A Minnesota Killer and Serial Rapist Will Serve Less Than Six Years for the Murder of Lorri Mesedahl

Mother Jones’ recent investigation revealed the details of the multiple other attacks for which Darrell Rea will never serve time.

A Star Tribune article on Lorri Mesedahl's murder in 1983.Newspapers.com

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A Minneapolis murderer and serial rapist, Darrell Rea, slipped through the fingers of local law enforcement for decades after killing 17-year-old Lorri Mesedahl in 1983—sexually abusing his stepdaughters and raping two more women in the years that followed. On Tuesday, in Hennepin County District Court, Rea was sentenced to 10 years and one month in prison for the second-degree murder of Mesedahl with intent, under Minnesota’s sentencing guidelines from the early 1980s. He will likely serve just over five years before being released under supervision. He is 64 years old. 

Rea denied involvement in Mesedahl’s death and did not express remorse in the courtroom. (Through his lawyer before the sentencing, Rea broadly denied the criminal accusations against him and declined to answer specific questions or comment further on allegations.)  

As detailed in my investigation published this week, Rea could be not be charged for either the rape of Mary-Scott Hunter or that of another woman, Barbara, even though there is DNA evidence linking him to the assaults, because of the three-year statute of limitations in effect when the attacks took place. (A similar situation is facing magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, who last week accused President Donald Trump of raping her in a New York department store in the mid 1990s, according to former Bronx sex crimes prosecutor Roger Canaff.)

Hennepin County prosecutors also declined to charge the sexual abuse of Rea’s stepdaughters, Monique Stevens and Naomie Rondo, which started in the late 1970s.

“Darrell won the game,” said Del Young, Mesedahl’s half brother, through tears in his victim impact statement to Judge Tamara Garcia on Tuesday morning. “No matter what happens in this court here today.”

In coming to Rea’s guilty verdict last month, Judge Garcia considered evidence from the 1988 attack on Barbara, whom Rea raped and stabbed in the neck. Still, Barbara was not permitted to read her victim impact statement aloud in the courtroom this week, but she shared it in writing with the judge. “I have come to the conclusion I will never see justice,” she wrote. “This 10 year sentence is just enough to get him madder. A slap on the wrist.” She signed it: “scarred, sad, and feeling hopeless at times.”

Minneapolis Police Sergeant Chris Karakostas at the spot where Lorri Mesedahl’s body was found.

Madison Pauly

Stevens and Rondo, Rea’s stepdaughters, gripped each other’s hands tightly in the courtroom. They too submitted victim impact statements to the judge, but were not permitted to read the statements aloud. “I get out of bed every morning and tell myself I am going to face the day,” Stevens wrote. “I am not going to let this man define me. I am not going to let what happened to me, define who I am.” 

“The abuse I suffered changed who I became and shaped my personality,” wrote Rondo. She added, “I am a fighter and refuse to let the abuse control me.”

Just before she read Rea’s sentence, Judge Garcia acknowledged their statements, telling the courtroom, “I would like all of you who wrote to me to know that I have heard each and every one of you.”

Hunter, who was raped by Rea in 1987, told me she is glad she did not have to deliver a victim impact statement in court. “I am not afraid to be vulnerable with people, but I consider it a sign of trust (or a leap of humanistic faith) when I am,” she wrote to me recently. “I believe that when folks are willingly and honestly vulnerable with each other, it’s a real gift. And, for obvious reasons, he doesn’t deserve that from me.”

Though Rea’s sentencing concludes the Mesedahl murder case, the law enforcement team that investigated the crime—and other crimes by Rea—isn’t done. “I think any investigator who worked, even touched this case, or knows anything about it, would agree that the probability that there are other victims out there, either living or dead, is probably pretty good,” Minneapolis Police Sergeant Chris Karakostas told me. As I detail in the investigation:

Now that Rea has been convicted of murder, he will be legally obligated to hand over a new DNA sample. And unlike the bloodstain from Barbara’s shirt, this one will be uploaded to the FBI’s national database. From now on, it will be automatically compared to unknown DNA from crime scenes across the country. When Rea’s DNA enters the system, Karakostas will be waiting to see if more hits come back from cases outside Minnesota. One day, he speculates, there could be another prosecution. In that future case, a judge could rule that the experiences of Hunter and Stevens count as corroborating evidence. Maybe they could still get some kind of day in court. “There’s a lot of women out there that really don’t have some justice for what happened to them,” Karakostas says.

Just before Rea entered the courtroom Tuesday, Karie Gibson, a member of the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit and part of the law enforcement team that worked on the Mesedahl case, leaned over to speak to me. “I don’t think today’s the last day we’ll be hearing about him,” she said.

Read the full investigation here.

An earlier version of this article misstated Del Young’s relationship to Lorri Mesedahl. This piece has been updated. Some names have been altered to protect anonymity.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate