Jody Campbell was a 'ray of sunshine' with a 'dark cloud following her,' friends say (2024)

FARGO — As heartfelt words and comments from a Facebook post made by Blackbird Woodfire pizza restaurant in Fargo earlier this week in tribute to one of their most treasured employees indicate, Jody Campbell was a truly beloved fixture of the community.

The post called her “the face and heart of the restaurant. A passionate server, a trusted friend and coworker, and a caring soul in the community," and remembered "her spitfire energy, her heart of gold, and her passion for serving others.”

The comments — nearly 200 of them — are full of vignettes from customers who adored Campbell, former employees who she took under her wing and became their “work mom,” and downtown businesses and workers mourning a woman who they said was a “ray of sunshine” in every room she graced.

On Saturday, June 8, Campbell, 59, was killed, police said, by a man who claimed he was her boyfriend. The police press release from the killing called it a domestic dispute-related murder. Randall Duffy, 61, was arrested and charged in the case.

Four of Campbell’s best friends gathered at Blackbird this week to talk about her life.

Caitlin Wachsmuth, Nicole Bartholomay, and Erica Laughlin have all been servers alongside Campbell over the last ten years.

David Samson/The Forum

Wayne Arnold was so taken with Campbell that he asked her to marry him last summer with a surprise ring at a back booth at Blackbird. While the engagement didn’t stick, the two were still close. He wears the ring around his neck on a chain.

The four friends said Campbell had an uncommon knack for making even the most marginalized people feel seen and understood. She was, they said, the best of humanity.

They want people to know what Campbell meant, not just to them but to her family and to the entire downtown community for which she cared so deeply.

“She was the most giving person,” Bartholomay said. ”We always joked about it. She had these storage lockers, and a new employee would start here and say, ‘oh I'm moving into an apartment and I was looking for a rug,’ and the next day Jody would bring four rugs for them to choose from, free of charge. She'd known them for a day.”

“Anyone on the street, anyone she's ever met, she immediately was just: heart open, so kind,” Wachsmuth said.

Arnold said Campbell considered everyone who worked at Blackbird as “her kids,” and cared for and nurtured them like they were her own.

David Samson/The Forum

But Campbell’s friends are also angry. They said the information about their friend from court documents about her tragic death and the resulting media reports are not accurate, mostly because the accounts rely on what Duffy told police.

In an interview with detectives after he admitted to killing Campbell, Duffy claimed an argument over meth and a missing meth pipe was what led to him putting her in a headlock until she lost consciousness and died. He claimed he and Campbell were active meth users.

Duffy, the friends said, is a “master manipulator,” who has been controlling and abusing Campbell for years, and that he lied repeatedly to responding officers and investigators.

And, they said Campbell was not just a victim of her abuser, but also of a system that makes it difficult if not impossible for victims like her who are caught in horrific cycles of abuse to escape.

Campbell’s friends are adamant that she did not use drugs. And, they said, not only were Campbell and Duffy not romantically entwined, he was not welcome in her home.

“He was not her boyfriend. She was not his girlfriend,” Bartholomay said. “That was not his apartment. That was her apartment that he was squatting in. He forced his way in there — several times — when she was gone, and then just would not leave. She struggled with her apartment landlords to get him out, and with her past experience, she was never very comfortable with police.”

According to charging documents in the case, Duffy claimed he had attempted to walk out of the apartment to avoid arguing with Campbell before killing her, but that Campbell had blocked the doorway and prevented him from leaving.

Her friends said that, if you knew Campbell like they did, that might be the most implausible part of Duffy’s story.

“She would never have stopped him from going out the door,” Arnold said.

“Yeah, that was an immediate flag,” Laughlin said.

Campbell’s friends said if Duffy had wanted to leave, she would have been thrilled. After all, she’d been trying desperately to get him out of her life for ten years.

Campbell has been on the straight and narrow since 2014, according to her friends. Before that, her record was not unblemished, which became part of the reason ridding herself of Duffy was even harder.

In 2010, Campbell was indicted along with 14 other people in a felony drug distribution conspiracy. Her role in the conspiracy was not a large one, but federal sentencing laws do little to distinguish between those dealing and trafficking illegal narcotics and those who are caught up in their web for minor roles.

Still, her attorney Mark Friese said, Campbell was able to secure a “decent” plea deal in the case. She served 4 1/2 years behind bars and started a three-year period of supervised release in the summer of 2014. After two years of full time employment at Blackbird and no violations, she got a rare reprieve and was freed from federal supervision early.

“To get early release — she earned that,” Friese said. “It’s a real credit to Jody. She landed on her feet big time. I was heartbroken when I saw the news. She was a wonderful client.”

“From the moment she got out, she was in Centre (Centre, Inc., a nonprofit that provides reintegration services for recently-released individuals), working 70 hours a week, trying to save up money to get an apartment. Her goal was to always have a house,” Bartholomay said.

“She was the least judgmental person. Working in a restaurant, you get all types of people in. But no matter if they were past users or just out of jail, she just immediately opened her arms and said you can create a life and make a beautiful thing and did whatever she had in her power to help support that,” Laughin said.

David Samson/The Forum

“She always believed somebody could pull themselves out of whatever they were in, because she had done it herself. She was that true story of: she had an unfair time in her life and really grew from it and she created this amazing life with so many people in it,” Wachsmuth said.

When she lived in Grand Forks, Campbell had a relationship with Duffy prior to her troubles with the law, her friends said. How he came back into her life once she was released from prison was unclear to them, but his presence had been nothing but troublesome, they said.

“He's been an issue since I met her a decade ago, before (Blackbird) was built and the parking lots were (across the street). There was about a week and a half where he sat outside here with a cooler and binoculars and we called the cops multiple times and he'd say, ‘Oh I'm just waiting for my wife to get off of work’ and they didn't do anything,” Bartholomay said. “He was a dark cloud following her.”

“She has so many instances where the cops did not help her,” Wachsmuth said. “He was intimidating her and harassing her outside of her work and following her home. She changed her phone number at least 10 times.”

Duffy has a lengthy criminal history that includes assault and drug charges. He was previously charged with domestic violence in a case involving Campbell in December 2020. In the police report from that incident, Campbell told officers that Duffy covered her mouth and nose and tried to cut off her ability to breathe after she tried to kick him out of her apartment. The charges were reduced to disorderly conduct in the case.

The Forum reviewed 20 previous incident reports involving Duffy, and found that at least nine of them were based on so-called domestic disputes with Campbell. When police asked Campbell if Duffy had been physical with her at a call to the apartment a year ago, Campbell responded “always.”

“He was stalking her and trying to control her,” Arnold said.

“She would move apartments and he would get a car, park (at Blackbird), and then follow her to the new place. Once he knew where she lived, he’d break in and then he wouldn't leave. Or he would take one of her animals with him, so that there was some emotional tie where she would let him back in so she could have the animal back,” Laughlin said.

Campbell’s friends said her criminal background made leasing apartments more difficult as some landlords will not rent to felons, so she could not easily find safe and secure buildings, or move.

They said that inability to smoothly relocate, along with what Laughlin called the state’s “gnarly squatters rights laws,” prevented Campbell from freeing herself from the cruel grip Duffy seemed to have on her.

A website for the National Domestic Violence Hotline said having an abusive partner removed from the home is, for many survivors, one of the trickiest parts of escaping abuse.

“Squatters’ rights can be used by an abusive partner to claim they can live in the home or apartment even if their name is not on any paperwork," the hotline website said. If they have have personal property in the residence or if they’ve lived there long enough to meet the state’s requirements, they may be recognized as a squatter rather than a trespasser, according to the website.

“There was a point where she had a restraining order against him and a short period where he was in jail and that was like a breath of fresh air. But the order expired for some reason and as soon as he got out, within two weeks it started to happen again. It was just this habitual thing,” Bartholomay said.

“He was a plague upon her life,” Wachsmuth said.

“It's hard because she was an extremely private woman and this has all been extremely, extremely public. But it feels like these things need to be said, especially given what he (Duffy) told police about her,” Wachsmuth said.

David Samson/The Forum

“He's just such a manipulator and he'll do anything to make it seem like maybe she was asking for it,” Bartholomay said. “I genuinely think this was his last attempt at power because he always wanted to control her. He’s trying to write the narrative to make her out to be a bad person when she was the opposite of that.”

The friends said Campbell had finally saved up enough money to buy a house and had just started spending nights there with her dog, Tank, the week before she died. They aren’t sure why she returned to her old apartment late Friday or early Saturday, but they said they believed Duffy had been withholding some of her possessions that she may have wanted to try to get back.

“It’s the epitome of an abuser losing control,” Bartholomay said. “He blocked himself in a room and he held some of her stuff hostage.”

“He was jealous, he had nothing. He realized that she was going to leave him for good. He knew that there was no coming back from this,” Laughlin said.

“That hardest part is that she was so close to getting out,” Wachsmuth said. ”This was always our biggest fear.”

“The sad thing is, she's probably not the only woman in Fargo dealing with something like this right now,” Bartholomay said.

“We couldn't help her and it's too late now for her, but we want to help other people in her situation,” she said. “The felon thing just hung over her head. I wonder if the police would have treated her differently if she weren’t a felon. They knew about her previous charges, and probably assumed what he (Duffy) said is true — they're drug users and they were fighting — which is not true at all. He was abusing her.”

“We’re grieving but we’re also motivated to do something because she would be,” Wachsmuth said. “She was always the person who helped.”

David Samson/The Forum

Right now, Arnold has custody of Campbell’s beloved Tank. He said Tank has been having nightmares and won’t let him out of his sight ever since Campbell died. Police reports indicated Tank was in the apartment when the alleged murder happened.

According to a GoFundMe started in Cambell's honor, she also owned a cat which police were unable to catch when they visited Campbell's apartment. The orange tabby cat is still missing.

The GoFundMe will help with expenses for her family — she leaves behind a son, daughter-in-law and two young grandsons — and pay for funeral services, as well as make a donation to domestic abuse crisis centers. It has raised over $12,700 as of Friday morning.

A family memorial service will take place Monday, June 17, in Grand Forks. Her friends said they will announce the date of another celebration of life in her honor in Fargo, so that the many people whose lives Jody Campbell touched will be able to pay tribute to her.