At 5:45 in the morning, Chad called the police and said there had been a murder. When officers arrived at the apartment, they found Tina in her bedroom, lying on the bed with a pillowcase over her head. She had been stabbed at least 27 times, sexually assaulted, and her clothes were missing from the waist down. Scratches and abrasions covered her hands and arms.
She had fought back hard. Chad told police he had been sleeping on the couch in the living room. He said he came home around 12:30 a. m.
after drinking, heard Tina come in from her late restaurant shift around 2 a. m. , and then went back to sleep. Hours later, he woke to smoke and the sound of a fire alarm.
The couch he had been sleeping on was on fire. There were three other small fires in the living room and kitchen. He put them out, checked Tina’s bedroom, found her body, and ran to a neighbor’s apartment to call police. Detectives immediately had questions.
How could Chad have slept through an attacker getting into the apartment, assaulting Tina, stabbing her more than two dozen times, and setting four separate fires in the same rooms where he was sleeping? He claimed nothing woke him except the smoke. And when police pulled his record, it did not help his case. Chad had prior arrests, including an incident involving a 17-year-old girl who became pregnant when he was 18, though the charges were dropped after she married him.
He also had theft-related offenses on his record. Police arrested Chad and charged him with Tina’s murder. He insisted he was innocent, but the pieces seemed to fit. He was in the apartment.
He had a burn on his hand that prosecutors said was consistent with holding a lighter too long. He allegedly broke down after the murder and told his brother, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do this. ” Jeremy, Tina’s husband and Chad’s brother, believed Chad was responsible, though he never said it publicly.
Chad’s attorney pushed back. There was no blood on Chad’s clothes, no scratches or bruises on his body, nothing to suggest Tina had clawed at him while fighting for her life. Prosecutors argued Chad could have showered and changed clothes afterward, then left with the bloody items and the murder weapon. The defense countered with forensic evidence.
Under Tina’s fingernails, investigators found skin particles. On her bed sheets, they found male semen. Three stray hairs on her body all seemed to come from the same person, and that person wasn’t Chad. But DNA testing in the mid-1990s was not what it is today.
Experts could not say with certainty that the DNA matched or excluded anyone, and the hair analyst couldn’t calculate how common that hair profile might be in the general population. Chad’s lawyer also pointed out that Tina and Jeremy kept a spare key near the front porch. Anyone who knew them could have let themselves in without forcing the door. And there was no sign of forced entry anyway.
The trial did not start until late 1996, more than two years after Tina’s death. By then, prosecutors had new ammunition. Two of Chad’s cellmates came forward, each claiming Chad had confessed to killing Tina. Both men testified in court.
The jury found Chad guilty and sentenced him to life in prison. For five years, Chad insisted he was innocent. Then he reached out to an organization that investigates wrongful convictions. They took his case seriously.
Investigators had recovered skin cells under Tina’s nails and semen from her bed sheets, and DNA technology had advanced significantly. In 2005, retesting delivered a result that changed everything. The skin under Tina’s nails, the semen on the sheets, and the three hairs all belonged to the same man. That man was not Chad.
It wasn’t Jeremy either. The DNA did not match anyone in the FBI database, so there was still no name attached to it. But it was enough to raise real doubt about Chad’s guilt. Then his attorneys uncovered something even more troubling.
Crime scene technicians had found a bloody fingerprint near the sink in Tina’s apartment. It was exactly the kind of place a killer would go to wash blood off his hands. The print did not belong to Chad, and it did not match anyone connected to the case. Yet it was never mentioned at trial.
Not once. Another inmate came forward, claiming he had overheard two prisoners discussing how they planned to set Chad up by saying he confessed to them. That detail complicated an already murky case. The DA’s office fought to keep the conviction intact, but the judge overturned it anyway.
The prosecution immediately announced they would retry Chad, so he stayed in jail while the gears ground slowly. A year later, prosecutors had to admit the obvious. With the evidence now in front of them, Chad being the killer did not look likely. In 2007, they dropped the plan for a second trial and Chad walked free after spending 13 years behind bars.
The case went cold. The killer’s DNA and fingerprints were still nowhere in any database. For years, the trail sat untouched. Then in 2017, the police department created a cold case unit and picked Tina’s case back up.
Still nothing. In 2021, they tried a new approach: forensic genetic genealogy. They sent the DNA to a lab that builds family trees through public genetic databases. The process stretched out over four years.
Finally, in September 2025, they narrowed the killer down to a family that had lived near Tina and Jeremy back in the 1990s. Detectives approached a close relative of the suspected person and asked for a DNA sample. The results showed a strong biological link to the killer’s DNA, pointing directly to a 51-year-old man named Michael Ziegler. At first, the name meant nothing.
Then detectives started digging and hit a detail that stopped them cold. Michael was not a stranger. He was one of Jeremy’s closest friends. They had served together in the Navy, bonded like brothers in arms.
Michael had been a groomsman at Jeremy and Tina’s wedding, just five months before Tina was murdered. Michael had no serious criminal record. He was retired and living in Georgia with his mother. Throughout the entire investigation, his name had never come up once.
Even Jeremy never suspected him. To Jeremy, Michael was always just a friend and fellow sailor, someone he eventually drifted out of touch with. Police coordinated with authorities in Georgia. Officers moved in and arrested Michael.
They collected his DNA, and the results came back as a full match. The semen, the skin cells under Tina’s nails, and the three hairs all belonged to him. Michael was charged with murder and sexual assault, then extradited to Florida. He is now in jail awaiting trial.
At his first hearing, he pleaded not guilty. No court date has been set. Because the crime happened in Florida, Michael could face the death penalty. Prosecutors might offer him a deal, life in prison in exchange for a guilty plea.
Chad returned to Wisconsin to be with his family after his release. He lost 13 years of his life and received no compensation. Florida law disqualifies people with prior convictions, even minor ones, from wrongful conviction compensation, and Chad had those earlier charges on his record. He says he is just grateful the truth finally came out, even after so many years.
It is hard not to wonder about that bloody fingerprint found near the sink, the one that didn’t belong to Chad and was never brought up in trial. That single detail might have changed everything. Whether it was an oversight or something worse, no one knows. Chad apparently chose not to spend the rest of his life buried in lawsuits.
After Tina’s murder, her parents started a scholarship in her name for low-income kids, covering tuition at the Catholic school she attended. It still exists today. Her family keeps holding events to fund it.
