POST-DISPATCH REPORTER RE-OPENS CASE OF SLAIN REPORTER

By: Randy Dotinga Tuft Digs Up New Evidence In 12-year-old Case





Only her murderer knows for sure how 24-year-old newspaper intern Audrey Cardenas was killed on a summer's day in 1988.



Prosecutors have long claimed the keeper of the secret is Rodney Woidtke, a mentally ill transient who has been serving a 45-year sentence in an Illinois prison for Cardenas' murder. But the work of a crusading journalist has brought Woidtke another shot at freedom. St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Carolyn Tuft, who knew the victim, contends the killer is actually another man who's in prison for a double-murder, and her stories have helped reopen the case.



In April, an Illinois appeals court threw out Woidtke's conviction. A county prosecutor is now set to retry Woidtke, starting Oct. 16, and he has flatly denounced the Post-Dispatch's relentless campaign to free him. Soon, a jury will decide if Woidtke really killed Cardenas and darkened the soul of a town and its newspaper.



The Rookie and the 'Crank'



When she arrived in Belleville, Ill., in 1988, Audrey Cardenas was ambitious and eager, looking forward to a career in the newspaper business. She had just been graduated from Texas A&M University and earned a job as an intern reporter at the daily Belleville News-Democrat in this town 15 miles east of St. Louis.



"She was very much in pursuit of a career. She wanted to make a name for herself at some point in her life," says Cardenas' mother, Billie Fowler. "She was a real personable, outgoing, very normal, American girl."



Cardenas barely had a chance to write a word for the newspaper when she failed to show up for work one Monday morning. Co-workers began to look for her around Belleville. When she didn't turn up, they called the police and circulated posters asking anyone who had seen her to call authorities.



About a week later, a custodian found a body in a creek bed behind a high school. It was Cardenas.



Her body was so decomposed that authorities were never able to determine the cause of death. But there was no doubt that someone brutally killed Cardenas and abandoned her ravaged body.



The newspaper went into shock and mourning. "It just profoundly affected a lot of employees," News-Democrat Publisher Gary Berkley recalls. "There was a lot of sorrow and sympathy, particularly in the newsroom where a lot of people had met her."



The murder baffled criminal investigators. Cardenas was new to town and appeared to have no enemies. But police did have suspicions about one man: 36-year-old Dale Anderson. He was no stranger to the police or the News-Democrat - and he may have known the victim.



Anderson, who worked in a local welfare office, had become known at the News-Democrat as an obsessed crank with a vendetta. He had accused three of his co-workers of attacking him and taking a briefcase full of records he'd compiled showing office corruption. He brought his story to both the police and Tuft, then a young News-Democrat reporter.



Tuft wrote a story about the dispute in 1988 and went to Anderson's house, where she says he waved a revolver at her, flashed a badge saying he was a sheriff's deputy (working undercover), and sweated profusely. After 45 minutes, she escaped, frightened and wanting to get as far away from him as possible.



She later filed criminal charges against Anderson and testified against him in court, where he was charged with impersonating an officer. He was convicted of disorderly conduct.



Anderson also apparently knew Audrey Cardenas, and his actions after her death raised the suspicions of police. For one thing, he appeared at her funeral wearing a three-piece suit. But police decided another suspect had killed Cardenas. He was 27-year-old Rodney Woidtke, a transient from California.



Police arrested Woidtke after he crossed a police line that surrounded the murder scene. They said he confessed to the crime, claiming he hit the victim several times in the head with a pipe after trying to sexually assault her. The medical examiner determined, however, that Cardenas did not die of a blow to the head.



In police reports, Woidtke's family described him as a mentally ill, sexually frustrated, and violent man. His father told police that he had been in fights with store clerks who gave him "dirty looks." A cousin said she thought he had a split personality, and a sister described violent rages.



Woidtke avoided trial for a year after being found mentally unfit, but he was eventually ruled sane and waived his right to a jury trial. An Illinois judge found him guilty of first-degree murder after hearing evidence that he had confessed three times.



According to news reports about testimony from detectives, Woidtke made several accurate statements about the crime scene in his talks with police. He correctly described the position of her body and said her set of keys was near her outstretched arm. But Woidtke also made some misstatements, including a claim that Cardenas was wearing high heels. She was actually wearing sneakers.



Woidtke was sentenced to 45 years in prison on Sept. 28, 1989.



Initial suspect kills two others



Just a day before Woidtke's sentencing, Anderson set himself on the path for his own life term in prison. On Sept. 27, he slashed a mother and child to death in one of the most notorious crimes in the history of southwestern Illinois.



On that day, Anderson entered the home of John and Jolaine Lanman, posing as a possible buyer of their house. When he left, 34-year-old Jolaine Lanman and her 3-year-old son, Kenneth, were dead. Anderson had beaten them and then slashed them to death with an ordinary pair of household scissors.



Authorities immediately fingered Anderson because a note found under Jolaine Lanman's body implicated the co-workers he had accused of assaulting him. Anderson had forced Lanman to write the note in the moments before he stabbed her. In a sensational trial, Anderson - who denied committing the crimes - was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. A jury spared him from the death penalty.



With both Anderson and Woidtke in prison, the Cardenas case dropped out of the news for nearly a decade. Her family was left to suffer its agony alone.



"A lot of things happen to you in life, and sooner or later the pain becomes dull," says Cardenas' mother, Fowler. "But a loss of a child is something you literally never get over."



Then, about 10 years later, a letter to a newspaper reporter brought the case into the spotlight once again. The murder of Audrey Cardenas hasn't been out of the public eye since.



A crusade begins



Tuft, the Belleville News-Democrat reporter who had that gun-waving encounter with Anderson in 1988, went on to become a local star.



In the early 1990s, she was the lead reporter on an award-winning project that revealed that 75% of traffic tickets in Belleville written by four police officers were given to blacks. "60 Minutes" did a segment on the story, putting Tuft on national TV. Soon she was on the move, to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri's largest newspaper. Tuft covered City Hall and later became an investigative reporter for the paper.



In the years after Belleville, her children - three boys - grew into adolescence. (Her husband worked as a detective for the Illinois State Police.) Then, in December 1997, Tuft got a letter from a suicidal man in prison named Rodney Woidtke.



Tuft had long doubted Woidtke's guilt - "none of the facts matched," she explains - and was used to getting letters from him. But this one was more powerful than the others. Woidtke said he had tried to kill himself, and he repeatedly wrote that "no one is listening." Tuft was deeply moved by his plea for help. With the support of her editors, she quickly reopened an investigation into the Cardenas case with Bill Smith, a fellow reporter. Tuft uncovered evidence that she thought exonerated Woidtke and pointed a finger at Anderson. Interviews with Anderson in prison confirmed her suspicions, even though he denied killing Cardenas.



Her stories for the Post-Dispatch were chilling. "Dale Anderson looked into my eyes, held my left hand, and said whoever killed Audrey Cardenas really wanted to murder me," Tuft wrote in the Post-Dispatch on June 7, 1998.



"You come back real soon," Anderson had said to Tuft as she left him at the prison. "Promise?"



Tuft also interviewed Woidtke. "I feel like I know him, I feel like he's always told me the truth," she observes, and her articles turned into a crusade that pushed for Woidtke's release.



She was heartened by reports that DNA testing had indicated that blood found on his pants belonged to him, not Cardenas. "He always said it's his blood," she explains. "Everything he says has always turned out to be true. We owe it to the people in this country who are wrongly convicted," she says. "It could be your brother or sister."



She continued to cover the Cardenas case despite her unusual personal involvement with Anderson. Tuft believes that he intended to kill her twice - the first time when she visited his home, and later when he approached her car in the News-Democrat parking lot and grabbed her arm trying to get her to go for a ride with him.



A week after the second incident, Audrey Cardenas disappeared.



Tuft will not cover Woidtke's retrial, however, because she is so deeply involved in the case. Questions, in fact, have been raised about whether Tuft should have stayed on the story at all. In a 1998 interview with E&P, Lee Wilkins, formerly a police reporter and now a professor at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, questioned whether Tuft could be objective, calling it "practically inhuman" to be completely evenhanded after a major character in a story waves a gun at you. "Who's kidding who here?" she asked.



A killer or just a 'liar'?



Richard K. Weil, the Post-Dispatch's executive editor, defends Tuft's coverage and says the newspaper has made sure it revealed her intimate role in the drama. "She's the consummate pro as a journalist," he says. "She's got this tremendous perseverance."



Plenty of people agree with Tuft's findings. One of them is Ron Jenkins, a St. Louis attorney who was fascinated by her stories in the Post-Dispatch. He ultimately agreed to serve as Woidtke's attorney. Without Tuft, Woidtke would be "nowhere," Jenkins declares. "He'd be rotting in jail with nowhere to go."



Armed with questions raised by Tuft, Jenkins demanded a new trial. Prosecutors stood by the police and the investigation, and they said Woidtke was indeed the murderer. But in an April 26 decision this year, the three-member Illinois Fifth District Court of Appeals overturned Woidtke's conviction.



The court ruled that an attorney who represented Woidtke in 1988 had a conflict of interest - because he also represented Anderson at the time. The court also said there is "a considerable amount of new evidence." Among other developments, a crime-scene technician has declared that Woidtke's confession incorrectly described the clothing worn

by Cardenas. The technician also says that Anderson implied he committed

the murders in a 1992 jailhouse interview.



Also, a search of Anderson's house after the Lanman murders turned up a personal diary that stated Anderson had been jogging with Cardenas on the day she disappeared. Anderson told police that she had been at his apartment the day before she vanished.



One of the appellate judges, Gordon Maag, in agreeing with the court's ruling, wrote that it is "unconscionable" that years went by and nobody acted on Woidtke's requests for a hearing. "I can perceive of no reasonable explanation for such conduct," he observes.



The local state's attorney has never agreed with Tuft's contention that Woidtke is innocent. After an investigation of several months this year, St. Clair County state's attorney Robert Haida declared that he will retry Woidtke on murder charges. Three assistant prosecutors reviewed thousands of pages of documents, Haida said. "They've interviewed 30 potential witnesses," he added, "including Dale Anderson, who has been propped up by some of the local press as the so-called 'real killer.' We've had DNA testing done, and our conclusion is that Rodney Woidtke should be put on trial again."



On Aug. 14, Haida held a press conference to blast the Post-Dispatch's coverage of the case and any information Tuft elicited from Dale Anderson, calling him "a liar who persists in delusions and obsessions."


The new trial will begin in two weeks. Woidtke has been transferred from state prison to a local jail. He could ask to be released on bail, but he doesn't know anyone in Illinois and has no place to stay, according to his attorney.



Who killed Audrey Cardenas?



From her home in Chapel Hill, Texas, Cardenas' mother says she is almost entirely convinced that Woidtke is innocent and Anderson is guilty, but she knows that there are "many unanswered questions about what happened to Audrey."



But Woidtke still has many detractors. George Pawlaczyk, a Belleville News-

Democrat reporter, has intensively covered the case for several years and thinks Woidtke is guilty. "There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to him," he observes, "from his sister who said that he's choked his mother before and had problems relating to women to his repeated statements that he needed to mate with a woman or the demons would destroy him."



Other observers wonder if a third party is responsible. Gary Berkley, publisher of the News-Democrat, suspects that Anderson and Woidtke might both be innocent. "If they [police] had really gone after all the suspects and vigorously interrogated them," he declares, "it's possible that somebody else would have been charged with the murder."



Back in St. Louis, Tuft insists that Anderson is the killer. She has no intention of backing off, no matter what the prosecutors do or say. "The battle just continues," she observes. "I owe Audrey's family the right to know what happened."





Dotinga is a free-lance writer based in San Diego.





Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.