The Night Shift

Katie Poirier was nineteen and worked nights at D.J.’s Expressway Conoco, a convenience store beside Interstate 35 in Moose Lake, Minnesota. Late on May 26, 1999, while she was working alone, a man walked in shortly before closing. The store’s security camera recorded him leading her out of the building, and witnesses reported a black pickup nearby; one recalled part of its plate.

Police and volunteers searched for weeks, and NASA helped enhance the grainy footage. A partial license plate and tips from the public pointed investigators to Donald Blom, a registered sex offender with a long record of kidnapping and sexual assault. He was arrested on June 22, 1999. In a fire pit on his rural land near Kerrick, about twelve miles from the store, searchers found burned bone fragments and a tooth, and dental records tied them to Katie. That September, Blom confessed to strangling her and burning her body, then took the confession back.

Heavy publicity moved the trial to Virginia, Minnesota. On August 16, 2000, a jury found Blom guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2004 and turned away later petitions. The case pushed state lawmakers to tighten sex offender laws. Blom died of natural causes in the Oak Park Heights prison on January 10, 2023, at age 73.