A 34-year-old cold case that haunted the small Wisconsin community of Appleton has finally been cracked, thanks to a DNA sample swabbed from a truck door handle. On the morning of November 6, 1988, 60-year-old Betty Rolfe, a beloved mother of five and grandmother, left her home in a severe snowstorm to walk the ten blocks to her job at the Country Aire restaurant. She never arrived.
Her badly beaten, sexually assaulted, and partially đť“·đť“ľđť“đť“® body was discovered the following day, hidden under a railroad overpass just a few blocks from her home. For more than three decades, the killer remained a ghost, eluding detectives and leaving a family shattered by grief and uncertainty. That mystery ended in December 2022 with the arrest of 66-year-old Gene Myers, a man who had been living a quiet life in Washington state, nearly 2,000 miles away from the scene of the crime.
Betty Rolfe was born in 1928 in the small village of Port Williams, Ohio. She grew up in a close-knit community and later married Charles, an Air Force serviceman. The couple moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where they raised five children.
Betty worked in the laundry department of the Country Aire restaurant, a job she could reach on foot. She was known as a gentle soul, a woman with a heart of gold who never hurt anyone. Her daughter, Sheila Worms, described her as a beautiful lady, a good cook, and a great artist.
Her granddaughter, Sue Schrenk, remembered her as the sweetest person imaginable. Betty loved family gatherings, especially Christmas, when she would bake rolls, pies, and bread. She was a familiar face in the neighborhood, walking everywhere and greeting everyone with warmth.
On November 6, 1988, the snow was falling heavily. Betty planned to leave before 6 a. m.
Her husband, Charles, was not scheduled to work until later, so he could not drive her. Undeterred, she donned a thick coat, grabbed her black purse, and stepped out into the storm. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.
When she did not return home by 2 p. m. , Charles began to worry.
He called family members, but no one had seen her. He spent a sleepless night listening for her footsteps. The next morning, he reported her missing to the Appleton police at around 10:40 a.
m.
Within minutes, officers began retracing Betty’s usual route to work. One officer, walking along West Spencer Street, came to a railroad overpass. An eight-foot wall stood beneath it.
Something urged him to look there. He found Betty’s body, hidden from view. She was wearing only her coat from the waist down.
A purse strap was wrapped around her neck. She was not breathing. The officer radioed for backup, and an ambulance arrived, but it was too late.
Betty’s body was taken to the Wisconsin crime lab for an autopsy.
The autopsy revealed the brutal nature of the attack. Betty had been sexually assaulted. She had been struck forcefully on the head and face with an object.
She had also been strangled. The forensic pathologist collected swabs from her body, which contained the killer’s DNA. But there was a critical problem: in 1988, DNA testing technology was not advanced enough to process the evidence.
The swabs were carefully stored, with the hope that future science would unlock their secret. Betty’s death was ruled a homicide, and detectives launched an investigation. They interviewed family members and neighbors, but no leads emerged.
The case went cold.
For Betty’s family, the uncertainty was agonizing. They suspected the killer might be someone they knew, which bred distrust among them. “We didn’t know if this person was deceased or had other crimes,” Sue Schrenk said.
The years passed, and hope faded. By 2015, Betty’s son, Charlie, told the media he did not think the case would ever be solved. “There is still anger there,” he said.
“Why would anyone take her life? The killer has no morals and no conscience.” Detectives admitted the case was not actively worked, though they followed up on tips when they came in.
The time between leads grew longer and longer.
Then, in 2019, detectives decided to try a new approach: familial DNA search. This technique allows investigators to search a DNA profile against a database to find potential relatives of an unknown suspect. The search identified two men: Gene Myers and another man identified only by the initials CM.
They were blood brothers. Detectives tracked down CM first. He fully cooperated, providing a saliva sample.
The results showed he was not the killer. Attention turned to Gene Myers.
During questioning, CM told detectives he had not seen Gene in a long time and believed he might be dead. But detectives discovered a crucial detail: in the 1980s, Gene had lived about a mile from where Betty’s body was found. They also tracked down a niece of Gene’s.
She told them that around the time of Betty’s death, Gene had called his sister to bid her farewell, saying he was moving out of Wisconsin. After the call, the niece noticed her mother was agitated. When asked what was wrong, her mother replied that she had a secret that would go to the grave with her.
The niece never learned what that secret was.
Detectives found no record of Gene’s death, so they believed he was alive. After weeks of searching, they located him living a peaceful life in Washington state, about an hour south of Tacoma. He owned a pickup truck.
For reasons of strategy, detectives did not approach him directly. Instead, the FBI began surveillance. On November 21, 2022, an FBI agent walked up to Gene’s parked truck and swabbed the door handle for DNA.
The samples were sent to the Wisconsin crime lab for analysis.
The results came back in early December. The DNA profile from the truck handle perfectly matched the DNA swab taken from Betty Rolfe’s body in 1988. The case was finally solved.
On December 7, 2022, Gene Myers was arrested by the Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI, and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office in Washington. He was 66 years old. He was charged with first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree sexual assault with a weapon.
Betty’s family was contacted with the news. They were stunned. “We’ve had to sit and wonder about this every day of our life for 34 years,” her daughter Sheila said.
“We thought the killer was going to be somebody we knew.” They expressed relief and gratitude for the detectives’ persistence. “Thank God for DNA testing,” Sue Schrenk said.
“Otherwise we would have never got him, and he would have gotten away with it.” Sheila added, “He took everything from us. My mom did not deserve this.
This never should have happened, especially not in such a cruel way. She was an innocent person.”
Gene Myers is currently held at the Pierce County Jail in Washington, awaiting transfer to Wisconsin. If convicted, he faces life imprisonment. The arrest brings a measure of closure to a family that has waited 34 years for justice.
But the pain of losing Betty, a woman who never hurt anyone and who simply walked to work on a snowy morning, will never fully heal. The case stands as a testament to the power of advancing forensic technology and the relentless determination of law enforcement to never give up, even when hope seems lost. The community of Appleton, and the family of Betty Rolfe, can now finally know that her killer will not go unpunished.
