Town note
Fond du Lac is French for bottom of the lake, named for its location at the south end of Lake Winnebago.
about 0:06:06The story
In the summer of 1990 Barrett Lynn Beck, an eighteen-year-old from Sturtevant in Racine County, Wisconsin, was starting a new job as a secretary at Bolt Construction in Appleton. On July 17 she set off north from her family home in the two-tone grey GMC conversion van she drove, with her father Dave watching her go. She told him not to worry, that all the people up north were good people.
She drove north on U.S. Highway 41. Fond du Lac sits about halfway to Appleton, so she stopped at the Forest Mall at the junction with Wisconsin Highway 23. At 11.04 she bought a Jolen hair-bleaching kit at the Walgreens inside the mall, planning to bleach her hair before the seminar. She walked back to the van and was never seen alive again. There were no security cameras outside and no witnesses.
Two days later, on July 19, the van was found locked in the Kmart car park across from the mall. Her keys were gone. Inside, police found a red T-shirt with a clean strip cut out of the back, the bleach kit still in its bag, a Burger King cup carrying two sets of fingerprints, a cellophane cigarette wrapper under the passenger seat, large piles of cigarette ash, condoms, a strip of nylon cut from pantyhose, her employment manual and an empty McDonald's bag with a Racine receipt from earlier that morning. Beck did not smoke, and her only food receipt was from McDonald's. Most telling was the odometer: she had noted her mileage for the trip, and the van had covered 462 miles more than it should have. The sheriff called it a bold stranger abduction.
On August 22 a man named Michael Plum was walking along Brown Road in the town of Waupun, in Fond du Lac County, about 18 miles from the mall, when he saw blond hair in a clump of tall weeds along a drainage ditch. It was Beck, five weeks in the summer heat and identifiable only by dental records. The autopsy found strangulation and suffocation. The cut-out red cloth had been used as a blindfold, cut away while she was wearing the shirt, and the nylon had been used to bind her.
DNA technology was in its infancy and there was no fingerprint database, so the case stalled. He had been active in car thefts and robberies in the area that June and July, and a hairbrush with blond hairs was found among his things. A farmer identified Beck's van near Kewaskum on July 17 with a man matching his description hiding his face. His girlfriend Jeanette Mikkelson told investigators he had been on a 'suicide run', capable of anything, and that he told her on July 18, 'It's all over with now. I did it.' In 1991 detectives obtained a search warrant declaring him 'more than likely involved'.
Between 2004 and 2013 the torn red shirt and the nylon binding disappeared from the sheriff's evidence lockers, with no explanation beyond staff misplacing or discarding them. The case was reopened in 2013, the subject of a USA Today network Wisconsin investigation. Born in 1954, he was a long-haul trucker since 1979 and a welder at a Kenosha plant, and his routes ran through the Highway 26 and 151 junction beside Brown Road. He was a heavy smoker. In 1989 he had taken a Cadillac in Green Lake and put more than 900 miles on it, leaving piles of ash.
Police interviewed him in Kenosha on March 28, 2014. He denied ever eating at Burger King, though an ex-wife said it was his favourite, and said he did not remember how he got in the van. Former co-workers came forward to say he kept photographs of young girls in his toolbox, one of them a blond teenager they were 90 per cent sure was Beck. He had no daughters.
The defence attacked the chain of custody, noted an unidentified print on the steering column and male DNA on a toothpick that matched nobody, and argued that fingerprints prove presence, not murder.
Beck's family set up a memorial scholarship for music students.