quote In December of 2008, investigators were able to track down a woman, named Chloe Hughesby, Diana's older sister.

Chloe confirmed what the neighbor said that her sister, Diana, was missing. They'd never filed the missing persons report, but they hadn't seen or heard from her since the early 80s. There were records that the family had called police to say that they hadn't seen Diana, but they never filed an official report, which is why it was so hard to identify her remains. I know our family cared, and I don't know, they're still family around so. But I have a hard time wrapping my head around if you called the police one time and why wouldn't you follow up. And maybe they said, we'll call back if she don't show up in two days.

And that was just, that was it. That she went on vacation and she never came back. As frustrating as it is, Detective Warren told us this isn't an uncommon thing to see in cases from decades ago. Things back then happened like that where sometimes maybe the family didn't have trust in law enforcement. Maybe they called them and said they were good and nothing ever was reported. I can't say that for a fact. I can't blame anybody or point fingers.

But to me by reading what I read, it sounds like maybe they didn't think it was, she'd be found or she was just a common to have her leave for a day or two and that I don't know about them just speculating. But a lot of times that happens and she was never seen again and there was never ever a missing person's report made on her. And again, the times have changed and we're not talking about a 12 year old. Talking about an adult and a lot of times back then they'd say, well, she's an adult, she can go where she wants. And missing persons were taken differently than they are today.

Reported or not, Deanna's family had felt the whole that her absence left in their family. Chloe said she was dumbfounded and amazed when she got a call that her sister had possibly been found. It renewed a hope that she and her family had let go of long, long ago. Now she was out of state by then, living in Iowa, but she was able to provide DNA for comparison. It's worth noting that in the press conference held by the BCA and the DOC, Chloe pronounced her sister's name as Dina, and unfortunately we were unable to get a hold of her for an interview, so for consistency's sake, we're pronouncing her name Diana,

which is how detectives pronounce it. Anyways, even before the results of the test came back, investigators were pretty convinced that Diana was indeed their Jane Doe. Remember how I said that police initially thought the woman had been hit by a car or in some kind of accident because she had some pretty severe injuries. Well, investigators learned that Diana had gotten badly hurt just a few months before she vanished. She jumped out of a back of a pickup and knowing those why she jumped, but she jumped out of a moving vehicle on a gravel road. And that caused a severe upper right arm fracture and also an injury to her right hip.

Deanna's injuries perfectly matched up with what the coroner back in 1989 concluded from the remains. Just a few weeks after Chloe gave her DNA, everyone's suspicions were confirmed. The test concluded, beyond all medical certainty, that the remains were Deanna Patinote. As part of that process, another autopsy was completed, and this time, drawing

from his findings and the new information that they'd learned, the medical examiner ruled that Deanna's manner of death was homicide. During the press conference held by the BCA and the DOC, Chloe described the mixed emotions that came with the DNA match. Grief, for her sister's death, but at the same time, relief for finally having answers after all of these years. She said, quote, We just never thought that we'd hear anything, and this is just phenomenal. We're so thankful that she got to be one of the playing cards because she wouldn't

be identified. I know that. I mean I didn't give up. I always expected her to walk through the door too, but no. It's Deanna." Investigators were also glad to finally have a name for their Jane Doe and a level of closure for Deanna's family. But this was just the beginning of a brand- new investigation. How did she end up there and who killed her? There was a problem.

Because she was never reported missing, that meant there wasn't another investigative file out there that Detective Warren could piece together with his own. He'd have to start from scratch, tracking the moments of someone who went missing 27 years before, which proved to be difficult because that meant that they'd have to rely on the memories of her friends and family from nearly three decades ago to piece together a timeline of her last known movements. Based on everyone's recollection, the last time Diana was seen was on October 26, 1982. She was out for a night with friends at the Buckboard Bar on Concord Boulevard in South St. Paul, which is roughly 80 miles away from where she was found in Wabashaw County.

Friends who were with her at the bar that night recalled that at some point, they saw her leaving with someone else. Now, at first, it was reported that she was seeing leaving with a friend, but later that was changed to her seeing leaving with an unknown man. Now, because this happened nearly 30 years prior, the friends couldn't recall what the man even looked like. Like, no guess at height, build hair color age, none of that.

Which I mean, that was at least something, because it probably meant this guy wasn't someone her friend knew, so he likely wasn't a close friend of Deanna's, and probably wasn't someone who went to that bar a lot. The friends also weren't able to provide a vehicle description, but it's not super clear if they even saw her get into a car with this mystery man at all. I mean, it's very possible that she just walked out of the bar with the man and then they went their separate ways. South St. Paul is only a few miles from Invergrove Heights, so maybe she tried to walk home and got abducted on the way. Or maybe she tried to hitchhike, which investigators

learned she wasn't against doing. If that was the case, maybe she got picked up by a shady character along the way. Regardless, it seemed like the last person who saw Deanna would have been this man that she was seen leaving with. It would have been great to track him down, but with literally no physical description to go from, this task was impossible. So they had to keep moving in directions that actually let them press forward. Detectives learned more about Diana, and they confirmed that she had no ties whatsoever to the Wabusha County area where she was found.

Which meant it was unlikely that she just happened to be in that area and ran into someone. She was taken there. Detectives continued trying to track down people who may have been with or seen Dianna the night she disappeared from the Buckboard bar, but the investigation eventually came to a screeching halt. And that's where things were when our reporting team went to Minnesota in September to interview Warren, who is now the chief deputy at the Sheriff's Office. But then, in January of this year, literally after this episode was written, our reporter got a call from Warren.

He said that he was going through the case file again when he found something interesting that he hadn't come across before. Right around the time detectives were diving deep into Diana's life in 2009, the Sheriff's Office got a call from someone that we've been asked to not identify. And this person said that their relative lived in the same neighborhood as Diana when she disappeared. Who's the relative they're referring to? Donald Blum That name might ring a bell for some of you because in 2000, Blum was arrested for the

1999 kidnapping and murder of 19-year-old Katie Poyer in Northeastern Minnesota. He abducted her while she was working the night shift alone at a convenience store, and her remains were found on his property a few weeks later. In addition to the Poyer murder, Blum was involved in five other cases of kidnapping and or sexual assault. From what Warren can tell, back then, the sheriff wrote to him in the out-of-state prison where he was serving his time. Blum never responded, though, and investigators had nothing on him other than that statement

from the relative, so they kind of just left it alone and it faded from everyone's memory. But with where they were now, Chief Deputy Warren felt like every dead end was worth re-examining. So he decided to do some digging. He found that Blum was no longer being held in that out-of-state prison, which was in Pennsylvania. He had recently been moved to a prison right there in Minnesota, which meant it'd be much more feasible to go in person and talk with it. Chief Deputy Warren also discovered that Blum might have been familiar with Highway 61 where Deanna's body was found, so he was having a good feeling about this.

After all of these years, maybe the answer was right in front of them all along. So he jumped right into action, wanting to interview him sooner rather than later. We actually held off on releasing this episode so we could let you all know how that interview went. But of course it wasn't that easy. That first call from Warren came to us on January 3rd. He said that he planned to talk with Blum in just a couple of weeks, but then we got another call on January 10th. Literal days before Warren planned to meet with him, Blum died in prison. A DOC spokesperson said that his death was expected and due to illness. Now when I heard the news of Blum's death, my jaw dropped. And I can only imagine how Chief Deputy Warren was feeling, having been that close to speaking

with one of the only potential persons of interest in a decade's old case, only for him to die days before he was going to speak with him. It's unbelievable. This is the prime example, though, of everything the deck is about. Dusting off these old cases, getting new eyes and ears on them while we can because time is precious. We're losing witnesses, persons of interest, people with information every single day, and it's important that we talk about these cases now while we still have time. Now though Blum is dead, Warren says he's not letting the lead die with him.

There are other avenues that he'll be chasing down in the near future, such as interviewing those who knew Blum in hopes of getting answers. Whether it's this lead that solves the case, or one that comes years down the road, Warren told our reporting team that he's hoping this case won't be cold for much longer. And he's glad that he picked up that cardboard box all those years ago. You ask me why I wanted to work on it. Well, nothing's gonna get solved

unless you don't work on it, right? So you gotta imagine when you go to work on something and you got, let's say, other people in your profession and even outside people saying, well, what do you use some guru? I'm like, no, it's not gonna get solved unless you work on. And then it turns out, well, you he is some guru, I'm like, no, it's not going to get solved unless you work on. And then it turns out, well, you got lucky. Yeah, we did get lucky, but guess what? We got lucky because we worked on it. I'm an optimist. And anything could bust at any

time if you just work on it, right? So I'm not feeling like confident. I'm very hopeful that every swing we take it connects to something and it won't connect with nothing if we don't try and go up there and find out, right? So I guess I'm instead of confident. I'm just hopeful that it's going to get solved, not just because of this tip, but because of, I don't know, continuing to work on it. We asked Chief Deputy Warren and Sheriff Barge what they think happened to Deanna back in 1982. Well, no doubt we think she got into a vehicle with someone.

There is no idea or no evidence to conclude that there was any type of a assault on her sexually or not, but we assume that an altercation occurred. Somewhere there or on the way down here on Highway 61 where she ended up in our county, but outside of that, we just have no idea how to put it together. But she could have had altercation with somebody. She could have been, for all we know, she could have been stabbed.

We know she wasn't shot. She could have been, for all we know, she could have been stabbed. We know she wasn't shot. She could have been strangled. She could have hit her head on a curb and died, maybe intoxicated and the person freaked out, but I had so long ways to bring a body. Something tells me that the person that did this knew the area of Highway 61 well enough to come down here and possibly leave her on the way

to maybe a different state. Sheriff Bart said the fact that the two crime scenes are nearly 80 miles apart has complicated the investigation. I think one of the issues here is location that while her body was placed here in the woods, we don't think the crime happened here. I think the crime happened someplace else and then she was placed here either by a trucker or somebody that was just driving needed to drive through this area, knew that area. So there wasn't a lot of tips that came in.

I think that was probably location was more than anything in regards to two tips. Although Diana's loved ones have gotten the closure of finding her and knowing she's not missing anymore, Sheriff Barch says he hopes this isn't the only closure they get. First and foremost, we've been thinking about the Pat and Old family and then her close friends as well to put some closure on it for them because I know this isn't closed for them. I know that they think about it every day in regards to what happened to her. I know they're grateful that she was identified

so that they could put her remains to rest. But the other part of this would be so concerning for them as it would any of us, if her family members had something like this happened to them and it was never determined how or who did it because that closure always or sometimes comes with somebody being held accountable for their actions and we're certainly hopeful and hoping for that outcome in this case.

Cheap Deputy Warren said that he knows people out there have the answers he's looking for, and he hopes that those people are listening to this podcast. He said no bit of information is too small because it could be the missing piece of the puzzle. Just anything they knew about that evening, anything they knew if they had a description of a vehicle that she would have gotten in or the guy that she was with. If they were in the bar and didn't see her but they knew for their friends that they were with that evening that we could have other people to talk to, so just anything about that night and anything about that bar, including if they knew of people that went into that bar that they might question from time to time in regards to who

they were, if they felt uneasy about this person being in the bar or if he looked at females in a different way, anything like that could be very helpful today. If you know anything about the murder of Deanna Patnode, or if you were at the Buckford Bar on Concord Boulevard in South St. Paul, October 26, 1982, and you remember seeing Deanna Patnode, or if you were at the Buckford Bar on Concord Boulevard in South St. Paul, on October 26, 1982, and you remember seeing Deanna that night. Please call the Wabashaw County Sheriff's Office at 651-565-3361 and ask for Chief Deputy Warren. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis to learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

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