In the summer of 1988, Audrey Cardenas, an ambitious 24-year-old female, had just graduated from Texas A&M University and was beginning an internship at the Belleville News-Democrat in Illinois. Her promising career was tragically cut short when she failed to show up for work on Monday, June 20, 1988. A week later, on June 26, her decomposing body was discovered by a custodian in a creek bed behind Belleville East High School.
Due to the state of her body, the exact cause of death could not be determined, though it was ruled a homicide. Investigators believed she may have been strangled or had her throat cut.
The investigation initially led to a mentally ill transient named Rodney Woidtke, who was 27 at the time. Woidtke was arrested after he crossed a police line at the crime scene. He subsequently confessed to the murder three times, though his confessions contained inaccuracies. For example, he claimed he hit Cardenas in the head with a pipe, but the medical examiner found no evidence of head injuries. He also incorrectly described the clothing she was wearing. Despite these inconsistencies and a lack of physical evidence, Woidtke was convicted of first-degree murder in a 1989 bench trial and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Woidtke, who was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, had been found unfit for trial for a year before medication was deemed to have restored his competency.
Years later, the case took a dramatic turn. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Carolyn Tuft, who had known Cardenas, began investigating the murder and uncovered evidence that pointed to another man: Dale Anderson. Anderson was already in prison, serving a life sentence for the brutal 1989 murders of a pregnant woman, Jolaine Lanman, and her three-year-old son, Kenneth. At that crime scene, a note was found, purportedly written by Jolaine Lanman, implicating three of Anderson's former coworkers in her murder and also claiming they killed Audrey Cardenas. Handwriting analysis later indicated Anderson himself wrote the note in an attempt to frame his ex-colleagues. It also emerged that Anderson had been in contact with Cardenas before her death and had attended her funeral. This new information, coupled with the fact that Woidtke's public defender had also briefly represented Anderson, creating a conflict of interest, led to an Illinois appeals court throwing out Woidtke's conviction in 2000. On March 30, 2001, after spending nearly 13 years in prison, Rodney Woidtke was retried and found not guilty. Although authorities and an FBI profiler have publicly stated their belief that Dale Anderson was a serial killer responsible for the deaths of Cardenas and several other women, he was never charged with Audrey Cardenas's murder. The case officially remains unsolved, a lingering mystery that began with a young woman's tragic death and led to the wrongful conviction of one man while another suspected serial killer remained imprisoned for other crimes.
