Mindy Morgenstern, a college student, was discovered dead in her dorm room on September 13, 2006. Her corpse was covered in Pine Sol.
Dateline will investigate Mindy’s murder on tonight’s show titled “Who Killed Mindy Morgenstern?”
Toni Baumann and Danielle Holmstrom, Mindy’s friends, came to the apartment complex to see if she was okay and discovered her dead. After hearing Toni’s screams, Mindy’s next-door neighbour Robert Linz went to check on her.
When they found Mindy, they found she had been stabbed in the neck and strangled with a belt. One of the two knives used to kill her had been shattered in her throat. Physical or forensic proof of a $exual assault was lacking.
For reasons including his proximity to the crime scene and the possibility that his scratches were self-inflicted, detectives focused on Robert since he was a neighbour.
Toni’s boyfriend James Robinson, who Mindy disliked, was another possible suspect. Toni’s boyfriend may have been violent after she tried to dissuade her from dating James.
Other possible possibilities were Mindy’s ex-father’s boyfriend and an unsettling patron at the restaurant where she worked.
The DNA evidence later led in a different direction, although still within the structure, and this took weeks. The DNA of Mindy’s next-door neighbour Moe Gibbs was discovered under one of her fingernails.
Because his DNA was already in the system from a 2004 $exual assault case, police were able to identify him. Previously known as Glen Dale Morgan Jr., he had lately adopted the name Moe Gibbs.
The reason for the name change was to hide a murder conviction from the public. For a drive-by shooting, he had already spent five years in prison.
Moe worked as a jail guard and he and his pregnant wife and stepdaughter lived in the complex.
His hands were scratched up when he was brought in for interrogation by the police. He told investigators that he had helped Mindy move her laundry and other belongings about her flat on the day she was murdered.
Even though he claimed he didn’t kill Mindy, the DNA evidence led to his incarceration. When word of his imprisonment spread, female detainees at the jail where he worked said that he had $exually assaulted them.
On the morning of Mindy’s murder, there was apparently a $exual assault.
Jeremy Leopold, Moe’s cellmate, testified against him and said that Moe had admitted to killing Mindy.
In court, Moe’s attorneys maintained that the DNA evidence was obtained from beneath Mindy’s nails because Moe had assisted Mindy with her laundry earlier that day.
The defence presented by Moe was not convincing to the jury, and they returned a guilty verdict after 27 hours of deliberation. He received a life sentence with no chance of release.
Despite being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (M.S.), Mindy didn’t let it slow her down.
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