FOND DU LAC, WI (WTAQ) – The trial in a 26-year-old murder has begun in Fond du Lac County.
18-year-old Berit Beck disappeared back on July 17, 1990, when she was traveling from Sturtevant to Appleton for work. 62-year-old Dennis Brantner, who was arrested in March 2015, is charged with killing Beck.
Prosecutors say that Beck made a stop at a Walgreens on her way.
“We have a pretty good idea that she made the purchase and then she disappeared,” said Dennis Krueger, Fond du Lac County’s Assistant District Attorney.
Two days later, Beck’s van was found in the parking lot of a Fond du Lac shopping center. Beck’s body was recovered six weeks later in a ditch near Waupun.
“His fingerprint on a window of the cargo doors that open on the passenger side of the vehicle,” said Krueger, who focused mainly on the fingerprint DNA. “Draw the conclusion from the evidence, that’s what the facts prove beyond a reasonable doubt he killed Berit Beck.”
“You’ll hear no evidence of connection between the two. They never crossed paths; they were never in the same area, they are strangers,” Brantner’s defense attorney, Craig Powell, said according to FOX 11.
Powell explained to the jury that key evidence in the case disappeared.
“Items in the state’s procession, the investigators’ procession, charged with keeping these things, safekeeping them, gone,” said Powell.
Powell also said there is other DNA evidence which was found in the van that isn’t linked to Brantner.
“The evidence in this case will not show you when she died, where she died, why she died and the evidence will certainly not sow you that it was Mr. Brantner who intentionally caused her death,” Powell said.
Opening statements wrapped up Tuesday morning, then witnesses began being called to the stand in what’s expected to be a two-week trial.
