Pair of Oklahoma City suspicious suicides to be reviewed
The suicides of two Oklahoma City women who died three years apart while dating the same man are under review by a longtime cold case investigator for Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater,
The Oklahoman learned Friday. The move by the Oklahoma City Police Department to reassign the cases followed a two-year investigation by The
Oklahoman, which published a five-part series on the deaths in May titled “Suspicious Suicides.”
Holly Sjostrom, 22, died in 2011. Sandra Stevens, 21, died in 2014. Family members of both women have challenged the official cause of death. The mothers of both women believe the boyfriend was responsible for their daughter’s death.
Oklahoma City police spokesman Capt. Paco Balderrama stopped short of calling the cases reopened.
“They try to find any leads that maybe we didn’t follow before,” Balderrama said.
The investigator will be “looking for new evidence: a phone call, a fingerprint, a
statement, an email.”
Within the 17-person team of detectives at the Oklahoma City Police Department, one cold case detective investigates unsolved cases, but is on the district attorney’s payroll, Balderrama said.
Prater could not be reached for comment.
Sjostrom had argued with her boyfriend of two months moments before her May 21, 2011, shooting, which took place in the backyard of her Oklahoma City home.
Sandra Stevens had also been with the same boyfriend for two months and been arguing with him in the moments before she died of a shotgun blast on Dec. 6, 2014, at the Oklahoma City home she had shared him.
The boyfriend told police a similar story in each case: Sjostrom and Stevens took drugs and had been depressed.
The Oklahoman is not naming the boyfriend as he has not been charged with a crime nor named as a suspect by police.
If a cold case investigator did find evidence that the Sjostrom or Stevens cases were homicides, police would first need to take the evidence to the medical examiner’s office and request a corrected death certificate, said Jaye Mendros, an Oklahoma City criminal defense attorney.
“It’s problematic as far as court — if it says suicide that’s built-in reasonable doubt as to whether there was a homicide,” said Mendros. “If additional investigation is done and the police find more evidence, they can take that to the medical examiner’s office and get the death certificate corrected.”
Only then could any prosecution move forward, Mendros said.
Told Friday that the cases had been reassigned to a cold case investigator, Sylvia Stevens, Sandra’s mother, said, “Good. So I guess it made people think, what had happened. I’m glad the story came out, and a lot more people know about it.”
“It’s a light,” she said. “A hope.”