Suspect arrested in 34-year-old cold case murder of Appleton woman
APPLETON - A suspect has been arrested in Washington for Betty Rolf's 1988 sexual assault and murder, the Outagamie County Sheriff's Office said Thursday.
Gene C. Meyer, a 66-year-old resident of Eatonville, Wash., who police believe formerly lived in Appleton, is being held at the Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, Washington. He has been charged in Outagamie County Circuit Court with first-degree murder and first-degree sexual assault with a weapon. He's awaiting extradition to Wisconsin, the sheriff's office said.
Rolf, a 60-year-old Appleton woman, was walking the 10 blocks from her home to her work at the former Country Aire banquet hall during a snowstorm on Nov. 6, 1988. Her body was found around 11:15 a.m. the next morning, lying near a railroad underpass on West Spencer Street in Grand Chute, according to the criminal complaint. She was lying parallel to an eight-foot concrete wall, hidden from any passing trains.
An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled and received blunt force trauma to the head.
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According to Post-Crescent archives, members of Rolf's family were "in shock" when they found out about her death. They remembered her as someone who "always cared about people," her granddaughter Sue Srnka said. They also said she had been a devoted mother and grandmother and an excellent baker "whose homemade bread, rolls, pies and noodles were the envy of the neighborhood."
Meanwhile, police started trying to find who had murdered Rolf. They took swabs from her body and found serological evidence left by her attacker, but were not able to discover anything further. When a DNA test was conducted in 2001, it ruled out everyone connected to Rolf. For years afterward, her killer was only known by the DNA profile.
However, in 2019, investigators conducted a search for familial DNA, which looked for possible relatives of Rolf's killer, according to the criminal complaint. They found two candidates: Gene Meyer and his brother, identified only by the initials CM.
CM cooperated with the investigation, the complaint said. When he was interviewed, he said he believed his brother to be dead and provided a DNA sample. Investigators compared this sample to the swabs taken from Rolf. The results from the Wisconsin Crime Lab showed that CM wasn't who they were looking for.
Investigators also interviewed Meyer's niece. The niece said, sometime after 1986, her mother had received a call from Meyer, telling her goodbye. The niece sensed something was bothering her mother, who told her, "I have a secret … I have a secret … and it's going to go in my grave," according to the complaint.
Investigators found, at one time, Meyer had lived only a mile away from the crime scene in Grand Chute. They traced Meyer to his residence about an hour south of Tacoma, Wash.
With the cooperation of local authorities, they obtained a DNA sample from the handle of Meyer's Dodge Ram truck, the complaint said. The sample, compared to the swabs taken from Rolf's body in 1988, was a match.
If convicted of Rolf's murder, Meyer faces a possible sentence of life plus 20 years in prison.
The investigation was conducted with the assistance of the Milwaukee-based Cold Case Team of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the Pierce County Sheriff's Office and local FBI agencies assisting in Meyer's arrest, the Outagamie County Sheriff's Office said.
This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Suspect arrested in 34-year-old Appleton cold case of Betty Rolf
