Wisconsin 1981 Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community
The Oneida County Sheriff’s Office is asking for your help this morning. A 22-year-old woman named Carly Debrinsky, last seen leaving the Lakeview Supper Club on Willow Street around 11:15 last night, has not returned to her room on Maple Avenue. She is 5’4 with brown hair and a red wool coat. If you saw Carly last night or know her whereabouts, please contact the Sheriff’s Office at the number below.
The announcement runs on WJMT radio at 7:00 a.m. m. on November 9th, 1980. Then again at 8:00. Then at 9:00, when the morning shows are winding down and people are pulling on their coats to go to work. No one who hears it calls the number with anything useful. No one who hears it, in a town of fewer than 5,000 year-round residents, needs to hear it twice to know that something has gone terribly wrong.
In Minocqua, Wisconsin, in November, after the summer people have gone home and the town has settled back into itself, everybody knows the red wool coat. Everybody knows the girl who made the crossword puzzles. This is the morning after election night. The morning Ronald Reagan carried 44 states and the country turned a page it would spend years arguing over.
The morning a town stopped paying attention to who had won and started asking where Carly Debrinsky had gone. And for 43 years, through every winter the lake froze and every spring it thawed, through every supper club fish fry and every snowmobile trail that wound past the place her coat was found, one person in that community knew the answer.
She organized the search. She wrote to Carly’s parents. She wept at the vigil with the rest of them. And she kept her secret for four decades until the one person who might have ended it years earlier lay dying in a hospital bed in Wausau and finally decided that silence had cost everyone enough. To understand what that silence covered and what it cost you have to go back to Minocqua.
You have to understand who Carly Dobrinski was and why a town that barely knew her at the start of that summer couldn’t imagine itself without her by the end of it. Minocqua sits on an island in the lake country of Oneida County connected to the mainland by two short bridges in the part of Wisconsin that exists in two modes.
The roaring warm weather version that fills every boat landing and supper club parking lot from Memorial Day to Labor Day and the quiet self-contained winter version that belongs entirely to the people who stay. In 1980 the year-round population was just under 5,000. Most of them had grown up there or had come north from Wausau or Green Bay or Milwaukee decades earlier and put down roots that went through the frost line.
The businesses that lasted were the ones that understood both versions of the town the tourist dollar and the neighbor dollar and treated them with equal respect. The Lakeview Supper Club had been doing exactly that since 1962. It sat on Willow Street two blocks from the lake front with a neon walleye in the window and a brandy old-fashioned recipe that regulars had been ordering from memory since before some of them could legally drink.
Gerald Kowalski had bought into the business in 1971 with his wife Diane and had run it as a co-owner with the founding family’s son ever since. Diane managed the books and handled the scheduling. Gerald ran the kitchen and the floor. They were, by every visible measure, the kind of couple that made a business like that work.
Carly Debrinsky arrived in Minocqua in the first week of June 1980. She was 22 years old, from Appleton, 2 and 1/2 hours south, and she had taken a summer waitressing job at the Lakeview after her roommate had done the same thing the year before and described it as the best summer of her adult life. Carly had finished 2 years at Fox Valley Technical College and was trying to figure out the next thing, which meant she had more energy than direction and a willingness to work hard while the figuring out took its time.
She was small and quick and could carry four plates without a tray and remembered every regular’s order after two visits. She had a habit that became something of a tradition within her first month. Every Friday morning, before the lunch prep began, she left a handwritten crossword puzzle on the staff bulletin board made entirely of references to the restaurant, the town, and the people she was learning.
Seven-letter word for the guy who always orders the walleye and tips in exact change. Five across. The name of the snowmobile trail that runs behind the Mobil station. The kitchen staff fought over who got to it first. Gerald Kausky told her once that she had done more for staff morale in 6 weeks than he had managed in 9 years.
And he meant it. By August, she had been invited to the supper club’s annual staff picnic, to two different regulars’ birthday parties, and to the Oneida County Fair, with a group that included Diane Kausky and two other women from the club’s year-round staff. She had been planning to go back to Appleton when the season ended.
She changed her mind in September when the fall settled over the lake country and the light went gold through the birches, and she realized she didn’t want to leave it. She renegotiated her hours, rented a room at a boarding house on Maple Avenue from a retired paper mill foreman named Earl Stanczyk, and stayed.
Her parents, Ron and Evelyn Dobrinski, drove up from Appleton in October to see the place their daughter had decided to stay. They sat at the Lakeview for dinner and watched the staff work around Carly and understood it a little, though they still thought she’d be home by Christmas. Her younger brother Kevin, 18 [clears throat] that fall, sent her a card that said simply, “Don’t forget us.
” She called him every Sunday. He told the Appleton Post-Crescent, years later, that she never missed a Sunday call in the 5 months she spent in Minocqua. Not one. On the evening of November 8th, 1980, Carly worked the Lakeview’s election night watch party, a tradition at the club that brought in three dozen regulars to eat and drink and watch the returns come in on the television above the bar. It was a full evening.
By the time the networks called the race for Reagan, the room was loud and the crowd was sorting itself into the satisfied and the subdued and the philosophical, and Carly had worked 4 hours on her feet with the practiced ease of someone who had stopped noticing that she was working. At 11:17 p.m., she told Earl Stanczyk’s wife, who was there with her husband at their regular table, that she was heading home.
It was four blocks. She had walked it a hundred times. She put on her red wool coat and said good night to three people she could name and stepped out into the November dark. She was not seen alive again. Earl Stan Sack noticed the light in Carly’s room was not on when he and his wife came home at quarter to midnight.
He thought nothing of it. She might have gone straight to bed. By 6:00 the next morning when he went to the kitchen and her door was still closed in the same way it had been the night before, he knocked. No answer. He tried the handle. The room was empty. The bed had not been slept in. He called the Oneida County Sheriff’s office at 6:22 a.
- Deputies reached the Lakeview within the hour. They retraced the four-block route from the club to the boarding house on Maple Avenue and found Carly’s red wool coat on the ground behind a row of arborvitae at the edge of a parking lot belonging to a hardware store on the second block. It was buttoned. It was not torn.
It lay in a way that made the discovering deputy stop and stand very still before he radioed it in. Because a coat that buttoned and neat left behind like that in the cold in November in a town where everyone walks home at night does not have an innocent explanation. Inside the coat, evidence technicians found two fibers that did not belong to Carly or to the coat’s wool.
Dark blue synthetic fibers, the kind from a heavy winter garment, a coat or a parka. They were photographed, collected, and logged. In 1980, fiber analysis was possible but limited. Examiners could classify fiber type and dye batch, but matching them to a specific garment without that garment in hand was a significant investigative challenge.
The fibers were documented. They were kept. They could not be immediately placed. The lead investigator assigned by the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office was Detective Roy Gruber, a 12-year veteran who knew Minocqua well enough to know the town’s rhythms and poorly enough to still see it clearly. He interviewed every person who had been at the election night party.
He interviewed the staff. He interviewed Earl Stoneman Sick who had nothing more to offer than the timeline he’d already given. He interviewed Gerald and Diane Kalsky on November 11th, 3 days after Carly disappeared. They sat across from him together at a table in the club after it closed for the afternoon. Gerald was composed, visibly distressed.
He said Carly was one of the best employees they had ever had. He said the staff was devastated. Diane Kalsky said much the same but added detail. She described Carly’s crossword puzzles, her Friday morning routine, the way she’d remembered that Diane’s mother liked extra lemon with her perch. She expressed the precise considered grief of a woman who had cataloged her feelings and found them orderly.
Gruber noted both interviews in his report. He flagged nothing specifically. He moved on. What Gruber did not know and would not learn for 42 years was that on the night of November 8th, Diane Kalsky had told her husband she was driving to pick up a friend near the highway and had been gone for nearly 2 hours.
He had not thought to mention it or had decided not to or had made a calculation in the particular silence of a long marriage that is neither innocent nor entirely guilty and that no one outside that silence ever fully understands. By January of 1981, with Carly’s body not found and every active lead exhausted, Detective Gruber filed a status report noting the case remained open, but that investigative resources had been redirected.
The fiber evidence stayed in the evidence room. The case file stayed on the shelf. Carly DeBrinsky stayed in Manawa in the only way available to her, as a name people lowered their voices around, a crossword puzzle tradition that a few sentimental staff members kept going for two more years before it faded, and a photograph on the bulletin board at the Lake View that nobody ever took down.
Diane Kowalski organized a community vigil for Carly in December of 1980. She lit a candle and stood in the cold with 40 other people from the town and bowed her head during the prayer. She wrote a personal letter to Ron and Evelyn DeBrinsky in Appleton expressing her grief and offering that Carly had become like a daughter to her in the months she had spent at the club.
The DeBrinskys kept the letter. They found it meaningful. They had no reason not to. By 1990, 10 years had passed. The Lake View Supper Club was still there under new management after Gerald and Diane sold their share in 1988 and retired. The walleye neon in the window had been replaced, but the brandy old-fashioned recipe hadn’t.
A few of the older regulars still remembered Carly, still mentioned her, the way you mention someone who became part of a place and then was taken from it before the place was ready to let her go. Kevin DeBrinsky, Carly’s younger brother, was 28 in 1990. He had become an electrician, had a young family in Appleton, and drove to Minocqua once a year in November on the anniversary to walk the four blocks between the Lakeview and the spot where the red coat had been found.
He did it alone. He did not tell people he was coming. It was not a ceremony he had designed. It was simply the thing he did, the way the body sometimes moves toward grief, the way water moves toward low ground, without being asked. Rhonda Brinsky died in 1997. Evelyn died in 2006. They had spent 26 years waiting for news that never came in a form they could use.
What came instead were status reports from the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office, periodic, professionally courteous, with nothing new to say. What came was Kevin’s calls on Sunday evenings, in which the three of them managed, across 26 years, to say almost everything except the thing they most needed to say. Gerald Kowalski was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the spring of 2022.
He was 83 years old. He had been retired for 34 years. He and Diane lived in a house on Timber Lane in Minocqua, 4 miles from the Lakeview, close enough to the lake that on clear mornings you could smell the water. He spent 6 weeks in a palliative care facility in Wausau before he died. His son Dennis, who had grown up in Minocqua and now ran a landscaping business in Rhinelander, drove down every weekend.
On one of those weekends in July of 2022, with Gerald’s voice already thin and his time clearly measured, he told his son that there was something he had never been able to say out loud, and that he was not going to die without saying it. Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that deserved better.
If you want us to keep bringing these stories forward, take a moment to like and subscribe, and drop us a comment telling us where in the world you’re watching from. Your support is what makes this possible. Now, let’s get back to Carly. What Gerald told Dennis that afternoon in Walworth was not a confession. It was something more complicated.
The testimony of a man who had watched something for 42 years without intervening, and had never found a way to live fully with either choice. He told Dennis that on the night of November 8th, 1980, Diane had left the supper club for nearly 2 hours without a credible account of where she had gone. He told Dennis that the following morning, while Carly was already being reported missing, he had found a scarf in the back seat of their car.
A green wool scarf he recognized as Carly’s because she had worn it constantly through October. And because it had a small embroidered C in the corner that she had done herself. He told Dennis he had taken the scarf and burned it in the fireplace that evening, and had never spoken of it again. Not to Diane, not to investigators, not to anyone.
He said he had wanted to be wrong. He said he had convinced himself he was wrong. He said he was sorry, and he did not specify to whom. He died 11 days later. Dennis Kausky went to the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office on a Tuesday morning in August of 2022, 5 days after his father’s funeral. He sat across from Detective Lori Haas, who ran the county’s cold case desk, and told her everything his father had told him.
He brought his father’s handwritten note. Gerald had written the key details down in a shaking hand during a lucid morning, as if he knew his memory might not hold until he could speak, and laid it on the desk between them. Haas pulled the Wiersbicki. She pulled the Debrinski case file that afternoon. She read Gruber’s original notes.
She read the fiber evidence log. She sent the original fiber samples, still intact, still sealed in their 1980 evidence envelopes, to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory with a request for modern spectroscopic analysis. Forensic fiber analysis had changed substantially since 1980. Where the original examiners could classify fiber type and approximate dye lot, modern Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy could characterize a synthetic fiber with enough precision to match it to a specific production run.
And when a comparison garment was available, to a specific garment. The question was whether any comparison garment could be located. Haas went looking. A 1981 homeowner’s insurance claim filed by Gerald and Diane Kausky, recovered from the Oneida County property records archive, included a photographic inventory of the home’s contents for valuation purposes, a standard document of the era.
Among the photographs was an image of a hallway coat closet. In it, clearly visible, was a dark blue winter parka. The spectroscopic profile of the fibers from Carly’s red coat matched the production characteristics of that parka’s fabric within the parameters the laboratory considered a qualified match. It was not a deed of certainty.
It was consistent, specific, and corroborated by every other element of the investigation. The timeline Gerald had described, the scarf he had burned, the two unaccounted hours on November 8th. On a Thursday morning in March of 2023, Detective Lori Haas and two Oneida County deputies drove to the house on Timber Lane.
Diane Czaikowski, 80 years old, answered the door in a cardigan and slippers with the careful, deliberate movements of a woman who had been managing her life one day at a time for a very long time. She looked at Haas. She looked at the deputies. She did not ask what they wanted. She stepped back from the door and sat down in the nearest chair, and she put her hands in her lap, and she waited.
She was charged with first-degree intentional homicide. Her attorney entered a not guilty plea. In pre-trial hearings, facing the fiber evidence, the insurance photograph, and Dennis Czaikowski’s account of his father’s dying statement, Diane Czaikowski’s defense team entered into negotiations. In November of 2023, at the Oneida County Circuit Court in Rhinelander, Diane Czaikowski, 80 years old, white-haired, transported in a wheelchair, pled guilty to second-degree intentional homicide.
The judge sentenced her to 20 years. She was transported to the Taycheedah Correctional Institution, Wisconsin’s maximum-security facility for women. The courtroom contained Kevin DeBrinsky, 61 years old, who had driven up from Appleton the night before, and had slept, or tried to sleep, in a motel on the edge of Rhinelander.
He had driven the route his sister had walked 43 years earlier on his way in that morning, passing the hardware store parking lot where the coat had been found, past the place where the boarding house had been before it was torn down and replaced with a medical clinic in 2004. He had not planned to say anything in court.
He had written something out in case he changed his mind, and he had not changed his mind, and he folded the paper back into his pocket when Diane Kausky’s entered and the judge began to speak. Some things you write for yourself and never need to say out loud because they’ve already been heard by the person who needed to hear them.
He said afterward in a brief statement to the Rhinelander Daily News, “I want Carly to be found. I want her to be brought home. I want to bury my sister properly. That’s what I want. That’s what’s left.” Carly DeBrynsky has not yet been found. Diane Kausky in her plea agreement stated that she did not remember the location.
Whether that is true or a final diminished act of withholding is something that cannot be proven and may never be resolved. Carly DeBrynsky was 22 years old. She took a summer waitressing job in a lake town she had never been to and fell in love with it and stayed. She remembered every regular’s order after two visits.
Every Friday morning she pinned a crossword puzzle to the staff bulletin board. Clues built from the people around her. The town she was learning. The place she was deciding was hers. She called her brother Kevin every Sunday. She never missed one. Not in 5 months. She went home in a red wool coat on a November night and did not get there.
And the woman who had organized her vigil, written to her parents, stood in the cold with a candle and bowed her head and called her like a daughter. That woman had walked four blocks and done something and then walked back and lived with it for 43 years. And no one had looked at her face in candlelight and known.
Dennis Kowski, who had done the right thing by going to the sheriff’s office, has said little publicly since the arrest. What his father asked of him in that hospital room in Wausau was not a simple thing. Gerald Kowski spent 42 years protecting a woman who had committed a murder. He burned evidence. He said nothing.
He told his son on his deathbed and then died and left his son to carry it. The question of what Gerald owed Carly DeBrynsky and when he owed it and whether there is any accounting for 42 years of silence does not have a clean answer. And anyone who tells you it does is not being honest about how complicated love and fear and self-preservation become when they have been wound together for that long.
What do you make of a community that held a vigil, kept a photograph on a bulletin board for years, passed a name from one generation of regulars to the next, and had the answer in its midst the entire time? And what do we owe to the Carlys and the Kevins? The one still waiting to bring someone home. Leave your thoughts in the comments.
We read all of them. Tell us where in the world you’re watching from tonight. Justice came for Carly DeBrynsky after 43 years, carried in by a dying man’s note, a 1981 insurance photograph, and fibers that outlasted everyone’s patience. Stories like hers are why this channel exists. If you believe that truth keeps until someone is ready to speak it, Subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.
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