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

40 years is a long time to carry a secret in a small town. It is long enough to watch the children who were in school during the investigation grow up, have children of their own, and send those children to the same school where the victim had once taught Sunday school classes. It is long enough for the original detectives to retire and then for two of them to die and for the third to reach his 80s with the case still open in his memory if not on anyone’s active desk.

It is long enough for the evidence boxes to travel from one county storage facility to another to survive two floods and one building fire and to arrive still sealed, still intact, in the hands of a forensic specialist in Madison, who had not been born yet when the crime occurred. In the fall of 1983, a 41-year-old librarian named Carol Voss disappeared from the town of Ashefield, Wisconsin. population 1700.

She left behind a returned library cart, a half-finished cup of coffee, and a community that spent 40 years believing the man responsible had to be someone from somewhere else. He wasn’t. He had attended the same church as Carol Voss for 11 years. He had shaken her hand at the coffee hour after the service every Sunday.

 His name had appeared exactly once in the original investigation as a neighbor who provided a statement confirming he had seen nothing unusual that evening. The Dena said otherwise. But to understand what that Dena finally gave back, you first have to understand what was taken. Ashefield, Wisconsin sat in the middle of Brunett County like something out of a picture someone’s grandmother kept in a frame on the mantle.

 a grain elevator visible from the main road, a hardware store that had been in the same family since 1951, a high school whose bleachers held most of the town on Friday nights in October. The winters were long and particular, the kind that arrived in early November and didn’t release until April, settling a quiet over the county that made people more deliberate about their evenings.

You didn’t go out without a reason. You didn’t pass a neighbor on the road without stopping to check if they needed anything. In 1983, Ashefield had one library, a singlestory brick building on Clement Street, built in 1962 with a reading room that smelled of old paper and radiator heat and the particular cedar of the shelves that had never been replaced.

It was open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 to 5. Carol Voss had worked there for 14 years. She was 41 that fall, dark-haired and small, with reading glasses she pushed up on her forehead when she wasn’t using them and kept losing, and a dry, precise sense of humor that her colleagues described as the kind that sneaked up on you.

 You’d be halfway out the door before you realized something she said had been funny. She had a gift for remembering what books each patron had checked out before and for quietly placing something new on the hold shelf that she thought they’d like without being asked. She was also the person who taught the Sunday school class for the nine and 10year-olds at Ashefield Lutheran, a role she had held for seven years.

 She organized the pageant every December and stayed late to paint the sets herself. Her friend Dorothy Neils, who taught the class for the younger children down the hall, said Carol treated every one of those kids like they were the most interesting person in the room. Carol had never married.

 She lived alone in a small house on Birchwood Lane, 5 minutes from the library, where she kept a vegetable garden in the summer and a bird feeder visible from her kitchen window year round. She had a gray cat named Aldis. She drove a 1978 Dodge Dart the color of a winter sky. Her mother, Edna Voss, lived in Spooner, 30 mi north.

 They had dinner together most Sundays after church. Carol called her every Wednesday night without fail. She was, by every account that survives, precisely the kind of person who makes a small town feel like it is working. the way it is supposed to. On the evening of Thursday, October 13th, 1983, Carol Voss closed the library at 5:00, walked to her car in the parking lot behind the building, and was never seen again.

The library’s closing routine was the same every night. Carol checked out any last minute returns, shut down the desk lamp, wheeled the return cart back into position beside the front desk, and locked the side door with a key she kept on a ring with a small ceramic owl her mother had given her. Colleagues confirmed this sequence was so consistent, it was almost ceremonial.

On October 13th, she completed it. Dorothy Neils driving past on Clement Street at approximately 5:10 p.m. saw Carol’s Dodge Dart still in the rear parking lot and Carol herself standing beside it, apparently looking for something in her purse. Dorothy waved. Carol looked up and waved back. Dorothy kept driving.

That wave was the last confirmed sighting of Carol Voss. By 7:30 that evening, Edna Voss had tried calling her daughter’s home number twice without answer. She told herself Carol was probably out. She tried again at 8:45. At 9:20, she called Dorothy Neils. Dorothy drove to Birwood Lane. The house was dark.

 The car was not in the driveway. She called the Bernett County Sheriff’s Office at 9:34 p.m. Deputies arrived at the library parking lot within 20 minutes. The lot was empty. No car, no purse, no sign of disturbance. Under a sodium light on the far corner of the lot, a deputy noticed something on the ground near the edge of the gravel. Carol’s key ring.

 The ceramic owl was still attached. It lay in the gravel as if it had been dropped or taken from someone’s hand. The keys were logged into evidence. By morning, the Dodge Dart had been found. It was parked on a logging access road off County Road E, 4 miles northeast of town in an area of dense second growth pine that local hunters used in deer season.

 The car was unlocked. Carol’s coat was folded on the back seat. Her reading glasses, the ones she was always losing, were in the cup holder. The gas tank was more than half full. Nobody had seen the car drive there. Nobody had heard anything. Over the next 6 days, more than 200 volunteers searched the Timberlands off County Road E.

The Bernett County Sheriff’s Office brought in a tracking dog unit from Washurn County. The Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation sent two agents from Madison. They covered 30 square miles of terrain in conditions that had already turned to early frost. They did not find Carol.

 They did not find any evidence of what had happened to her. what they had. A ceramic owl keyring, a folded coat on a back seat, a returned library cart perfectly positioned, a half-finished cup of coffee still on the desk in a styrofoam cup with Carol’s handwriting on the side, the letters CVL for Carol Voss, librarian, the way she always marked her cups so no one else used them by mistake.

That cup stayed on the desk for three days before anyone moved it. Nobody wanted to be the one to throw it away. The lead investigator was a Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation agent named Thomas Greer, 38 years old, who had worked violent crimes in northern Wisconsin for 11 years and had seen most of what a rural case could look like.

He was methodical in the way that experienced investigators become methodical. Not rushed, not theatrical, just thorough in a way that eventually cost him sleep when thorowness wasn’t enough. Greer identified three areas of focus in the early weeks. The first was Carol’s professional life. Libraries and small towns receive everyone.

 the transient, the lonely, the disruptive, the ordinary. Greer and his team reviewed every patron complaint, every incident report, every name that had come across the desk with any kind of friction attached. They found two. One was a man from Rice Lake who had been asked to leave twice for inappropriate behavior. He was interviewed, his alibi confirmed, and he was eliminated by mid November.

 The second was a juvenile matter from the previous spring, minor and unrelated. The second area was Carol’s personal life, which was by all accounts uncomplicated. She had no romantic relationship at the time of her disappearance. She had no known disputes with neighbors or colleagues. Her finances were simple and transparent.

There was nothing in her life that suggested she had become involved with someone dangerous. The third area was the logging road. Greer spent more time on that road than anywhere else. Who knew it? Who used it in October? Whether the car had been driven there by Carol or by someone else? The road was a local fact.

 Hunters knew it. County road workers knew it. People who’d grown up in Bernett County knew it. It was not on any public map. To take that car there, you had to know it existed. That detail never left him. Meanwhile, Edna Voss was driving to Ashefield from Spooner twice a week, sitting in the libraryies parking lot for stretches of time that her daughter Dorothy Neils said could last an hour or more, just sitting.

Looking at the gravel where the key ring had been found. She told Dorothy once, “Someone in this town knows something. I can feel it like I can feel weather coming.” Thomas Greer could not argue with her. He developed one strong person of interest, a man named Kenneth Stra, 44, who had been Carol’s neighbor on Birwood Lane for 3 years and who had, according to two separate accounts, shown an unwanted interest in Carol that she had mentioned to Dorothy.

Greer interviewed Strob four times. He requested a voluntary search of Strob’s property. Strob consented. Nothing relevant was found. Strob passed a polygraph in February of 1984. The investigation had no place left to go. In a case summary written in June of 1984, Greer noted, “Physical evidence is insufficient to support prosecution of any known individual.

The removal of the victim’s vehicle to a remote location suggests local geographic knowledge. The absence of the victim and of any secondary crime scene is consistent with premeditation. Case remains open.” He kept a copy of that summary on his desk until he retired in 2001. He crossed paths with the investigation one more time 20 years later before he could finish what he had started.

By 1988, 5 years had passed. The library on Clement Street had a new reading room chair where Carol’s desk chair had been. They had kept the same desk. By 1993, 10 years, the Sunday school class Carol taught had cycled through an entire generation of children who had never known her name. The Lutheran church put a small plaque in the fellowship hall, a brass rectangle that read in memory of Carol Voss, who served this congregation faithfully, and it hung there between the coat rack and the bulletin board.

noticed mostly by the people who had been there long enough to remember why it was there. By 2003, 20 years, Ednavas, now in her early 80s, had stopped making the drive to Ashefield. Her health would no longer allow it. She had kept a journal since Carol’s disappearance, not daily, but regular. A practice she told her doctor was the only thing that gave the years any order.

The entries documented the anniversaries, the phone calls to the sheriff’s office, the letters she wrote to the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation every 3 years asking whether anything had changed. She always received a response. The response was always the same. Thomas Greer, retired in Bayfield since 2001, had taken the case file with him, not the original, which remained with the division, but his own notes, the copies of the evidence logs, the interview transcripts he had typed himself on a machine in his office. He

kept them in a cardboard box in his spare room. His wife had asked about the box once, early in his retirement. He told her it was the one he hadn’t finished. She never asked again. In 2005, the Bernett County evidence storage facility was consolidated. Boxes from cases dating to the 1970s were transferred, inventoried, and in some instances re-examined for material that newer forensic techniques might find useful.

 A technician noted the Voss case boxes in the transfer log and flagged them for Adena review panel that was at that point backlogged by years. The boxes waited. The reward poster that had been in the window of Henson’s hardware on Main Street since 1983 finally came down in 2009. Not because anyone had given up, but because Hensen’s was sold and the new owners simply didn’t know what it was.

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 Drop a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. We read everyone. Now, let’s get back to Carol. Edna Voss died in March of 2018 at 94 years old. Her journal had more than 300 entries. She had asked in her final years to be buried in Ashefield near Carol’s memorial marker. Her request was honored. The case had been cold for 38 years when the Wisconsin Forensic Sciences Unit in Madison opened the Voss evidence boxes in the spring of 2021.

 The forensic specialist who opened those boxes was a woman named Dr. Lisa Hayward, 36 years old, who had been with the Wisconsin Forensic Sciences Unit for 9 years and who specialized in the recovery of biological material from aged evidence. It was her job specifically to look at what had been collected 40 years ago by investigators who had not known what they were looking for and ask what did they actually find.

The answer in Carol Voss’s case was more than anyone had realized. Among the items transferred from Bernett County were the original evidence bags from the library parking lot and from Carol’s car. Most were exactly what the logs described, the ceramic keyring, fiber samples, a partial shoe impression photographed, but not castable at the time.

But one bag contained something that had not been assigned a formal evidence number in 1983. A small piece of adhesive tape, no larger than a thumbnail, recovered from the door frame of Carol’s Dodge Dart on the driver’s side. The original collection note written in pencil on the paper tag attached to the bag reads simply door frame adhesive source unknown 101483.

Nobody had known what to do with it in 1983. Nobody had thrown it away either. Doctor Hayward sent it to the Dena analysis team on a Tuesday in April. The process called low tempmplate dena analysis which allows scientists to extract a full or partial genetic profile from an object that a person has barely touched.

 A finger pad pressed against a surface for a fraction of a second returned a result 6 weeks later. A full male Dena profile. It did not match Kenneth Stra, the man Thomas Greer had spent months investigating in 1984. It did not match any person in the active investigation files. But when the profile was submitted to the Wisconsin DINA database and then to the national COTUS system, it returned no hit because the man it belonged to had never been arrested, never been processed, never entered any criminal system in the 40 years since.

What it did enter was a genealogical database. The process works by comparing crime scene dena to profiles voluntarily uploaded by members of the public to ancestry websites. The same services people use to trace their family trees and then working backward through genetic distance to identify whose family the unknown profile belongs to.

It is painstaking work. It can take months. In this case, it took seven. In January of 2023, the genealogical analysis identified a candidate. His name was Raymond Hol. He was 81 years old. He had lived in Ashefield, Wisconsin his entire life. He had attended Ashefield Lutheran Church from 1972 until he moved to an assisted living facility in Spooner in 2020.

He had shaken Carol Voss’s hand at the coffee hour after Sunday service for 11 years. His name had appeared once in the original case files as a neighbor, as a man who had seen nothing unusual. Doctor Hayward called the cold case unit. She gave them the name, and then she sat quietly in her office for a long moment before she said anything else.

Raymond Hol had been, by every visible measure, an ordinary man living an ordinary life. He had worked for 31 years as a rural mail carrier for the Bernett County Postal District. A job that put him on every back road, every logging access track, every private drive in the county, in every season, in every kind of weather for three decades.

He had known county road E and the logging road off it, the way a person knows the lines of their own hand. He had retired in 2004 and spent the following 16 years in Ashefield, where he was known as a man who kept his yard very neat, who brought casserles to the church potluck, and who had over the years been widowed once and outlived a son.

People described him as private, polite, the kind of person you saw every week and realized you knew very little about. In 2020, declining health had moved him to the Spooner Assisted Living Facility. By the time investigators from the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation arrived to interview him in February of 2023, he was 81 years old, walking with a cane, and living in a room with a window view of a parking lot.

 The investigators did not come with handcuffs. They came with a warrant for a voluntary Dena swab. and the particular patience of people who have learned that the moment before a 40-year lie ends is often a quiet one. Raymond Hol agreed to the swab. His dena was a match to the profile recovered from Carol Voss’s car door frame. He was arrested on February 28th, 2023 and charged with firstdegree intentional homicide in the death of Carol Voss.

 He was transported from the assisted living facility in a sedan, not a squad car. He did not speak during the arrest. A staff member who witnessed it said she would later describe it as the strangest thing she had ever seen. A small elderly man being walked out of a building by two detectives on a winter morning.

 and the way the other residents had come to their doorways to watch and how none of them had any idea what they were looking at. The news arrived in Ashefield like something long suspected but never said aloud. Some people recognized Raymond Hol’s name and felt a cold recognition they couldn’t fully explain.

 Others said it made no sense. He had carried their mail. He had sat in the church pew. He had brought casserles. Thomas Greer, 81 years old and living in Bayfield, received a call from a retired colleague the morning the arrest was announced. He sat on his porch for a long time after he hung up. His daughter, who was visiting, found him there and asked what was wrong.

 He told her. She asked how he felt. “Like I should have found it sooner,” he said. “I’m glad somebody did.” In November of 2023, Raymond Holst pleaded no contest to seconddegree intentional homicide. Given his age and medical condition, he was sentenced to 15 years, a sentence the presiding judge acknowledged was in practical terms a life sentence.

He was remanded to a medical corrections facility. He made no statement. Carol Voss’s remains were never found. The case was closed without that answer. There is a library on Clement Street in Ashefield, Wisconsin that still has the same desk Carol Voss worked at for 14 years. The chair was replaced. The desk stayed.

It is a plain wooden desk, the kind that holds coffee rings and decades of small accumulated use. and it sits under the same window that looked out on the same parking lot where Dorothy Neils waved goodbye on a Thursday evening in October 1983. Dorothy Neils, 82 years old in 2023, was one of the people reporters sought out after Raymond Hol’s arrest.

 She said she had thought about that wave for 40 years. The ordinary afternoon gesture of one friend to another. the last one. She said she was glad the truth had come out. And then she said something that has stayed in the record of that interview. I think Carol knew him. I think she knew his face when she saw it in that parking lot.

 I think she probably wasn’t afraid until it was too late because you don’t expect it from someone you know. That is the particular cruelty of this kind of case. Not the stranger in the dark, the familiar face in the light, the man who hands you back your library card, the person whose handshake you know, the neighbor who has been given by proximity and routine and the ordinary trust of a small town, a kind of invisibility that takes 40 years and a genealogy database to dissolve.

 Edna Voss spent the last 40 years of her life waiting for an answer she did not live to receive. Her journal, 300 entries of grief and hope and the stubborn refusal to let her daughter become a name that faded was given to the Bernett County Historical Archive after her death. It is there now in a box preserved.

 Thomas Greer got the phone call he had been waiting 22 years for. Carol Voss, 41 years old, a librarian in a small Wisconsin town who put books on shelves so children could find them in the right order on Monday morning. Carol Voss, who marked her coffee cup so no one would take it by mistake, who had a gray cat and a vegetable garden and a dry sense of humor that you didn’t notice until you were halfway out the door.

 Carol Voss got 40 years of silence and then the truth. It was not the ending anyone would have chosen for her, but it was an ending. Before you go, three questions worth sitting with. Raymond Hol carried the mail on those roads for 31 years after Carol Voss disappeared. driving past the families of the people he had harmed, past the church where they prayed together, past the library where she worked.

What is the right word for that kind of sustained concealment? Is it cowardice, calculation, something else? The evidence that solved this case was collected in 1983 and sat in a storage facility for nearly 40 years. How many other boxes in how many other counties contain answers that no one has thought to look at yet? And Dorothy Neil’s wave, the last one, the ordinary one, the one she has lived with for four decades.

What does it mean that the most ordinary moments are often the ones that survive the longest? Leave your thoughts in the comments and let us know where in the world you’re watching from.