Stalked and killed by his wife's ex-lover

Kenny Fandrich was trying to build a new future with his wife after her affair, but he couldn't escape a figure from her past

- WORDS: GAIL SHORTLAND

Police were searching for this maroon van

n 27 January 2023, a woman phoned the police to say her husband, Kenneth "Kenny" Fandrich, 56, hadn't come home from work. She told them his phone location said it was still in the multi-storey car park at the tech company where he was a contract fitter. She also told them he had a stalker, so she was concerned something was terribly wrong.

Police officers rushed to the car park outside Portland, Oregon. They found Kenny slumped in the driving seat of his car as though he'd fallen asleep. But on closer inspection, they discovered he was dead. Kenny's wife Tanya was devastated.

The scene inside Kenny's black Honda Civic didn't look violent. His lunch box, keys and phone were on the passenger seat next to him. So had he died of natural causes? Tanya was adamant there must have been foul play, and it turned out she was right. An autopsy revealed Kenny had died from blunt and compressive trauma to the neck.

Investigators started to look through footage from the security cameras in the car park. They saw a masked man wearing red mirror-tinted glasses and a hard hat spraying at least six cameras with blue paint at 7am that morning. The company's security team hadn't noticed. One that hadn't been vandalised captured an image of the vehicle they believed belonged to the suspect. It was an old, maroon-coloured Dodge van with no front licence plate. They could see it parked right by Kenny's vehicle just before he walked into the car park at 3.21pm, after he'd finished his shift.

It was hard to make out with the blue paint obscuring some of the view, but Kenny's headlights flashed, as though he had unlocked the car with his key fob.