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“I Ate Mom”: Man Found Guilty in Gruesome Murder and Cannibalism of His Mother · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: I want you to picture just a quintessential American small town, Like,
0:06
close your eyes for a second if you can, and
0:08
just mentally walk down the main street.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, paint the picture for us.
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Speaker 1: Right, So we are talking about Big Lake, Minnesota. It
0:14
is this community of about ten thousand people nestled right
0:18
there on the Mississippi River chain. Picture lakeside homes with
0:21
incredibly well kept lawns, family pontoon boats bobbing gently at
0:26
the docks as the sun goes down. You know, Fourth
0:28
of July parades with local marching bands and politicians tossing
0:33
candy from the back of classic convertible.
0:35
Speaker 2: The whole Americana vibe exactly.
0:37
Speaker 1: It is the kind of place where local government doesn't
0:40
run on like bitter, toxic partisan divides. It runs on coffee,
0:45
donuts and consensus.
0:46
Speaker 2: Right.
0:46
Speaker 1: It's a place where neighbors genuinely wave hello over the fence,
0:49
where the schools are a point of intense local pride,
0:52
The parks are sprawling and family friendly. There's this overarching,
0:56
almost tangible sense of safety, a protective bubble. You know,
1:00
you know the exact kind of town I'm talking about.
1:01
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, it is the exact kind of demographic and
1:05
geographic space, people they actively seek out when they want
1:10
to escape the chaos of the broader world. The entire
1:13
sociological architecture of a town like Big Lake is built
1:16
on the promise of stability. It's a place where the
1:19
social contract is highly visible. Like you look out for
1:21
my kids, I look out for yours.
1:23
Speaker 1: Exactly stability, predictability. It's the promise that tomorrow will look
1:27
pretty much exactly like today. But well, we are taking
1:30
a deep dive today because that specific comforting bubble was
1:35
shattered in a way that frankly defies almost all human comprehension.
1:39
Speaker 2: It really does.
1:39
Speaker 1: We're looking at a terrifying reality that unfolded in one
1:42
of those quiet, picturesque lakeside homes in July of twenty twenty,
1:47
a crime so brutal, so deeply unsettling, that it entirely
1:50
strips away all of those comforting small town illusions and
1:54
forces you to look at what happens behind closed doors.
1:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, the contrast is just jarring.
1:59
Speaker 1: It is. You're talking about an active matricide, the killing
2:02
of a mother by her own son. But I mean,
2:06
it wasn't just a sudden act of leadful violence. It
2:08
escalated into something primitive dismemberment and pre mortem cannibalism.
2:14
Speaker 2: God, those are concepts that you almost never hear strung
2:17
together in the same sentence, let alone in the context
2:20
of a community defined by its quiet normalcy. The juxtaposition
2:24
between the setting, this idyllic lake town, and the sheer,
2:28
visceral horror of the crime is incredibly jarring. It forces
2:31
a complete cognitive dissonance, It really.
2:34
Speaker 1: Does so today. Our mission in this deep dive is
2:37
to guide you through the comprehensive records, the police timelines,
2:40
the forensic evaluations, and the court filings that document this nightmare.
2:45
But I want to be incredibly clear right up front,
2:47
our goal here isn't just to recount a true crime
2:50
tragedy for the sake of shock value. Treating this like
2:53
a campfire ghost story would be doing a massive disservice
2:56
to the victim, her family, and the community that is
2:59
still reeling from it. Our mission is to fundamentally explore
3:03
the extreme, terrifying limits of familial bonds when they are
3:07
placed under the crushing weight of severe untreated psychosis. Right.
3:11
Speaker 2: The psychological element is huge.
3:13
Speaker 1: Here, yeah, and we want to understand the agonizing deeply
3:17
philosophical complexities of the justice system as it tries to
3:21
legally parse out the boundaries of human sanity. And ultimately,
3:25
we want to look at how a community even begins
3:27
the mechanics of healing when the absolute unthinkable happens right
3:31
in their own backyard.
3:32
Speaker 2: And you know, to fully grasp the gravity of this
3:35
and why we are unpacking it right now, we need
3:37
to firmly ground ourselves in the present timeline point, because
3:40
today is April fourteenth, twenty twenty six. For nearly six years,
3:44
this specific case has been a dark, suffocating cloud hanging
3:47
over Big Lake.
3:48
Speaker 1: Six years.
3:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, six years. It's been a legal purgatory, delayed by
3:52
years of agonizing medical and psychiatric evaluations. But just days ago,
3:56
a massive legal milestone was finally reached. A guilt see
4:00
verdict was handed down. The sheer length of time it
4:03
took to get to this verdict, the agonizing weight for
4:06
the family, and the horrific nature of the forensic details
4:09
that have now been officially confirmed in court, they have
4:13
completely reignited these fierce, complicated.
4:16
Speaker 1: Debates, debates about accountability.
4:18
Speaker 2: Exactly, debates about mental illness, about where we as a
4:22
society draw the line on moral culpability and what the
4:25
concept of justice actually looks like when a human mind
4:28
entirely collapses in on itself.
4:30
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, because to even begin to understand
4:34
the sheer magnitude of this tragedy, we have to look
4:37
past the blood stains and the shock value. We have
4:39
to pivot sharply to the human elements. We have to
4:42
understand the specific gravity of what was actually lost, and
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to do that well, we have to look at the stark,
4:47
heartbreaking contrast between a vibrant public facade and a devastating
4:52
private reality. We need to start with the life of
4:54
the victim, Rosalie Ellen Johnson. To everyone in Big Lake,
4:58
she was just Rose.
5:00
Speaker 2: When you look at the trajectory of Rose's life and
5:02
her footprint in this town, the word that consistently emerges
5:05
is pillar. But I don't mean that in the cliche
5:09
passive sense of someone who just donates to local charities.
5:13
She was a structural pillar right. She was active, very active.
5:17
She was born in an era and raised with a
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set of values that heavily emphasized hard work, direct civic duty,
5:23
and proactive neighborly support. She was the absolute embodiment of
5:28
that classic roll up your sleeves Minnesota ethos.
5:31
Speaker 1: She really was. If you just look at her resume
5:33
as civic engagement, it's exhausting in the best way possible.
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Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
5:37
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, she ran in the local election for
5:40
the Big Lake City Council. Now, she finished third in
5:43
that race, but she didn't just pack up her signs
5:46
and go home. She didn't let a minor electoral defeat
5:48
stop her commitment to the town. By twenty nineteen, when
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a vacancy unexpectedly opened up on the city council, the
5:55
town immediately looked to her and she was appointed to
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fill it.
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Speaker 2: That says a lot about her reputage.
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Speaker 1: It does, But she wasn't just sitting in a comfortable
6:02
leather chair at a televised meeting once a month, bang
6:04
in a gavel. She was actively in the trenches of
6:07
local government right.
6:09
Speaker 2: She gravitated toward the real, often unglamorous, highly technical work
6:14
that keeps a municipality from falling apart, the invisible infrastructure
6:19
of civilization.
6:20
Speaker 1: Precisely, she served on the Big Lake Economic Development Authority,
6:24
trying to bring jobs and businesses to the town. She
6:27
was on the Personnel Committee, dealing with the human resources
6:30
aspect of running a local government. She worked on road
6:33
maintenance issues. I want you the listener, to think about
6:37
that for a second. Road maintenance that is the literal
6:40
definition of doing the groundwork for your community.
6:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, nobody wants to deal with road maintenance exactly.
6:46
Speaker 1: It's patholes at snowplow routes, it's drainage. It's the stuff
6:49
no one notices until it's broken, and she was the
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one making sure it didn't break.
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Speaker 2: Wow.
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Speaker 1: She's also active in the Big Lake Community Lake Association, which,
6:58
in a town geographically and culturally defined by its water,
7:01
is crucial. And on top of all of that municial infrastructure,
7:05
she served on the Big Lake School District's Community Education
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Advisory Board.
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Speaker 2: The recollections from her colleagues are incredibly revealing about her
7:12
specific brand of leadership too. What do they say, Well,
7:16
they didn't just respect her title. They fundamentally relied on
7:19
her intellect. They consistently described her as brilliant. One colleague
7:24
noted she was a voice of reason who helped weather storms.
7:27
Speaker 1: That's a great compliment, it is.
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Speaker 2: Another council member specifically remembered her ability to bring humor
7:33
into the room, like she could diffuse a tense, gridlocked
7:37
meeting with a joke. But she never ever lost sight
7:41
of tackling the serious local issues, whether that was zoning laws,
7:45
infrastructure budgets, or advocating for youth programs.
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Speaker 1: And her focus on youth programs was a huge part
7:52
of her identity. She worked closely with the Wave Youth
7:55
Center in town, actively mentoring young people. She was constantly
7:58
trying to channel community resources to help the next generation
8:01
find their footing. A family member, speaking in the immediate,
8:05
raw aftermath of her death, provided a quote that just
8:08
stops you in your tracks. They said, she was the
8:10
smartest person I ever met in my life and is
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the single person who has done the most good that
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I know.
8:15
Speaker 2: That is a profound, incredibly heavy legacy to leave behind.
8:19
It paints a picture of a woman who possessed an
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enormous capacity to carry the weight of others.
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Speaker 1: It does, but it also makes me think about the
8:26
mechanics of how we perceive people like Rose. I'm thinking
8:29
about this count of ten thousand people and how Rose
8:33
functioned within it. Yeah, think of a sinkhole under a
8:36
perfectly manicured, beautiful suburban lawn. On the surface, the grass
8:40
is vibrant, green, The long word glides over it perfectly
8:43
every Sunday. The neighbors admire it. But underneath that surface,
8:48
out of sight, subterranean water is slowly, silently eroding the limestone.
8:53
The structural integrity is hollowing out day by day, month
8:56
by month, but the surface.
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Speaker 2: Holds until it doesn't.
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Speaker 1: It holds into the exact moment a cant anymore, and
9:02
then the collapse is sudden, catastrophic and completely devastating to
9:06
everything sitting on top of it.
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Speaker 2: Wow, that's a powerful analogy.
9:09
Speaker 1: Rose was maintaining that perfect lawn for the entire town.
9:13
She was holding up so much for Big Lake, projecting
9:16
this incredible capability, all while balancing her public service with
9:20
her home life with her husband Andrew Jordal and their
9:23
twenty six year old son, Eric, who was living at home.
9:26
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the profound, terrifying tragedy of this story,
9:30
because while Rose was this incredibly visible stabilizing force for
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the entire community, while she was the one people called
9:37
when the roads needed fixing or the youth center needed funding,
9:41
there was a massive subcranean erosion happening in her own home. Yeah,
9:46
that hidden erosion was the severe, escalating psychological struggle of
9:50
her son, Eric Laife Jordal.
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Speaker 1: I want to try to map out what that struggle
9:54
actually looked like. Yeah, what do we actually know about
9:57
Eric's life before that night?
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Speaker 2: Well, the reality is that the public in legal footprint
10:00
of Eric's life before the murder is incredibly constrained. We
10:04
know the basic demographic facts he was twenty six years
10:07
old and he lived in the basement bedroom of his
10:09
parents' home. But the granular details of his existence, like
10:13
his educational background, whether he was ever employed, what does
10:16
social circle look like, or what is day to day
10:18
routine entailed? Those details remain heavily shielded.
10:22
Speaker 1: Why is that privacy laws?
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Speaker 2: Exactly? It's largely due to the strict federally mandated privacy
10:28
protection surrounding mental health and medical records. But the core
10:32
indisputable fact that forms the entire foundation of this tragedy
10:36
is that Eric had a documented, severe, longstanding history of
10:40
mental illness.
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Speaker 1: Okay, I have to stop here because if you're listening
10:43
to this, you are probably screaming a question at your
10:45
audio player right now. I know, I am, what's the
10:47
question if Rose was this incredibly connected, resourceful, brilliant woman,
10:52
someone who literally sat on boards to mentor youth and
10:55
fixed complex unity problems for a living. How in the
10:59
world did the terror struggles in her own basement go unaddressed?
11:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the big question, right.
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Speaker 1: How does a family living with a twenty six year
11:07
old man experiencing severe, escalating mental illness not have alarms
11:11
ringing for the whole community to hear? If she knew
11:15
how to navigate municipal zoning, surely she knew how to
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navigate the mental health system.
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Speaker 2: You are hitting on the central, agonizing paradox of this
11:23
entire case. It is the question that haunts every community
11:26
when something like this happens. Right, But the reality of
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severe mental illness, particularly within tight knit, idyllic communities, is
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incredibly complex. Public vibrancy can and very often does, serve
11:40
as a brilliant mask for intense private.
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Speaker 1: Battles because of the stigma.
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Speaker 2: Exactly you have to put yourself on the psychological shoes
11:47
of a parent in that situation. First, there is the profound,
11:50
lingering stigma of severe psychiatric disorders, even in a modern society.
11:55
Admitting that your adult child's mind is fracturing, is terrifying.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't even imagine.
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Speaker 2: Families often try to manage these crises entirely internally. They
12:04
want to protect their loved one's privacy and dignity. They
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might firmly believe that with enough parental love, enough hypervigilance,
12:10
or quiet private medical consultations, they can keep the situation managed.
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Speaker 1: They act as the shock absorbers for the illness. They
12:20
try to contain the blast radius within the walls of
12:22
their own home.
12:23
Speaker 2: Precisely, they become the containment vessel. And there is a
12:27
crucial systemic point to understand here. There was no public
12:31
warning sign none at all. No, there is no evidence
12:34
in the public records suggesting Eric had any prior criminal history.
12:38
No assaults, no erratic public behavior that resulted in police calls.
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Speaker 1: Wow.
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Speaker 2: There was no documented substance abuse, no meth or fentanyl
12:46
arrests that might have served as an obvious red flag
12:48
to law enforcement or neighbors that a crisis was brewing.
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The focus has remained entirely on his long standing internal
12:55
psychiatric struggle.
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Speaker 1: It means the system has no mechanism to intervene.
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Speaker 2: Exactly when you have an adult child living at home
13:01
experiencing untreated, recurrent, or escalating mental illness. The family is
13:05
incredibly isolated. If the individual is over eighteen, parents have
13:09
very little legal leverage to force medication or hospitalization unless
13:13
there is an imminent, demonstrable threat of violence, so their
13:17
hands are tied pretty much. Without a precipitating criminal event
13:20
or a public breakdown, the state doesn't intervene. The community
13:24
remains completely unaware. The parents are left to try and
13:27
hold the earth together above that growing sinkhole until the
13:30
pressure finally catastrophically fractures the facade, and.
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Speaker 1: That fracture it brings us to the night of July
13:38
twenty second into the early morning hours of July twenty third,
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twenty twenty.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the turning point.
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Speaker 1: This is the moment with the tension between Eric's hidden
13:47
escalating psychiatric illness and Roses stabilizing maternal presence ineviably and
13:52
violently snapped. The court documents, specifically the judge's meticulous seventeen
13:57
page verdict filing, provide a harrowing, minute by minute reconstruction
14:01
of this attack. And I need to pause here and
14:03
warn you the listener, that the sequence of events we
14:06
are about to explore is deeply disturbing, very much so.
14:09
It is gruesome, but it is absolutely essential to understanding
14:13
the legal and psychological gravity of what the court had
14:16
to evaluate. We cannot understand the six year legal battle
14:20
without understanding exactly what happened in that basement.
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Speaker 2: The details are agonizing, yes, but it's vital to view
14:26
this not as a piece of sensationalized horror, but as
14:30
a forensic roadmap. We are looking at a calculated descent,
14:34
a timeline of cognitive collapse that we must look at
14:38
clearly to understand the profound questions of sanity and culpability
14:42
that the judge ultimately had to weigh.
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Speaker 1: So let's walk through that timeline. Let's look at the escalation. Okay,
14:47
Late at night, Rose is sleeping in her bedroom, which
14:50
is located down in the basement of the house. Eric,
14:53
whose bedroom is also in the basement, enters her room.
14:56
Rose wakes up. She sees her twenty six year old
14:58
son standing there in the dark, and she says something
15:01
so incredibly mundane, so universally typically motherly. She doesn't scream,
15:05
she doesn't panic. She simply tells him to go back
15:07
to bed.
15:08
Speaker 2: It's a simple protective boundary setting command. It is the
15:13
exact phrase a mother uses to sue the toddler who
15:16
has woken up from a nightmare, or to dismiss a
15:19
teenager who is staying up too late. It is rooted
15:21
entirely in normalcy.
15:23
Speaker 1: But in this specific moment, to a mind that is
15:26
actively fracturing, that simple mundane phrase triggers an absolute, frenzied
15:32
explosion of violence. Yeah, Eric doesn't just argue back. He
15:35
physically rrupts. He begins punching his mother repeatedly in the head,
15:39
in the face. He grabs a fan that is sitting
15:42
right there in the room and uses it as a
15:44
blunt force weapon, striking her with it. Wow, he even
15:47
bites her. The assault is incredibly personal, It is frenzied, chaotic,
15:51
and it is entirely focused on her head and upper body.
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Speaker 2: And this exact moment, the end of this initial flurry
15:57
of violence, is where the timeline of the night becomes
15:59
the app most legally crucial element of the entire six
16:03
year case. So because if you think about criminal law,
16:05
if the attack had ended right there, or if that frantic,
16:08
chaotic beating had resulted in her death in that immediate moment,
16:11
the legal system would be looking at a completely different scenario.
16:14
We would likely be looking at a heat of passion
16:16
defense or a second degree murder charge, characterizing it as
16:21
a spontaneous eruption of rage where the rational mind was
16:24
temporarily bypassed.
16:25
Speaker 1: But Eric is not satisfied the explosion of rage doesn't
16:29
exhaust him. He stops the physical assault. He leaves his
16:33
mother bleeding in the basement. He turns around, walks out
16:37
of the room, and he walks all the way upstairs
16:39
to the main level of the house.
16:41
Speaker 2: This is the critical pause.
16:42
Speaker 1: Right he goes into the kitchen, he actively searches for
16:46
and retries a large butcher knife, and then, armed with
16:50
that knife, he walks all the way back down the
16:52
stairs to the basement, returning to the bedroom with the
16:55
explicit conscious intent to kill his mother.
16:58
Speaker 2: What you just describe is the exact legal fulcrum of
17:01
the prosecution's case.
17:03
Speaker 1: It's horrifying. It is the physical manifestation of crossing a
17:06
psychological point of no return exactly. Think about the mechanics
17:10
of what you just described. Is the difference between a sudden,
17:12
blind explosion of uncontainable animalistic rage and a conscious deliberate
17:17
choice to escalate to lethal violence. Walking up a flight
17:20
of stairs in the dark, navigating a kitchen, opening a
17:24
drawer or a knife block, selecting a butcher knife over
17:27
a butter knife, gripping the handle, walking back to the
17:31
top of the stairs, descending those stairs step by step,
17:34
listening to the sounds of his injured mother below.
17:37
Speaker 2: It's chilling.
17:38
Speaker 1: It is That entire sequence takes time, It takes physical coordination,
17:42
and most importantly, it takes swt. No matter how deeply distorted, sick,
17:47
or delusionally driven that thought might be, the brain is
17:50
actively engaged in a sequential process of planning and execution.
17:54
Speaker 2: You have articulated the precise legal mechanism of premeditation. Okay,
17:58
the law does not require pre medication to involve weeks
18:01
of careful planning. With blueprints and alibis. Premeditation can be
18:04
formed in minutes, sometimes even seconds, if there is a
18:07
distinct period where the attacker has the opportunity to reflect
18:10
on the choice to kill and then proceeds anyway.
18:12
Speaker 1: And walking upstairs provides that.
18:14
Speaker 2: Opportunity exactly the judge's seventeen page verdict filing zeros in
18:19
heavily on this specific walk up and down the stairs.
18:21
The violence was not instantaneous, it was prolonged by a pause.
18:25
It was deliberate. Furthermore, Eric even admitted to police and
18:28
subsequent interviews that he had consciously planned the fatal elements
18:32
in that moment, and that he had actually harbored fleeting
18:35
thoughts of harming his mother previously, though obviously never escalating
18:39
to this degree.
18:40
Speaker 1: But the premeditation, the cold calculation of retrieving the knife
18:44
is really only the first layer of the horror.
18:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, it gets worse.
18:47
Speaker 1: Because the medical examiner's findings detail what happened when he
18:50
returned to that basement bedroom, and it documents a descent
18:54
into complete, unfathomable depravity. Right armed with the butcher knife,
18:58
Eric stabbed his mother multiple times. But it didn't end
19:02
with the physical act of ending her life. The violence
19:05
escalated into severe mutilation. He skelped her, he completely severed
19:10
her jaw from her face, and then the medical examiner
19:14
confirmed the most chilling detail of all, he engaged in
19:17
pre mortem cannibalism. He began cutting up and actively consuming
19:20
parts of her body, including her brain, while she was
19:23
still alone.
19:23
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is and I want to be very
19:25
clear that I am using the word fascinating purely in
19:28
a clinical, forensic, and sociological sense.
19:32
Speaker 1: Right of course, when you look at the intersection of
19:34
matricide and cannibalism, you are looking at an event that
19:37
is statistically almost non existent in.
19:40
Speaker 2: Human behavior, almost non existent.
19:42
Speaker 1: Yes, matricide on its own accounts for a tiny, tiny
19:45
fraction of all homicides globally. It is an incredibly rare crime.
19:49
But when you introduce the element of cannibalism, the case
19:53
completely leaves the realm of standard criminal pathology like anger, greed,
19:58
or even typical sociationopathy and enters a highly specific, very
20:03
narrow area studied intensely by forensic psychiatrists and evolutionary biologists.
20:09
Speaker 2: I am trying to wrap my mind around this. What
20:11
are those forensic psychiatrists actually looking for in a case
20:14
like this? What possible mechanism in the human brain drives
20:18
a biological organism to consume the very entity they gave
20:21
birth to it. If I'm looking at this from a
20:22
layman's perspective, I read a phrase like delusions of incorporation,
20:26
which comes up in this field, and my initial thought
20:28
is it sounds almost like a literal, terrifying interpretation of
20:32
you are what you eat, Like.
20:34
Speaker 1: His broken mind actually believed he could absorb her power
20:38
or her authority by physically consuming her. Is that clinically
20:42
what is happening in a shattered mind?
20:44
Speaker 2: You are incredibly close to the clinical reality and it's
20:47
a terrifying mechanism to explore. Forensic psychiatrists looking at a
20:52
scene like this are searching for clues about the absolute
20:56
deepest extremes of human cognitive collapse. They're looking for evidence
21:00
of extreme dissociation, severe long term, untreated schizophrenia, or sometimes
21:06
substance induced psychosis that completely breaks the brain's connection to reality.
21:10
Speaker 1: But no substance abuse here.
21:12
Speaker 2: Right, But remember in Eric's case, there is no public
21:15
evidence of substance abuse. The drugs weren't doing this. So
21:18
the clinical focus lands squarely on a profound organic psychotic
21:22
break and nailed the terminology. In farensic psychology, this incredibly rare,
21:27
specific type of behavior is often tied to what are
21:30
termed delusions of incorporation.
21:32
Speaker 1: Let's really dig into that. Delusions of incorporation, How does
21:35
that actually work mechanically in the brain.
21:37
Speaker 2: It is a profound, horrifying psychological drive that occurs when
21:42
the ego, the part of the mind that separates self
21:45
from other, completely dissolves. Wow, the individual begins to believe
21:50
with absolute, unshakable certainty that by literally physically consuming the
21:56
flesh of another person, they can achieve a psychological goal.
22:00
Often they target someone they perceive as a profound existential threat,
22:05
or conversely, they target a source of ultimate power.
22:08
Speaker 1: And control, So it's about control or neutralization exactly.
22:12
Speaker 2: The delusion tells them that by eating the victim, they
22:14
can either become that person, absorb their essence and authority,
22:19
or completely fundamentally, on a cellular level, eradicate the threat
22:23
they believe that person poses. That is so dark It
22:26
is not an act of hunger. It is a literal,
22:28
physical manifestation of a completely shattered psyche trying to forcefully
22:33
resolve a terrifying internal conflict that they can no longer
22:36
manage through rational thought.
22:37
Speaker 1: So if we apply that to the basement bedroom, in
22:40
his completely fractured mind, she was no longer just his mother,
22:43
rose standing in her pajamas telling him to go to sleep.
22:45
His psychosis had completely overwritten her identity. She had become
22:49
an entity, a symbol, of authority, or perhaps a perceived
22:52
demonic threat that had to be entirely physically consumed in
22:56
order to be neutralized.
22:57
Speaker 2: Exactly the delusions or reality so severely, so completely that
23:03
the fundamental evolutionary biological instinct to protect one's mother, the
23:08
instinct that is hardwired into almost every mammal on earth,
23:12
is entirely overwritten.
23:13
Speaker 1: It's just gone.
23:14
Speaker 2: Yes, it is replaced by this primal, deeply sick, fabricated
23:18
drive to consume and eradicate. The brain's wiring completely misfires,
23:23
turning the protector into the predator.
23:25
Speaker 1: The violence in that basement finally ends, but the horror,
23:29
the impact of that cognitive collapse, it doesn't end. It
23:32
just expands outwards.
23:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ripple effect begins immediately.
23:35
Speaker 1: It waits in the quiet of the house until the
23:36
outside world finally pierces the bubble of that crime scene.
23:39
And the very first person to pierce that bubble, the
23:41
person who has to absorb the immediate shockwave of this reality,
23:44
is Eric's father, Rose's husband, Andrew Jordal.
23:47
Speaker 2: It is genuinely impossible to overstate the profound, life altering
23:52
trauma of what Andrew Jordan walked into that morning. The
23:55
psychological toll of that moment is unfathomable.
23:59
Speaker 1: I cannot begin to fathom it. Let's look at the
24:01
timeline of the discovery. It's around nine am on the
24:04
morning of July twenty third. Okay, the sun is up,
24:07
the town of Big Lake is starting its day. Andrew
24:10
Jordal comes home. The public records mentioned he was returning
24:13
from a night shift or an early morning workshift. He
24:16
pulls his vehicle up to his own house, his safe haven.
24:19
He hits the button to open the garage door, and
24:21
as that door slowly rises, he is greeted by a
24:24
sight that no human being, let alone a father, should
24:28
ever have to process. Oh man, his son Eric is
24:32
standing right there in the garage. And Eric is completely
24:34
covered in blood. And he's not just standing still, He's
24:37
highly agitated. He is jumping around, waving his arms erradically
24:41
in the air.
24:41
Speaker 2: And the most chilling part is that Eric doesn't attempt
24:44
to hide what he's done. He doesn't try to flee.
24:46
He immediately issues an explicit, terrifyingly coherent confession to his father.
24:51
The moment the garage door.
24:52
Speaker 1: Opens, what does he say?
24:54
Speaker 2: He pleads with his father, saying don't kill me. And
24:57
then he delivers a line that defines the entire psychological
25:01
landscape of this case. I'm a cannibal. The devil exists.
25:04
It's in me an I eate mom.
25:06
Speaker 1: The devil exists. It's in me an I eate mom. Yeah,
25:10
think about hearing those words from your own child. Eric
25:14
is explicitly framing his actions through the lens of possession.
25:18
He is handing his father the narrative of demonic control
25:21
right there in.
25:22
Speaker 2: The driveway, and that specific phrasing is deeply clinically significant.
25:26
So references to the devil, to demons, or to spiritual
25:30
possession align perfectly with the religious or demonic delusions that
25:33
are incredibly common symptoms in cases of severe untreated schizophrenia
25:38
or schizoepfhective disorder.
25:40
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
25:40
Speaker 2: When the brain begins to generate terrifying auditory or visual hallucinations,
25:45
when it starts giving the individual commands to commit violence,
25:48
the conscious mind desperately tries to find an explanation for
25:51
what is happening. It's looking for a reason exactly. The
25:54
psychosis often latches onto deeply ingrained cultural or religious touchstones
26:00
like angels, demons, or the devil. To explain the terrifying
26:04
internal reality the person is experiencing, they blame an external
26:08
supernatural force because the reality of their own brain betraying
26:13
them is too abstract a process.
26:16
Speaker 1: Andrew, trying to process this impossible, nightmarish statement, leads his
26:20
son in the garage and rushes inside the house to
26:22
find his wife. Yeah, and the scene he walks into, well,
26:25
the police record is detail that almost immediately upon entering,
26:29
right there, sitting on the kitchen counter is a human jaw,
26:32
his wife severed jaw resting on the counter of their
26:35
family kitchen.
26:36
Speaker 2: It is the absolute worst nightmare imaginable, brought to vivid
26:39
physical life in a space associated with family meals and
26:42
domestic comfort.
26:43
Speaker 1: It's beyond comprehension, it is.
26:45
Speaker 2: But despite the overwhelming shock, Andrew somehow maintains enough presence
26:48
of mind, enough adrenaline fueled focus to back out, instruct
26:52
his son to lie down on the ground in the garage,
26:54
and he calls nine to one one.
26:55
Speaker 1: The Sherburn County Sheriff's Office deputies receive the call and
26:58
arrive at the home in quickly. They find Eric still
27:02
in the garage. They take him into custody without further incident.
27:05
Speaker 2: Okay.
27:06
Speaker 1: The initial police reports are incredibly detailed about Eric's physical state.
27:11
They note that his clothing is completely saturated with blood, hair,
27:15
and human tissue. A bloody butcher knife, completely matted with hair,
27:19
is lying nearby in the garage. And then the officers
27:23
have to do their job. They have to clear the
27:25
house to ensure there are no other victims or threats.
27:28
They have to walk through what the responding officers described
27:31
as a crime scene of unimaginable gore.
27:34
Speaker 2: The physical footprint of the violence was extensive. It wasn't
27:37
contained to just one room.
27:39
Speaker 1: Not at all. The officers track the chaos through the
27:42
entire house. There is physical brain matter tracked through the hallways.
27:45
On the main floor, Oh my god, there are bloody
27:47
footprints criss crossing the hardwood. There are drag marks. Disturbingly,
27:53
body parts are distributed across different areas, some on the
27:56
kitchen table, some on the counter where Andrew found the jaw.
27:58
Speaker 2: It's a complete house of horrors.
28:00
Speaker 1: It really is. Finally, the officers navigate down the stairs
28:03
to the basement bedroom and they find Rose's body. The
28:07
scene is horrific. Her body is there, and her scalp
28:09
is resting against a wall nearby.
28:11
Speaker 2: The level of physical destruction inflicted on her body was
28:14
so absolute, so complete, and frenzied that when the Midwest
28:18
Medical Examiner's Office arrived to take custody of the remains,
28:21
they couldn't even identify her visually.
28:23
Speaker 1: Wait, really, not even visually.
28:25
Speaker 2: No, let that sink in. They had to rely on
28:28
dental records just to positively confirm the identity of this
28:31
woman who just twenty four hours before was a beloved,
28:35
highly recognizable, photographed community leader. That is just it's unbelievable.
28:41
Speaker 1: That forensic detail alone speaks volumes about the sheer intensity,
28:45
the primal frenzy, and the duration of the attack. It
28:47
was an absolute obliteration of identity.
28:50
Speaker 2: The physical crime, the actual act of kinetic violence, ends
28:53
on that morning of July twenty three, twenty twenty. But
28:56
the legal attempt, the psychiatric attempt, and really the broader
28:59
societal attempt to process what happened that takes nearly six
29:03
grueling years.
29:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, a very long road. That timeline takes us right
29:07
up to the present day, to April twenty twenty six.
29:10
This brings us out of the basement and into the courtroom.
29:13
We have to look at the mechanics of the justice
29:15
system and the incredibly complex, often agonizing, intensely philosophical process
29:20
of parsing out competency versus culpability.
29:24
Speaker 2: And it's crucial to understand that those six years were
29:27
not just empty bureaucratic delays or continuances. They were filled
29:32
with intense, constantly shifting medical and legal maneuvering. Okay, Immediately
29:37
following his arrest in July twenty twenty, the legal system
29:40
collided head on with Eric's shattered mental state. By twenty
29:44
twenty one, the court, relying on psychiatric evaluations, officially ruled
29:48
that Eric was legally incompetent to stand trial.
29:51
Speaker 1: Let's clarify that specific terminology for the listener, because people
29:54
hear the word incompetent on the news and they very
29:57
often confuse it with being found insane at the time
29:59
of crime.
30:00
Speaker 2: Yes, very common misconception.
30:02
Speaker 1: Those are two vastly different legal concepts. YEA, if you're
30:04
eating someone's brain, aren't you by definition insaying why is
30:08
the court arguing about competency? First?
30:10
Speaker 2: That is a vital distinction, and it's where a lot
30:13
of public frustration with the legal system stemes from competency
30:16
to stand. Trial is entirely forward looking.
30:19
Speaker 1: Forward looking, yes, it only looks.
30:21
Speaker 2: At the defendant's mental state in the present moment, as
30:23
they sit in the courtroom. It asks two basic constitutional questions.
30:28
Can this person understand the charges currently being brought against them?
30:32
And can this person actively rationally assist their defense attorney
30:36
in preparing a case right now?
30:38
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense.
30:39
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty one, Eric psychosis was still so profound,
30:42
his mind was so deeply unwell, that the court looked
30:44
at him and said, no, he cannot. He does not
30:47
understand reality enough to participate in his own defense. Oh,
30:50
they can't try him exactly. Therefore, under the US Constitution,
30:54
you cannot legally put him on trial. He was indefinitely
30:58
committed to the Minnesota Security Hospital, which is now operating
31:01
under the name Forensic Mental Health Program down in Saint Peter.
31:04
He was held securely under the specific legal designation of
31:08
being mentally ill and dangerous.
31:10
Speaker 1: So the gears of the justice system just grind to
31:13
an absolute halt. The trial literally cannot happen until a
31:16
doctor signs a piece of paper deeming him competent. Right,
31:20
and the prosecutors, the judge, and most agonizingly, Rose's family
31:24
just have to wait.
31:25
Speaker 2: Yes, they had to wait for years of intense specialized
31:29
psychiatric treatment. This involves massive regimens of antipsychotic medications, continuous
31:36
behavioral observation, and essentially trying to artificially reconstruct his connection
31:41
to reality.
31:41
Speaker 1: Wow.
31:42
Speaker 2: It is a slow, deeply uncertain process. It wasn't until
31:46
extensive evaluations conducted in twenty twenty three and twenty twenty
31:49
four that medical professionals finally determined that the medication and
31:52
treatment had stabilized him enough that his competency had been
31:56
restored to a baseline level where he could finally understand
31:59
a courtroom proscus.
32:00
Speaker 1: Okay, here's where it gets really interesting, and I mean
32:02
philosophically legally fascinak. We finally get to the actual trial
32:06
in January twenty twenty six. Yeah, Eric, now deemed competent,
32:10
waives his right to a jury trial. This means he
32:13
opts for a bench trial where a single individual judge,
32:15
Karen Schalmer, will hear all the evidence and alone decide
32:18
his ultimate fate. But it is not a normal, straightforward trial.
32:24
His defense attorney officially files a notice for a mental
32:27
illness defense, and in Minnesota, filing that specific defense triggers
32:31
a highly unique procedural mechanism.
32:34
Speaker 2: A bifurcated trial.
32:35
Speaker 1: Yes, the bifurcated system is a highly specialized legal structure.
32:40
A bifurcated trial literally means the trial is surgically split
32:43
into two entirely distinct phases handles. Sequentially, Phase one focuses
32:48
entirely exclusively on factual guilt. Did you, the defendant, commit
32:53
the physical acts you were accused of? It ignores the.
32:55
Speaker 2: Why so just the physical actions exactly.
32:58
Speaker 1: Then Phase two, which only happens if guilt is established
33:01
in Phase one, focuses entirely on the mental state at
33:04
the exact moment of the crime. Were you legally saying
33:07
when you committed those acts?
33:08
Speaker 2: I have to push back on this concept because from
33:10
a layman's perspective, trying to look at this logically, I
33:12
asked myself, why artificially split it up? It's a fair question.
33:16
Speaker 1: Doesn't severing the physical act of murder from the mental
33:20
state of the murderer artificially separate two things that happened
33:24
at the exact same precise millisecond in time.
33:27
Speaker 2: Wow.
33:28
Speaker 1: I try to imagine a judge sitting there during Phase one.
33:31
How can a judge look at the forensic evidence that
33:33
a man scalped his mother and ate her brain and
33:36
just check a box that says, yes, he did the
33:38
physical act without simultaneously acknowledging that his mind must have
33:42
been completely irreparably broken to do it. It feels like
33:46
asking someone to describe the wetness of water without mentioning
33:50
the liquid.
33:51
Speaker 2: It is a profound philosophical tension, and your pushback highlights
33:54
exactly why the bifurcated system is so controversial among legal scholars.
33:58
It feels unnatural, right, but the system is designed this
34:01
way to address two completely different and sometimes fiercely competing
34:04
societal needs. Phase one exists because society and the law
34:09
demands a factual, indisputable accounting of reality. Okay, I see,
34:13
we need a definitive legal record of what happened, who died,
34:17
and whose hands caused it. During Phase one of Eric's trial,
34:21
the prosecution presented an overwhelming mountain of physical evidence. They
34:25
presented Eric's immediate confessions in the garage, the horrific forensic traces,
34:30
the bloody footprints, the DNA and the premeditation, And crucially, yes,
34:35
they presented the timeline the fact that he paused, walked upstairs,
34:38
and retrieved the knife, which legally proves the physical act
34:42
of premeditation. The defense attorney didn't even attempt to contest
34:45
these physical acts. It was undeniable. So the court establishes,
34:49
beyond the reasonable doubt, the cold hard physical reality of
34:52
the crime.
34:53
Speaker 1: Right. Phase one is strictly about establishing the what and
34:56
the who. It locks in the timeline.
34:58
Speaker 2: Exactly, it creates the factual bedrock. But then Phase two
35:01
exists to address the much more complex, messy moral argument
35:05
of the justice system. Yes, the law, historically, going back
35:09
centuries in common law, requires not just a guilty act
35:13
the actus rieus, but a guilty mind the mens rehea.
35:17
If true, profound organic insanity completely erased a person's cognitive
35:21
ability to understand the nature of their act or to
35:24
understand that what they were doing was morally or legally wrong.
35:27
The system argues that holding them morally culpable is wrong. Okay,
35:31
punishing them as a malicious criminal rather than treating them
35:34
as a deeply sick patient is viewed as fundamentally unjust.
35:38
The bifurcated system tries to cleanly separate these two arguments.
35:42
It tries to balance the community's visceral need for factual
35:45
accountability with the legal and moral requirement to assess true
35:49
cognitive culpability.
35:50
Speaker 1: And that separation brings us to the breaking news element
35:52
of this deep dive. Just days ago, or on April
35:55
ninth or tenth of twenty twenty six, Judge Chummer delivered
35:58
her verdict for Phase one. She did he looked at
36:00
all the evidence of the physical act, and she found
36:03
Eric Laife Jordal guilty of first degree premeditated murder in
36:07
the state of Minnesota. That specific charge carries an automatic
36:10
mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
36:15
She also found him guilty of two counts of second
36:17
degree murder.
36:18
Speaker 2: But the story and the legal jeopardy does not end
36:21
with that guilty verdict on paper, because, as the legal
36:25
documents dictate, Phase two, the mental illness defense phase began
36:29
almost immediately after, around April thirteenth, twenty twenty six. This
36:33
is the phase that is actively happening right now as
36:35
we speak, Wow, right now, right now, and the stakes
36:38
Phase two couldn't possibly be higher, the entire trajectory of
36:42
his life hinges on it. If the defense is successful
36:45
improving legal insanity during phase two, Eric will not go
36:48
to prison.
36:49
Speaker 1: Where does he go.
36:50
Speaker 2: He will likely be confined indefinitely to a highly secure
36:53
state psychiatric facility where the focus is containment and treatment,
36:57
not penal punishment. But if the defense fails to meet
36:59
the legal standard for insanity, that phase one verdict.
37:03
Speaker 1: Locks in and he goes to prison.
37:05
Speaker 2: He goes to a maximum security state prison for the
37:08
rest of his natural life, with absolutely no chance of pearl.
37:12
Speaker 1: While the courts in the county seat are dealing with
37:14
the clinical mechanics of Eric's ultimate fate, we have to
37:17
pull our focus back to the town of Big Lake.
37:19
Speaker 2: Yes, definitely, Because a.
37:21
Speaker 1: Guilty verdict printed on a piece of legal paper or
37:23
a psychiatric commitment order doesn't somehow magically erase the void
37:28
that was left by Rose Johnson. A community of ten
37:31
thousand people is left to grapple with an emptiness, a
37:34
profound absence that is incredibly hard to quantify or repair.
37:38
Speaker 2: The sociological ripple effect of a crime of this magnitude,
37:42
particularly in a small, interconnected town, is seismic it shatters
37:46
the foundational trust. Yeah, But the public record details how
37:49
just a few months after the murder, in the Crisp
37:52
autumn of October twenty twenty, the community made a concerted
37:55
effort to create a physical, tangible space to process their
37:58
collective grief. Friends, family, and colleagues gathered to dedicate a
38:02
memorial bench to Rose at Lakeside Park, right on the
38:05
water she loved.
38:06
Speaker 1: And the quotes from that dedication ceremony are so poignant
38:09
they really highlight how the town was trying to heal.
38:13
But Tina Potter, a close personal friend of Ros's, spoke
38:16
at the dedication and actively encouraged people to use the
38:19
bench to just sit, to look at the lake and.
38:22
Speaker 2: To reflect that's beautiful it is.
38:24
Speaker 1: Councilman Scott Zereval, who had worked alongside her in those
38:27
crunches of local government, called it the perfect memorial, a
38:30
place for conversation, reflection and relaxation.
38:34
Speaker 2: What you were seeing in that dedication ceremony is a
38:36
community deeply guided by victim advocates and her closest friends
38:41
actively trying to construct a psychological counter narrative.
38:44
Speaker 1: Counter narrative.
38:45
Speaker 2: Yes, they are fiercely determined to emphasize Rose's life of service,
38:49
her humor, her intellect, and her brilliance over the horrific, gory,
38:53
sensationalized matter of her death right. They are essentially planting
38:57
a flag in the ground, trying to assert that a
38:59
lifetime sime building a community piece by piece cannot and
39:03
will not be entirely eclipsed by one single night of
39:06
incomprehensible darkness.
39:08
Speaker 1: It is a beautiful effort to reclaim her memory, but
39:11
the lingering trauma beneath that effort is undeniable. You have
39:16
to think about Andrew Jordal, the husband who lost his
39:18
wife to the hands of his son, the father who
39:20
had to hear that confession in the garage, devastating the
39:24
public records. Note he has not spoken publicly in detail,
39:27
and understandably so his grief is entirely, profoundly private amid
39:32
this massive media storm. And you also have to think
39:35
about that physical house, that family home in Big Lake.
39:38
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
39:39
Speaker 1: The reality is that a structure where something like this
39:41
occurs rarely goes back to being a normal home. It
39:45
likely stands empty, or perhaps he was quietly sold to
39:47
someone unaware, but either way it serves as this silent, haunting,
39:51
physical monument to the tragedy sitting right there in the
39:54
middle of this perfectly manicured, picturesque town.
39:57
Speaker 2: If we connect this highly specific, i verifying case to
40:01
the bigger picture, it forces us to look hard at
40:03
the broader implications for small town America and our approach
40:06
to public health policy. Aw So, whenever a tragedy of
40:10
this unimaginable scale occurs, there is an immediate, totally understandable,
40:15
visceral public outcry for better community mental health resources. People
40:20
demand a system that catches these individuals before they fall
40:23
through the cracks. They want a stronger safety net. They
40:27
want assurance that the sinkhole will be filled before it collapses, right.
40:30
Speaker 1: It's human nature. People want a legislative fix. They want
40:33
a policy that says, if we just allocate x amount
40:36
of funding to this clinic, we can definitively prevent why
40:40
tragedy from ever happening again. They wanted to re establish
40:43
the illusion of control.
40:44
Speaker 2: But the harsh, deeply unsettling reality that we have to
40:48
confront when studying this case is that no single policy,
40:51
no matter how well funded, how well intentioned, or how
40:53
perfectly executed, could have definitively predicted or prevented this specific
40:58
extreme iteration of horror.
41:00
Speaker 1: That's a tough pill to swallow.
41:01
Speaker 2: It is when severe mental illness manifests as sudden, profound,
41:05
lethal violence in an individual who has absolutely no prior
41:09
criminal history. This statistical predictability is almost zero. You cannot
41:13
effectively legislate against a ghost. We are dealing with the absolute, chaotic,
41:18
unpredictable extremes of human biology and psychology. It represents a
41:23
terrifying blind spot in human civilization, which brings.
41:26
Speaker 1: Us to the core takeaway from this incredibly heavy, demanding
41:30
deep dive. We started this journey with the chilling phrase,
41:33
I ate mom. Those three words spoken by a blood
41:37
drenched son in a quiet suburban garage. They encapsulate the ultimate,
41:41
unimaginable betrayal of the deepest biological bond we know as
41:45
human beings. But the true story here, the complex narrative
41:48
we've tried to unpack for you over the last hour,
41:50
is so much larger and so much more tragic than
41:52
those three sensationalized words. It is the story of a
41:55
fractured family silently fighting a losing battle, hiding in place
42:00
sight behind a perfect lawn. It is the story of
42:03
a brilliant, dedicated public servant who spent her life holding
42:07
her entire town together, but found herself unable to hold
42:10
back the subterranean darkness swelling in her own home right.
42:15
And it is the story of a justice system, incredibly
42:17
human institution, painstakingly trying to parse out the invisible philosophical
42:22
boundaries of human sanity and moral culpability over six long,
42:27
agonizing years.
42:28
Speaker 2: And as you walk away from this case, I want
42:30
to leave you with one final, deeply provocative thought.
42:33
Speaker 1: Okay, what is it?
42:33
Speaker 2: It's a concept that isn't explicitly codified in the legal
42:37
documents or the police reports, but it is the haunting
42:40
existential question that underpins absolutely everything we've discussed today. We
42:44
are watching a court right now, in real time try
42:47
to carefully weigh the brutal, calculated physical reality of an
42:51
act against the total invisible collapse of the perpetrator's mind.
42:54
But if severe mental illness, if a literal chemical imbalance
42:58
were a misfiring sinna can completely overwrite a child's fundamental
43:03
biological instinct to love, revere, and protect the parent who
43:07
gave them life. Wow, if faulty neurological wiring can turn
43:11
a quiet sun into a literal, ravenous predator of his
43:14
own mother. Then we are forced to ask ourselves a
43:17
terrifying question. How much of our identity, our morality, and
43:21
our deep capacity for love is truly us the soul
43:23
we believe we possess, and how much of it is
43:26
just fragile brain chemistry waiting for a single tragic misfire.
43:29
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. I
43:31
know we covered some incredibly dark territory today, but I
43:33
want you to take that final thought. Maybe find a
43:35
quiet park bench of your own by a lake, sit
43:38
down and really sit with it for a while. We
43:40
will see you next time.