Wisconsin 1983 Cold Case Solved — The DNA Matched Someone Nobody Suspected 

40 years is a long time to keep a secret in a small town. Long enough to see how the children who attended the school during the investigation grew up, had children of their own, and sent them to the same school where the victim once taught Sunday school. Long enough for the first investigators to retire, two of them to die, and the third to turn ninety, still remembering the case , even though no one was working on it anymore.

Long enough for the boxes of evidence to travel between county warehouses, survive two floods and one fire, and finally end up, intact and sealed, in the hands of a forensic scientist in Madison who wasn’t even born when the crime occurred.  In the fall of 1983, a 41-year-old librarian named Carol Voss disappeared from Ashfield, Wisconsin.

  Population – 1,700 people.  She left behind a returned book cart, an unfinished cup of coffee, and a community that believed for 40 years that someone else was to blame.  That was not true.  He attended the same church as Carol Voss for 11 years.  Every Sunday he shook her hand during the coffee break after the service.

  His name was mentioned only once in the initial investigation: he was a neighbor who confirmed that he had not seen anything suspicious that evening. But the DNA said otherwise. However, to understand what DNA ultimately discovered, one must first understand what was lost. Ashfield, Wisconsin, lay in the middle of Brunette County, like a picture someone kept framed on a mantelpiece.

  A granary visible from the main road, a hardware store owned by the same family since 1951, and a school whose bleachers held most of the town on Friday nights in October.  The winters here were long and peculiar: they began in early November and lasted until April, enveloping the district in a silence that forced people to be more cautious about their evening plans.

  You didn’t leave the house without a reason.  You didn’t pass a neighbor on the road without stopping to ask if he needed anything. In 1983, Ashfield had one library —a one-story brick building on Clement Street, built in 1962, with a reading room that smelled of old paper, the heat of radiators, and the cedar of shelves that had never been replaced.

It was open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Carol Voss worked there for 14 years.  She was 41 that fall, dark-haired and frail, with reading glasses that she pushed up on her forehead when she wasn’t using them and kept losing, with a dry, apt sense of humor that her colleagues called sneaky.  You were halfway to the exit before you realized what she had said was ridiculous.

  She had a knack for remembering which books each visitor had previously checked out and quietly putting something new on the order shelf that she thought they would like, even without being asked.  She also taught Sunday school for nine- and ten-year- olds at Ashfield Lutheran Church—a role she held for seven years.

  Every December, she organized performances and stayed up late to paint the sets herself.  Her friend Dorothy Niles, who taught the younger children’s class down the hall, said that Carol treated each child as if they were the most interesting person in the room.  Carol was never married.  She lived alone in a small house on Burwood Lane, five minutes from the library, where she grew a vegetable garden in the summer and kept a bird feeder visible from the kitchen window all year round.

  She had a gray cat named Aldis. She drove a 1978 Dodge Dart the color of winter sky.  Her mother, Edna Voss, lived in Spooner, thirty miles north.  Most Sundays after church they had dinner together. Carol invariably called her every Wednesday night.  By all accounts, she was the kind of person who makes a small town feel functional.

  Exactly as it should be.  On the evening of Thursday, October 13, 1983, Carol Voss closed the library at 5:00 p.m., walked to her car in the parking lot behind the building, and was never seen again.  The library closing procedure was the same every night.  Carol checked the latest returns, turned off the desk lamp, rolled the book cart back to its place by the front desk, and locked the side door with the key she kept on a ring with a small ceramic owl her mother had given her.

Colleagues confirmed that this sequence was so consistent that it resembled a ritual.  On October 13, she completed it in full. Dorothy Niles, driving past Clement Street at approximately 5:10 p.m., saw Carol’s Dodge Dart in the parking lot and Carol herself standing nearby, apparently looking for something in her purse.

  Dorothy waved her hand.  Carol looked up and waved back. Dorothy drove on. This wave was the last confirmed sighting of Carol Voss.  Around 7:30 p.m. that evening, Edna Voss tried to call her daughter’s home twice, but no one answered. She reassured herself that Carol had probably gone out somewhere.  She tried again at 8:45 .

  At 9:20 she called Dorothy Niles.  Dorothy went to Bearwood Lane.  The house was dark.  There was no car in the driveway .  At 9:34 p.m., she called the Burnett County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the library parking lot within 20 minutes.  The parking lot was empty. No car, no handbag, no signs of a struggle.

  Under a sodium lamp in the far corner of the parking lot, the assistant noticed something on the ground near the edge of the gravel. Carol’s keys.    The ceramic owl was still on them.  They lay on the gravel as if they had been released or snatched from someone’s hands .  The keys were registered as physical evidence.

  By morning, the Dodge Dart was found.  It was parked on a logging road off County Route E , 4 miles northeast of town, in a thick pine undergrowth where local hunters hunted deer. The car was not locked. Carol’s coat was folded in the back seat. Her reading glasses, which she kept losing, were in the cup holder.

  The tank was more than half full.  No one saw the car arrive there.  Nobody heard anything. Over the next 6 days, over 200 volunteers combed the woods near County Route E. The Burnett County Sheriff’s Office brought in a canine unit from Washburn County.    The Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation sent two agents from Madison.

  They surveyed 30 square miles of terrain in early frost conditions. They didn’t find Carol .  They found no evidence of what happened to her.  That’s what they had.  A ceramic owl key ring, a folded coat on the back seat, a book cart turned over, set perfectly level, an unfinished coffee in a Styrofoam cup on the table, with a note on the side: “CVL “—for Carol Voss, librarian.

  This is how she always marked her cups so that no one would take them by mistake. This glass sat on the table for three days before someone removed it.  No one wanted to be the one to throw him out.    The lead investigator was Wisconsin Bureau of Criminal Investigation Agent Thomas Greer, 38, who had spent 11 years investigating violent crimes in northern Wisconsin and had seen just about everything that could happen in rural areas.

  He was methodical, as befits an experienced investigator.  No rush, no theatrics, just thorough, which eventually deprived him of sleep when thoroughness wasn’t enough.  In the first weeks, Greer identified three main areas of work. The first was Carol’s professional life.  Everyone comes to libraries and small towns .

  Those who come and go, lonely, troublemakers, ordinary people .  Greer and his team reviewed every visitor complaint, every incident report, every name mentioned in connection with any conflicts.  They found two.  One of them is a man from Rice Lake who was asked to leave twice for inappropriate behavior. He was questioned, his alibi confirmed, and by mid-November he was removed from the list of suspects.

The second incident involved a minor last spring, it was minor and had no relation to the case.  The second area was Carol’s personal life, which, by all accounts, was uncomplicated. She was not in a romantic relationship at the time of her disappearance.  She had no known conflicts with neighbors or colleagues. Her financial affairs were simple and transparent.

  There was nothing in her life that would indicate a connection with a dangerous person. The third area was the forest road.  Greer spent more time on that road than anywhere else.  Who knew about her?  Who used it in October?  Did Carol drive the car there herself , or did someone else? This road was known to the locals.  The hunters knew her.

  The county road workers knew her.  People who grew up in Burnett County knew her.  It was not on any public map.  To drive there by car, you had to know about its existence.  This detail never left his mind. Meanwhile, Edna Voss drove from Spooner to Ashfield twice a week, sitting in the library parking lot for hours, or even longer, as her daughter Dorothy Nails said , just sitting.

  Looking at the gravel where the key ring was found .  She once said to Dorothy, ” Someone in this town knows something. I can feel it like a change in the weather.”  Thomas Greer couldn’t argue with her. He found one prime suspect: 44- year-old Kenneth Strobe, who had been Carol’s neighbor on Burwood Lane for three years and, according to two separate testimonies, had been showing Carol unwanted attention, which she had told Dorothy about.

Greer questioned Strobe four times. He requested permission to voluntarily search Strobe’s property.  Strobe agreed.  Nothing significant was found .  In February 1984, Strobe passed a polygraph test. The investigation has reached a dead end.  In his summary of the case, written in June 1984, Greer stated: “The physical evidence is insufficient to hold any known person responsible.

 The movement of the victim’s vehicle to a remote location indicates knowledge of the area. The absence of a victim and a secondary crime scene indicates premeditation. The case remains open.”  He kept a copy of this report on his desk until his retirement in 2001.  He crossed paths with the investigation again 20 years later, before he could finish what he had started.

  By 1988, 5 years had passed.  A new reading chair has been installed in the Clement Street library to replace Carol’s desk chair . We decided to leave the table the same.  By 1993, 10 years later, the Sunday school where Carol taught had changed, with a whole generation of children who no longer knew her name.    The Lutheran Church installed a small brass plaque in the meeting hall that reads: “In memory of Carol Voss, who faithfully served this community.

” It hung between the coat rack and the bulletin board, and was mostly noticed by those who had been here long enough to remember why it was there.  By 2003, after 20 years, Ednavas, who was already in her 80s, stopped going to Ashfield.    Her health no longer allowed her to do so. She had been keeping a diary since Carol disappeared—not every day, but regularly.

  It was a habit that, she told the doctor, was the only thing that gave these years any order.  The records recorded anniversaries, phone calls to the sheriff’s office, letters she wrote to the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation every 3 years asking if anything had changed.  She always got an answer.

  The answer was always the same.  Thomas Greer , who retired and had lived in Bayfield since 2001, took the case files with him.  Not the original that remained in the department, but his own notes, copies of evidence logs, transcripts of interrogations that he typed in his office.  He kept them in a cardboard box in a spare room.

His wife once asked about this box at the beginning of his retirement .  He replied that it was a matter he had not finished.  She never asked again. In 2005, the Burnett County evidence warehouse was merged with others. Boxes of cases from the 1970s were moved, listed, and in some cases reviewed for material that might be useful with new forensic techniques.

  A technician marked the Voss case boxes in the transfer log and marked them for the expert team, which at that time had years of blockages. The boxes were waiting.    The reward poster, which had been hanging in the window of Henson’s on Main Street since 1983, was finally removed in 2009.  Not because anyone gave up, but because Henson’s was sold and the new owners just didn’t know what it was.

No one is responsible for what they don’t know. Every case on this channel requires weeks of research, fact-checking, searching for documents and people whose stories have been buried for too long.  If you want us to continue uncovering cases like this, please like and subscribe to the channel.  Write in the comments from which part of the world you are watching us.

  We read each and every one of you.  Now back to Carol. Edna Voss died in March 2018 at the age of 94.  Her diary had over 300 entries.  In her final years, she asked to be buried in Ashfield, next to Carol’s memorial.  Her request was granted.  The case remained unsolved for 38 years when, in the spring of 2021, the Wisconsin Department of Forensic Science in Madison opened boxes of evidence in the Voss case.

  The forensic expert who opened these boxes was 36-year-old Dr. Lisa Hayward; She worked in the department for 9 years and specialized in extracting biological material from old physical evidence.  Her job was to analyze what had been collected 40 years ago by investigators who didn’t even know what they were looking for, and figure out what they had actually found.

  The response in the Carol Voss case turned out to be more significant than anyone could have imagined.  Among the items turned over from Burnett County were the original evidence packages from the library parking lot and from Carol’s car. Most of them were exactly what was described in the protocols: a ceramic key ring, fiber samples, a photograph of a partial shoe print that was impossible to cast at the time.

  But there was something in one package that was not assigned an official evidence number in 1983.    A small piece of duct tape, no bigger than a fingernail, found on the driver’s side door frame of Carol’s Dodge Dart. The original note , written in pencil on a paper tag attached to the package, stated simply: “Duct tape from door frame, source unknown, 10/14/83.

”  In 1983, no one knew what to do with it.  But no one threw it away.  Dr. Hayward sent it to the DNA analysis team on a Tuesday in April.  It’s a process called low- concentration DNA analysis, which allows scientists to extract a full or partial genetic profile from an object that a person has barely touched.  A fingerprint that was pressed to the surface for a split second gave a result after 6 weeks.

  Complete male DNA profile.  He did not match the profile of Kenneth Stra—the man Thomas Greer had been investigating for months in 1984 .  He did not match any person involved in active investigative cases.  But when the profile was uploaded to the Wisconsin DNA database and then to the national CODIS system, there were no matches because the person it belonged to had never been arrested, registered, or entered the criminal system in the past 40 years.

However, it ended up in the genealogical database .  The process involves comparing DNA from a crime scene with profiles voluntarily uploaded by people to genealogy websites.    The same services that people use to search for family trees, then work backwards through genetic distance to determine whose family a profile belongs to.

  This is painstaking work.  It can last for months.  In this case, it took seven.  In January 2023, genealogical analysis revealed a candidate. His name was Raymond Hall.  He was 81 years old. He lived his entire life in Ashfield, Wisconsin.  He attended Ashfield Lutheran Church from 1972 until he moved to a nursing home in Spooner in 2020.

  He shook Carol Voss’ hand during coffee breaks after Sunday services for 11 years. His name was mentioned only once in the original case materials as a neighbor, a person who did not see anything suspicious.  Dr. Hayward called the unsolved crimes unit.  She gave them her name, then sat quietly in her office for a long time before saying anything else.

Raymond Hall was, at first glance, an ordinary man living an ordinary life.  He worked as a rural mailman for 31 years in the Burnett County Postal District. A job that took him to every back road, every logging trail, every private driveway in the county, in every season and in every weather for three decades.

  He knew County Road E and the forest trail beside it like a man knows the lines on his own palm.  He retired in 2004 and spent the next 16 years in Ashfield, where he was known as the man who kept the yard spotless, brought casseroles to church dinners, and over the years was widowed and survived by his son.  People described him as reserved, polite, someone you saw every week and realized you knew almost nothing about.

  In 2020, due to declining health, he moved to a nursing home in Spooner.  When investigators from the Wisconsin Department of Criminal Investigation arrived for questioning in February 2023 , he was 81 years old, walked with a cane, and lived in a room with a window overlooking the parking lot.  The investigators came without handcuffs.

  They came with a warrant for a voluntary DNA swab.  And with the special patience of people who have learned that the moment before a forty-year lie ends is often silent. Raymond Hall agreed to the swab. His DNA matched the profile found on the door frame of Carol Voss’ car.  He was arrested on February 28, 2023, and charged with first-degree intentional murder in the Carol Voss case.

He was taken out of the nursing home in a sedan, not a police car. He did not say a word during his arrest. The employee who saw it later called what she saw the strangest thing she had ever witnessed.    On a winter morning, two detectives were escorting a small elderly man out of a building.  And how the other residents came out the door to look, and how none of them understood what was happening.

  The news came to Ashfield as something that had long been suspected but never spoken aloud.  Some recognized the name Raymond Hall and felt a cold realization that they couldn’t quite explain .  Others said it made no sense.  He delivered their mail. He sat with them on the same pew in church. He brought casseroles.

  Thomas Greer, an 81-year-old Bayfield resident, received a call from a retired colleague the morning the arrest was announced.  After the conversation, he sat on the porch for a long time.  His daughter, who was visiting, found him there and asked what had happened.  He told her.  She asked how he felt.

  “I should have found this sooner,” he said.  “I’m glad someone did it.”  In November 2023, Raymond Hall pleaded guilty to second-degree intentional homicide, pleading no contest to the charges.  Given his age and health, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison—a term that the judge acknowledged was effectively life. He was sent to a medical correctional facility.

  He didn’t make any statement. Carol Voss’ remains were never found.  The case was closed without an answer to this question.  In the Clement Street Library in Ashfield, Wisconsin, there still stands the same desk where Carol Voss worked for 14 years. The chair was replaced. The table remained.  This is an ordinary wooden table, the kind that retains traces of coffee and decades of daily use.

  And he stands under the same window overlooking the parking lot where Dorothy Niles waved goodbye on a Thursday night in October 1983 .  Dorothy Niles, who was 82 years old in 2023, was one of those sought by reporters after Raymond Hall’s arrest. She said she had been thinking about that handshake for all these 40 years.

    A normal everyday gesture from a friend to an acquaintance. Last.  She said she was glad the truth had come out .  And then she said what remained in the transcript of that interview.  I think Carol knew him. I think she recognized his face when she saw him in that parking lot.  I think she probably didn’t feel fear until it was too late, because you don’t expect that from someone you know.

  This is the particular cruelty of cases of this kind.  Not a stranger in the dark, but a familiar face in the light: the man who returns your library card, the person whose handshake you know, the neighbor to whom the proximity, the everydayness, and the ordinary trust of a small town have provided a kind of invisibility that took 40 years and a genealogical database to dispel.

  Edna Voss spent the last 40 years of her life waiting for an answer that she never got. Her diary, 300 entries of grief, hope and a stubborn reluctance to let her daughter become a forgotten name, was donated to the Burnett County Historical Archives after her death.  It’s there now, in a preserved box.  Thomas Greer received the phone call he had been waiting for for 22 years.

  Carol Voss, 41, a librarian in a small town in Wisconsin, arranged books on shelves so children could find them in the correct order on Monday mornings. Carol Voss, who marked her coffee cup so no one would take it by mistake, had a gray cat, a vegetable garden, and a restrained sense of humor that you notice the moment you walk out the door .

  Carol Voss received 40 years of silence, and then the truth.  It’s not the ending anyone would have chosen for her, but it was the ending.  Before you go, three questions to ponder.  Raymond Hall delivered mail on those roads 31 years after Carol Voss disappeared. driving past the families of those he had harmed, past the church where they had prayed together, past the library where she had worked.

  What is the correct word for such a long concealment?  Is it cowardice, calculation, or something else?  The evidence that helped solve this case was collected in 1983 and languished in storage for almost 40 years. How many more boxes like this in how many more counties contain answers that no one has yet guessed to ask? And that wave of Dorothy Neal’s hand, the last, the usual one, the one she had lived with for four decades.

  What does it mean that the most mundane moments often prove to be the most enduring? Share your thoughts in the comments and write from which part of the world you are watching us.