The report of a 33-year-old missing from St. Paul seemed just that at first — until an investigator saw surveillance video from outside her apartment.
Laurie Finnegan, then a St. Paul police sergeant, watched the footage that showed Mani Starren running from her apartment. A man exited the same apartment, ran after her and pushed her back inside.
Starren wasn’t seen alive again after that day.
Mani Starren (Courtesy of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension)
The video, found by an attentive apartment manager, made Finnegan realize: “There’s obviously something more to this” than a missing persons case.
A suspect emerged: The man seen in the video, Joseph Steven Jorgenson, whom Starren had a relationship with.
And it didn’t end there. As police searched for Starren, a man happened to call a Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tipline about trafficking. He didn’t know Starren or that Jorgenson was under investigation, but he reported his friend — Fanta Xayavong — had been missing for about two years.
Finnegan, who worked on the BCA’s trafficking task force, was sitting nearby when the call came in and suddenly she heard a name of significance: Jorgenson. The tipster said Xayavong had last been seen with Jorgenson.
The investigation became a whirlwind. After searches with cadaver dogs and tracking of electronic records, there were answers in the weeks that followed. Law enforcement found Starren’s body dismembered and hidden in a Woodbury storage unit. Xayavong had befallen the same fate and was found about a week later in a Coon Rapids storage unit.
Jorgenson, now 42, pleaded guilty to murdering both women and was sentenced to 40 years in prison earlier this year.
With the case closed, Finnegan and prosecutor Treye Kettwick gave the Pioneer Press a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation. And family and friends of Starren and Xayavong spoke of their grief over their murders, saying they want the women to be known as more than victims of brutal crimes.
People hoped she’d left to get help
Last year, St. Paul police received 1,020 reports about missing people. Two people remain missing and the rest of the cases were resolved, according to police department data.
When Starren’s father reported her missing to police, the situation at first didn’t appear different from many reports police receive: She was going through a difficult time with her sobriety, and told people she was going to treatment. Her family hadn’t heard from her and they weren’t sure if it was because she was in treatment.
Ricki Starren, Mani’s mother, hoped she was getting help, especially because she knew Mani wanted to be there as a mother to her three children.
“She was really trying to commit to changing her life so that she could make her family whole again,” said Pershelle Johnson, a friend of Mani’s who lived down the hall from her.
Manijeh Starren, known as Mani, grew up in the countryside near Roseau in far northern Minnesota. She’d been a Girl Scout, was on the swim team and ran track. “She was really sweet,” her mother said. As a teen, she turned rebellious, though she never lost her kind heart, Ricki Starren said.
She was briefly married to the father of her two older children. After becoming a certified nursing assistant as a teenager, she took classes to get her nursing license.
Starren also had another, younger child. Johnson said she and Starren bonded over motherhood, with their kids playing together.
Crystal Mikaelson, then the manager of Starren’s apartment building, marveled over how pristine Starren kept her apartment. She’s also a mother and she thought, “How do you have time for that?” with a little one running around, though Ricki Starren said her daughter always had a knack for decorating and organizing.
More than anything, Mikaelson saw Starren’s love for her son. “He was her everything,” she said.
‘Targeting vulnerable people’
Facebook messages showed Starren and Jorgenson met around February 2023, according to Finnegan.
Joseph Steven Jorgenson (Courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Corrections)
Johnson said she didn’t see their situation as a relationship, but as Jorgenson “preying on her.”
“It really bothers me that you keep hearing that it’s all related to drugs and ‘her boyfriend, her boyfriend,’ and we know it wasn’t,” Ricki Starren said.
In the past, Mani Starren had been to treatment for alcohol use and there were times in her life when things were going better, though she seemed to be in a low spot before she was killed, Ricki Starren said.
Later in the investigation, Finnegan obtained a search warrant for messages in Jorgenson’s Facebook account. He previously wrote to someone about “picking girls who have addiction issues,” she said.
“Targeting vulnerable people,” Kettwick added.
Violence Free Minnesota, which tracks domestic violence homicides, frequently sees abusive partners using a woman’s history of substance use or mental health to “manipulatively portray” them to courts, attorneys, judges, police, doctors and others, said Meggie Royer, communications senior manager.
“I don’t think the public reaction always really understands that a person was not a bad mom, they were not unstable,” she said. “They were being manipulated and … taken advantage of.”
Violence Free Minnesota would like to see more collaboration between places that provide services for substance use and mental health with organizations that provide help for domestic violence.
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“Both of these women’s lives ended horrifically as a result of domestic violence, but we would also want to really draw attention to other forms of abuse that are more emotional and psychological, like substance use coercion,” which includes keeping someone from entering treatment or forcing them to use substances, Royer said.
Police later found a message that Jorgenson sent Starren on April 5 that said she’d called the police on him. “Very clear I was of that being punishable by hanging,” the message said.
The last time Johnson saw Starren was in April 2023 and she thinks it was the day before she went missing.
Starren was in the lobby of their building; she was crying and had red marks around her neck. Johnson said she asked her, “Is somebody putting their hands on you?” and offered to call the police. Starren told her, “No, that’s just going to make it worse,” Johnson recalled.
Found video
Ricki Starren hadn’t heard from her daughter about Jorgenson, but she was able to get his phone number. She called him and, during the conversation, said they were going to file a missing persons report.
Jorgenson said something like, “I don’t want to tell you what to do, but that might just make her more mad because she doesn’t really like the police,” according to Finnegan.
On May 1, 2023, the day Starren’s dad reported Mani missing, Jorgenson googled, “What do police do with a missing person’s report,” police later found through a search warrant of his records. On April 21, 2023, the last day anyone heard from or saw Starren, Jorgenson had searched, “Jugular.”
A surveillance camera was in the hallway near Starren’s apartment, but the officer initially assigned to the case (who has since retired) told Ricki Starren there wasn’t surveillance footage available, she said.
Mikaelson took it upon herself to look for answers. She combed through surveillance videos, taking notes of what she saw and the corresponding timestamps.
“The day she was missing, she had run out of the apartment, like in the movies, like someone’s going to kill you,” Mikaelson said of the footage she located and turned over to police.
Caution: Disturbing video.
It was a crucial piece of evidence: “Without the video, I think that investigation takes a lot longer,” Kettwick said.
When Finnegan was assigned to investigate and also looked through the days of surveillance footage after Starren was last seen, they showed Jorgenson coming and going from Starren’s apartment. He was seen carrying two duffle bags and a suitcase away.
Fateful conversation
At first, police only knew of the man in the surveillance video as “Joe.”
Then Finnegan determined Joe’s full name through his phone number. On that same day, she was at the BCA when a man who knew Xayavong called the trafficking tipline.
“I don’t know if it was fate,” said Finnegan, then a St. Paul police sergeant of human trafficking and missing persons who was assigned to the BCA’s Minnesota Human Trafficking Investigators Task Force.
She heard the person who took the call say aloud the name of the last person Xayavong had been seen with — Joseph Jorgenson — and Finnegan thought, “What are the odds?”
With a report of another missing woman who was also tied to Jorgenson, Finnegan received help from the St. Paul Police Department’s homicide unit. Finnegan has years of experience as an investigator, though these cases were her first homicide investigations.
Police carried out a search warrant at Starren’s apartment on May 25, 2023. Finnegan noted it was “super clean” and she wondered if her suspicions had been wrong. But when members of the police department’s crime lab used a chemical to detect blood residue that can’t be seen with the naked eye, the couch “lit up,” as did other areas of the apartment, Finnegan said. It appeared someone had tried to clean up the blood.
The people working on the case believed “with this amount of blood, she was likely dead,” Kettwick said. “Then the discussion went to, ‘Was she in the bags?’” that Jorgenson had been seen carrying away.
Starren lived in a ground-level apartment and there were woods nearby, and Finnegan and Kettwick also wondered if her body could have been concealed there. And a worker at Jorgenson’s Maplewood apartment later told police about Jorgenson dragging something out of his apartment and then to dumpsters.
Law enforcement used cadaver dogs to search the woods near Starren’s apartment and Finnegan wondered if they’d also need to scour landfills.
“I definitely had fears we were never going to find her,” said Finnegan, who is now a special agent with the BCA who is assigned to the human trafficking unit.
Storage units lead to remains
Police arrested Jorgenson at his apartment. Soon after, information came back from another search warrant that law enforcement had served — they asked for records of who rented storage units at a Woodbury facility because they’d discovered Jorgenson’s phone had “pinged” in the area on May 18, 2023.
As Finnegan reviewed the records, a name jumped out at her: Jorgenson’s roommate. They later determined Jorgenson had rented the storage unit in his name.
Inside the storage unit, with another warrant, police found two coolers and a duffle bag. They were brought to the the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office, where human remains were inside all of them and they were identified as Starren.
Fanta Xayavong is seen in a selfie. (Courtesy of the family)
With Xayavong still missing, Finnegan dug deeper into Jorgenson’s previous messages and searched for references to a storage unit. She found old messages about a storage place in Coon Rapids, and obtained a search warrant for the unit in question.
At first, they didn’t see anything suspicious, but then behind a wooden chair was something similar to what they’d found in Woodbury: two large storage totes, packaged in plastic wrap, with a number of car air fresheners.
The remains inside were confirmed to be Xayavong’s. She was 31 when she was last seen.
Xayavong’s sister, Lexi Graziano, said in court that their family’s story began with hope as they’re first-generation immigrants from Laos. Their father was a Vietnam War veteran who fought at 15 years old and “sacrificed everything for us to have a chance at a better life and the American Dream.
“He never imagined that one day, he would have to bury his youngest daughter, taken from us in such a cruel and unimaginable way.”
Xayavong grew up in Apple Valley and was a mother of two.
“She wasn’t a perfect person; she had her own struggles,” her sister said.
She dreamed of owning a home and building a better future for her children. “But he robbed her of all of that,” Graziano said.
Plea deal
The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office first charged Jorgenson with the intentional murder of Starren.
There was strong evidence tying Jorgenson to Xayavong, but because it had been a couple of years since she was killed, it was going to be more difficult to prosecute, said Kettwick, an assistant Ramsey County attorney who is also assigned as the attorney for the BCA’s human trafficking task force.
The evidence in Starren’s case was even stronger, but Kettwick said because her autopsy couldn’t determine a cause of death — other than classifying it as a homicide — “it’s hard to go before a jury and not be able to tell them what happened” and to prove it was intentional and not unintentional murder.
“We wanted him to accept responsibility if he did it, to be held accountable for it, and to provide closure to the families for what happened,” Kettwick said.
Entering into a plea deal with Jorgenson was their best option to ensure convictions of intentional murder for both homicides, Kettwick said. Jorgenson agreed to accept the statutory maximum of 40 years in prison and to tell authorities the circumstances of killing Xayavong.
He said in court that Xayavong had been staying with him at his Shoreview townhouse and he thought he killed her around Sept. 1, 2021, but he couldn’t be certain of the date because he “was very drunk at the time.”
Jorgenson said they got into an argument, he was “very angry” and he was beating up Xayavong, including throwing punches. “It ended with me dropping a knee on her head,” he said. He said he realized he’d knocked her unconscious and she was no longer breathing.
If Jorgenson had gone to trial and was convicted of unintentional murder rather than intentional murder, a risk that Kettwick considered, a middle-range sentence under the state sentencing guidelines would have been around 12.5 years because Jorgenson didn’t have a felony record, according to Kettwick.
If convicted of intentional murder, a judge could have sentenced him to 40 years of prison for each count, though it’s questionable whether that would have stood up to appeals, Kettwick said.
Though Ricki Starren said she understands that’s how Minnesota law is structured, it’s difficult to accept.
“How do you do what you did to two people and admit to it and then you only get that amount of years?” she said.
Other victims?
Even after Jorgenson was charged, the question remained: “Are there additional victims?” Kettwick said.
Flannagan spent more than a year looking at missing persons and cold cases that were potentially similar, and hasn’t found anything linking him to other cases. She would continue investigating if more information comes forward.
Jorgenson, in a message from prison to a Pioneer Press inquiry, said he has no connection to other missing people.
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People brought together by the murders have stayed in contact: Finnegan attended both Starren’s and Xayavong’s memorial services. Ricki Starren and Finnegan remain close, and Ricki chats with a sister of Xayavong.
The whole experience left Mikaelson traumatized.
She’s moved onto managing another apartment complex. She always made it a point to get to know residents and she’s stepped up her efforts more now. She’s organized gatherings to help neighbors get to know each other better.
“If something does happen, I want my residents to have people they can go to for help,” she said. “It brings more of a sense of community, we’re watching out for each other.”
For help
Help is available in Ramsey County and St. Paul through the St. Paul & Ramsey County Domestic Abuse Intervention Project 24/7 by calling 651-645-2824. Throughout Minnesota, the Day One crisis line can be reached around the clock by calling 866-223-1111 or texting 612-399-9995.
