Lauri Anne Winkel Deatherage, 48, a White female, was found dead inside her Robbinsdale, Minnesota home on June 18, 2021, during a welfare check. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner determined she died of a gunshot wound to the head at her residence at 3456 Grimes Avenue North that morning. She had married just days earlier, a late-spring joy that framed the abruptness and cruelty of what followed.
Police quickly focused on her ex-husband, Robert Dewayne McCloud.
Investigators learned he had recently purchased a handgun and been at her home that morning; when they moved to contact him at a residence in Brooklyn Center, efforts to reach him failed and a perimeter was set. After a lengthy standoff that lasted roughly ten hours, McCloud was taken into custody without incident.
Prosecutors charged McCloud, then 64, with intentional second-degree murder, alleging he shot Lauri inside her home. Court records and charging documents described evidence including a pistol, ammunition, and a labeled key to her house recovered from his residence. The case deepened as investigators obtained a recording in which he admitted to killing his ex-wife and expressed anger about her recent remarriage, a thread of jealousy that prosecutors said ran through his actions.
In January 2022, a Hennepin County grand jury elevated the case, indicting McCloud on premeditated first-degree murder, and a judge raised his bail to $2 million. The indictment underscored prosecutors' contention that the killing was planned, not impulsive, arriving seven months after the charges were first filed.
The criminal case never went to trial. In July 2022, the Hennepin County Attorney's Office dismissed the charges after authorities reported that McCloud, then 65, had died. With the suspect's death, the prosecution ended, leaving the narrative of loss fixed to the day officers opened a quiet house on Grimes Avenue and found a life cut short just as a new chapter had begun.
