One of St. Richard Hubert Ireland, Jr. His next court date is October 6. I am so glad they found him. Lynch touted the arrest as the first cold case solved since the creation of the cold case sub-unit little more than a year ago. Muldoon assembled a spreadsheet of more than unsolved murders dating back nearly 40 years and then prioritized those that seemed promising.
Despite gathering dust in evidence rooms for decades, some cases have yielded far more helpful information than expected, Lynch said, as advancements in technology make it easier to extract DNA from smaller and smaller samples. Even hairs without a follicle can be analyzed. Lynch called the process of piecing together dated evidence and tracking down leads that had chilled with time painstaking but worthwhile. A dozen retired St. Paul police officers helped Muldoon in the investigation.
He had been castrated and slashed by butcher knives in the neck and abdomen. Press clippings at the time noted he had been sexually assaulted, but Muldoon said her investigation had not focused on that and sex assault is not part of the latest charges. An autopsy report showed Shemukenas bled to death, but police noticed little blood on the couch. His body had apparently been moved there from the bed, where investigators found six knives, a pair of scissors and a roll of masking tape.
Police at the time suspected Shemukenas had been killed by a gay lover and they placed posters in gay bars in St. Paul and Minneapolis, but leads did not pan out. In , Ireland emerged as a suspect after being arrested for groping a year-old boy in a sauna and kissing him on the mouth.
He was convicted of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct. Ireland told police at the time he did not remember ever being in the apartment, according to press clippings. The investigation went cold until last summer, when the cold case unit started up and Muldoon began looking into the murder again. She submitted various pieces of crime scene evidence to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for further analysis, and learned that Ireland was living in Duluth.
