Police race to save murder evidence from being turned into scrap metal

▶ Watch Video: Murder in the Parking Garage

Detective Devin Rigo knew the clock was ticking as he raced to a metal scrapyard just north of Portland, Oregon. Rigo, with the Hillsboro Police Department, had just learned about the discovery of a maroon minivan he believed contained evidence connected to the murder of 56-year-old Kenneth “Kenny” Fandrich, a contract pipe fitter.  

On Jan. 27, 2023, Kenny Fandrich was discovered in a parking garage at the Intel campus in Hillsboro. Police reviewed surveillance camera images and determined that Fandrich had been dragged into the minivan by a masked man. Police believed the killer had broken Fandrich’s neck and killed him inside the minivan, before staging his body back in the driver’s seat of his own vehicle.

From evidence found at the scene, investigators believed the murder suspect tried to cover his crime by spray-painting multiple security cameras in the parking garage with blue spray paint. Correspondent Natalie Morales covers the investigation into Kenny Fandrich’s murder and the hunt for the killer in “Murder in the Parking Garage,”  now streaming on Paramount+.

Soon after police arrived on the scene, Intel security personnel provided investigators with recordings from their hundreds of security cameras in the parking garage. Police soon had images of a suspect – wearing a hard hat, tinted glasses and a face mask – spray-painting the security cameras around Fandrich’s car early that morning, to apparently conceal the crime. At the time, the suspect had not been detected by Intel. But when police looked at the footage, they discovered that the spray paint didn’t cover everything the cameras recorded.

Police believed that whoever had killed Fandrich waited for him inside that minivan, then attacked Fandrich when he returned to his car after his shift. The killer left the garage in the maroon minivan soon after.

The night that Fandrich’s body was found, his wife, Tanya Fandrich, told investigators Kenny had a stalker: a well-off former veterinarian named Dr. Steven Milner. Tanya Fandrich had worked for Milner at his vet clinic for years, and they had an affair, which Tanya Fandrich said was long over. Police found that Kenny Fandrich had filed several orders for protection against Milner, and that Milner had been warned by Hillsboro police officers to stop following Kenny Fandrich. Just months before Kenny Fandrich’s murder, Milner had been caught placing a tracking device on one of the Fandrichs’ vehicles and was criminally charged. After several days of investigation, police arrested Milner and charged him with the murder of Kenny Fandrich.

Once in custody, police were able to connect the minivan, and another vehicle, to Milner, who had left them at a Home Depot parking lot for long periods of time.

To prove the case against Milner, investigators felt they had to find that minivan. “Because it’s the minivan that we believe was really our main crime scene …” said Rigo. “We thought there was going to be forensic evidence … in that minivan.”

Rigo and his partner, Detective Stephanie Winter, called the vehicles “burner cars.”

“Everybody kind of is more familiar with like a burner phone …” said Rigo, “where you have a phone that’s not … traced to you but, you know, you can use it for what you need, get rid of it … Essentially, he did the same thing, but with a car.”

The maroon minivan had been flagged at the Home Depot parking lot and the VIN number had been recorded. Security footage showed the van leaving the Home Depot parking lot shortly before Fandrich was murdered.

“We are sending flyers to every agency in the area,” said Rigo about the minivan’s VIN number.

The first alert they got was from the Oregon Department of Transportation. The minivan had been towed off the side of the busy I-5 highway in North Portland just days after Fandrich was murdered. Detectives believe it had been dumped there by Milner. Rigo called the tow company and found out the minivan had been sold to a scrap metal company. That’s when he started racing to the scrapyard to see if they could retrieve the minivan, and the key crime scene evidence it may have held. But he was too late. When Rigo arrived and asked about the minivan, he was shown a video of the crime scene being picked up and smashed to pieces. “I was able to watch one of my key pieces of evidence be crushed and taken away,” said Rigo, “before my very eyes … exactly a week too late.”

Discover how the investigation unfolded, and Milner’s defense at trial, on this week’s “48 Hours,” “Murder in the Parking Garage.”