A
38 year old Sharon Bloom kisses
her live in boyfriend David Koefod goodbye
and joins the morning commute.
She arrives at work around 7:30am,
but fails to make it home in time for dinner.
Calls to her cubicle go unanswered
and Koefod begins to worry.
Bloom hasn't been missing long enough
for police to get involved.
Koefod, however, feels certain that something is wrong.
He calls back to 3M and asks workers on the night shift
to take a walk through the employee parking lot.
And at 11:00 approximately I got a call back.
They told me her car was still in the parking lot.
Koefod stays up all night,
waiting by a phone that never rings.
On Friday morning he files a missing person's report
with the Woodbury Police Department.
Investigator David Hines is assigned to the case.
He begins with Bloom's car.
For her to leave that behind didn't make any sense.
We were quickly getting to the idea
that she had definitely disappeared from the work place.
It didn't take us very long to kind of zero in
on the fact that we don't think
she was ever back at work after the lunch hour.
Hines pokes his head into every cubicle on Bloom's floor.
Beneath the corporate veneer
he finds a hostile work environment.
The primary target, Sharon Bloom.
Over the past year Bloom's keys had been stolen from her desk
four times, documents or presentations pilfered,
and most recently someone dumped a pot of coffee on her chair.
There was quite a series of incidents
and it was quite clear
that this was not just the usual workplace prank kind of thing.
This was somebody who was definitely zeroing in on her
and harassing her with a purpose.
One day she came home and was in tears and her reaction was,
"What could I have done to somebody to cause them
to hate me so much?"
Bloom had working relationships with dozens of people.
On the day Sharon disappeared,
all of them returned to their office after lunch,
save one, a systems analyst named Stephan Zanter.
He offered us an alibi right away.
But it was an alibi that wasn't alibiiing him.
It was an alibi that made no sense in fact.
Zanter tells detectives he left work shortly after 11:00am.
After lunch at a fast food restaurant,
Zanter says that he did not return to work
because his car broke down.
After that, according to Zanter, he went home.
He didn't see anybody that he knew.
There was nobody that he knew of that could verify any of it.
It was really accounting for his time,
but it was in a way that he almost went out of his way
to let us know that no one could verify this.
The shaky alibi prompts Hines to examine
Zanter's office politics.
He finds bad blood between the suspect and the missing woman.
The two had competed for a promotion.
Sharon Bloom got it, Stephan Zanter didn't.
We have a guy who is a problem.
We have a guy who others think could be capable of harassment.
He has given us an alibi that is just really, well, lame.
Eight days into the investigation
Hines calls in reinforcements.
The state's premier investigative agency,
the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent
Ray Diprima reviews the case file
and concurs with investigator Hines' suspicions.
All eyes now fall to Stephan Zanter.
Diprima and Hines take a ride out to Zanter's home
to give the suspect an opportunity
to flesh out his story.
Three hours into the interview, Zanter's is rock solid.
His demeanor calm, his story unchanged.
Detectives are about to pack it in,
but Ray Diprima takes a phone call.
One that changes everything.
And as we're conducting the interview, my pager went off
and I was informed by my supervisor
that Sharon Bloom's body had been found in a corn field.
She obviously had had trauma,
and beyond that there was no sign of any struggle.
It had looked as if she had just been placed there.
The body is naked from the waist down.
To an experienced detective strongly suggestive
of sexual assault.
Seeing someone that way, partially clad, bra pushed up,
it appeared she had been raped.
Biological samples are collected from the body
as well as human hair found at the dump site
and determined not to belong to the victim.
Bloom's body is transported to the morgue for an autopsy.
At the same time, agent Diprima breaks the news to the man
he suspects might have killed her, Stephan Zanter.
He fell to pieces. He just sort of dropped.
We were in his family room and he became catatonic.
He started crying, became almost convulsive
and he was on the floor.
He went all the way around his family room on his knees.
Detectives are unsure of what to make of Zanter's behavior,
but lack the physical evidence to charge him
with Bloom's murder.
The following day the investigation
is dealt a critical blow when the coroner
informs detectives that biological samples
they thought might be semen, are not.
And he told us, "What I thought was seminal fluid, was not.
It was pre-menstrual discharge."
Without a semen sample the case against Stephan Zanter
amounts to two strands of human hair
determined to be similar to the suspect's,
but far from enough to make a case for murder.
In time the investigation stalls, then goes cold.
That is until Stephan Zanter's wife starts
talking to her friends.
-Barb and I were good friends. -In 1989 Jo Sorensen worked
with Barbara Zanter at Woodland Elementary School.
Sorensen tells Diprima she recalls a school meeting
she and Barbara attended where the topic of conversation
shifted from books to blood.
At that meeting she brought up the fact that she wanted to know
if anyone knew how to get blood out of their new carpeting
because they had just moved into this new house
and Stephan had had an accident or something
and he got blood all over it
and she wanted to know if we knew how to remove it.
According to Barb Zanter the blood trail
went across her new carpet, up the stairs,
and into a bathroom on the second floor.
She didn't give a lot of detail about the way it looked,
except she did use the word splattered.
Diprima needs to verify Sorensen's story.
He asks if she and Barb's other friends
would be willing to help him out.
He asked if we would be willing to tape conversations with Barb.
You shared a lot of stuff with us that, at the time ...
We didn't tell the police about all that.
They don't know about the blood on the carpet I don't think.
Revelations recorded around Jo Sorensen's kitchen table,
add up to a probable cause for a search warrant.
On March 4th, 1992,
investigators descend upon the Zanter home.
Florescence from luminol testing indicates the presence of blood
throughout the second floor.
The other search team in the basement
did locate a set of keys that were later identified
as keys belonging to Sharon Bloom.
As we left that day, I felt the case was solved.
Got the blood. We got the keys.
As it turned out it was only the beginning.
On October 23rd, 1992, a grand jury indicts
Stephan Zanter on a charge of murder.
Three years later, however,
the case has still not gone to trial.
His defense attorney submitted a motion
to suppress the evidence, especially the keys.
It went to the Minnesota Supreme Court
and the threw the keys out claiming
that we had over stepped our bounds.
That we didn't have probably cause to seize the keys.
That we only had probable cause to seize the blood.
Without the keys the prosecution is left no direct physical link
between the blood in Steve Zanter's carpet,
and Bloom.
Basically at that point
in time DNA was not as sophisticated as it is now.
The blood evidence in the carpet had been diluted
by a number of chemicals to clean the carpet,
and they could say it was a consistent with,
but they couldn't say
that it was specifically Sharon Bloom's blood.
Unwilling to risk a possible acquittal,
Rice County's prosecutors reluctantly dropped the charges,
leaving David Koefod with the name
of his girlfriend's suspected killer,
and nothing at all he can do about it.
By 1999 the forensic revolution is under way.
Short tandem repeat, or STR, DNA testing breathes new life
into old cases by detecting strains of DNA
where there once appeared to be none.
In March of 1999
she turns her attention to a section of bloody carpet,
pulled from the home of murder suspect, Stephan Zanter.
She then compares the unknown profile to the genetic signature
of the victim.
The blood then on the carpeting matched the DNA profile
from the blood of the victim.
In addition to the blood evidence,
a hair from the body dump site
is linked through mitochondrial DNA
to samples provided by Stephan Zanter.
Faced with the daunting physical evidence,
Zanter confesses to the crime in April 2003
and is sentenced to 25 years
behind the walls of Minnesota's Stillwell Penitentiary.