CROOKSTON, Minn. – No new evidence, suspects or witnesses emerged from a tip law enforcement received last month regarding the death of Daryl Sindermann in rural Minnesota about 28 years ago, according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies received information Nov. 4 from a tipster who claimed to have witnessed Sindermann’s death, Lt. Jim Tadman, of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, said last month. The tipster told deputies that Sindermann was hit or pushed and hit his head on the back of a vehicle, Tadman said. Deputies reopened the case to investigate the new information but did not turn up any new evidence, suspects or witnesses, according to a release from the Sheriff’s Office.
“We’ve received other tips or concerns through the years that there was more to this case,” Tadman said. “It has been opened and closed numerous times as new information has come in. That’s not uncommon.”
Nineteen-year-old Sindermann was reported missing in September 1986 after he did not return home from a keg party out in the country a couple of days earlier. Law enforcement repeatedly searched the area where Sindermann was last seen, at the party site near the Thompson Bridge south of East Grand Forks, but did not find anything.
Eight and a half months later, in May 1987, Sindermann’s body was found in a drainage ditch 150 yards away from the party site. The autopsy performed on Sindermann’s badly decomposed body by the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office found no evidence of trauma, hemorrhage, projectiles, broken bones or fractures.
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The report lists the cause of death as “probable freshwater drowning, probable accident.”
But Sindermann’s mother, Elvoris Sindermann, who died of cancer in October 2004, was sure there was more to her son’s death. Frustrated by the investigation into Daryl’s death, she believed justice had not been served and that someone was not coming forward.
The case will be classified again as “inactive,” according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office release.
