Barbara Sue Frost Murder 1985

Barbara Sue Frost murder is an Anoka County unsolved murder.  Anoka County has just received a federal grant of $1.15m to work on 38 unsolved homicides dating back to 1965.  Barbara Frost is one of them.

Police identify 17-year-old stabbing victim
Star Tribune Tuesday 27 August 1985

The mutilated body of a girl found Saturday in a drainage ditch in East Bethel was identified Monday as that of Barbara Sue Frost, a 17-year-old high school dropout who friends said had alcohol problems.

Anoka County sheriffs Investigators said yesterday that they suspect that the killer is the person who picked Frost up while she was hitchhiking Friday night. That person is still being sought.

Frost had been stabbed at least 20 times in the chest and other upper portions of her body, said Dr. Joseph
coroner. He said that she died of her stab wounds, that there was no sign of a struggle where her body was found and that she had not been sexually abused.

The body appears to have been moved to the drainage ditch after the slaying, Investigators in the Anoka County Sheriff’s Department said. On the basis of the autopsy reports, they estimated that she was killed late Friday night or early Saturday morning [24 August 1985]. The fully clothed body was discovered face down in the ditch at 2:23 p.m. north of County Rd. 22 and east of Hwy. 65 by a farmer who had been mowing tall grass.

We think she was hitchhiking south on Hwy. 65 and that whoever killed her had to know the area pretty well, knew the roads, because there’s not a lot of traffic in that area,” said Capt. Bill Hoogestraat of the Anoka County sheriffs major crimes.

No arrests have been made, but Hoogestraat said investigators were confident of several leads. One of the problems hampering investigators is that the rain Saturday morning left few tire tracks at the scene.

In the last several months Frost had been living intermittently at a house in Blaine with three men who were recovering alcoholics. She attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with them in Fridley.

“She was a ‘runner’ and a troubled young lady who was chemically dependent, but lately she’d been working hard trying to stay sober,” said Ed Nelson, one of the men at the house.

You could see a lot of pain and hurt in that girl’s eyes, he said. “Somebody was saying the other day that they thought one of our best meetings was two weeks ago when she led a discussion group on how people can’t run away from their problems and how she, since she knew she had a long history of running away from problems, had finally learned there were no quick solutions, that you had to ride it out.

“I always thought that was pretty good thought for a person who was 17 years old and in trouble. She was no dummy, that’s for sure.”

Nelson said he last saw her a week ago and described her as “upbeat, real happy.” partly because she mentioned she was going to be getting a new job and would no longer have to earn money as a maid in Downtown Minneapolis.

Frost told Nelson that her father had died about five years ago, he said, and that the death had caused her severe emotional problems. Her mother, Carol Patterson [passed away 2 June 2008] lives in Minneapolis.

Patricia Carlson, one of Frost’s two sisters, said she didn’t know Frost’s whereabouts Friday.

“My sister never deserved this, no-body deserves what happened to her,” Patterson said. She said many of her sister’s problems started after their father’s death.

When he died, I think a part of her died too. They were very close.” For at least the last six months she had been attending the sobriety meetings and was recently working toward getting her general education diploma, said Nelson. Frost dropped out of St. Francis High School in 1982, said a school spokesman.

“Hitchhiking was the main way she got herself around, and despite all our warnings not to do it, she felt it necessary to do it, and she just ran into the wrong, crazy person and that was it,” said Nelson. “We never ran together, we just tried to stay sober together and support each other.”

Police get description of suspect in slaying of girl found in ditch
Star tribune Friday 30 August 1985

Anoka County sheriff’s investigators said Thursday that they have a description of a suspect in last weekend’s slaying of a 17-year-old girl from St. Francis, Minn.

Officials yesterday released a sketch of the suspect drawn from a description received from a gas station attendant, who said he had seen the girl in the gas station with the man the night before her body was found.

The body of Barbara Sue Frost was found in a drainage ditch in East Bethel Saturday afternoon by a farmer who was mowing tall grass. She had been stabbed more than 20 times in the chest and upper body, but had not been sexually assaulted. The murder weapon penetrated her heart several times from the front and the back, officials said.

Authorities are seeking a white man, between 35 and 40 years old, about 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4 with a trim build and short, neat, sandy-colored hair parted on the left. The man also had a noticeable cleft chin, a prominent Adam’s apple and a small bump on the bridge of his nose that might indicate it had once been broken. He was driving a tan, late model Volvo station wagon with Minnesota license plates beginning with the letters NOX or NOZ. He also was wearing a gold watch with diamonds or similar stones on the face. Anoka County Undersheriff Donald Dwyer said that he had sent the license information to the state highway department but that the department had not identified a specific car yesterday afternoon.

Dwyer said investigators received the information from an attendant at a gas station at 45th and Lyndale Ave. N, in Minneapolis. The attendant told authorities that he knew the girl and that he saw her with the man in the gas station about 11:30 p.m. Friday.

Dwyer also said that the girl called one of the men with whom she lived in Blaine at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday and that there was party noise in the background. She did not indicate that she was in trouble, investigators said, and the men with whom she shared the house have been cleared as suspects.

Investigators believe the suspect picked up Frost while she was hitchhiking south on Hwy. 65.

Frost was an “inveterate hitchhiker” who also carried a knife because, she said, drivers had tried to take advantage of her, Dwyer said.

Authorities have not found the knife.

Officials ask that people with information on the crime or the suspect call the Anoka County major crime…

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