By Brandi Makuski | Point Plover Metro Wire

This story originally appeared in the Point Plover Metro Wire and is republished by permission. See the original story here.

For almost 40 years, the death of UWSP student Janet Raasch has been treated like a homicide.

Raasch was 20 years old when she left Watson Hall on the UW-Stevens Point campus on Oct. 11, 1984. She was last seen by passing motorists as she was walking south of Stevens Point at about 1:30 p.m. that day.

Her body was found just over a month later, on Oct. 11, 1984, by hunters in a wooded area near State Hwy. 54 and County Hwy. J South, about 15 miles from Stevens Point.

Law enforcement has never released details about what evidentiary items they collected from what was, at the time, believed to be a crime scene.

Until now.

Detective Dustin Kitzman was assigned the cold case in May 2020. He’s the latest in a long line of investigators at the Portage Co. Sheriff’s Office to study what had been considered an unsolved murder. He’d been working on the case for several months when, based on the evidence, he formulated a new theory.

Kitzman said the case is nuanced, with several key pieces of information coming together to form his conclusion. He disclosed several pieces of evidence during an exclusive, joint interview with WAOW and the Metro Wire on Oct. 6.

Investigators who previously worked the case believed that Raasch had been sexually assaulted and strangled before being set on fire, although the condition of her body made it difficult to confirm a cause of death, even after a 2002 exhumation.

Kitzman said the evidence points to accidental death, and the evidence was strong enough that his peers, a medical examiner, and a Portage County judge all agreed—Janet Raasch’s death was an accident, not a homicide.

“As I explored the evidence further and further, I really wanted to do this case right and not just push something that I believed happened,” Kitzman said. “I wanted the evidence to speak for itself.”

The court hearing

Judge Patricia Baker on Oct. 5 ruled in favor of amending her official cause of death from “suspected strangulation” homicide to “accidental.” Sheriff Mike Lukas said it’s the first time in his memory that a death certificate was changed in such a way. Vital statistics records in Wisconsin cannot be amended without a judge’s ruling.

Scott Rifleman, the deputy medical examiner for Portage Co., petitioned for the change, based on Kitzman’s investigation. Rifleman was in the courtroom on Oct. 5 to testify in person, while Kitzman was out of town and testified remotely.

District Attorney Cass Cousins was also present for the hearing and told Baker that he agreed with the recommendation to change the cause of death.

Raasch’s sisters were also present for the hearing. Both said they’d been presented with Kitzman’s findings prior to court and agreed with the change.

Kitzman testified that Raasch’s decomposing, charred body was located in a wooded area about 100 yards off Hwy. 54. Her belongings were an additional 50 yards out in what he called “a makeshift campsite.”

Kitzman said investigative techniques and technology have evolved since 1984. While he was limited to photographs of the scene taken almost 40 years ago, those pictures could be further analyzed with modern software, and Kitzman did have a 3-D modeling program at his disposal.

The diagrams he created with that software showed that Raasch was setting up camp for the night, he said.

Kitzman also had the services of the state crime lab, where he sent fibers from the evidence collected nearly 40 years ago. It was largely that fiber analysis that made Kitzman believe his theory was correct.

“The jeans that she was wearing were conclusively shown to be buttoned and her shirt was tucked in at the time she caught fire,” Kitzman said during his Oct. 5 testimony. “There was also some fiber analysis out of the state crime lab in Milwaukee that concluded some of the fibers on her clothing were in fact sleeping bag [material].”

After consulting with Rifleman, Kitzman said the delicate necklace found around Raasch’s neck was unbroken, and that her hair was still secured via an intact ponytail. Both made strangulation unlikely, he said.

Photos of the scene show an elongated burned area, where investigators believe she’d been lying in a sleeping bag. Next to that, Kitzman said, was her Raasch’s duffle bag, a flashlight, pocket knife, radio, a can of soda, her shoes and socks, and the likely tools of her death: a can of lighter fluid and a lighter.

Rifleman would testify that Raasch suffered third-degree burns on about 60 percent of her body. Once her sleeping bag became engulfed by campfire flames, Kitzman said it’s most likely that Raasch stood and began “ripping and shredding her clothing” off in order to escape the fire.

Melted polyester from the sleeping bag was found mixed in with fibers from her blue jeans, found in shreds on the ground, which Kitzman said confirms that theory she pulled the burning fabric from her body as tried running to the road for help.

This story will be updated.