173. Anita Knutson - The Ongoing College Murder
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Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Moreland. And I'm Garrett Moreland. And he's the husband. I'm the husband and we are back. We are in our studio. Garrett's here. It feels good to be home. That's right. Last week it was just Peyton. If you didn't miss me, then you were not my friend. Then go listen to Binged. If you did miss me, then we are friends. No, but it was actually kind of funny. I was reading all the comments on YouTube and Instagram and just all the social medias and I guess I'm useful. Yeah, everybody loves you.

So it feels good to be loved and we had a good time. We were able to disconnect for a little bit. That was the first vacation Peyton and I have been on alone in a couple years. So it was nice to, no, not a couple years, a year. A year. In a year, which I guess is pretty normal, but it was nice for us to disconnect and

We went to Cabo and we loved it. It was our first time in Cabo. It was so beautiful. We literally just did not do anything. It was great. We just ate food and got sunburned and went to the spa. I hate spas, but I did it for Peyton. So we went to the spa. And something else that I found out, or I guess that we found out, is Daisy is obsessed with watermelons.

with water like she was jumping in the pool left and right but the weird thing is that she well i guess a good thing she only jumps in if we're in there but oh man that girl can swim for hours yeah she's so sad when we get out so sad so that was kind of fun but she loves and she loves to jump in the pool so she waits for garrett to put her up on a ledge and then she dives as far as she can yeah

That's about it for my 10 seconds. We Cabo. I'm back. Feels good to be loved. I got a haircut like a new me. I'm a little bit tanner. You look tan, actually. Thank you. So thanks, everybody. And you know what? Let's hop into it.

Our case sources are always listed in our episode notes, and this week I'm going to keep it as just that because there are a lot of them. So let's just get right over into the episode. So we think of murders as often taking place in big cities, maybe like Chicago or L.A. and New York, where big city police departments have big-time resources and access to all the latest technology and a force of highly trained homicide detectives.

Murders, though, do still happen in small cities with very small police departments. And have you ever thought about the implications of that? How does a small city with a small police department handle a case that turns into a big-time murder mystery?

It can be overwhelming for a department that rarely handles murder cases. It can be overwhelming on their resources, particularly when there are multiple potential suspects, even if all the clues they need to solve the case are right in front of them just waiting to be put all together. A case like that might just need some additional resources to get it investigated properly. We all need help from time to time, and sometimes a small town police department needs a little bit of help.

And our case this week is exactly that. A big time murder mystery that takes place in a small town setting. I feel like, and this is probably not true, so sorry to everyone who lives in smaller towns, but I feel like the cases in smaller towns are just freakier. Just, I don't know. Yeah. And maybe it's just because it's a little more eerie because it's a small town, but I feel like there's just always something crazy happening.

behind these cases in smaller towns. So June of 2007 is an exciting time for 18-year-old Anita Mae Knutson. She's a college student in North Dakota and she's just finishing up her freshman year. She wants to become a teacher and is studying elementary education. She's living about an hour away from her hometown of Butte, North Dakota in an off-campus apartment with a girl she knows from high school.

Now, Anita and her family, though, didn't always live in North Dakota. In fact, Anita was born on September 22nd, 1988, in Orange County, California. She was adopted by her loving parents, Gordon Knutson and Sharon May Fellows Knutson, in February 1989, when Anita was just five months old.

Gordon and Sharon adopt a total of three children and are raising a blended, multiracial family. In addition to Anita, they adopt a boy, Daniel, who was born in May 1990.

He's a year and a half younger than Anita, and they adopt a little girl, Anna, who's three years younger than Anita. The Knutson family is living in Anaheim, California, where Anita attends elementary school and middle school. But as she's in high school, the family then moves to North Dakota. This is in June of 2002. At some point, her dad, Gordon Knutson, serves as mayor of Butte, North Dakota, the tiny town where the Knutson family lives, which is...

This is pretty crazy that he's mayor, but when I say tiny, I mean tiny. The population of Butte is only 82 people in 2007. Okay. The population of Velva, this is where Anita goes to high school, is only 946 people. So she goes to the bigger city of only 946. So she probably has like 100 kids in her high school? Yes. So it's an exciting time for Anita, though. Now fast forward, she's going to college.

She's pursuing her life goals as becoming a teacher, but Anita's life isn't perfect.

For one thing, she needs to work two jobs in addition to attending school in order to help pay tuition and make ends meet. She's a very hard worker, though, and she doesn't complain. She works as a housekeeper at the Fairfield Inn. I'm more curious as how these stores and hotels even stay alive. Well, this is in her college town, so it's a bit bigger. She's now out of her small town. Understood. So she's a beautiful girl with a lovely personality. She's kind, friendly, and likable. She has many friends, and she seems nearly universally liked.

As her sister Anna says, for some reason, it always seemed like no matter who she was talking to, she made them feel like the most important person in the world at the time. Anita is also smart and talented. She plays piano and violin and soccer, and she's a member of St. Paul's Lutheran Church. I played violin in third grade, and I was so bad at it that they sent me to choir. And I was so bad at choir that they kept me there because there was no other options, but...

Just want to let everyone know out there that I'm not musically talented at all. Did you have to play? Yeah, yeah. We had to play. Oh, it was either choir or band? It was either choir or, yeah, band. And I tried playing violin and I was so bad at it. They said, hey, you should go do choir. I cannot imagine you'd be very good at violin. Oh, no. I'm just not musically talented. I have rhythm, so it's like different, you know? But you also just don't have the patience. No, I don't have the patience for it. Yeah.

Anyways, sorry to interrupt the case, but if you ever get kicked, if you're in third grade and you ever get kicked out of playing violin, it's okay. Life goes on. And if you're in third grade, please ask your parents for permission to listen to this. That is true as well. Now, there's a young man who's interested in dating her, and it's a boy from her high school named Tyler Schmaltz.

Anita goes to her high school senior prom with him, but they're just friends. Tyler, though, gets a major crush on her at this prom and becomes infatuated with her, but he feels a little too awkward and nervous to try to make their relationship anything more. So he just has this kind of crush on her. Oh, got it. Okay.

So even though Anita is now living away from home, she remains very tight-knit with her family. She talks to her mom on the phone every single day. Her roommate in the apartment complex is a girl named Nicole Thomas, and they already knew each other from high school. Apparently, they had just graduated together, although Nicole is a full year older.

Tyler Schmaltz, the guy from high school who went to prom with her, who has a really big crush on her, moves into the very same apartment complex at college. So it's not like she goes off to college and doesn't know. I mean, it seems like a lot of people from high school tend to go to this specific college. So it's Friday, June 1st, 2007, and Anita speaks on the phone with her mom, Sharon, just like she does every single day at college.

Anita is out for the evening at a girlfriend's house and she tells her mom that she's about to go back to her own apartment. Neither of them can possibly know that this is the last time though they're ever going to speak.

When she gets home to her apartment on Friday night, June 1st, Anita puts her June rent check in the deposit box. Anita's brother Daniel is in a big sports tournament that weekend, either for basketball or baseball, and it's the North Dakota State Tournament, and Anita's parents and her sister all travel from their home to Bismarck to cheer him on, so they're not home.

While they're away, they try calling Anita on her cell phone, but she's not answering. She's also not calling them back. And this is just, it's not like her. Anna remembers how odd it was that Anita wasn't answering their mother's phone calls. The first day that Anita doesn't answer her mom's calls is Saturday, June 2nd, 2007. According to parkrapidsenterprise.com, Anita misses her morning shift that day at the Fairfield Inn.

Anita is a normally reliable worker, so she's not known for missing shifts, so this is really unusual. However, it seems that no one from the hotel notifies her family about Anita not showing up for work, which is

She has moved out of the house like she's a college student, but still at this point, her family just thinks she's not answering the phone. On Sunday, June 3rd, Anita is still not answering the phone, and on Monday, it's the same thing. Sometime early that morning, Monday, June 4th, the maintenance man for Anita's apartment complex, a man named Marty Lee, notices that a screen is damaged on one of the apartment units. It's ripped.

So he removes it and takes it away. He says he doesn't think much of it and he says he doesn't notice anything else unusual at the time. Meanwhile, by now Anita's family is back from the tournament in Bismarck and they're extremely worried about her. Anita's father, Gordon, is the one who goes out to check on her. On Monday, June 4th, he drives an hour from their home in Butte to Anita's apartment.

Now let me give you a visual of Anita's apartment complex as it may not be exactly what you're thinking. This is not some tall multi-story apartment building. Google Maps shows that the apartment complex is made up of long, low-slung, one-story rectangular, plain, block-like structures with walkways and grass separating the various individual buildings. Okay.

The windows and doors to the apartments are all on ground level. Gordon arrives and he knocks at Anita's door, but nobody answers. And there's just one door to her apartment, so he tries the door, but it's locked. It feels like no one is home, neither her or her roommate. However, Gordon can see that his daughter's car is there. It's a spot parked very closely to the apartment.

Even more alarmed now, Gordon goes and tracks down the apartment building's landlady, Laura Knapp, and tells her that he needs to get inside Anita's apartment. This is an emergency. Since her car is there, maybe she'd had an accident and injured herself inside. Maybe she needed help. At first, the landlady says she'll get in trouble if she lets anyone into another adult's apartment.

She's sitting there in the office with her boyfriend, Marty, who happens to be the maintenance man I just mentioned earlier who changed out the screen. But Gordon is persistent, says, listen, we haven't heard from my daughter. She's not answering calls. I absolutely need to get in and check.

This is when the maintenance man tells Gordon how he saw a damaged window screen on the ground outside of an apartment just that morning. It had been ripped or it had a big slice in it. Here we go. Once Anita's dad sees the screen or hears about it, he realizes that it's come from Anita's bedroom window. They put two and two together.

Her small bedroom has only one window and it's right at the foot of her bed. Her dad rushes back to her apartment and this time he looks in Anita's bedroom window. The lights inside her apartment are off, but it's easy to see inside because it's daytime. This is when Gordon Knutson sees what no parent should ever have to see. It breaks my heart to even think about it.

He sees his daughter lying face down on her own bed. She's got a bathrobe over her and he can see that her mattress is covered in blood. Anita's body is so close to the window that Gordon is able to reach through the open window and touch her. Her body is cold and he knows that his daughter is dead. The landlady now rushes to use her own key to unlock the door and let Gordon in and she calls the police. I cannot imagine finding your kid like that.

As a parent. No. That is horrible. And to have followed suspicions, he's probably a wreck the whole entire drive down. Like they've been nervous this whole time. They're at their son's tournament and then he has to make this drive and he's probably like trying to just chalk it up to nothing. And then this is what happens. Just, yeah. At 5.12 p.m. on Monday, June 4th, the police arrive on scene.

The police find Anita, just as Gordon did, lying face down on her bed. She's covered by only a pink bathrobe. She's not wearing panties or a bra. The mattress and floor are soaked in blood. Anita has two stab wounds to her chest. A pocket knife covered with dried blood was left behind at the scene, and it's found near the edge of the bed, near the wall, and near her bedroom window. Police believe, for obvious reasons, that this is all...

the murder weapon it's got a three or four inch blade and it's just a cheap pocket knife it's not clear from the sources whether the bathrobe was placed on top of her after she was killed but that seems to be the case it also seems from the sources that the knife didn't cut through the bathrobe so she was naked when she was killed okay interesting that whoever killed her then covered the body covered the body because it usually means you're remorseful remorseful usually

So Anita's cell phone is found near her body on the bed, partly covered by blankets. The police examined the screen to Anita's bedroom, the one that had been sliced open. It's kind of a shame that he had already removed the screen because now that evidence is compromised. The police can see blood on the screen right where the screen was cut, but nothing is missing from the apartments.

Nothing is disturbed below her window. Anita's purse, cell phone, computer, and camera are all still in her room. It's a small, crowded room, and there's no sign of a struggle. Police quickly come to the conclusion that this wasn't a burglary or robbery. They confirm that Anita's car is parked at the apartment complex. They also determine that only four people have a key to this apartment. Anita herself, her roommate Nicole, the landlady, and Marty, the maintenance worker.

Anita's roommate is not home when the body is discovered. So Anita's dad calls Anita's aunt, Karen, to come out to the scene and be there with him. Anita's sister, Anna, finds out about Anita's murder when her dad calls and says her brother is on his way to pick her up at her friend's house. So she's younger. Now he has to call all of his family and say...

Our daughter's dead. Like I saw her. And then there's this game of telephone as it starts to spread through the family. So Daniel, the brother, picks up little sister Anna. And it's clear to Anna that Daniel has been crying and that he doesn't want to tell her what's going on. But she begs to know. They sit in silence for the most dreadful half hour car ride after this.

What college is she at again? She's at Minot State University in North Dakota. Okay, so she's still pretty close to home, but obviously in quite a bigger city. Right.

So Tyler Schmaltz, remember he's prom date, is one of the first people to come upon the scene after Anita's body is discovered. So all the police are there and they're starting to investigate and Tyler Schmaltz just waltzes on over. Yeah, of course he does. The police ask him when he last communicated with Anita and he's able to immediately tell them the exact time they last texted each other. And the police find this to be odd. Like he doesn't even check his phone.

Yeah, it's a little weird. So Anita's body is transported later that same night at about 1130 p.m. to the state crime lab in Bismarck. No drugs or alcohol are found in her system. And according to the medical examination, Anita has been dead for more than a day by the time she was found on Monday. The autopsy determines that she likely died early Sunday morning.

And I'd just like to mention that the time of death is confusing as Anita didn't report for work on Saturday. Plus her family wasn't able to reach her by phone on Saturday. So they're saying she died Sunday, but she missed work and her family couldn't get in contact with her on Saturday. So she most likely died Sunday or Saturday. Well,

Not according to autopsy. They're saying she didn't die until early the next morning. Interesting. There's no interesting because why is she, why is she missing work? Like why is she right? She might not have died till Sunday, but where is she at Saturday?

Right, because in her little room, there's no evidence of even a disturbance. So what were they... If someone's in her room with her that whole time, holding her hostage, no one heard anything and they didn't leave any sign of a struggle behind? I'm curious to see when the last time her and Tyler spoke is. We'll get there. Okay. Hola. ¿Cómo está? Hola, ¿cómo estamos? Want to learn a new language? Well, the best way is to uproot your entire life, move to Spain, and live there for the rest of your...

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So there's no evidence of sexual assault, and there are no defensive wounds on her body, not even a broken nail. It's like she was just lying there, unsuspecting, when the killer struck. The cause of death is blood loss from the stab wounds, and she had been stabbed in the heart. It's not clear how long it took for her to die.

The local police investigate the blood on the screen and it turns out to be Anita's blood. It's not the killer's blood. Even with the murder weapon, the police feel they don't have much in the way of solid evidence. The time of the stabbing is unknown, which makes it harder to pin down details about people's whereabouts at the exact time. One lead the police have is that a witness reports having seen a man running from the area of Anita's apartment building sometime that weekend.

The police release a sketch to the public with a drawing of this man. And the man actually comes forward and says, yeah, that's me. That's a sketch of me. However, he says I had nothing to do with the murder. He says he's a jogger that runs in that area occasionally. That's hilarious. And someone thought he was running away. Yeah. So police investigate it and they decide to rule him out as a suspect.

While almost all of the DNA on the knife is from Anita, authorities are able to get a tiny amount of DNA off the knife, DNA that doesn't belong to her. The police decide to take DNA samples from just about everyone who knew Anita, which is a long list, including Anita's friends, associates, neighbors, and a group of construction workers who'd been working close by. This was a roofing company that was doing work right on Anita's apartment complex.

The police interviewed dozens of people, more than 40 men and women. And what the police conclude is that even though Anita was very well liked, they are faced with many potential suspects. It's actually an overwhelming number of suspects for this small police force to tackle. Why? I'm confused. Well, one suspect is Marty Annell, the maintenance man who makes the early morning rounds at the apartment complex, the one who discovered the slashed screen. Yeah.

They find it suspicious that he was right there and admits to having found the screen, but claims to not have seen Anita's body lying just beneath the window. Like he took that screen off. Okay. That's a good point. Police also interview many students along with friends of Anita's back home and even people who knew her back in California before she moved.

They looked into men that her roommate Nicole had brought back to their apartment over the past few months. They interview people who would frequent the dance club that Anita liked to go to. They, of course, interview Nicole, Anita's roommate. They bring her and many other witnesses to the police station for questioning. Nicole says that she wasn't there at the apartment the weekend of the murder. She was out of town with her family all weekend at their farm in Velva.

The town of Velva, where Anita and Nicole attended high school and where Nicole's family lives, is about 25 to 30 minutes southeast of the college. Which is interesting because right now it seems like it has to be someone that knew that she was out of town. And the only people that knew that are people that are close to her. Right. So, I mean, right away, obviously the suspect, Tyler. His name Tyler? Yeah. Man, I'm getting good at this.

Right. Well, so you're saying that they had to have known she was going to be gone because then that means Anita would be alone. Yeah, because what if the roommate was there and Anita was there? I doubt some random, I mean, it happens, but some random guy just happens to attack her. And if the roommate was there, it's a completely different story, right? Yeah.

So I feel like it had to have been someone that knew that Anita was going to be alone. Right. So police, though, aren't entirely satisfied with Nicole's account of her whereabouts over the weekend. They questioned her more than once, and she contradicts herself a bit about details as to what she was doing that weekend, whether she saw a movie, what relatives she was with.

Police follow up on Nicole's alibi with her dad, who confirms no, Nicole was home with them from about 7 p.m. on Saturday, June 2nd, all the way through the morning of Monday, June 4th. Nicole then went straight from her parents' house on Monday morning to work without even stopping at her apartment first. Nicole is thoroughly questioned and is cooperating fully with police. There are some rumors, though, that come forward floating around about her, which are

If you followed along with the Idaho campus murders, this is a very similar thing. Everyone becomes a suspect and people just start talking. And there's so many, there were so many rumors that just were not true, which was kind of sucked because a lot of people in positions that didn't deserve to be in those positions. Right. And it's just disrespectful. Yeah.

So Nicole says she and Anita were best friends, but other witnesses and friends say, no, the two didn't get along very well. They fought a lot. One said that Nicole seemed more concerned about a missing iPod than her slain friend. And that's not all. Just a month or so before she was murdered, Anita had asked her father to put a lock on her bedroom door because she didn't feel safe. Apparently telling her family that she'd been receiving threatening texts from Nicole.

By some reports, Anita is planning to even move out of the apartment. However, according to Anita's dad, the two had patched things up by the time of the murder. He's like, no, they figured it all out.

they're just freshmen. It's hard. Moving in with someone is hard. This could be completely blown out of proportion. At this point in the investigation, police check Anita's phone records and computer records. They discovered that Anita was texting with a guy friend in the wee hours of Sunday, June 3rd, 2007. The last time that Anita's phone sends a text is at 4 48 a.m.

At 4.53 a.m., the friend sends a last text to her, but he never gets the red receipt from her. So Anita doesn't read or send any more texts after this time.

The police don't initially release his identity or the nature of the text, but they consider him a suspect as well. And again, the timing is a bit weird. Anita missed a Saturday morning shift and didn't talk to her parents that Saturday, but both the medical examination and now her texts indicate that the stabbing must have happened early Sunday morning because her phone was active. So I also am confused why, where are the cameras at? I mean, we're in modern days, modern society, whatever you want to call it.

And I'm surprised that this apartment complex doesn't have any cameras. Small town. No cameras. No cameras. Mistake number one. So when I said that the police department had no shortage of suspects, I also think that a part of this has to do with

they have to rule everyone out and maybe larger police departments do that a little bit more efficiently. So I'm not, I mean, I think this is great, but they don't have enough evidence at all or suspicion for an arrest. After Anita's death, Tyler Schmaltz creates a 20 minute Facebook video tribute to Anita. This raises eyebrows as Tyler continues to be what some consider overly involved with the case.

So it's safe to say the police most definitely consider Tyler a suspect. They first questioned him actually right at the crime scene. He lives close by, so he was there fast. When they ask him how...

He knew exactly what time, like it was almost like he rehearsed the answer. He explained it away and says that Anita's aunt arrived quickly on the scene and grilled Tyler about when he last spoke to Anita. This was before he talked to police. So he'd already gone and checked his chat logs before he got questioned by police. So he's like, I'd already talked to your aunt. So that's how come I know.

He protests his innocence and feels that police are hounding him. His brother lives with him as well, and they both provide DNA samples and are questioned several times. He tells the police at some point that Anita was his only friend. Which...

I don't know if that's what you should tell police, but that's okay. Anita's funeral is on June 11th, 2007. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations for dollars for scholars. Nicole attends the funeral and something truly awful happens. Nicole's mother actually confronts Anita's mother at the funeral. Oh my, no. Upset and angered because Nicole is considered a person of interest and had to go to the police station for questioning. Not...

It is not the time. No. At a funeral that is so disrespectful. For her murdered daughter. Yeah, no, that's not okay. And I understand that if you're innocent, it's frustrating to be questioned. For sure. But look, not at a funeral. But also they're questioning everybody. It's not like the police department is singling out Nicole. Yeah.

So the same day as the funeral, there's another development in the case. On June 11th, a Montana man named Devin Hall is arrested for burglary while armed with a knife in the college town. An FBI profiler gets involved in the case and identifies the burglar as the most likely suspect in Anita's murder. He's like, what are the chances? This seems to be linked.

Despite all the witness interviews they're conducting and an abundance of suspects, the case goes nowhere. Apparently, the DNA isn't going anywhere either. The sample they got off the knife is just too small for comparison. The police are puzzled by many aspects of the crime. For one, the fact that the blood on the screen is Anita's doesn't make sense. According to investigators, this indicates to them that the screen was cut after the murder. They believe the killer used the knife to stab Anita and then slashed the window screen with the same knife.

Why? If someone didn't slash open the window in order to gain entry, why would they slash it after the murder? The case is simply overwhelming. Keep in mind that it's a relatively small place. I mean, I think I know the answer, but I'm going to let you keep going to see if what you say is what I'm thinking. Might be jumping the gun, but I don't know. Tyler's still looking a little suspicious.

Well, within just days of Anita's murder, clues are waning and the police feel they have nothing solid to make an arrest. And unfortunately, the case just starts going cold. So the next major development comes about a year and a half after the murder. On January 1st, 2009, Marty Leonel, the maintenance man who was also the apartment manager's boyfriend, takes his own life.

He was 46 years old. He had been questioned by the police several times, given that he had a key to the apartment and was right there on the scene the morning Anita's body was found. But the police just didn't develop him as a suspect. So investigators interview Marty's friend who had spoken with him just hours before he killed himself. And all he had to offer was that he had, quote, a gut feeling that Marty had murdered that girl.

So did Marty do it? Did he kill himself out of remorse? Well, now this is pretty sensitive because if he didn't do it, then... Right.

Yeah, I don't know. So the years keep passing. Life just goes on. Friends of Anita's from high school and college get married. They start having kids. On June 2nd, 2010, Nicole Thomas gets married for the first time and changes her last name. At first, the Knutson family thinks the police are doing a good job, but over the years, they feel that the police have given up and unnecessarily turned this into a cold case. Okay.

A resounding theme in the case is that a small town police force that is simply overwhelmed by this big murder investigation. And I'm very sorry to say that extreme tragedy finds the Knutson family again.

On April 9th, 2013, Daniel, Anita's younger brother, shoots himself and takes his own life in his home. He's just 22 years old. It's been almost six years since Anita's murder. Got it. As reported in the Washington Post, Anna said that their sister's death was particularly devastating for her brother and the incident changed him and caused him a lot of pain.

Their mom, Sharon, says she spoke with Daniel the day before and he had seemed fine. The pain this family is enduring is just unthinkable. The ripple effects from Anita's murder are staggering.

And although the case does seem very cold, police are still trying to solve it. They begin reworking the case again in 2018. In 2019, as a result of funds donated by crowdfunding, Anita's family rents electronic billboards for two weeks during the North Dakota State Fair, asking for the public's help in providing information to help solve the crime. I'm kind of confused as...

Is there no DNA on the scene? How does she get killed with a pocket knife and he doesn't get cut once or she, he, whatever, whoever kills her. I just feel like there's no hair anywhere. There's no skin anywhere. There's no thumbprints anywhere. Like nothing, especially in a small town. I,

I mean, I doubt there was other traffic through her apartment. I'm just confused how there's, where's all the evidence? The only DNA evidence that police say they have at this point is the DNA on the pocket knife that's too small to test. They know it's not Anita's. They think it's the killer's, but it's too small to test. Okay. So in early 2022, the police decide to try something totally new in the case. They turn to true crime, the genre, for help.

That's right. They partner with a true crime show called Cold Justice to try to at least get some new leads on the case, get it in front of other people, maybe even get the case solved. Cold Justice is a TV show on oxygen that's produced by Dick Wolf.

The premise of the show is that Cold Justice sends out their own experienced investigators who go to small towns and try to help those police force solve their cold case murders. So Cold Justice sends Kelly Siegler, a former prosecutor from Harris County, Texas, and Steve Spingola, a retired Milwaukee homicide detective, to North Dakota.

The police department provides them with all the volumes and volumes of police files on the case and reports that they have accumulated over the years. The Cole Justice team works hand-in-hand with the police and take it from square one. They re-interview all the witnesses in the case on all those who are still alive. They re-interview Tyler Schmaltz and Nicole and her family. They also interview high school friends who knew Anita and Nicole and many other witnesses.

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The team looks to the psychology of the murder in order to get them into the mindset of the killer. What was the killer's motivation? Forensic psychologist Catherine Paneri had analyzed Anita's case and had been able to come to some conclusions.

The absence of any defensive wounds suggested to her that the murder was not a crime of passion. She says, quote, this is a too quick stab wounds and the perpetrator is out of the picture. This was not a frenzied overkill.

Surprising because I think I thought the opposite. Kelly Siegler from Cold Justice says, is it possible that Anita's murder was more thought out? Interesting. Was this a premeditated cold blooded murder? Another psychological clue is the fact that the killer apparently covered Anita's body after the fact. This often indicates that the killer actually knew the victim personally. So,

Some experts believe that covering a body is a coping mechanism to depersonalize the victim or hide the horror of what the killer had just done. So they feel remorse and they cover it to try to cover up what they had done. The cold justice team goes through the suspects one by one. There's the burglar who was arrested in the area right around the time of the murder. The police believe they've cleared him. And there's the jogger who was seen running near the crime scene. The police feel he's innocent. But

But there are still the four other main suspects that Cold Justice and police are really zeroing in on. Some witnesses believe Tyler Schmaltz may have done it. Some suspect Nicole, the roommate. Some suspect the other two. And here we go one by one.

It turns out that a man named Michael Vann was the one who was texting with Anita in the early hours that Sunday morning when she was murdered. He was 25 years old at the time. He wanted a more serious relationship with Anita rather than being just friends. He met Anita at a Denny's a few months earlier. He's listed as Money Mike in Anita's contacts on her phone. It's a Motorola flip phone that was popular back then.

Their relationship appears to be confined to just texts and phone calls, and although it can't be definitively proven, it is believed that Van doesn't know where Anita lives. So despite this, many consider this last texter to be a good suspect. Michael Van cooperated with police by giving a DNA sample, and he apparently also took two polygraphs. Investigators with Cold Justice dive into these texts between Anita and Money Mike.

One of her last texts ever to Mike was, how do you move on after being engaged twice? That's a huge life-altering thing. Then Mike's number texts back, you never move. You just become jaded. Hope that you find someone who will love you for you. Anita's phone responds, good night. Mike responds at 4.39 a.m., oh, good night.

Then he sends another message at 4.43. Nice, I thought you were going to reply to my last text. Her phone responds, I didn't know what to say. He writes, you don't say anything. This last message, though, is never marked as read. As for what this conversation was about, Anita had an ex-boyfriend in California, so it's possible that that's what she was referring to. According to a 2022 Oxygen article, Mike allegedly told another individual that he killed Anita.

It's not clear when that confession supposedly took place, but the thing is, Michael Vann is no longer alive. He died in 2009 of natural causes from an asthma attack. No way.

So the next suspect, Tyler Schmaltz, has been a suspect from the very beginning, given that he was reportedly extremely obsessed with Anita for years and given his heavy involvement in the case. How does that work? So you think Mike does it, but then he dies. So you're just like, oh, let's now see if Tyler did it. Well, these are just possible suspects. It's not that they have zeroed in on anyone. It's just, it's kind of weird. It's like, okay, Mike dies. So now maybe...

Maybe it's Tyler. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't know. So many suspect him, particularly because he was one of the first people on the scene. However, in his defense, he did live close by, which would help explain the fact, and he didn't have a key to her apartment.

So this leaves Marty, Anel, and Nicole as suspects. Many suspect the maintenance man because he took his own life just a year and a half after the murder. The people from Cold Justice want to find out what led up to his suicide, so they call his sister. She tells them that Marty's long-term girlfriend was cheating on him and that their relationship was ending after many years. They'd been living together, and not only was he going through the trauma of the breakup, but he had also just lost his job and his home.

In other words, Cold Justice discovers that Marty had some very traumatic things going on in his personal life that may have had nothing to do with Anita's murder. So they don't think that's what motivated him to take his life. That leaves us with Nicole. What do we know about her? She was hot-tempered and reactionary. She was 19 at the time of the murder. She was also gone.

Though, Saturday night, Sunday. Right. And Monday. But Sharon, Anita's mom does report, remember, that Anita was scared of Nicole. Nicole makes it seem like they were best friends. But really...

There had been some issues. Their relationship had become toxic. Would be easy to get away with it because her DNA is already going to be in the apartment. Right. Friends told investigators that Nicole Thomas was jealous of Anita. And they also said that Anita hated going home because of the tense environment. So it does not seem like a very good living environment. Nicole's friends think she seemed capable of committing murder, which that is something to say about a friend. If anyone thinks that about me.

I don't know. I must be a horrible person. Her friends also claimed she was acting weird after the death. The police never ruled out Nicole, but they never felt they had enough to arrest her. Her only alibi was her own family, which is hard. So remember those threatening texts that people had talked about? I want to go through those while talking about Nicole.

So on April 21st, Nicole texted Anita. Okay, so next time you leave and don't plan on coming back in the morning and lock your door because God knows I am dying to get in there, shut the effing alarm off so I don't have to listen to it all morning when I can be sleeping.

This was six weeks before the murder. There's no record of Anita responding. Another from Nicole on the same day. And just for the heads up, my dad and I are going to talk to landlord ASAP and see what we can do. Because honestly, I have no idea what I did to you to make you all of a sudden be all weird on me. But I'm going to tell you right now, I sure as hell ain't going to put up with this till December. This sucks.

She said, I may sound like a B word, but what goes around comes around. And another one, things shouldn't have gotten like this in the first place. I didn't do crap to deserve this. But whatever, I'm done discussing this. Oh, and by the way, I really don't feel like talking on the phone. So I guess we're both crap out of luck. Got it. I mean, those aren't that threatening to me. That just sounds like two people fighting, you know? Yeah, but they are fighting and they have to live together. Yeah, but I mean...

We don't fight like that. But I mean, there's married couples that fight like that. You know what I'm saying? And they live together and they don't kill each other. So I don't know. So the next day, an incoming text from Nicole says, are you going to move out or am I? If we can get out of this lease, if one of us leaves. And another one, this is causing me problems with my family because my stress level is very high on the subject. Seriously, what did I do to you? I ain't ever home. You pretty much have the effing place to yourself.

Why are they fighting so bad? I can't even tell what's going on. The next day, what does your mom want my phone number for? This one isn't read as Anita is already dead. So she sends a text after she's dead. Her body will be found that day. And I'm going to assume the mom wants her number because she's trying to figure out where her daughter is and why she hasn't been answering the calls. Well, it seems like if she sent that, it probably wasn't her. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, those don't those don't seem super threatening to me. Like not I'm going to kill you threatening, you know? Yeah. Well, the cold justice investigators zero in on Nicole. They even interview her dad to say, hey, are you lying about her alibi? Are you just covering up for her? And he goes, no, my daughter was on the farm with me the whole time. I'm not an effing liar. So who did it?

Cole Justice explains how they started the case with four main suspects, but after going through all the evidence, they were left with just one. One person who had both a motive and a key to the apartment, and that was Nicole. As Kelly Siegler says, the only person who needs to stage the scene is the person who's implicated if they don't stage it, because they believe that someone staged the scene to look like someone had come in through the window, and that's how the blood got on there.

That someone with a key first stabbed her and then staged the whole scene to make it look like it had been an intruder. Also, most, I feel like majority of time as well, if it's a male that kills a female, they're usually sexually assaulted. Right. She was not. Or cover up the body. Yeah. And it does seem like they were having quite a bit of fighting. She even said she was fighting with her family because of Anita. And honestly, the only person in the whole world who didn't like Anita, it seems, was Nicole. Like,

Of everyone they've interviewed, that's the only person who was having issues with her. Okay, so does this solve what's going on? The police and the cold justice team meet with the Knutson family and tell them what they think. Nicole Rice is arrested at 325 p.m. on March 16th, 2022.

She's placed in custody. She's 34 years old at the time and has just got married to her second husband, and she has a teenage daughter. She worked as a hairdresser and at a car dealership. She pleads not guilty, and then they go to a preliminary hearing where a judge does rule that there's sufficient probable cause for the case to proceed to trial. So Nicole, again, pleads not guilty. Cole Justice, at this point, airs their program. Oh, man, it's hard because I'm all for this.

Like I'm all for, oh, if it's her, then she needs to be found and let's air all these programs. But it's hard because I feel like I'm usually on the opposite side of this.

I don't know if there's enough evidence to say that it was her. And then if it isn't her, you just put her through the ringer. Well, also more evidence is going to come out at trial because this trial has not taken place yet. Okay. Okay. Okay. So there's supposed to be a pretrial hearing in on March 1st, 2023, but then it's rescheduled. You know how these things go. It's been pushed back and pushed back. So, um,

We're still in pre-trial hearing phrases phases right now with just appeals and requests for more time and everything. Um,

But what about the DNA in this case? Because that will surely prove. Yeah. Well, the amount of DNA on the knife that did not come from Anita is very small and it's still too small of a sample to run through CODIS. So the only way to do the DNA analysis is to compare the small samples side by side with DNA samples the police collect from potential suspects.

And the only person they say who couldn't be excluded was Nicole during this, like the way that they're comparing the DNA. It's not 100% certain, but they also said it was close enough that they couldn't exclude her. So what now? Nicole faces life without the possibility of parole if she's convicted. And again, I wanted to cover this case because more details are going to come out at trial. Like there's always more that police know. Because I...

Usually you don't take it to trial if you don't have something that's going to blow everyone's mind. Right. And we all do need to remember that she's presumed innocent until proven guilty. So we're not talking right now saying she's guilty. I'm just kind of catching you up on this case so that we can all stay tuned where my mom over on Rise and Crime will probably cover the updates. Yeah. And we can kind of know what's going on. Uh-huh.

The latest development in the case is that the pretrial conference has been delayed again. They say they need more time to go through a significant new discovery, but it's not clear what this new discovery is.

So the next hearing is now scheduled for September 27th, 2023. Oh man, these get pushed back so far. Yeah. Questions that have not been answered yet and perhaps will be answered at trial include information about the murder weapon. Where did the knife come from? Who owned it? Is there any evidence even tying it to Nicole? Also, is it possible that Anita died earlier than Sunday morning and that Nicole was using her cell phone to send texts?

after she'd already died. This is an ongoing story. We'll keep you updated. If listeners have any information about the case, you're asked to please contact the police department at 701-852-0111. And let's please keep the Knutson family in our thoughts as we're moving forward. And this is going to trial because that is always a really, really tough time for victims' families. Well, first of all, I want to apologize to Tyler because I blame Tyler and

It looks like it wasn't him. Second of all, I don't want to blame anyone because it's going to trial. Yeah. And we'll see. I don't want to get in trouble or sued. I will say, um, if you watch the episode on this case, it does show pretty good evidence that whoever did this most likely had a key to the apartment. Okay. I also think it's, what are the chances that, um,

What are the chances that the maintenance man takes his own life? I know. But they looked into it and it said he had other stuff going on personally. And then Mike dies? Like how many people that are connected to this case die? Like what's up with that? Oh, yeah. And then also her brother. Yeah. I mean, that's a cause of her death most likely, which is super sad. But still, I mean, there's a lot of death.

It's a crazy one. Yeah, well, I guess we'll just keep everyone updated. I don't know what to expect. But it's kind of crazy because I feel like when we talk about cold cases, usually it's like we cover the cold case that's now just been solved recently in recent years. This hasn't been solved. I mean, I guess it's been solved, but we'll see at trial what really happened. All right, you guys, that was our episode for this week, and we will see you next time with another one. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye.