She Dragged a Suitcase Down Riverside Drive—Not Knowing the Cop Already Understood the Stain

The security video begins like nothing at all—just another wet morning on a quiet residential street in South Minneapolis. The kind of street where people walk dogs in old sweatshirts, where commuters sip coffee and glance at the sky, where rainwater sits in shallow puddles and reflects the dull gray of early spring.

Then the camera catches her.

A young woman in a red jacket, small-framed but determined, wrestling an oversized Navy suitcase across the slick pavement. The suitcase looks too heavy for her. It jerks and skids, the wheels snagging on cracks and seams in the sidewalk. She leans back, dragging it with both hands as if the thing is trying to anchor itself to the earth.

And behind it, a dark trail forms.

At first glance, you might think it’s just rainwater. The street is still wet from the night before. But the trail is too thick, too persistent, too wrong. It doesn’t spread like water. It stains.

In the distance, an officer appears in the frame—still far enough away that he’s a shape more than a face. For a moment he doesn’t react, because why would he? A woman moving a suitcase isn’t a crime. It’s ordinary. It’s college move-out season. It’s somebody late for a bus. It’s nothing.

Until it isn’t.

In less than thirty seconds, the woman will stop, turn, and speak with a calm that will rattle investigators for years. What she says next will crack open a case that spans three states, five killings, and an obsession so methodical it looks less like impulse and more like a blueprint. Not a crime of opportunity. A crime of accounting—names circled, addresses mapped, debts collected.

And the most chilling part is this:

She didn’t want to get away.

She wanted to be seen.

Her name was Lauren Mitchell. She was twenty-six years old when she dragged that suitcase down Riverside Drive, and the story the public would come to know began long before the rain, long before the camera, long before the dark trail marked her route like a signature.

Lauren grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota—the youngest of three sisters, a kid who by most accounts seemed built for a bright life. She played violin. She made honor roll. She talked about becoming a veterinarian. Her family remembered her as creative, talented, quick to laugh.

Then she turned fifteen, and something shifted.

Her mother, Patricia, noticed it first: Lauren skipping dinner, disappearing into her room for hours, dark circles under her eyes that makeup couldn’t disguise. Depression didn’t arrive gently. It hit like a freight train. One day Lauren was talking about school events; the next she couldn’t get out of bed. Her grades collapsed. The violin went quiet. Friends drifted away and Lauren didn’t chase them—not because she didn’t care, but because she didn’t have the energy to explain what was happening inside her mind.

Patricia did what terrified parents do when they’re watching a child slip away: she went searching for help.

In September 2013, she enrolled Lauren in a clinical trial at the Midwest Institute for Psychiatric Research. The trial promised a breakthrough: treatment for adolescent depression using an experimental medication called Neuraxin 7. It was described as safe, closely monitored, revolutionary. The lead researcher, Dr. Michael Brennan, personally assured Patricia that her daughter would receive the best care possible.

Lauren was assigned a primary therapist: Dr. Jonathan Price.

Jonathan was thirty-two, charming, confident, the kind of professional who could make a teenage patient feel like she was understood without having to translate her pain into tidy sentences. Dark hair. Warm eyes. A manner that made you feel you were the only person in the room.

Lauren trusted him immediately.

For eighteen months, she attended weekly therapy sessions with Jonathan and monthly check-ins with the research team. At first, it looked like success. Lauren smiled more. She returned to school. Patricia felt the crushing weight of fear lift, just slightly, from her chest.

But behind the official checklists and progress notes, something else was happening.

According to what investigators later reconstructed, Neuraxin 7 wasn’t stabilizing Lauren’s mood the way it was supposed to. It was altering it—sharpening something dangerous, rewiring the way trauma and emotion were processed. Other trial participants would later describe severe psychological effects: paranoia, violent ideation, an unsettling change in how they perceived threats and betrayal. And the most damning claim—one that would haunt every stage of the investigation—was that warnings were being suppressed. Data minimized. Adverse effects buried under the language of “unrelated symptoms.”

By the time Lauren turned seventeen, Patricia barely recognized her. There was a flatness in her voice, a coldness behind her eyes. Yet she still functioned. She went to school. She kept up appearances. On paper, she looked like a success story.

The trial ended in March 2015. Lauren was tapered off the medication, monitored briefly, then released from care. Jonathan Price moved on to other patients. Dr. Brennan published findings that—conveniently—omitted data about severe adverse psychological effects. The pharmaceutical company behind Neuraxin 7 shelved the medication, citing market viability concerns.

And Lauren was left with the feeling that something inside her had been fundamentally altered by eighteen months of chemical experimentation.

She didn’t have a clean word for it. She just knew she wasn’t who she had been. And nobody, it seemed, was coming back to explain why.

For the next two years, Lauren tried to look normal while fighting thoughts that scared her. She woke from dreams of violence drenched in sweat. She spent hours online, searching for information about Neuraxin 7. She found forums where other trial participants described their own derailment—their panic, their intrusive thoughts, their spirals. She learned there were other research sites across the country running parallel studies.

And slowly, the fear curdled into anger.

Lauren began collecting names—doctors, researchers, pharmaceutical representatives—anyone tied to Neuraxin 7. She created a list. At the top was Jonathan Price.

Not because he was the most powerful person in the machine.

But because he was the one she had trusted most closely.

On the morning of April 8, 2017, Lauren showed up at Jonathan Price’s home in South Minneapolis at 6:47 a.m., before his first appointment. He had left the institute the previous year and opened a private practice specializing in trauma therapy—an irony Lauren reportedly found unbearable.

When Jonathan opened the door in pajamas with a coffee mug in hand, he didn’t recognize her at first. Four years can reshape a face. Lauren had cut her hair short. She’d lost weight. There was a hardened look of someone who no longer slept through the night.

“Lauren?” he said, confusion shifting into concern.

“What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

“Can we talk?” Lauren asked, her voice steady, almost friendly. “Just for a few minutes. About the trial.”

Jonathan hesitated. Any therapist knows what a boundary violation this is. But according to the later theory of the case, he saw desperation in her—and that old instinct to help overrode judgment.

He let her inside.

What happened in the next twenty minutes wasn’t captured by any camera. Jonathan lived alone. There were no interior security systems. But investigators later alleged that Lauren came prepared with restraints and tools meant to control the situation. They believed she confronted him about the trial, the suppressed side effects, the ethical compromises. Jonathan reportedly tried to defend himself—claiming he had followed protocol, claiming he didn’t know the full extent of what was hidden.

But Lauren did not come for an explanation. She came for a reckoning.

Jonathan Price was reported missing the next day when he failed to show up for appointments and stopped answering his phone. A wellness check at his home showed nothing suspicious from the outside—car in the driveway, lights off, curtains drawn. Officers knocked, got no response, and left.

Inside, the truth waited in silence.

And Lauren was already gone—already driving toward the next name on her list.

Over the following weeks, she moved with a frightening calm across state lines, selecting targets tied to the Neuraxin 7 program. Investigators later described her method as “organized”—not chaotic, not opportunistic. Each step looked planned. Each victim had a connection. Each killing, in her mind, was a correction.

One victim was a pharmaceutical representative in Wisconsin who, according to Lauren’s later statements, had helped push Neuraxin 7 into trials despite internal concerns. Another was a research coordinator who had handled data collection. Another was a pharmaceutical rep in Chicago. Another was a medical director connected to the broader trial program.

At the time, law enforcement didn’t connect the deaths. Different jurisdictions. Different crime scenes. Different initial interpretations—robbery, missing person, isolated homicide. The fragmentation worked exactly the way Lauren had counted on.

Until it didn’t.

Because revenge is exhausting, and eventually even the most determined obsession runs out of fuel.

By April 25, 2017, Lauren was tired of running.

She had kept something, though—something she couldn’t release.

Jonathan Price, the first person she had trusted after everything fell apart, became in her mind the symbol of betrayal. According to her later confession, she kept his remains for seventeen days in her apartment freezer. Not to hide. Not to preserve. But to carry, literally, what she believed had been done to her.

And on that rainy Tuesday morning, she decided it was time for the world to finally see.

Riverside Drive was ordinary at 8 a.m. Wet streets. New grass smell. People moving through their routines without thinking twice. Lauren stepped into that ordinariness dragging the heaviest object in her life behind her, leaving the dark trail that the security camera captured so clearly.

Officer David Morrison was on routine patrol when he got a call: a disturbed person on Riverside Drive. He assumed it might be a mental health crisis—someone confused, someone in distress. He radioed that he was responding and drove toward the location.

When he spotted Lauren, his first thought was mundane: a young woman struggling with a suitcase, maybe moving out, maybe late, maybe just having a bad morning.

Then he noticed the stain.

And the way she walked—unhurried, not panicked, almost deliberate, as if she were heading toward something rather than away from it.

Morrison stepped out of his cruiser and called out, “Ma’am, can you stop for a moment?”

Lauren stopped.

She let go of the handle and turned to face him.

And she smiled.

Not wild-eyed, not manic—just a sad, relieved smile, like someone who had been holding her breath for years and had finally decided to exhale.

“I’ve been waiting for someone to finally see,” she said, her voice carrying across the wet street. “He deserved worse than what’s in there.”

In that instant, Morrison understood: the suitcase wasn’t luggage. It was evidence. And the trail behind her wasn’t rain.

Training took over. He drew his weapon, ordered her to the ground. Lauren did not run. She did not resist. She knelt on the wet pavement, hands behind her head, and waited while he called for backup.

When additional officers arrived and the suitcase was opened, the scene shifted from bizarre to catastrophic. This wasn’t just a homicide. It was a confession staged in daylight, delivered to law enforcement with intention.

At the station, Lauren waived her right to an attorney.

She wanted to talk.

For the next eighteen hours, she spoke as if she were presenting cause and effect—names, locations, reasons. She drew maps. She described where bodies could be found and how people had died. She explained her logic with the exhausted clarity of someone who believed her work was already finished.

Detective Rebecca Torres led the interrogation. She had years of experience and had faced the worst kinds of offenders. But Lauren wasn’t bargaining. She wasn’t minimizing. She wasn’t pretending she hadn’t done it.

She was explaining it.

“They destroyed my mind,” she told Torres. “I was a kid. A kid who needed help. And they used me like a lab rat for profit. Every single person I killed knew what that drug was doing to us… So I chose justice over mine.”

Torres listened, documenting everything.

Then she asked the question that cut through the entire case: “Why did you keep Jonathan’s body?”

Lauren went quiet for a long moment.

“Because he was the first person I trusted after everything fell apart,” she said, “and he betrayed that trust for a paycheck and a research publication. I wanted to carry that betrayal—literally carry it—until I couldn’t anymore.”

The investigation that followed expanded rapidly. With Lauren’s maps and statements, investigators recovered bodies in the locations she described. Ballistics and forensic work tied evidence back to her. Federal agents joined local law enforcement to verify the confession and examine the wider implications.

And then there was the second explosion—beyond the murders.

In Lauren’s apartment, investigators reportedly found boxes of files and hard drives: internal pharmaceutical memos, recorded conversations, confidential patient materials obtained through hacking and manipulation. Some of it could not be admitted in court because of how it was acquired. But it painted a picture that ignited national outrage: claims of systematic negligence, suppressed side-effect data, careers and profits prioritized over vulnerable teenagers.

The courtroom battle was never about whether Lauren killed five people. She had confessed, and evidence corroborated key parts of her account. The battle was over culpability: whether her mental state had been altered to the point that her responsibility was diminished.

Her defense argued temporary insanity rooted in long-term psychological effects of Neuraxin 7, bringing experts to describe how medication can impact brain chemistry and impulse control. The prosecution countered with a simple point: her actions were too organized—too planned, too methodical—to be dismissed as a temporary break from reality.

After six days of deliberation, the verdict came back: guilty on all counts of first-degree murder.

Lauren Mitchell was sentenced to five consecutive life terms without parole.

Before she was led away, she addressed the court in words that reporters would quote for years:

“I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t even ask for understanding. I just want people to know there are consequences to playing with human minds like they’re nothing more than data points.”

In the end, the security footage remained the symbol of the case: a young woman in a red jacket dragging a suitcase down a wet street, not realizing—or perhaps fully realizing—that the cop watching her already understood what the stain meant.

Not because she made a mistake.

But because she finally stopped trying to hide it.