How One Slip-Up Exposed a Prominent Businessman’s 26-Year-Old Murder

On June 13th, 1993, a resident living one floor below another apartment in the Horn Towers, a tall apartment building on Pillsbury Avenue in South Minneapolis, noticed something was very wrong. Water was leaking down through their ceiling, and it was tinted red. They called the building superintendent right away.

 The superintendent and a security guard made their way up to the apartment. Nobody answered when they knocked, so they let themselves in.    Inside, they found the shower still running. Steam and water had been pouring out for who knows how long.    They shut it off, and that was when they saw her.

 A woman’s body lay on the floor of the bedroom, partly wedged between the bed and the dresser. The security guard,    a man named Corey Busker, realized right away that this was no accident. He made the decision to stay right there and guard the apartment himself. He did not step out, not even for a moment, because he did not want to risk disturbing anything before the police arrived.

 It was a decision that would end up mattering more than he could have known. When officers finally walked through the door, what they found stopped them cold.  The bedroom window was wide open, and the screen was missing entirely, as if someone had either climbed in or torn their way out. The bed was soaked and completely disheveled.

 Blood had pooled on the floor and mixed with the water from the shower,    spreading across the tile. The walls carried the same reddish stains, spattered in patterns that told their own story. The woman had been beaten and stabbed, and from the sheer amount of blood, it was clear that whatever had happened in that apartment had been violent beyond anything the officers had seen in a long time.

 She was found to have been stabbed around 65 times. Investigators would later determine that many of those wounds had been inflicted after she was already dead.    The woman’s name was Genie Childs. She was 35 years old. Miles away, a woman named Betty Eakman was working a shift as a hospice caregiver, sitting with a client who wanted the television turned on.

 A news report came on about a body being removed from an apartment building. The victim was a woman in her 30s. Betty looked toward the building on the screen and felt a wave of dread rush over her. She recognized it.    It was the building where her daughter Genie lived. She watched as a team wheeled a body out of the building and loaded it into a vehicle.

 Something in her gut told her this was not a stranger’s tragedy. She called her husband right away and told him that she believed something terrible had happened to Genie. Her husband told her to call the mortuary and the coroner’s office to find out for certain whether they had brought in a body and if so, whose it was.

 When Betty called, the man on the phone asked her a question that made her stomach drop even further. He asked if she was alone. She told him she was at a client’s home working. He gently told her that she should try to get somebody with her. Then he asked for the name of the person she wanted to confirm. She gave him the name, Genie Childs.

 There was a pause and then the man on the phone told her he was sorry, but that was her daughter. Betty began to scream. Genie was the oldest child of Betty Eakman  and by every account from the people who loved her, she had a playful, warm spirit. Her sister Cindy Bloomer would later describe her as someone who accepted everyone exactly as they were without judgement.

 She loved music, especially the singer Lionel Richie, and she would dance around the house whenever his songs came on, snapping her fingers and singing along. She was said to be wonderful with elderly people and adored children, but Genie’s life had not been an easy one. According to her mother, something happened to her when she was very young involving a male relative, and after that, something in her seemed to change.

She began running away from home around the age of 12 or 13. Her mother spent countless nights consumed with worry searching for her, praying for her safe return. Jeanie would sometimes call in the middle of the night crying, caught up in a world of drugs and people who did not have her best interests at heart.

Despite everything,  Jeanie kept in touch with her family. She wrote letters to her younger sister, Cindy, telling her to listen to their mother and not make the same mistakes she had made,    signing off with love. Her mother held onto those letters for the rest of her life.

 Jeanie had been  married twice. In one of those marriages, she had become a stepmother and stayed close with her stepchildren long after the relationship ended.    At the time of her death, she was living in the Horn Towers apartment with a man named Arthur Gray who held the lease. Investigators would later describe Gray as her boyfriend, though some accounts suggest he also profited from her work.

   Jeanie had turned to sex work as a means of survival, a fact that would later shape much of how her case and her memory were treated. Just days before her murder, Jeanie had gone to a hospital emergency room for a painful abscessed tooth. Her mother had urged her to go to a clinic and get proper treatment.

 Jeanie brushed off the concern with her usual response, telling her mother not to worry,    that she could take care of herself. Those would be some of the last words she ever said to her. Back at the crime scene, investigators moved carefully through the apartment, piecing together what might have happened.

 The scene told a story of extreme violence. Blood covered the bed, soaking through the comforter, through the sheets, and into the mattress itself, showing that Jeannie had bled heavily while she was on that bed. It was also found spattered across the bathroom walls, suggesting she had been attacked while standing near that area as well.

 It appeared she had been assaulted in more than one place inside the apartment, moving or being moved from room to room while she fought for her life. Investigators found defensive wounds on her hands, a clear sign that she had tried desperately to protect herself and fight back against her attacker.

 Then came a discovery that would end up defining the entire case for the next 30 years. Beneath the bedroom window, investigators found bloody footprints, bare footprints, not the print of a shoe. Jeannie had been wearing white socks when she was found, which meant these prints could not have come from her. Someone else had walked through her blood barefoot, leaving identifiable marks behind.

   To the trained eye, a footprint could be just as unique and traceable as a fingerprint.    Investigators carefully photographed and lifted seven separate footprints from the scene, labeling them one through seven.    Whoever these belonged to, they now had reason to believe was very likely the killer.

   A bloody knife was also found sitting in the kitchen sink. At first glance, it did not appear to be connected to the crime, showing no clear blood or signs of having been used, tucked in among what looked like ordinary dirty dishes. It was left untested. The actual murder weapon was never recovered.

Investigators also collected items believed to hold biological evidence, including a blue towel and washcloth from the bathroom, along with pieces of clothing and bedding. Testing on these items would later reveal the presence of semen, evidence that would prove to be the single most important clue in the entire case, though nobody in that room in 1993 could have known just how important it would become.

 As detectives began building their list of suspects, their attention naturally turned to the man closest to Jeannie, her boyfriend, Arthur Gray. Hairs found clutched in Jeannie’s hand were tested and found to be consistent with Gray, but detectives soon learned Gray had a solid alibi. He had been out of town that weekend attending a motorcycle rally in Wisconsin and multiple people could confirm he was there.

 When investigators compared his footprint to the bloody prints from the scene, they did not match. He was cleared as a suspect. The hairs in Jeannie’s hand were explained simply by the fact that he lived in the apartment with her. Investigators pursued other leads in the months that followed. They spoke to men who had been clients of Jeannie’s, including one she reportedly referred to as “fatal attraction.

” A witness described seeing Jeannie with a tall, slender man in a trench coat carrying a case of beer on the day she was killed and claimed to have seen that same man running from the building afterward. None of these leads led anywhere solid. Suspect after suspect was tested and their footprints were compared against the bloody prints from the bedroom window.

 None of them matched. As the months turned into years,    the leads dried up completely. The case went cold. For Betty Eckman, the years that followed were an agony of unanswered questions. She stayed in contact with detectives, calling year after year to ask if there had been any new developments, even as investigators retired one after another and the case sat largely untouched.

   She never let go of the hope that one day someone would be held responsible for what happened to her daughter. Minneapolis in the early 1990s was in the middle of a violent stretch with a rising number of unsolved killings, many of them involving women connected to the sex trade.

 Jeannie’s case became one of many that got buried under the sheer number of open files. For over two decades, nobody was actively working to solve it. Then, in 2015, that began  to change. A renewed effort to solve long unresolved Minneapolis homicides brought detectives back to Jeanie’s file. Investigators were drawn to her case for a few key reasons.

 The level of violence recorded in the original crime scene photos was striking, and more importantly, there appeared to be a strong chance that the killer had left behind DNA evidence,    something that simply had not been usable back in 1993, when DNA testing was still in its infancy for criminal investigations.

Detectives pulled the original case file    and met with forensic scientists at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, known as the BCA, to review everything from the beginning. A forensic scientist agreed to run further testing on evidence that had been sitting in storage for over 20 years, including material collected from the bathroom.

 The results confirmed what investigators had long suspected. DNA recovered from semen on the bed comforter matched the DNA found on the blue bathroom towel. Further testing on a shirt, a blood stain from the bathroom, and a washcloth all returned matching or closely related profiles. Whoever this DNA belonged to had almost certainly been present during the murder. There was just one problem.

 They still had no idea who that person was. A DNA hit connected to the building’s stairwell was followed up as well, but it led nowhere. That person’s footprint did not match the one left at the scene, either. By 2015, the trail seemed to run cold again. The investigation stalled once more, set aside as detectives turned their attention to other pressing cases.

 Then, in the spring of 2018, a case unfolding on the other side of the country changed everything. News broke that a man named Joseph James DeAngelo had been arrested as the suspected Golden State Killer, a serial predator responsible for a string of murders and assaults decades earlier in California. What made the arrest remarkable was not just who he was, but how he had finally been caught.

 Investigators had taken unidentified DNA from decades-old crime scenes and uploaded it to a public genealogy website    using distant family connections to build out family trees and narrow down a suspect.    For the detectives working Genie’s case, this was like watching the exact tool they needed appear right in front of them.

 They had unknown DNA sitting in evidence storage.    They just needed a way to turn it into a name. They reached out to the investigators in California who had worked the Golden State Killer case and were told with total confidence that this method would identify their suspect too. The unknown DNA profile from Genie’s case was sent off and uploaded into a genealogy database in October.

 A few months later, in January, a genetic genealogist reported back that she had found a strong match. Later that same day, she followed up with even more promising news. She had identified two brothers who could plausibly be connected to the unknown DNA profile. Investigators had one more clue to narrow things down.

   Based on the genetic profile, the person they were looking for likely had brown eyes. Of the two brothers, one had brown eyes and the other had hazel. That was enough to point them toward one specific person. His name was Jerry Westrom. Digging into his background, detectives found he had lived in the Twin Cities area around the time of the murder in the early 1990s.

 They also discovered he had two arrests for soliciting a prostitute in Minnesota. Everything was starting to line up. But a hunch and a family tree were not enough to make an arrest. They needed his actual DNA. And there was no way he would hand it over willingly. So they started following him. For weeks, investigators quietly tracked Jerry Westrom’s movements, waiting for an opportunity to collect something he had touched or used, something that might carry his DNA.

 They learned he was a devoted hockey dad, regularly attending his daughter’s games. They followed him to several rinks, hoping he might toss aside a cup or a wrapper they could retrieve without him ever knowing he was being watched. Eventually, their search led them to Wisconsin, where Westrom was attending a hockey tournament with a group that included other families and fans.

 At one point, he sat in a hotel breakfast area, but he was surrounded by other people, making it impossible to know for certain which discarded item was his. Their patience paid off during an afternoon hockey game. During a break between periods, Westrom stepped into the lobby, bought a hot dog,    and sat down to eat.

 When he finished, investigators watched him wipe his mouth with a napkin, and then walk over and drop it into a trash can before heading back into the arena for the next period. Investigators moved toward the garbage can,    but there was a tense moment. A young boy nearby was holding a large drink and looked as though he might toss it into the same bin, which could have contaminated or buried the evidence they needed.

   Fortunately, the boy walked away without throwing anything in. The napkin was still sitting right on top.    It was carefully collected and secured. The sample was rushed back to Minnesota and delivered to the BCA lab. When the DNA profile from that napkin was compared to the unknown profile from the crime scene, it was a match.

 The semen recovered from the bed comforter in 1993,    the towel in the bathroom, all of it lined up with Jerry Westrom. Investigators now had what they believed was their killer. But there was still one more piece of evidence they wanted badly, his footprint, to compare against the bloody prints left behind under the bedroom window nearly 26 years earlier.

In February of 2019, members of a violent crime apprehension team arrested Jerry Westrom outside his workplace. He did not resist and did not ask why he was being taken into custody.  During questioning, investigators showed him photographs, pictures of the Horn Towers, pictures of Genie Childs.

 They asked him directly whether he recognized the buildings, whether he remembered ever visiting them, and whether he recognized the woman in the photo. Over and over, he said no. He claimed he had no memory of ever being in Minneapolis with a woman like her, and insisted he had never visited a prostitute in his life outside of his marriage.

Investigators then showed him the evidence, the bloody footprints found beneath the window, the blood-stained towel, the shirt and washcloth carrying DNA that matched his own. Each time,  he denied any explanation for how his DNA could have ended up in that apartment. To the detectives in the room, his denials rang hollow.

 It is very difficult to explain away that much of your own DNA turning up throughout a crime scene you claim you have never set foot in. News of the arrest spread quickly. Westrom was revealed to be a 52-year-old man from Isanti, a small town north of Minneapolis, with a wife, two grown children, and what many described as a well-known, respected life in his community.

   He had a business degree, managed a farm, and was deeply involved in youth sports. His family and supporters rallied around him, writing letters to the court describing him as a devoted husband and father who had never shown any capacity for violence. His wife shared that she had met him only a month before Jeannie’s murder, and that they married the following year.

 The family eventually sold their century-old farm to help pay for his legal defense. Westrom was initially charged with second-degree murder. His defense attorney publicly declared that investigators had simply gotten the wrong man. More than a year later, in June of 2020, a grand jury indicted Westrom on the far more serious charge of He turned himself in to face the new charge.

 The case finally went to trial in August of 2022, nearly 30 years after Jeannie Childs was found dead. Prosecutors laid out their case around two central pillars of evidence. First, the DNA. Semen matching Westrom had been found on the bed comforter and bathroom towel, with additional matching DNA identified on a red shirt, a washcloth, and a blood stain in the bathroom sink.

 Second, the footprint. A forensic examiner with the Minneapolis police testified that he had compared Westrom’s known footprints against four of the seven bloody prints recovered from the scene and found they matched. Even a forensic expert brought in by the defense agreed that at least one footprint was, without question, a match to Westrom.

 The defense fought back hard. They argued that Jeannie had been a sex worker whose apartment saw many visitors,    meaning DNA from an unknown source did not automatically prove murder. They pointed again to Arthur Gray, Jeannie’s former boyfriend, noting his hair had been found in her hand, and suggesting he had a history of being abusive  toward her.

 They argued that prosecutors could never prove exactly when Westrom’s DNA had ended up in that apartment. The defense had also hoped to introduce a specialized footprint analysis technique of their own, but the judge ruled that the science behind it was not reliable enough to be presented to the jury. That ruling meant the defense went into the trial without any forensic expert of their own to counter the state’s footprint evidence.

 After a week of testimony, the case went to the jury. It only took about 2 hours to reach a decision. Jerry Westrom was found guilty of both first-degree premeditated murder and second-degree murder. At his sentencing, the judge acknowledged the toll the case had taken on Westrom’s own family, but reminded him that he had taken away Jeanie Child’s chance at a life.

Westrom was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole only after serving 30 years, meaning he would not be eligible until the year 2052, when he would be 86 years old. Betty Eikman addressed the court saying she had waited decades for this moment and that the pain of losing her daughter would never truly leave her.

 Jeanie’s niece spoke as well, describing how a crime like this echoes through an entire family for a lifetime. Westrom did not accept the verdict quietly. He appealed directly to the Minnesota Supreme Court raising several challenges, including questions about how his DNA was obtained from the discarded napkin and disputes over which alternate suspects the defense had been allowed to present.

 In 2024, the state’s highest court upheld his first-degree murder conviction, though it vacated the second-degree conviction on a technicality, since a person cannot be convicted of both the greater and lesser versions of the same crime. His life sentence remained unchanged. He then asked the United States Supreme Court to hear his case. They declined.

For Betty Eakman and Jeanie’s sister, Cindy, the guilty verdict did not erase the grief, but it brought something they had waited nearly 30 years for, some measure of peace. Betty had always insisted that her daughter, no matter the choices she had made or the life she had lived, was still a human being who did not deserve to die the way she did.

She had spent decades refusing to let the world forget her daughter’s name, and in the end, that refusal helped bring her daughter’s killer to justice. Jeanie Childs was a daughter, a sister, a woman who loved to dance to Lionel Richie, and who wrote letters signed with love. For over 25 years, the person responsible for her death walked free, believing his secret was safe.

 It took a bloody footprint preserved since 1993, a breakthrough in DNA science, and a discarded napkin at a hockey game to finally prove otherwise. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to like it, share it with someone who loves true crime, and subscribe for more real cold cases brought back into the light.