On January 13, 2019, police in Calverton Park, Missouri, a municipality within St. Louis County, made a grim discovery while conducting a welfare check at a residence on Williams Boulevard. Inside a garage behind the home, officers found the body of 68-year-old Kenneth Alvern Linzie, a male resident of Berkeley, Missouri. He had sustained fatal gunshot wounds, and his death was immediately investigated as a homicide. The Major Case Squad of Greater St.
Louis was activated to assist the local police department in uncovering the circumstances surrounding the killing.
Investigators quickly developed leads that pointed toward a resident of the property where the body was found. The day after the discovery, authorities identified 53-year-old Jeffrey E. Tod as a person of interest. He was taken into custody and subsequently charged with second-degree murder and armed criminal action in connection with Linzie’s death. Further inquiry revealed that Linzie had likely been killed two days prior to the discovery of his body. Ballistics analysis later matched bullets recovered from the victim to a pistol found inside Tod's home, and witnesses reported seeing the suspect driving the victim's vehicle around the time of the murder.
The investigation into Linzie’s death also provided a breakthrough in a separate, unsolved homicide from the previous month. Detectives linked Tod to the December 2018 shooting death of another man, Deandre Moore, whose body had been found in a car nearby. Authorities determined that both victims were killed while in their vehicles in the driveway of Tod’s residence. In August 2022, Jeffrey Tod appeared in court and pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of armed criminal action. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison, with the stipulation that he must serve at least 85 percent of his sentence before becoming eligible for parole.
