Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (12 page)

Investigators were sent to examine the supposed scene of the crime, several days and several snows later, hoping to find some evidence of what had transpired. As the team scoured the area, one of the investigators noticed a reddish spot in the snow. Not knowing for sure but assuming it was blood, the team decided to do an excavation of the snowy area, just as they would if exhuming a body from a grave. After excavating down several inches, the investigators found a layer of blood, lots of blood, in a large swath, permeating underneath the snow. In order to collect the bloody snow evidence for analysis, ingenious investigators used foam cups and coffee filters as their forensic collection kits. The bloody snow was scooped up and its contents were put into a coffee filter set on top of a cup, thus filtering out the liquid as it melted and separating the blood from the snow. The blood that collected on the filter was eventually sent to the lab for DNA analysis. After the area was excavated and all of the blood revealed, the investigators then called in the medical examiner, who determined that even without a body, the amount of blood lost was sufficient enough to rule that a homicide had taken place. Erik Schrieffer was no longer thought to be missing; he was now presumed to have been murdered, and Joseph Wehmanen probably knew something about it.

Joseph Wehmanen was arrested on suspicion of murder, and his truck was seized and sent to the lab for analysis. Investigators were initially thrilled to collect the truck for the laboratory investigators, hoping that it might contain blood evidence. Earlier in the week, investigators had been called to a car wash where lots of blood was found being washed down one of the drains. Thinking their suspect might have taken his truck there to clean it up, they rushed to the location, but the blood they found was animal. It was hunting season, and animal blood would be found in many trucks in Duluth. Someone must have pulled into the car wash to wash out a fresh kill. Wehmanen, of course, had nothing to say about anything. Unfortunately, after three months of examination by the lab, neither did his truck. The lab couldn’t find a trace of anything human or from a human—blood, hair, skin, clothing fibers, nothing. With Wehmanen still not talking and with no tangible evidence against him, investigators were desperate. One theory was that Wehmanen might have disposed of Schrieffer’s body via an ice hole out at Joseph’s friend’s ice-fishing house (in Minnesota, icehouses are considered dwellings akin to mobile homes), but unfortunately the investigators did not even have enough evidence to get a search warrant for the fishing house. They could not hold Wehmanen indefinitely, and prosecutors would not prosecute him without something more than just conjecture to pin on him. Could Wehmanen be innocent?

The icehouse where police searched for Erik Schrieffer.
COPYRIGHT © BY DULUTH POLICE DEPARTMENT, MINNESOTA

With nowhere else to turn, the investigators decided to take a look at Wehmanen’s truck themselves. They culled the truck, top to bottom, inside and out, and just like the lab initially found nothing. They crawled into the back of the truck, through the camper top, searching every crack and crevice. Still nothing. Then one of the investigators happened to look behind a piece of the camper top frame that supported the roof. And there it was: blood that had been splashed up behind the aluminum frame of the camper top, as if someone had sprayed a hose trying to clean something up. Still, it wasn’t a tremendous amount of evidence.

The investigators decided, without even testing the blood to see whose it was (or whether it was even human), to inform Wehmanen’s lawyer of what they had discovered and what their next move would be—to prosecute his client for murder. The lawyer and Wehmanen immediately decided to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Without a body or a lot of evidence, the prosecutor had little choice. As part of the plea deal, Wehmanen agreed to tell the investigators what had happened, at least his version of events, as well as where Schrieffer’s body was, if he knew. Wehmanen was ushered to the St. Louis County district attorney’s office right away, where he immediately began his testimony, even before the plea had been officially entered into the system.

The investigators interviewed Wehmanen at length about the events that unfolded on that night in January. Joseph Wehmanen was first read his rights, and then he began his conversation with the investigators. For the most part, the early portion of his testimony correlated with what the eyewitnesses had told the police. He and Schrieffer had fought over something about Arizona, they had spilled out of the house and into the street, and he had gotten the best of Schrieffer. But that’s where the similarities ended. Wehmanen then told a tale far different than the witnesses had, one much more bizarrely philanthropic. Supposedly, Erik Schrieffer had pulled a gun on Wehmanen, and one of the bystanders had grabbed it from him and handed it to Wehmanen, telling him to “kill Schrieffer.” Wehmanen, however, said he’d wanted no part of it, claiming that he’d responded, “I’m not going to shoot him.” Instead, he said he unloaded the gun and put the bullets in his pocket, then handed it back to the person who had grabbed it from Schrieffer. He then claimed to have simply gotten into his truck and driven toward home, but noticed after a considerable distance that his truck wasn’t steering very well. So he got out, looked under and all around the truck, and saw that he must have somehow
accidentally
run over Schrieffer, whose body had gotten hung up on the steering mechanism underneath the car. Wehmanen claimed that he’d pulled Schrieffer out from under the truck and “gave him a few breaths and chest compressions,” attempting to resuscitate him. Wehmanen continued, “I decided then and there that, ah, since he wasn’t breathing you know, that I had a better chance of probably helping him than they [Herb and Charlie] did by calling [911], so I put him in the back of my pickup truck.” He tossed Schrieffer’s body into the back of his truck and drove off in the direction of the hospital. Unfortunately, this is where his phony lifesaving heroics ended.

Wehmanen ultimately decided that he couldn’t risk dropping off Schrieffer at the hospital because he might have to spend the night in jail for what it would have looked like he had done. So he drove to his mother’s house instead, to do what clearly doctors would also have done for a person in Schrieffer’s condition: strip him of all of his clothing; lay his body out on a tarp; steal three hundred dollars out of his clothes; and, as a last-ditch effort to save his life, smash his face in with a cinder block.

Wehmanen admitted to smashing Schrieffer’s face several times with that cinder block. When asked by the investigators why he did it, he replied, “I figured I was going to prison and I was angry.” They believe the contrary; they think Schrieffer was still alive, and Wehmanen was finishing him off. But no one will ever know for sure why he committed that last act of violence.

Wehmanen continued his heroic actions by tying window counterweights to Schrieffer’s body, placing him into an army sleeping bag, and binding the whole macabre package with copper wire. Before he threw Schrieffer back into his truck, he also took some more cinder blocks and an ice drill, tools he would need to dispose of Schrieffer’s body once and for all at the bottom of the river.

Wehmanen
did
know where Schrieffer’s body was; he had always known. And the police’s theory had been correct: Wehmanen had dumped Erik Schrieffer’s body into an ice-fishing hole down from his friend’s icehouse. “I was getting a little nervous,” Wehmanen told investigators, because on the day after he killed Schrieffer he was planning to put his body into the water, but divers had been out looking around the icehouse. Therefore, he simply went back out to where his friend’s house was, drilled a few small holes in the ice, smashed through the ice with the cinder block, and dropped Schrieffer’s body into the St. Louis River.

Wehmanen then (as seems to be the modus operandi for all criminals who kill and drive trucks) pressure-washed his truck over and over, making it spic-and-span—except for the blood he left in the camper top that eventually forced him to plead guilty and confess to what he had done. The prosecutors, armed with only a little splashed blood and no body, got the best sentence that they could, which was eight years. And he ended up where else but in the Stillwater prison. We’d bumped into him just two days before in the chow line.

Divers entering the frozen water, hoping to find the body of Erik Schrieffer.
COPYRIGHT © BY DULUTH POLICE DEPARTMENT, MINNESOTA

Months later, with the summer thaw, Erik Schrieffer’s body was eventually found on the Wisconsin side of the St. Louis River. This was only days after the sheriff’s department had dragged the bottom of the river with hooks, pre-ROV style, and Lieutenant Ron Leino is still pissed off that Schrieffer’s body washed up on the Wisconsin side of the river, seemingly taunting Duluth. “We loosened him up,” he told us. Schrieffer’s body had probably been lodged in some debris, and the dragging probably
did
loosen him up, his secondary reflotation interval causing him to move downstream with the current into Wisconsin. Among the throng in attendance for the dragging had been a handcuffed Joseph Wehmanen, who had given the investigators the starting point for the search. “Eight years, I don’t feel I deserve that personally,” Wehmanen told them. “Maybe manslaughter, possibly.” If the investigators had retrieved the body before having to make a deal, he would most likely have gotten much more than the eight years. And with his confession, it is clear that he deserved to serve much longer. If a case like this happens around Duluth again, you can bet the ROV will play a huge role in the investigation. But until that time, it will continue to patrol the frozen underworld in search of unfortunate souls who find their way to the bottom of the frozen waterways in Minnesota—those who are weighted down with cement blocks and those who are not.

The authors, Jarrett and Amy, standing in the middle of the frozen St. Louis
River, near where Erik Schrieffer’s body was dumped.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC