Murder in the Parking Garage: A Chilling Case of Stalking and Betrayal
Detective Devin Rigo knew the clock was ticking as he rushed 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 January 27, 2023, Kenny Fandrich was found dead 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. Investigators 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.
Uncovering the Evidence
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.
A Suspect Emerges
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.
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.
Racing Against 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 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.
Discover how the investigation unfolded, and Milner’s defense at trial, on this week’s “48 Hours,” “Murder in the Parking Garage.”
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