Who Killed the Killer?

In June 1982, 32-year-old Lee Rotatori moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a new job at Jennie Edmundson Hospital. While staying at a motel before her husband joined her, Lee went out boating with new coworkers the night before her first official day of work. The next morning, she never showed up. When staff entered her room, they found Lee dead on the bed, stabbed once in the heart and sexually assaulted. The case quickly went cold, and for decades the killer remained unknown. In 2001, investigators recovered male DNA from the crime scene, but it didn’t match anyone in the databases. Everything changed in 2020 when an 18-year-old genealogy enthusiast contacted police and offered to help. After nearly two years of research, he identified the killer as a trucker named Thomas Oscar Freeman. Freeman had actually been murdered himself just months after killing Lee, leaving investigators with new questions about whether the two crimes were connected. Nearly 40 years later, Lee Rotatori’s killer was finally identified.

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