Sheriff: Fond du Lac Co. body probably isn't Laurie Depies, Amber Wilde or Stacy Peterson

December 4, 2008

Deer hunters find skeletal remains buried in two remote places nearly 100 miles apart in eastern Wisconsin. Brown County investigators identify theirs quickly. Fond du Lac County officials aren’t so lucky.

After almost two weeks and inquiries from 18 law enforcement agencies, Fond du Lac County Sheriff Mick Fink said today he has no leads into the young woman’s identity.

“Somebody saying, ’Hey my kid is missing or my wife is missing and I think John Doe murdered her,’ none of that,” Fink said. “It doesn’t appear to be a high-profile local missing person or even statewide in Wisconsin. At this point, we don’t see that.”

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That rules out Laurie Depies, who was 20 when she disappeared Aug. 19, 1992, from a parking lot at a town of Menasha apartment complex where her boyfriend lived. And University of Wisconsin-Green Bay student Amber Wilde, 19, who was 4½ months pregnant when she vanished Sept. 23, 1998, in Green Bay.

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Fink said he also doesn’t think the body belongs to Stacy Peterson, the young suburban Chicago police officer’s wife whose disappearance has drawn national attention.

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For now, Fink calls the partially decomposed body found Nov. 23 in a creek 17 miles south of Fond du Lac “Jane Doe.” He believes she’s a homicide victim who’s been dead months, not years.“I am hoping the forensic people can come back with something,” he said.

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The Wisconsin Clearinghouse for Missing & Exploited Children & Adults listed 32 adults and 10 children as missing Thursday in Wisconsin, the longest being a Mauston woman who disappeared in 1949. Thirty have been missing since 2000.

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Excluding Fond du Lac County’s Jane Doe, seven other bodies found in the state since 1977 remain unidentified, the Clearinghouse said. Fink said his detectives have identified 24 girls described as missing and exploited children in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan who “kind of fit our description” and are sorting through those.

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On Wednesday, remains found by hunters Nov. 26 in a shallow grave in rural Brown County were identified as Areerat Chuprevich, a 32-year-old Allouez woman missing since April 2003. Investigators said she died of a gunshot wound to the head. A suspect in the killing, Chuprevich’s 41-year-old stepson-in-law, hung himself in prison in 2006, investigators said.

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Fink said Brown County had a big advantage — they had a person missing under suspicious circumstances and dental records to compare to the remains.

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In Fink’s case, all investigators know is: the remains are those of a physically mature, Caucasian woman, maybe as young as 14 or as old as 40. The cause of death is unknown, but investigators found no evidence of suicide, and there’s no explanation for why she was found in an isolated, rural area.

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Investigators sent insects located near the body to an expert at Purdue University who “hopefully can give us some rough time frame of how long the body has been there,” Fink said.Other forensic specialists are working to get a good sample of DNA from either her teeth or bones, the sheriff said. Police inquiries about the remains have come from Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin, Fink said.

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Illinois investigators asked whether the remains could be Peterson, the 23-year-old Bolingbrook, Ill., woman who vanished Oct. 28, 2007. Fink said. “It is very slim, probably outside the realm of possibility, that this is Stacy Peterson,” he said. “Based on their known facts and what we know.” Peterson’s husband, 54-year-old Drew Peterson, a former Bolingbrook police sergeant, is a suspect in her disappearance. He has not been charged and has repeatedly said he thinks his wife ran off with another man and is alive.

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Sgt. Tom Burek, a spokesman for the Illinois State Police, which is leading the Peterson investigation, said he was unaware of any inquiries made in Wisconsin. “I don’t get briefed every time something is discovered,” he said. Fink said the discovery of Jane Doe’s remains prompted a call from some worried parents from Hartford who hadn’t heard from their daughter in a while. The lead was promising, given Hartford wasn’t that far from the discovery site. “But we found her alive and well,” the sheriff said.