The Murder of April Lee Pease

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

March 22, 2026

April Lee Pease was doing everything right. She had gotten clean. She had moved across the country to escape the man who had spent years threatening her life. She had taken her four-year-old son with her and settled into a women's shelter in Bloomington, Minnesota, where she was rebuilding something that looked, for the first time in a long time, like a future. Her mother said she seemed to be doing well. She had a custody court date coming up on March 20. She had reasons to stay.

On March 17, 2009, April walked out of the Cornerstone shelter and was never seen alive again. She was thirty years old.

The man who killed her, her former boyfriend and the father of her son, had already told her he would do it. He had told her it would be easy to dispose of her body. He had told her he knew of land in Oklahoma where no one would ever find her. He kept every one of those promises. And it would take ten more years, two more murders, and the confessions of the people who helped him for the world to understand what had happened to April Lee Pease.

Who April Was

April Lee Pease was originally from Washington State. By the time she was in her twenties, she had lived through more than most people twice her age. She had battled addiction. She had been in relationships that left marks on her, not all of them visible. She had a son she loved. She was the kind of person who kept trying, who kept reaching for something better even when the ground kept shifting beneath her.

In the mid-2000s, April became involved with a man named Cedric Joseph Marks. Marks was a former MMA fighter with a professional record of 31 wins and 28 losses, a history of violence stretching back to an aggravated burglary conviction in his teens, and a life of extraordinary deception. He was married when he and April got together. His wife, Ginell McDonough, had an open arrangement with him and was aware he dated other women, a dynamic that served as cover for a pattern of predatory behavior. April and Marks had a son together. She lived with him and his wife for a period of time. Then, like many of his women before and after her, she tried to leave.

What followed was the pattern Marks would repeat for the rest of his criminal career, escalating violence, threats, manipulation through the legal system, and the use of a compliant girlfriend to help him track and control the woman trying to escape him. He pinned April to the ground and suffocated her. He strangled her on at least ten separate occasions. He sexually assaulted her multiple times. He threatened her with knives and guns. He told her weekly that he would kill her. And he told her, specifically, that he knew of unpopulated land in Oklahoma where it would be easy to dump a body.

In October 2008, April filed for a protective order against Marks. In that filing, she documented the years of abuse in unflinching detail. It would become one of the most chilling exhibits in what followed, because Marks read every word, and instead of backing down, he escalated.

The Shelter and the Threat

April first entered a women's shelter in Seattle in 2008, seeking treatment for her addiction and trying to put distance between herself and Marks. He found her there almost immediately. He called her at the shelter and told her that the next time he saw her he was going to stab her in the face. A witness overheard the threat and Seattle police documented it in a formal report. The following day, Marks showed up at the shelter and refused to leave. He departed before officers arrived but was arrested later that day.

Understanding that Marks knew where she was in Seattle, the shelter worked to transfer April somewhere safer. She was moved to the Cornerstone shelter in Bloomington, Minnesota, with her son, hoping that the distance would buy her some time. She had been there for approximately five months when she disappeared on March 17, 2009. She had a custody hearing scheduled for three days later.

What April could not have known, because it was discovered only through later investigation and recorded jail phone calls, was that Marks had never stopped looking for her. While sitting in a Washington State jail in November 2008, Marks made recorded calls to his wife and to his then-girlfriend, Kellee Kristine Sorensen. He directed them to impersonate April, calling airlines and domestic abuse shelters across the country to locate her. He told them he understood why people in domestic disputes end up killing their accusers. He was methodical and patient about finding her.

He found her.

The Abduction

On the afternoon of March 17, 2009, Marks and Sorensen drove to the Cornerstone shelter in Bloomington and parked across the street. They waited. When April drove up with her four-year-old son and got out of the car, Marks crossed the street and punched her, forcing her into his vehicle. Sorensen took April's young son and dropped him off at the shelter entrance, then got back into the car. Marks drove south on Interstate 35 with April in the vehicle.

According to Sorensen's later account to investigators, April screamed and cried at first, pleading for her life. At some point during the drive, she fell silent. Marks turned off the interstate onto a gravel road and stopped near what appeared to be an abandoned shack, somewhere in the Dakotas or potentially Oklahoma. Sorensen stayed in the car. Marks walked April out of sight behind the shack. When he returned, he was alone and crying. He told Sorensen he had murdered April and had removed her hands and her teeth so her body could never be identified.

Marks's wife, Ginell McDonough, would later tell investigators he had confessed the murder to her as well, framing it as something he had done to gain custody of their son. He had recorded a disc, intended for his son to watch on his eighteenth birthday, in which he spoke directly to the boy and said he had gone on a road trip to save his life because April had kidnapped him. In the videos, he told the child he was about to do something that could get him "locked away for the rest of his life or get him killed." He said he had to do it because the courts were siding with Pease.

The Long Silence

When April failed to appear for the custody hearing on March 20, 2009, Marks showed up in court and told the judge he suspected she had relapsed. He was awarded custody of their son. He was not considered a suspect at the time. April was not formally reported missing for approximately six months. By then, Marks had moved on. He remarried. He kept fighting professionally. He kept dating women he met on apps, sometimes while simultaneously maintaining his marriage, and he kept subjecting them to the same cycle of violence, control, and terror.

Bloomington police did have Marks on their radar as a person of interest after April was reported missing. But they could not build a case. April had vanished without a physical trace. Her body had not been found. Sorensen was not talking. The investigation stalled, then went cold.

For almost a decade, April's family waited. Her mother, Dottie Pease, was interviewed by Bloomington detectives in Washington State during the years the case was open, and she told them what she knew, what she feared, what she hoped. The answer never came.

Two More Murders Crack the Case Open

In January 2019, a young woman named Jenna Scott and her friend Michael Swearingin disappeared from Temple, Texas. Scott, 28, had been in an on-and-off relationship with Cedric Marks. She had filed for a protective order against him in 2018, telling a judge she feared for her life and that Marks had choked her into unconsciousness on multiple occasions. The judge denied her order. After Marks subsequently broke into her home and fled Texas on a federal warrant, Scott and Swearingin disappeared. Their car was found wiped down with bleach. U.S. Marshals arrested Marks in Michigan the following day. Two weeks later, their bodies were found in a shallow grave near Clearview, Oklahoma. The location was on land with ties to Marks, just as he had told April years before.

Marks's girlfriend at the time, Maya Maxwell, told investigators she had been present when he strangled Scott and Swearingin. She took a plea deal and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

When Bloomington police heard about the double murder and the way it had been carried out, using a girlfriend to help him control and transport the victims, they recognized the pattern immediately. "Fast forward 10 years, and Jenna and him are in an involved relationship, it's the same routine," Temple detective Ashley Cunningham later said. Detectives flew to Washington State to re-interview Sorensen alongside investigators from the Bellingham Police Department. This time, Sorensen talked.

She told them everything: how she had helped Marks locate April by calling shelters and impersonating her, how they had staked out the Cornerstone shelter, how she had watched Marks force April into the car, how she had dropped the little boy at the shelter door and gotten back in, how April had begged for her life during the drive, and how Marks had returned from behind the shack alone and crying. She also told them something investigators had suspected but never confirmed: she believed Marks had disposed of April's remains somewhere in the Clearview, Oklahoma area, the same rural land where he had later buried Jenna Scott and Michael Swearingin.

Charges, Conviction, and Death Row

On March 17, 2020, exactly eleven years after April's abduction, Bloomington Police announced that Cedric Marks and Kellee Kristine Sorensen had each been charged with second-degree murder in April's death. The Bloomington Police statement honored the detectives who had worked the case across the years, noting that they had never given up on finding April and holding those responsible accountable.

Marks was already in Texas custody facing capital murder charges for Scott and Swearingin. In May 2023, after a trial in which he represented himself and repeatedly disrupted the proceedings, a Bell County jury convicted him of capital murder in just under four hours. During the penalty phase, in an extraordinary moment, Marks told the jury he was responsible for the deaths of Jenna Scott and Michael Swearingin, and he asked them to sentence him to death. He said he had colon cancer and was ready to die. The jury obliged. He was sentenced to death on June 9, 2023, and was subsequently transferred to Texas death row. His motion for a new trial was denied in August 2023. His direct appeal is ongoing through the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which as of early 2025 was still working to assemble the record.

Because Texas law has jurisdictional authority over Marks given his capital conviction and death sentence there, the Hennepin County, Minnesota murder charge for April's killing remains open but has never been tried. It may never be. In May 2025, the Hennepin County Attorney's Office dismissed the charges against Kellee Sorensen. She had been found incompetent to stand trial in 2021, and in the intervening years she had assisted investigators, including traveling with Bloomington police and Hennepin County attorneys to Oklahoma to help search for April's remains. The dismissal was based on both her cooperation and her mental incompetency. She was the only other person charged in April's death.

A Body Still Missing

April Lee Pease has never been found. Investigators believe her remains are somewhere in or around the Clearview, Oklahoma area. Bloomington police have conducted multiple searches in that region, and Sorensen made the trip there to assist. A two-thousand dollar reward was offered for information that could help locate her. None of the searches have produced anything. Marks has never disclosed exactly where he left April, and there is no reason to believe he ever will.

Bloomington Detective George Harms has spent years as the primary driver of this investigation. He is still actively trying to find April's remains so that her family can lay her to rest. Her mother, Dottie Pease, has wanted nothing but an answer, a location, something to hold. April's son, who was four years old when his mother was taken from a parking lot and murdered, is now a young man who has never had the chance to know what really happened to her, or to say goodbye in any formal way.

April Lee Pease was thirty years old. She was getting clean. She was fighting for her son in court. She was trying, in the most literal sense possible, to survive. The man who had threatened her life for years took it anyway, on a gravel road somewhere in the middle of the country, and then took her hands and her teeth to make sure no one could ever find her.

He is on death row. She is still out there somewhere.

Anyone with information about the location of April Lee Pease's remains is urged to contact Bloomington Police Department Detective Harms at 952-563-4689. Callers can remain anonymous.

Sources

Benjamin Hayes

Benjamin Hayes is a blogger with a passion for true crime and unresolved mysteries. In his free time, Benjamin is an avid hiker and photographer. He finds solace and inspiration in nature, often trekking through the scenic trails of the Appalachian Mountains.