Pay attention to the woman in the red jacket.
In this security footage from a quiet residential street, you can see her struggling with an oversized Navy suitcase, dragging it across wet pavement.
Watch carefully as she moves toward the camera.
See that dark trail she’s leaving behind?
That’s not water.
And notice the police officer in the distance just now realizing what he’s witnessing.
In less than 30 seconds, this woman will do something that will shock investigators and change everything they thought they knew about one of the most calculated revenge plots in modern criminal history.
What she says next will lead police to four more bodies buried across three states.
You know that feeling when you trust someone completely with your darkest thoughts, your deepest fears, your most vulnerable moments?
For 26-year-old Lauren Mitchell, that trust was supposed to heal her.
Instead, it destroyed everything.
This is the story of how one woman’s descent into darkness began in a therapist’s office and ended on a rain soaked street in Minneapolis, dragging evidence of her crimes in broad daylight.
But here’s what makes this case so haunting.
Lauren didn’t want to hide anymore.
She wanted to be caught.
She needed the world to know what had been done to her and what she’d done in return.
Let me take you back to where it all started.
Not to that morning in April 2017, but four years earlier when Lauren was just a kid trying to survive.
Lauren Mitchell grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, the youngest of three sisters.
By all accounts, she was bright, creative, talented.
She played violin, made honor roll, had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.
But when Lauren turned 15, something shifted.
Her mother, Patricia, noticed it first.
The way Lauren stopped eating dinner with the family.
How she’d lock herself in her room for hours.
The dark circles under her eyes that makeup couldn’t hide.
Depression hit Lauren like a freight train.
One day she was planning for homecoming.
The next she couldn’t get out of bed.
Her grades plummeted.
She stopped playing violin.
Her friends drifted away and Lauren let them go.
She didn’t have the energy to explain what was happening inside her head.
Patricia did what any terrified mother would do.
She sought help.
In September 2013, she enrolled Lauren in a clinical trial at the Midwest Institute for Psychiatric Research.
The trial promised breakthrough treatment for adolescent depression using an experimental medication called Neuraxin 7.
It was supposed to be safe, closely monitored, revolutionary even.
The lead researcher, Dr. Michael Brennan personally assured Patricia that Lauren would receive the best care possible.
Lauren was assigned to Dr. Jonathan Price as her primary therapist.
Jonathan was 32, charming with the kind of easy confidence that made teenage patients feel understood.
He had dark hair, warm eyes, and a way of making you feel like you were the only person in the room.
Lauren trusted him immediately.
The medication trial lasted 18 months.
During that time, Lauren had weekly therapy sessions with Jonathan and monthly check-ins with the research team.
At first, things seemed to improve.
Lauren smiled more.
She returned to school.
Patricia felt that crushing weight of worry lift just slightly from her chest.
But here’s what nobody knew at the time.
Neuraxin 7 wasn’t working the way it was supposed to.
Instead of stabilizing Lauren’s mood, it was creating something far more dangerous.
Patients in the trial were experiencing severe psychological side effects that the research team was actively suppressing.
Paranoia, violent ideation, a complete rewiring of how their brains process trauma and emotion.
By the time Lauren turned 17, she’d become someone her mother didn’t recognize.
There was a coldness in her eyes, a flatness in her voice.
But she was functioning, going to school, maintaining a social media presence, showing up to therapy.
On paper, Lauren Mitchell looked like a success story.
The trial ended in March 2015.
Lauren was taken off Neuraxin 7 gradually, monitored for 3 months, then released from care.
Jonathan Price moved on to other patients.
Dr. Brennan published his research findings, conveniently omitting the data about adverse psychological effects.
The pharmaceutical company behind Neuraxin 7 shelved the medication, citing market viability concerns.
And Lauren, Lauren was left with a mind that had been fundamentally altered by 18 months of chemical experimentation.
She didn’t understand what had happened to her.
She just knew that something inside her had broken, and nobody seemed to care.
Here’s the thing about trauma.
It doesn’t just go away because a trial ends.
For Lauren, the next two years were a blur of trying to feel normal while fighting thoughts that scared her.
She’d dream about violence, wake up in cold sweats, spend hours researching what Neuraxin 7 had actually done to her brain.
And the more she researched, the angrier she became.
She discovered online forums where other trial participants shared their experiences.
Kids like her, whose lives had been derailed by an experimental drug that should never have made it to human trials.
She learned about the five other research sites across the country running parallel studies.
She found the names of everyone involved, the doctors, the researchers, the pharmaceutical reps who’d pushed this medication through despite warning signs.
Lauren created a list.
At the top of that list was Jonathan Price.
On the morning of April 8th, 2017, Lauren showed up at Jonathan’s home in South Minneapolis.
He’d left the Midwest Institute the previous year and opened a private practice specializing in trauma therapy.
The irony wasn’t lost on Lauren.
She knocked on his door at 6:47 a.m. before his first appointment.
When Jonathan opened the door, still in his pajamas with a coffee mug in hand, he didn’t recognize her at first.
Four years had changed Lauren.
She’d cut her hair short, lost weight, had that hardened look of someone who’d stopped sleeping through the night.
“Lauren.” Jonathan’s face showed confusion, then concern. “What are you doing here? Are you okay?”
“Can we talk?” Lauren asked. Her voice was steady, almost friendly. “Just for a few minutes about the trial.”
Jonathan hesitated.
This violated every professional boundary, every ethical guideline, but he saw something in Lauren’s eyes—desperation maybe or pain—and his instinct to help overrode his judgment.
He let her inside.
What happened in the next 20 minutes, no one knows for certain.
Jonathan lived alone, had no security cameras inside his home.
But here’s what investigators would later piece together from forensic evidence.
Lauren had come prepared.
In her backpack, she carried a knife, zip ties, chloroform, and plastic sheeting.
She’d planned this moment for months, maybe years.
Once inside, she confronted Jonathan about the trial, about what Neuraxin 7 had done to her and others, about the side effects that had been hidden, the data that had been manipulated.
Jonathan tried to defend himself, tried to explain that he’d just been following protocol, that he didn’t know about the suppressed data.
But Lauren didn’t want excuses.
She wanted justice.
Or maybe she just wanted him to understand what it felt like to be powerless, to have your entire sense of self destroyed by people you trusted.
The medical examiner would later determine that Jonathan Price died from multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, 47 in total.
The attack was frenzied, personal, full of rage that had been building for years.
Jonathan Price was reported missing on April 9th when he didn’t show up for his morning appointments and didn’t answer his phone.
His receptionist called the police, concerned.
When officers did a wellness check at his home, everything appeared normal from the outside.
Car in the driveway, lights off, curtains drawn.
They knocked, got no answer, and left.
Here’s what they didn’t know.
Jonathan’s body was in his bathtub wrapped in plastic sheeting.
And Lauren was already in Wisconsin.
You see, Jonathan wasn’t the endgame.
He was just the beginning.
Lauren had spent two years creating a detailed map of everyone involved in the Neuraxin 7 trials.
She knew their addresses, their routines, their vulnerabilities, and she decided that if the justice system wouldn’t hold them accountable, she would.
Her second victim was Dr. Richard Carlson, a pharmaceutical representative who’d been instrumental in getting Neuraxin 7 approved for clinical trials despite internal concerns about its safety profile.
Richard lived in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife and two young children.
He was 41 years old, coached his daughter’s soccer team, seemed like a regular family man.
Lauren waited until April 15th when Richard’s wife took the kids to visit her parents in Green Bay.
She approached Richard in the parking lot of his gym, pretending to have car trouble.
Richard, always the helpful type, walked over to take a look.
Lauren injected him with a veterinary sedative.
She’d learned about dosages from her abandoned dream of becoming a vet and somehow managed to get his unconscious body into her car.
She drove him to a storage unit she’d rented under a fake name.
Richard regained consciousness to find himself bound to a chair, Lauren sitting across from him with a laptop open between them.
“I want you to see something,” Lauren said.
She showed him internal memos from his pharmaceutical company, documents she’d obtained through a combination of hacking and social engineering.
Emails where Richard and his colleagues discussed the adverse effects of Neuraxin 7, where they strategized how to minimize the data before presenting to the FDA, where they calculated that the potential profits outweighed the risk to patients.
“You knew,” Lauren said. “You all knew what this drug was doing to kids and you didn’t care.”
Richard tried to reason with her, tried to explain the complexities of pharmaceutical development, the pressure from investors, the belief that the benefits would outweigh the risks.
But Lauren had stopped listening.
She’d already made her decision.
Richard Carlson died from asphyxiation.
Lauren left his body in the storage unit and moved on.
The thing that’s so chilling about Lauren’s crimes is how methodical they were.
She wasn’t acting in a rage-fueled frenzy.
Well, not entirely.
She was executing a plan.
Between April 8th and April 23rd, she killed five people across three states, each one connected to the Neuraxin 7 trials that had destroyed her adolescence.
Victim three was Dr. Sarah Chen, a research coordinator from the Midwest Institute, who’d been responsible for data collection and analysis.
Lauren found her in Iowa City, where Sarah had moved to work at the University Hospital.
Sarah’s death was quick—a single gunshot to the head in her own kitchen.
Neighbors reported hearing what they thought was a car backfiring around 10:00 p.m. on April 19th.
Victim four was Marcus Webb, another pharmaceutical rep who’d worked alongside Richard Carlson.
Marcus was found dead in his Chicago apartment on April 21st, strangled with a lamp cord.
His laptop was missing along with any personal files related to his work history.
And then there was Dr. Angela Foster, a psychiatrist who’d served as the medical director for the entire Neuraxin 7 trial program.
Angela lived in Minneapolis, just 20 minutes from where Lauren had grown up.
On April 23rd, Lauren broke into Angela’s home while she was at work and waited.
When Angela returned that evening, Lauren was sitting in her living room.
“You remember me?” Lauren asked.
Angela did remember.
She’d reviewed Lauren’s file multiple times during the trial, had signed off on continuing her treatment despite clear warning signs of adverse psychological effects.
Angela had prioritized the completion of the study over the safety of her patients.
And now that decision was standing in her living room holding a gun.
The conversation between them lasted over an hour.
Lauren made Angela read through patient files on her own laptop.
Files of other kids whose lives had been damaged or destroyed by Neuraxin 7.
Kids who’d committed suicide, been institutionalized, developed violent tendencies they’d never had before.
“Tell me how you sleep at night,” Lauren demanded.
Angela broke down, admitted to the ethical compromises she’d made, the data she’d helped suppress, the money that had influenced decisions that should have been purely medical.
She begged for her life, promised to come forward with the truth, to help Lauren expose what had happened.
But Lauren had passed the point where promises meant anything.
Angela Foster died from a knife wound to the throat, similar to Jonathan Price.
Lauren left her body in the living room and walked out the front door.
By this point, some of these deaths had been discovered.
Jonathan Price’s body was found by his business partner on April 18th when they needed to access files from his home office.
The police initially treated it as a burglary gone wrong.
Jonathan had clearly interrupted an intruder, or so they thought.
Richard Carlson’s wife reported him missing on April 17th when he didn’t show up to pick up the kids from her parents’ house.
His car was found abandoned near the gym, but there was no sign of Richard.
Without a body, police treated it as a missing person case.
Dr. Sarah Chen’s death was ruled a homicide, but with no witnesses and minimal evidence, investigators had no leads.
Marcus Webb’s murder looked like a robbery.
Angela Foster wouldn’t be discovered for another two days.
Nobody had connected these deaths yet.
They were happening in different jurisdictions, involving victims with no apparent relationship to each other.
Lauren had counted on this fragmentation of law enforcement, this lack of communication between agencies, but she’d made one critical mistake.
She’d assumed she could keep going, keep crossing names off her list until every person responsible for her suffering was dead.
What Lauren didn’t anticipate was how exhausting revenge would be.
Each killing took something from her, left her emptier than before.
And by the time she’d killed Dr. Angela Foster, Lauren Mitchell was tired of running.
Let me paint you a picture of what the morning of April 25th, 2017 looked like in the South Minneapolis neighborhood where Lauren had grown up.
It had rained the night before.
That spring rain that makes everything smell like earth and new grass.
The streets were still wet, puddles reflecting gray sky.
People were heading to work, walking dogs, living their normal Tuesday morning lives.
Lauren Mitchell was dragging a Navy suitcase down Riverside Drive.
She’d spent the previous night dismembering Jonathan Price’s body, the one death she hadn’t been able to let go of, the one she’d kept.
His remains had been in her apartment freezer for 17 days.
Lauren had decided it was time for everything to end.
Time for someone to finally see what she’d become.
So, she loaded Jonathan into the largest suitcase she could find and started walking.
Not trying to hide, not trying to be subtle, just walking down the middle of a residential street in broad daylight, leaving a trail of blood behind her.
Officer David Morrison was on routine patrol when he got the call.
A disturbed person reported on Riverside Drive.
He thought maybe it was a mental health situation, someone having a crisis.
He radioed in that he was responding and drove toward the location.
When David spotted Lauren, his first thought was that she looked like a college student moving out of an apartment.
Young woman, oversized suitcase, struggling with the weight.
But then he noticed the stain spreading across the pavement behind her and the way she was walking.
Not hurried, not panicked, just methodical, like she was walking towards something instead of away from it.
David got out of his cruiser and called out, “Ma’am, can you stop for a moment?”
Lauren stopped.
She let go of the suitcase handle and turned to face him.
And here’s what haunted David Morrison for years afterward.
Lauren was smiling.
Not a manic smile, not a crazy smile, just this sad, relieved kind of smile, like she’d finally reached the end of a very long journey.
“I’ve been waiting for someone to finally see,” Lauren said, her voice carrying across the wet street. “He deserved worse than what’s in there.”
David’s training kicked in.
He drew his weapon, ordered Lauren to get on the ground, but she didn’t run, didn’t resist.
She simply knelt down on the wet pavement, put her hands behind her head, and waited while David called for backup.
When other officers arrived and opened that suitcase, the crime scene team had to take a moment.
This wasn’t just a body.
This was evidence of rage, of trauma, of something deeply broken in the person who’d done this.
The dismemberment was crude, violent, the work of someone without medical training, but with a lot of anger to work through.
At the station, Lauren waived her right to an attorney.
She wanted to talk.
She needed to talk.
For the next 18 hours, she laid out everything, the names, the locations, the reasons.
She drew maps to where she’d buried Richard Carlson, Marcus Webb, and Dr. Sarah Chen.
She provided detailed descriptions of how each person died, what they’d said, what she’d felt.
Homicide detective Rebecca Torres led the interrogation.
Rebecca had been doing this for 15 years.
Had sat across from serial killers, child murderers, the worst humanity had to offer.
But Lauren Mitchell was different.
Lauren wasn’t denying what she’d done.
She wasn’t making excuses.
She was simply explaining cause and effect like a scientist presenting data.
“You need to understand,” Lauren said at one point, her voice flat with exhaustion. “They destroyed my mind. 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 and they chose their careers over our lives. So I chose justice over mine.”
Rebecca let her talk, documenting everything.
When Lauren finished, when she’d given up the location of her final burial site in a wooded area outside Minneapolis, where she’d left Dr. Angela Foster, Rebecca asked the question that had been bothering her since the interview began.
“Why did you keep Jonathan’s body?”
Lauren was quiet for a long moment.
“Because he was the first person I trusted after everything fell apart, 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 forensic investigation that followed was massive.
FBI agents joined local law enforcement to verify Lauren’s confession.
They found Richard Carlson’s body exactly where she said it would be, buried in a shallow grave near the storage unit she’d rented.
Marcus Webb’s body was recovered from a drainage ditch outside Chicago.
Dr. Sarah Chen’s murder was confirmed through ballistics matching a gun found in Lauren’s apartment.
But here’s what made this case explode into national news.
The documentation Lauren had collected.
In her apartment, investigators found boxes of files, hard drives full of internal pharmaceutical company memos, recorded conversations, patient records that should have been confidential, but that Lauren had obtained through a combination of hacking and social engineering.
This evidence painted a picture of systematic negligence, of a pharmaceutical company that had knowingly pushed a dangerous medication through clinical trials, and of medical professionals who’d prioritized their careers over patient safety.
The prosecution would later use some of this evidence in the trial, but much of it was obtained illegally and couldn’t be admitted.
And then there was the security footage.
Remember that video from the beginning?
The building manager who called 911 about Lauren had been watching his security monitors.
He’d captured the entire encounter between Lauren and Officer Morrison on camera.
That footage became the iconic image of this case.
A young woman dragging a suitcase full of her therapist’s body parts, choosing to be caught rather than continue running.
During the investigation, prosecutors reached out to other participants in the Neuraxin 7 trials.
They found 19 former patients willing to testify about the psychological side effects they’d experienced.
Three had been hospitalized for suicide attempts.
Five had developed violent tendencies they’d never exhibited before.
Two had been diagnosed with permanent psychotic disorders, and all of them had been told their symptoms were unrelated to the trial.
The pharmaceutical company Medcrest Pharmaceuticals released a statement expressing sympathy for the victims and their families while maintaining that Neuraxin 7 had been developed with the highest safety standards.
They quietly settled wrongful death lawsuits with the families of Lauren’s victims for undisclosed amounts.
Dr. Michael Brennan, the lead researcher who’d assured Lauren’s mother that her daughter would receive the best care, retired suddenly and moved to Florida.
He was never charged with any crime.
The trial of Lauren Mitchell began on October 15th, 2018 in Minneapolis.
The prosecution charged her with five counts of first-degree murder.
There was never any question about whether Lauren had killed these people.
She’d confessed to everything, provided evidence, led police to bodies.
The question was whether her culpability was diminished by what had been done to her.
The defense argued temporary insanity caused by the long-term psychological effects of Neuraxin 7.
They brought in neuroscientists who testified about how the medication had fundamentally altered Lauren’s brain chemistry, creating a propensity for violence that hadn’t existed before.
They presented the evidence Lauren had collected, showing the jury exactly what Medcrest Pharmaceuticals had known and when.
The prosecution countered that Lauren’s crimes were too calculated, too methodical to be the result of temporary insanity.
They argued that regardless of what had been done to her, Lauren had made a choice, five separate choices in fact, to take human lives.
The jury deliberated for 6 days.
On November 3rd, 2018, they returned a verdict.
Guilty on all five counts of first-degree murder.
At sentencing, the judge acknowledged the extraordinary circumstances of the case, but noted that the legal system couldn’t excuse premeditated murder, no matter the motive.
Lauren Mitchell was sentenced to five consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Five counts of first-degree murder.
Five consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole.
Before she was led out of the courtroom, Lauren was given a chance to make a statement.
She stood, looked at the families of her victims seated in the gallery, and said something that reporters would quote for years afterward.
“I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t even ask for understanding. I just want people to know that there are consequences to playing with human minds like they’re nothing more than data points.”
“The pharmaceutical industry, the researchers, the doctors, they did this to me. And then they moved on to the next trial, the next drug, the next group of kids they could experiment on. I couldn’t move on, so I made sure they couldn’t either.”
Lauren Mitchell is currently serving her sentence at the Minnesota Correctional Facility for Women.
She’s 33 years old now, and by all accounts, she’s become a model prisoner.
She tutors other inmates, works in the prison library, and has participated in several studies on the long-term effects of experimental medications on juvenile brains.
The families of Jonathan Price, Richard Carlson, Dr. Sarah Chen, Marcus Webb, and Dr. Angela Foster have all established foundations focused on protecting the rights of clinical trial participants and ensuring proper oversight of experimental medications.
Jonathan’s sister Amy Price became a vocal advocate for stricter FDA regulations regarding adolescent participation in psychiatric medication trials.
As for Neuraxin 7, it was permanently shelved by Medcrest Pharmaceuticals.
The company faced no criminal charges, though they paid out over $40 million in civil settlements to former trial participants.
In 2020, new federal regulations were passed requiring independent oversight of all clinical trials involving minors and psychiatric medications.
Regulations that came too late for Lauren Mitchell and the 19 other kids whose lives were forever altered by an experiment that should never have happened.
This case forces us to ask uncomfortable questions about medical ethics, corporate responsibility, and the limits of revenge.
Was Lauren Mitchell a victim or a villain?
The answer, like most things in life, isn’t simple.
She was both.
A young person whose trust was betrayed by the system meant to help her and a calculated killer who took five lives in cold blood.
Lauren once told a reporter who interviewed her in prison, “I’m not asking anyone to sympathize with what I did, but I am asking people to remember that every clinical trial subject is someone’s daughter, someone’s son. They’re not lab rats. They’re human beings who trusted you to help them, not destroy them.”
This is the story of Lauren Mitchell, the Riverside Drive murders, and the experimental medication that created a killer.
May Jonathan Price, Richard Carlson, Dr. Sarah Chen, Marcus Webb, and Dr. Angela Foster rest in peace.
And may we learn from their deaths that some betrayals have consequences that ripple far beyond what anyone could predict.
