ELK POINT, S.D. (KTIV) – After around two hours of deliberation, Alfredo Castellanos-Rosales has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the 2023 stabbing death of Jordan Beardshear in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota.
Over seven days, 15 Union County residents heard testimony from nearly 30 people, including the defendant himself, and saw more than 100 pieces of evidence. In the end, 12 people decided that the State of South Dakota had proven that Castellanos-Rosales murdered Beardshear the night of April 23, 2023.
Under South Dakota law, Castellanos-Rosales faces a life sentence after being found guilty of first-degree murder. His sentencing is scheduled for Monday, Aug. 25, at 1 p.m.
Trial Recap
The murder trial began at 9 a.m. on June 16, 2025, at the Union County Courthouse in Elk Point, South Dakota. Over four days, the first week, Deputy Attorney General Ernest Thompson and Assistant Attorney General Alexis Tracy walked the court through how they say Castellanos-Rosales killed 23-year-old Beardshear.
Castellanos-Rosales and Beardshear shared a then-one-year-old son. According to testimony, Beardshear, who worked overnights at Wells Blue Bunny, would pick up their son from the babysitter in the afternoon, then Castellanos-Rosales would take him for the night.
“She was amazing,” Christine Marsh, Beardshear’s grandmother, said she loved being a mom to her son. “She loved that baby more than she loved life. She was a great mom. She was very attentive. She wanted to experience everything with him.”
Beardshear and Castellanos-Rosales began dating when they both worked at Seaboard Triumph Foods in Sioux City and welcomed their son together in November 2021.
After he was born, Castellanos-Rosales testified, and things changed.
“After (our son) was born, things were never the same,” Castellanos-Rosales told the jury on Monday, June 23, saying he and Beardshear decided to try and make the relationship work for the sake of their son.
Threats made to Beardshear
When the relationship officially ended and Beardshear moved into her Dakota Dunes apartment in April 2023, she, her brother and his then-girlfriend went to Castellanos-Rosales’ Sioux City home to move the last of her things.
“The only pieces I had of her was my son and I didn’t want things of hers at my house,” he said in court.
During the trial, Beardshear’s brother and then-girlfriend testified that Castellanos-Rosales had threatened Beardshear that day saying not to be surprised if she disappeared. That happened on April 18, 2023, and something Castellanos-Rosales denied in his own testimony.
In separate testimonies on June 16, Beardshear’s best friend Claudia Orozco, Beardshear’s bother Zachary Holsinger, and Holsinger’s ex-girlfriend Abigayle Oehlerking, discussed comments Castellanos-Rosales had made to them or to Beardshear that seemed to threaten her life in the weeks prior to her murder.
“Jordan had told me that Alfredo said that if he had ever caught her cheating that he would kill her and the guy she was cheating with,” Orozco told the court in the early days of trial. “I told her that she should take it seriously, but Jordan just laughed it off and told me not to worry about it because she didn’t believe that he would try anything like that to her.”
Holsinger and Oehlerking helped Beardshear move out of the home she had been staying in with Castellanos-Rosales the week before her death, and recalled statement’s the defendant had made about Beardshear after she had left.
“We were getting ready to leave and we had walked to the front and he was getting ready to tell us bye and he said he could kill her,” Holsinger recalled.
Oehlerking also heard Castellanos-Rosales make a separate comment about Beardshear. “He said if she goes missing in a week, don’t be surprised,” she recalled on the witness stand during the trial’s first day.
“He said it in a way that he didn’t necessarily mean it,” Oehlerking said, “a lot of people say stuff like that.” People “say stuff out of anger when going through a break-up,” she told the jury.
When she heard Beardshear had been killed, Oehlerking said she “definitely felt a little guilty, like it was my fault” for not saying anything.
The relationship between the two had become strained, with messages between them appearing hostile, Special Agent Jon Basche with South Dakota’s Division of Criminal Investigation said during his testimony Wednesday, June 18.
Agent Basche reviewed the contents of Beardshear’s cell phone after investigators located it in War Eagle Park in the early morning hours of April 27, 2023. On her phone, they found a 22-second-long video from December 5, 2022 that Beardshear had recorded.
That video, played in the courtroom and entered into evidence, showed Beardshear’s legs. In the video, you can hear a man who investigators say in Castellanos-Rosales, yelling “demeaning and assaulting language” at Beardshear. You could also hear her sobbing silently behind the camera.
“I think it gives us a glimpse of their domestic relationship,” Agent Basche testified. “It shows us the way the defendant speaks to her and the anger and hostility towards Jordan.”
Agent Basche also read aloud several text messages sent between the two in the week before Beardshear’s murder. In those messages, dated April 17, 2023, Castellanos-Rosales tells Beardshear he “never wants to see you on (sic) my (expletive) life.”
“He stated that ‘whatever you did to me, the same will happen to you. Just wait’,” Basche said reading the text messages to the jury. “‘Wait for the moment. I don’t give a (expletive).'”
“It’s threatening text messages,” Agent Basche testified, commenting on the string of messages Castellanos-Rosales sent to Beardshear. “The statements indicate that something bad is going to happen to Jordan.”
April 25, 2023
Beardshear had paid for and furnished her new apartment all on her own, several family members told the courtroom. She was proud of it.
The night of April 25, 2023, Castellanos-Rosales was visiting Beardshear’s apartment at Wellington in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota to pick up their son around 9 p.m. Cell phone records show Castellanos-Rosales texting Beardshear “here”, before eventually ringing her phone through the building’s security system, which is how he gained access to the apartment building.
Castellanos-Rosales, according to his own testimony, says she never answered the call from the security box, despite phone records showing she did.
“I decided to try and get into the apartment,” he told the jury. According to evidence presented by the state, Beardshear did answer that call and let him inside the building.
When arriving at her 3rd floor apartment, Castellanos-Rosales told the court that Beardshear was angry, and told him she didn’t know where her phone was because their young son had taken it.
According to Castellanos-Rosales, he noticed their son had a poopy diaper and he got angry at Beardshear that she hadn’t changed him. He told her, according to his testimony, that he was going to take their son away from her.
“I told her if you’re not responsible with my son, I’m going to take him away from you. She got mad. She started attacking me,” Castellanos-Rosales told the court Monday, June 23.
This, he says, made her angry and she began attacking him, first by hitting and kicking him, then getting a kitchen knife.
“She called me names or said ‘I told you if you ever take my son away from me, I’ll kill you and kill myself’,” he said, telling the jury what Beardshear supposedly said that night.
Castellanos-Rosales testified that he’d fought Beardshear for the knife, which she dropped, before grabbing another one. At one point, he said, she “poked” herself in the back with it.
Beardshear would be found with a large v-shaped wound across the back of her neck and left shoulder.
Castellanos-Rosales said left the apartment with their son and didn’t called 911 or report the incident because “nobody gonna believe me, what happened over there,” he said when asked. “I’m a brown skin. I’m not from here.”
Castellanos-Rosales said he also grabbed one of the knives because he wanted to kill himself.
On his drive home with his son, he told the court he reached into the diaper bag he had grabbed from Beardshear’s apartment to get his son a bottle, when he grabbed Beardshear’s cell phone instead.
Beardshear, he claimed, told him she’d lost it. Phone records would show she had her phone moments before Castellanos-Rosales would arrive at her apartment door.
Castellanos-Rosales says he stopped at War Eagle Park in Sioux City and threw her phone out, along with the knife he’d taken from the apartment that he said he was going to kill himself with.
Investigators would find Beardshear’s cell phone in War Eagle Park the following day. The knife has never been recovered. Investigators also state one knife was missing from the knife block in Beardshear’s apartment.
After leaving Beardshear’s apartment, Castellanos-Rosales called Beardshear’s mother, Sharrona Beardshear.
“He said that when he walked up to the door (to pick up their son), that he could hear people arguing in the apartment,” she recalled on the witness stand during the trial’s first day, stating that Castellanos-Rosales said the argument was with Jordan Beardshear’s then-boyfriend.
Castellanos-Rosales asked Sharrona to meet him at his home so they could “talk about Jordan”, and as Sharrona and her boyfriend drove there, she tried contacting her daughter but didn’t get an answer.
Sharrona Beardshear detailed that night with Castellanos-Rosales at his home, stating he had told her his son, whom he had in the car, needed a diaper change. Beardshear said she took the boy from the truck and everyone went inside. She changed his diaper while Castellanos-Rosales went to the basement, then went upstairs where she heard water running for “three to five minutes” she recalled.
Minutes later, they all went in Castellanos-Rosales vehicle to Jordan Beardshear’s apartment, with Sharrona stating Castellanos-Rosales was “driving recklessly”.
When they arrived at the apartment, they couldn’t get inside the building but could see that the lights were off, her mom recalled. With Beardshear’s overnight work schedule, they believed Jordan Beardshear to be asleep and went to leave.
“When we started walking back to Alfredo’s car, Alfredo stated how tired he was,” Sharrona Beardshear said on the witness stand. Sharrona agreed to take the child for the evening and left.
Beardshear’s body is found
According to evidence presented by the state and testimony from law enforcement and state investigators, Beardshear was found facedown in her apartment’s kitchen. Her then-boyfriend, Christian Crane, found her after a text from Beardshear’s coworker stated she hadn’t shown up to work.
She also wasn’t answering her phone, which was unlike her.
“She always replied,” Areli Sanchez, Beardshear’s coworker told the court Tuesday morning, June 17. “Even if it was a couple of hours later, she always replied.”
After getting the message from Sanchez and not being able to get ahold of his girlfriend, Crane went to Beardshear’s apartment in the morning hours of April 26, 2023.
Detailing for the court the events of that morning, Crane spoke about gaining access to Beardshear’s apartment building, walking up to her third-floor unit, and finding the door shut, but unlocked.
So he walked inside, and into the kitchen that was just inside the door.
“And then I looked and there was a table. And then the refrigerator, and I looked over and saw like red all over the refrigerator,” Crane testified. “And then I kind of kept walking and then I just seen like… basically I looked down and seen her on the ground and then I just kind of froze and walked out.”
Special Agent Jeff Kollars with the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation detailed the crime scene photos he captured that day. One item of note in the photos shown to the court: a knife sitting on top of a folded red towel, laying on the kitchen floor next to Beardshear.
The knife, Special Agent Kollars said, was clean, but the towel it rested on looked like it had been dropped in the blood on the floor, based on the spatter around it. There was also a blanket with blood stains under her head.
Dr. Kenneth Snell, the Minnehaha and Lincoln County coroner who performed the autopsy on Beardshear, said she had been stabbed seven times, with the fatal wound being a large gash in her chin and through the left side of her neck that severed her carotid artery and jugular vein and would have killed her in minutes.
Blood soaked the kitchen area, refrigerator, stove and walls. Investigators also found blood, visible only under blacklight, in the bathroom area in Beardshear’s bedroom.
DNA and fingerprints were also found at the scene, but none could be linked to anyone but Beardshear. Though, Jessika Kirkpatrick, the forensic scientist that did that DNA testing, tested several other items taken from Beardsehar’s apartment that showed other DNA, but there was not enough for comparison.
In a search of Castellanos-Rosales’ Sioux City home on April 26, 2023, investigators recovered a pair of men’s jeans, and a toddler shirt and pants that had a “reddish-brown substance” on them.
Forensic testing showed that the substance, specifically on the toddler clothes, was Beardshear’s blood.
Several items tested for DNA by investigators that were taken from Beardshear’s apartment or Castellanos-Rosales home included more than one sample of DNA, but testing could not confirm, or eliminate, Castellanos-Rosales, Kirkpatrick testified in court, because there wasn’t enough present to determine the DNA profile.
The search for Castellanos-Rosales
In the early afternoon hours of April 26, 2023, Castellanos-Rosales called his wife Reyna Castellanos from his workplace, Tyson Foods in Dakota City, Nebraska.
He had left his shift early and was walking away from the processing plant.
“Look, I got into a huge problem. I killed that (expletive) lady,” Castellanos-Rosales said in a transcript of a phone conversation Castellanos-Rosales had with his wife that afternoon. “I killed her yesterday, it’s gone to (expletive).”
“It was easy for me,” he continued in the phone call from April 26, 2023. “I killed her yesterday during the night.”
One special agent from South Dakota’s Division of Criminal Investigation detailed his interview with Castellanos-Rosales’ wife, 37-year-old Reyna Castellanos, and subsequent search of cell phone records and calls between the two following Beardshear’s death.
In one phone call, which was played in the courtroom in Spanish and then translated by special agent Javier Murguia during the trial’s first day, detailed Castellanos-Rosales’ alleged confession and plea to Reyna to help him leave the country.
Castellanos-Rosales vehicle was found at Tyson Foods in Dakota City. In the phone call, according to prosecutors, he tells Reyna to sell the home he had in Sioux City. Reyna Castellanos then tells Castellanos-Rosales that she will come get him.
Phone records and data-tracking show Reyna Casellanos picked Castellanos-Rosales up and took him to Siouxland Federal Credit Union where he added her to his savings account and pulled $15,000 cash out. This cash came from a mortgage he had taken out on his home the week prior.
Cell phone data then show the two of them stopping at some farmland a few miles outside of Jackson, Nebraska before the data stops before going back to Castellanos-Rosales home, where he then got a ride from someone to Sgt. Bluff, then hitch-hiked to Mexico, Castellanos-Rosales told the court during his testimony on Monday, June 23.
In the transcript of the phone call Castellanos-Rosales made to Reyna before she picked him up April 26, he asked her to help him escape to Mexico.
He admitted this on the witness stand, then claiming he only wanted to go to Omaha.
“My plan was not to go to Mexico,” he told the jury. “My plan was to clear my mind and come back. I was going to come back here to face whatever and explain.”
Castellanos-Rosales, a Guatemala native who came to the U.S. in 2001 and became a U.S. citizen several years later, was arrested in Mexico two weeks after Beardshear’s murder, and had changed his appearance. He was brought back to Union County, South Dakota a few days after his arrest.
When questioned and shown photos of the crime scene, Castellanos-Rosales maintained his innocence to the court.
“We’re going to look at exhibit 110,” said Thompson as he showed Castellanos-Rosales the crime scene photo. “Was this easy for you?”
“I don’t kill her. I never kill no one in my life,” he responded.
“111,” Thompson continued with the images, “was this easy for you?”
“Again,” Castellanos-Rosales said, “I don’t kill nobody in my life.”
Reyna Castellanos was arrested for her role in helping Castellanos-Rosales, and later pleaded no contest to one count of being an accessory to a felony and one count of false reporting. She has not yet been sentenced.
Want to get the latest news and weather from Siouxland’s News Source? Follow these links to download our KTIV News app and our First Alert Weather app.
Read more on https://www.dakotanewsnow.com
