Council Bluffs Police Division
For 4 a long time, the sexual assault and homicide of a 32-year-old hospital nutritionist—who had just lately moved from Michigan for a brand new job in Council Bluffs, Iowa—had stumped authorities.
However this week, investigators introduced that genetic family tree has helped them crack the case, revealing an odd twist to the 40-year saga.
Council Bluffs authorities say they’ve concluded that Thomas O. Freeman, a trucker from West Frankfort, Illinois, murdered Lee Rotatori at a resort positioned alongside two interstates. Freeman, who they imagine dedicated the homicide whereas passing via on a trucker job, would have been 32 when he stabbed the hospital employee to demise in her resort room in June 1982.
However in an odd flip of occasions, Freeman was murdered months later and his physique was dumped in a wooded space in rural Illinois that wasn’t removed from the place he lived. Cops have but to establish his killer, however now imagine it could possibly be linked to Rotatori’s homicide.
Earlier than she was killed, Rotatori was briefly staying on the Greatest Western Frontier Lodge after relocating to the realm and beginning a job as a meals companies director at Jennie Edmundson Hospital. She had plans to dwell on the resort till her husband might drive to satisfy her with their cellular dwelling, in accordance with a report on the time from the Omaha World-Herald.
After she failed to indicate up for work on June 25, 1982, simply days after beginning orientation, a resort worker found her physique in her floor ground resort room clad in pajamas soaked blood from a single stab wound, in accordance with the Every day Nonpareil an area newspaper in southwest Iowa. The Pottawattamie County medical expert mentioned she might have been lifeless for 12 hours and that she had been sexually assaulted.
There have been no indicators of compelled entry or a wrestle, Eldon Jones, the police captain on the time mentioned, telling the Lincoln Journal Star shortly after Rotatori's homicide that there have been “no stable leads” within the case.
Native authorities labored the case with the Michigan State Police, and collaborated to chase down leads and interview witnesses. Rotatori’s husband, Jerry Nemke, was dominated out as a suspect when he introduced a convincing alibi though he was arrested years earlier than in Chicago as a teen and was later convicted of beating a waitress to demise in 1960. He was launched in 1978 and married Rotatori that yr. The couple divorced and remarried in 1981, in accordance with the Nonpareil.
After exhausting leads, the case went chilly till 2001 when proof was submitted to a state crime lab which developed a male DNA profile. The event of the profile was promising, however didn’t appear to match any of the DNA data in state and federal DNA databases.
For years, the databases had been scanned for matches with out luck. Investigators had been stumped till additional strides in DNA know-how made it potential to crack the case.
In 2018, investigators thought of whether or not genetic family tree is likely to be an possibility. Police Capt. Todd Weddum advised the Nonpareil that the technique occurred to him after watching a program about the way it was used to crack the Golden State Killer case. “There wasn’t a lot else we might do on the case,” he mentioned.
Months later, Council Bluffs investigators submitted the suspect’s DNA profile to Parabon Nanolabs, opening a genetic family tree case. After the Virginia-based firm returned a DNA profile of the suspect, it started evaluating that profile towards DNA submitted to household tree web sites.
Investigators reached out to household, however the preliminary match was a distant relative of the suspect—once more leaving Rotatori’s killer simply out of attain—till Eric Schubert, a university scholar with a knack for genealogical analysis provided to assist attempt to zero in on the suspect in March 2020.
“He was very quickly capable of get to the great-grandparent of our topic,” Council Bluffs Police Detective Steve Andrews, who has labored the case since 2011, advised the Nonpareil. As family members had been recognized, investigators would ask them to submit kits within the hopes of getting a match.
The suspect was ultimately narrowed down to 2 brothers. Primarily based on their ages on the time of the crime, cops pointed to the elder Freeman as their suspect.
“It took this new know-how to resolve this case,” Weddum advised the Nonpareil.
To verify their concept, investigators tracked down Freeman’s daughter for a DNA pattern and submitted it to Iowa’s Division of Legal Investigation lab. Her DNA confirmed a mother or father and youngster relationship match to the DNA present in Rotatori’s case, they mentioned.
The invention of Rotatori’s killer almost 40 years later was an enormous breakthrough within the case, though additional investigation revealed that Freeman was killed shortly after he allegedly murdered Rotatori.
October 30, 1982, his physique was present in a shallow grave close to Cobden, Illinois, with a number of gunshot wounds. Decomposition steered that he had been lifeless for roughly three months earlier than his stays had been discovered, cops mentioned. His case hasn’t been solved, however Council Bluffs police say they're aiding the Illinois State Police to look at whether or not Freeman’s homicide was linked to his function in Rotatori’s demise.
“I’m not an actual large believer in coincidences,” Weddum advised the Nonpareil, explaining that Rotatori’s husband, Nemke, who died in 2019, is taken into account an individual of curiosity in Freeman’s homicide.
“Along with his identified historical past of being within the space of the place our suspect lived and the place our suspect died, it raises suspicions of his involvement. That he presumably might’ve been concerned,” Weddum mentioned.