7-17-13 berit beck cold case homicide

Twenty three years ago today a Sturdevant teenager disappeared while driving from Sturdevant  to Appleton.  Eighteen year old Berit Beck’s van was found a month in the Fond du Lac Plaza parking lot and her body was found August 22nd in a roadside ditch near Waupun. Sheriff’s Lieutenant Cameron McGee says it seems hard to believe that more than two decades  have gone by.   He says investigators believe the killer probably forced his way into Beck’s van in the Forest Mall parking lot after she had stopped at a mall pharmacy there.  But McGee says what happened after that only the killer knows.  "A lot of that is speculative,"  McGee told AM 1170 WFDL's Between the Lines program.  "Her last contact was at the Walgreens and after that its all pretty much speculative what takes place after that."  McGee says in the last couple of years DNA testing of evidence found in Beck’s van has come back inconclusive.  A West Bend man who was in the Fond du Lac area at the time of the murder and who allegedly bragged to his girlfriend at the time that he had killed someone in Fond du lac quickly became a prime suspect in the case.  But McGee says investigators did not have enough evidence to refer formal charges.