Solved cold cases in Wisconsin
3 documented cases.
Berit Beck
Berit Beck, an 18-year-old from Sturtevant, Wisconsin, vanished on July 17, 1990, while driving to a computer seminar in Appleton. Her van was found abandoned two days later in a Kmart parking lot in Fond du Lac, and her body was discovered about a month afterward in a ditch near Waupun; she had been suffocated and strangled. The case stayed cold for nearly 25 years until a 2014 re-analysis of evidence from the van matched fingerprints to Dennis Brantner, a Kenosha trucker. After a 2016 trial ended in a hung jury, Brantner entered an Alford plea in 2018 to second-degree reckless homicide and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Carol Jean Pierce
Carol Jean Pierce, 35, was last seen in September 1975 at the trailer home she shared in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, with her husband Richard Pierce, a sailor on the Coast Guard cutter Mesquite. He told people she had "taken off," gave police different accounts of when she left and how much money she took, and did not report her missing for 82 days. A neighbor later saw that her purse, her record collection, her cat and her makeup were still in the trailer. Pierce moved to Cheboygan, Michigan, and had a new girlfriend within weeks. No body was ever found, and for 43 years no one was charged. In September 2018 the Wisconsin Cold Case Review Team looked at the file, and on October 11, 2018 Pierce, 82, was arrested in Cheboygan and charged with first-degree murder and disinterment of the dead. In April 2022 a Door County jury convicted him on both counts after about ten hours of deliberation, and in August 2022 he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in prison in October 2024, aged 88, with an appeal still pending.
Peggy Lynn Johnson
Peggy Lynn Johnson was 18, cognitively impaired and alone when her mother died of AIDS in November 1994. She went to a medical clinic in McHenry, Illinois for help, and a registered nurse there, Linda La Roche, took her home to work as a nanny and housekeeper for her family. For the next five years, according to La Roche's own children and former husband, Peggy was slapped and beaten, made to sleep in a crawl space under the house and once stabbed at with a pitchfork. On July 21, 1999 a man walking his dog found her body at the edge of a cornfield in the Town of Raymond, Wisconsin, about forty miles from McHenry. An autopsy found she had died of sepsis pneumonia from infected injuries inflicted through chronic abuse. Nobody had reported her missing. Racine County buried her as Jane Doe, exhumed her in 2013 for new testing and reburied her in 2015, still without a name. In 2019 a concerned citizen told the sheriff's office that a woman in Cape Coral, Florida was telling people she had killed a woman when she lived in Illinois. Investigators interviewed one of La Roche's children, learned that a Peggy Lynn Johnson had lived with the family, and confirmed the identity with familial DNA. La Roche was arrested on November 5, 2019, convicted of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse on March 16, 2022, and sentenced to life without parole. Peggy was reburied beside her mother in Belvidere, Illinois on March 4, 2020, her forty-fourth birthday.