June 11 – Weeks after Santa Fe police began investigating the suspicious death of a woman outside a downtown apartment complex, it is still not clear how she died or whether foul play was involved.
The body of 57-year-old Katherine Rademaekers was found almost a month ago in the parking lot of Evergreen Apartments. Details of the investigation are unclear. The department has provided only heavily redacted reports on the incident.
Santa Fe Police Capt. Aaron Ortiz – who heads the department’s Criminal Investigations Unit – said the death has not been ruled a homicide and that investigators are still awaiting a report on the cause and manner of death of Rademaekers of the state Office of the Medical Examiner.
There were no signs of “blunt force trauma” to her body, Ortiz said.
Officers collected samples from eight suspected bloodstains at the scene. Ortiz said the samples were submitted to the state crime lab, which did not return test results.
The heavily redacted reports show that Rademaekers’ body was discovered by maintenance workers just before 8 a.m. May 15 in the parking lot of the apartment complex, located on Calle Lorca south of St. Michael’s Drive.
The two workers arrived at work at 7 a.m. that day and later told officers they were “doing their rounds” on the property when they noticed the woman’s body and called police to report the incident. They told officers what they saw, but those details – along with many others – were redacted as “confidential information.”
As detectives and crime scene technicians processed the scene in the parking lot, an officer wrote, a man watched the investigation from the edge of the taped off area. He “appeared to be visibly upset.” The officer wrote that the man “was shaking and seemed delayed in his responses to me” and “one could describe [him] if not present.”
The officer interviewed the man, who gestured toward the crime scene and told him “none of this was there” when he got home from work at 7 a.m., the report said.
A woman who lives at San Miguel Apartments — across the street from the lot where the body was found — told investigators she heard a man and a woman arguing loudly the night before around 10 p.m., another officer noted in an report.
Officers used a drone camera to photograph a stretch of the Santa Fe Rail Trail behind Evergreen Apartments, which runs past Santa Fe High School and across Siringo Road to West Zia Road, according to a report from the department’s drone operator . Detectives also requested photos of a vacant triangular lot adjacent to the apartment complex on the route.
Although detectives requested video footage from nearby businesses the night before the body was found, including an Allsup gas station and the Smith’s grocery store on Pacheco Street, Ortiz said no surveillance video was recovered.
