A young man made a blood-soaked confession to his father moments after stabbing and cannibalising his mother in a frenzied attack at their lakeside Minnesota home.
Eric Leif Jordahl was 20 years old when he killed Rosalie Johnson, a 62-year-old city councilwoman, at the family's lakeside property in Big Lake, Minnesota, in July 2020. Now 26 and freshly convicted of murder, horrifying details of the attack have emerged in court documents filed in Sherburne County.
When her husband returned home on July 23, 2020, he found Jordahl standing in the garage drenched in blood. His son's confession was immediate.
"The devil exists, it's in me and I ate Mom," he told his father according to records.
What happened that night
Jordahl crept into his mother's room late at night while his father was at work, reports The Sun. When she told him to go back to bed, he beat her before seizing a knife and repeatedly stabbing her. Police said he also bit her during the attack.
Johnson was found in the basement, beaten and stabbed, with parts of her body missing. She had suffered severe facial trauma and was covered in blood, according to a probable cause statement seen by the Daily Mail.
Jordahl removed part of her body, carried it to the kitchen, and that is where officers discovered human tissue and a butcher's knife on the table.
The medical examiner ruled that Jordahl had cannibalised his mother before she died, citing extensive blunt-force and sharp-force injuries to her head, neck and torso. Judge Karen Schommer, in delivering her guilty verdict, concluded he had beaten and stabbed his mother and then "began to cut up and cannibalise" her while she was still alive.
Jordahl was initially found too mentally incompetent to stand trial in 2021. He regained competency and proceedings restarted in 2024, with his lawyers arguing not guilty by reason of mental illness.
He waived his right to a jury trial. Judge Schommer found him guilty on all counts, including first-degree murder, which carries an automatic life sentence.
On Monday, Schommer will hear evidence on whether he should be found not guilty by reason of mental illness.
If she rules in his favour, Jordahl could avoid prison and be committed to a psychiatric facility instead.
