 |
| Photo by Adam Ryan Morris. |
photo by Adam Ryan MorrisThis story appears in the December 2010 issue of Milwaukee Magazine.
by Kurt Chandler
Two or three times a week, Karren Kraemer would get up at 3 or 4 in the morning,
fill a thermos with strong coffee, and drive from her home near Oconomowoc to one of Milwaukee’s toughest neighborhoods. With grim determination, Kraemer would walk the lonely, early-morning streets, papering the neighborhood with fliers bearing the face of her 23-year-old daughter, Becky.
“Please help us find Becky,” the fliers implored. “Missing/Endangered since December 13, 2003.”
Kraemer believed Becky’s boyfriend, Carl Rodgers II, murdered her daughter. Their relationship had turned violent, and Becky filed criminal charges of battery a few months before she went missing. “He was the last person to see her and remains a person of interest in her disappearance,” read the fliers.
Rodgers had become Kraemer’s obsession. She hung hundreds and hundreds of fliers – on lampposts, telephone poles and fences, along the street where Rodgers lived, in the parking lot where he worked, on the trees in front of his parents’ home – coming back night after night to replace them whenever they were ripped down, so Rodgers and everyone who crossed his path would know he was to blame for her daughter’s suffering.
In the predawn hours, Kraemer would sometimes talk to vagrants, asking if they’d seen Becky. “I can’t remember ever being scared,” she says. “I mean, what kind of person would hurt a mother who’s trying to find her daughter?”
Kraemer was consumed by sorrow, anger and guilt, and those emotions fueled what has become her unrelenting mission to find her lost daughter and incriminate Rodgers. In the course of her crusade, she remade herself into something remarkable: a national advocate for families of missing people – and, at times, an unauthorized cop, prosecutor and judge, pursuing justice with a ferocity that has left many amazed and others appalled.
Becky Marie Kraemer married when she was 19, taking the last name of her groom, Mike Marzo. Her parents, Karren and Dave Kraemer, thought the couple married too young, and sure enough, the marriage soon fell apart.
Two years later, in February 2001, Becky met Carl Rodgers II. He was 11 years older, divorced, with two kids. Carl was a charmer, a handsome African-American who raced high-performance dragsters and rode a red motorcycle. Becky was smitten. A few months after they met, she moved from her parents’ suburban home into his duplex near Fifth and Burleigh in Milwaukee.
Becky’s behavior began to change. “We started noticing little bruises on her arms,” Karren Kraemer remembers. “She wouldn’t talk. Whenever she came home, she would get into an argument and then get depressed and cry. I said, ‘This is crazy. We don’t know why you’re staying with him. You don’t have to.’ ” But Becky would make excuses for Carl. “He didn’t mean to hurt me,” she told her mother. “It was an accident.”
Around Christmas of 2002, Becky’s parents persuaded her to move back home. Carl was furious. He called Becky over and over, 50, 60 times.
Eventually, Becky gave in. “Don’t you understand? I have no choice,” she said to her father. “I have to go back.”
Months passed. Then, on the night of March 31, 2003, she showed up at her parents’ door. Her face was black and blue and caked with dried blood. Carl had choked her, slammed her against the wall and thrown her onto the floor, according to a police report.
“I wrapped her face in an iced towel and held her all night,” says Karren Kraemer. She was treated at a hospital for a broken nose, bruised ribs and a fractured cheekbone.
Carl was arrested and charged with battery. “At this point, we’re begging her to break up with him,” Kraemer says. Becky’s father was so angry, he wanted to hire a hit man to kill Carl, says Kraemer. Her brother wanted to take a baseball bat to him.
Becky still wouldn’t leave him. Four days after the assault, Carl’s pickup truck pulled into the Kraemers’ driveway. “Becky got in and left,” Kraemer says.
Her parents had run out of patience. “We had heard the excuses long enough,” Kraemer says. “We decided to try tough love and told her she couldn’t come home again until she broke up with him. It’s not that we didn’t love her. We just couldn’t keep picking up the pieces.”
It’s a decision that still haunts the mother. “I can’t forgive myself. I live with the guilt every day – that I wasn’t there when she needed me most.”
That April, after another blowout with Carl, Becky took off for Florida. Kraemer tracked her down by phone. She was staying in Miami, “but she just wanted me to leave her alone,” Kraemer says. “That was the last time I talked to her.”
Weeks passed, and Becky returned to Milwaukee. For a while, she stayed with a girlfriend. Then, abruptly, she moved back in with Carl and recanted her abuse claim.
“I did intentionally make a false statement/complaint,” she said in a statement signed Sept. 24, 2003, “thereby falsely accusing Carl Rodgers [the defendant] of hitting me, chipping my tooth, and causing me bodily harm. Carl did not then, or ever, harm, batter, or accost me in any way.”
On Dec. 10, 2003, the Milwaukee County Circuit Court formally dismissed the battery charges against Carl Rodgers II.
Three days later, Becky disappeared.
It was a Saturday, girls’ night outfor Becky and two friends. They headed to a North Side bar called Conversations to drink and dance – three young women out on the weekend.
Sometime around midnight, Becky’s cell phone rang. It was Carl, wanting to know when she was coming home. “I’m not ready to leave,” she told him. A few minutes later, he called again, upset. They argued. Becky hung up. He called again, and then again.
“You know, we’re not going to have any fun if you answer that phone,” her friend Kristina Randall said. “Just turn it off.”
At 2 in the morning, Kristina drove Becky home and waited at the curb for her to get inside safely. “She turned on the light and waved out the window,” Kristina says.
Over the next week, none of Becky’s friends heard from her. They called her, went to her house, knocked on her door, walked around her yard looking for signs of Becky. Nothing.
Finally, they went to the police. But because they weren’t members of Becky’s family, they weren’t allowed to file a missing person report.
“Becky’ll show up,” they told each other. “She’ll call eventually.” But something didn’t feel right.
It was nearly two months before Karren Kraemer knew Becky was missing. She hadn’t spoken with her daughter for nearly a year, but she’d been having dreams about her. Bad dreams.
One day, she got a call from her niece, who’d been trying to contact Becky. “Auntie Karren, I don’t know what’s going on, but something’s happened to Becky.”
Waves of fear and dread swept over Kraemer, nearly knocking her to her knees. She dialed her daughter’s phone number, but no answer, just Becky’s voice mail with Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” playing in the background.
Kraemer called the police to report her daughter missing. “They told me because Becky was an adult, she had the right to go missing,” she says. So she kept calling Becky, hour after hour, listening through the Whitney Houston song over and over.
Weeks went by without any sign of Becky. Again, Kraemer called the police. “And again they said, in domestic situations like this, it was common for women this age to run away,” she says.
Finally, in October 2004, the frustrated mother drove to a Milwaukee precinct station with a friend and demanded that police file a missing person report. “I’m not leaving until you take the report,” she told a sergeant. As she waited in his office, a squad car was sent to bring in Carl Rodgers for questioning. Carl was escorted into the room and seated right next to Kraemer.
“Mrs. Kraemer, tell this man what you think he did,” the sergeant said.
She was stunned. It was the first time she had met Carl face to face. “I think you killed my daughter,” she blurted out.
Carl didn’t blink. “That bitch wasn’t worth my time,” he shot back, according to Kraemer. He said Becky had run away to Florida with two men, and she was using drugs and working as a prostitute. She knew the life, he said. Months earlier, she had walked out and taken a job at a Miami strip club. Now, said Carl, she had done it again.
Kraemer didn’t believe it for a second. Becky had a full-time job as a cashier at Target and was credits away from completing an accounting degree at MATC. Her daughter wouldn’t just disappear.
Becky Marie was the second of five children. She was a sentimental girl who collected Winnie the Pooh keepsakes, played the clarinet and was addicted to Yahtzee.
“Becky was petite and brainy, but naïve,” says Kraemer, now 50. “She always brought home the underdogs from school. She felt if she could only befriend them, their lives would change.” On a band trip to New York City, she gave her money and lunch to homeless people. “She thought she could fix the world.”
As a child, Becky suffered a hearing loss that required surgery. In her teens, she was treated for chronic depression.
Her health didn’t diminish her playful sense of humor. “Becky was always the clown, a real practical joker,” says Kraemer. “I remember when she was maybe 16, we went to the grocery story, and she picked up a package of Depends and yelled down the aisle: ‘Hey Mom, what size Depends do you wear?’ ”
Eight months had passed since Kraemer first contacted police. No one seemed to take seriously her allegations against Carl. While raising her children, Kraemer had taken criminal justice courses at UW-Milwaukee and worked part time as a police dispatcher. It was there she developed a keen eye for investigative work.
So Kraemer began asking her own questions. She quit her six-figure job managing several Kinko’s copy centers. She cashed in her 401(k) and started a full-time crusade to find her daughter.
Knowing Becky had confided in co-workers at Target, Kraemer took a job at the same store and began pumping them for information. “They told me Becky would come to work and every part of her body would be covered with clothing, and she would have bruises on her cheek,” she says. One co-worker revealed that her daughter-in-law had also dated Carl for a while and ended it when he began threatening her.
But like everyone else, the Target employees hadn’t heard from Becky. She never picked up her last paycheck, $483.Her driver’s license had expired. Her credit cards showed no activity.
Kraemer’s suspicions grew deeper. She hired a private investigator and asked for advice from former Waukesha district attorney Paul Bucher, who assisted crime victims in his law practice. They talked about filing a wrongful death suit against Carl.
Kraemer learned from police and Becky’s friends that she had been seeing another man while she was living with Carl. The man, named “Jamal,” bought Becky a plane ticket and took her to Florida after Carl assaulted her. Police contacted investigators in Miami, who confirmed that Becky had in fact worked at a “gentleman’s club” called Goldrush before returning to Milwaukee and Carl. It was a side of Becky that Kraemer had never seen.
Armed with the barest of details, Kraemer headed to Miami in August 2005. For two weeks, she pounded the sidewalks, talking to police and the FBI, handing out fliers and offering cash to prostitutes and drug dealers, hoping to get a tip about her daughter. But no one had seen Becky.
Kraemer met with the manager and dancers at Goldrush. “They told me she wasn’t stripping, she was bartending,” Kraemer says. “Becky was 130 pounds, plus she had scars and black and blue wounds on her body. She wasn’t a dancer.”
Returning home, Kraemer picked up Carl’s trail, parking in front of his house, trailing him everywhere, reporting his every suspicious move to police. Once, she noticed fresh concrete had been poured on the floor of a shed next to his apartment. Another time, she saw Carl fill a dumpster with drywall and old pipes from his bathroom.
She showed up at his workplace and handed out fliers to his co-workers. She contacted men on his drag racing team. On Becky’s birthday, Kraemer and 30 of her friends called Carl and sang “Happy birthday dear Becky” onto his voice mail. She followed him to his parents’ house, to the racetrack, to the grocery store, always leaving her calling card on the hood of his parked car – an illustration of Winnie the Pooh, a reminder she was watching. “I stalked him in a way where he couldn’t call the cops and say I was harassing him,” she says. “But I wanted him to know he wasn’t going to get away with it. You almost get to the point where you’re a vigilante.”
She pleaded with police to look into his involvement in Becky’s disappearance, to no avail. “Right now, Becky is on the bottom of the workload,” one investigator told her, according to Kraemer. “What makes you think her case is more important than anyone else’s?”
She was livid. “You owe it to me to find my baby!”
As Kraemer continued to feed information to authorities, a secret John Doe investigation was opened by the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office. “As soon as I looked at [the case], Carl Rodgers was a person of interest,” Mark Williams, a top homicide prosecutor, said at the time.
Carl’s friends and family members were questioned, and a search warrant was issued. Police found traces of blood, but it was later determined to be nonhuman blood, possibly a dog’s. Following up on Kraemer’s allegation that Carl buried Becky in the basement, investigators excavated a section of the basement floor, but found nothing.
Milwaukee police have followed “every credible lead” in the disappearance of Becky Marzo, says spokeswoman Anne E. Schwartz. “Several hundred hours have been spent on this by numerous investigators.”
Carl’s upbringing had been complicated. His parents, Anita and Carl Rodgers Sr., were divorced by the time he was 2, and he was raised by Carl Sr. and a stepmother, Jackie Rodgers, for years after that. But in high school, he was mostly raised by birth mother Anita and her husband, Jeff Stemper. They got married when Carl was 9.
Jackie owned the house where Becky and Carl had lived and became Kraemer’s unlikely ally. She told Kraemer she was convinced her stepson killed Becky.
“There’s been a crime committed here, and it needs to be solved,” says the stepmother. “I know Carl was physically abusing Becky. I know that. He even had taken her to emergency after beating the crap out of her.”
Jackie says her own mother had lived downstairs from Carl and Becky and had heard the two argue. “My mother called the police on numerous occasions for Carl beating Becky,” she says. After Becky went missing, Jackie evicted Carl.
Carl was a problem child, she says: “He’s always been a liar. Was he angry? Yeah. He beat up a boy so bad he knocked a few of the boy’s teeth out.”
She told Kraemer something disturbing: Carl’s uncle, Granville Rodgers, was an ex-Milwaukee cop and knew some of the officers investigating Becky’s case. But even more alarming was this: Granville operated Unity Funeral Services, a small funeral home at 39th and Center streets, minutes from Carl’s house.
Kraemer’s suspicions kicked into high gear. What if Granville Rodgers helped Carl dispose of Becky’s body? They could have buried her body in an unmarked grave or in a coffin with another corpse. No one would know.
A private investigator tracked down a startling piece of information: Carl’s car, said the investigator, had been parked outside the funeral home at 4 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2003 – the morning after Becky went missing. Copies of two parking tickets confirmed this, Kraemer says.
Kraemer began posting fliers across the street from Unity’s funeral home and monitoring the funerals it handled. Certain Rodgers was involved, Kraemer persuaded a district attorney in Kenosha County to approve the exhumation of two graves in two Kenosha cemeteries – burials performed by Unity just days after Becky’s disappearance. “I thought, ‘Oh God, please let her be in there,’ ” Kraemer says, “but I had very mixed feelings.” She was terrified of what she might find. Neither exhumation, however, revealed any evidence of Becky.
Granville Rodgers will not talk about Kraemer. “I have no response to that gutter stuff,” he says.
Kraemer wouldn’t let up. She befriended prosecutors and retired cops, picking their brains on how to track suspects and search for leads. She sent letters to the governor and Milwaukee’s mayor, police chief, county sheriff and district attorney. And she courted the media, circulating a feel-good video of Becky to every news outlet she could. Her story got national play, including coverage by ABC’s “20/20” and “Dateline NBC.”
“I may be a media whore, but it’s because my daughter is missing. Goddamn it, I gave birth to that baby. I breast-fed her. I loved that child.”
Kraemer contacted a Philadelphia missing person’s advocate, who offered a $100,000 reward for information on Becky’s disappearance. She brought in “cadaver dogs” trained to search for human remains. She called on psychics, following their leads to a river and to a set of railroad tracks. “If a psychic tells me there’s a chance Becky is down at the bottom of a river, I want to jump in and find her,” she says, her voice trembling. “You try anything.”
Carl Rodgers II was married for nearly 13 years before meeting Becky Marzo. His marriage ended in a fit of violence.
In November 2000, Carl argued with his wife in their kitchen. “He came up behind me and held me very tight,” his wife told police. “He … threw me down the basement stairs. … He would not let me go up the stairs. … I thought right then and there that he would kill me and then himself.” He finally let her go. She was hospitalized with a concussion.
Carl pleaded no contest to battery and was sentenced to a stayed seven-month jail term and 18 months of probation. The court also ordered him to attend a Batterers Anonymous program.
Carl had been violent in the past, his wife said to police. “In 1998, he slammed me up against the bathroom wall while choking me when I was holding our son, who was 1 at the time,” she reported. The couple divorced in August 2001.
In July 2005, following Becky’s disappearance, Carl began dating June Insixiengmay. Three months later, she moved into his house on Milwaukee’s West Side. The relationship soon turned abusive, “with him saying I was worthless and would never make it in life,” she said in an interview.
Insixiengmay first became aware of Karren Kraemer when she saw her stapling fliers to telephone poles along the street. “Every time, Carl would have me take them down. If I didn’t, he would hit me,” Insixiengmay says.
Kraemer approached Insixiengmay at her workplace one day, claiming Carl had killed her daughter. “I just blew her off,” Insixiengmay says. But one morning, while getting ready for work, Insixiengmay found Carl in the garage sawing a black and silver handgun into pieces, she says. Carl didn’t want the gun in the house, he said, and told her to toss the pieces into a dumpster on her way to work.
Carl had another handgun and three rifles in the house, she says. “So why cut up one gun, not another?” she asks. “I said, ‘Did you use that gun to kill Becky?’ And he was like, ‘Shut up. You don’t need to know about that. The past is the past.’ ”
The relationship was over after two years. On Aug. 31, 2007, Insixiengmay filed rape charges against Rodgers. He was indicted on two counts of second-degree sexual assault. His stepfather posted $6,000 bail. Carl was scheduled to go to trial in January 2008; he faced prison if convicted.
He never went to trial. On Oct. 5, 2007, police were called to Carl’s home, where they were met by his mother and his lawyer. In the kitchen, they found a suicide note.
Carl’s body was found in the garage in his red, two-door 1994 Pontiac Firebird, his prized race car. A gasoline-powerd generator sat nearby, switched to the “on” position. Its gas tank was empty. He had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
On the dashboard of the Firebird was an audio tape recorder. According to his mother and stepfather, Carl left these words: “I am not a monster. I never killed anybody. I never raped anybody. I’m just tired of all this…” It was three days after his 39th birthday.
The news stunned Kraemer. “As much as I wanted him dead, I didn’t want to see it – for the family,” she told Milwaukee Magazine at the time. “It’s kind of bittersweet. At first, I lost hope. I thought, ‘Now I’ll never have an answer.’ But then I thought, ‘I’m not going to let him win. I will still find Becky.’ ”
The likelihood of a prison sentence pushed him to take his life, says Carl’s stepmother Jackie. “You can only lie for so long,” she says. “It would’ve been nice if he would have told the truth at the end.”
But Carl’s mother, Anita Stemper, defends her son as a “gentle-natured” person who was incapable of the violence Kraemer and Jackie Rodgers describe. “Carl was a very smart kid,” she says. “We had him at Washington High School. When he was 14 or 15 years old, three guys jumped him. Carl swung and hit one of them and knocked his teeth down his throat. … That was the only time we had to go down to school for anything.”
She also believes Carl’s former girlfriend faked the rape charge at Kraemer’s suggestion. (Kraemer acknowledges she drove to Arkansas to bring June Insixiengmay back to Milwaukee to testify against Carl and provided lodging to her while she was in Wisconsin. But Insixiengmay denies being manipulated by Kraemer.)
“Karren Kraemer said he killed himself because he was guilty,” says Anita Stemper. “No. He was just tired of being hunted. I’d be talking to him on the phone and he’d say, ‘Mom, there’s a car behind me.’ And they’d be following him.”
Jeff Stemper also sees his stepson as innocent. “If there’s some evidence out there, I’d like to see it,” Stemper said shortly after Carl’s suicide. He blames the suicide on Kraemer. “Carl’s life was a nightmare. He’s lost jobs. He’s been embarrassed for years because she had the resources to basically hassle all his friends and family from day one.
“I know [Kraemer] is grieving from the loss of her daughter,” he adds. “But her daughter’s missing.She had gone to Florida before. She hung out with, Carl said, some rough people down there.
“Carl had a penchant for bad choices in women,” Jeff Stemper continues. “He brought Becky Marzo to our house on Thanksgiving. And we were like, ‘This girl’s a tramp. Why are you with her?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, she’s got a problem…’ He ended up breaking up with her and she ended up disappearing. And that’s Karren Kraemer’s whole case. This woman has been harassing him since 2003.”
Anita Stemper says Kraemer has twisted the facts. The suggestion that Carl’s uncle helped dispose of Becky’s body is absurd, she says.
“I really have compassion for her,” she says of Kraemer. “I would be looking for mydaughter, for myson. But I wouldn’t be directing it so it’s hurting the family. … I don’t hate anybody that bad to do the things she’s done.
“I just hope Becky shows up alive, and then she can say her mother was wrong.”
In 2009, more than 700,000 missing person cases were filed in the United States, according to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Most – about 77 percent – were for minors. The cases of adults, like Becky’s, usually get low priority from police and the press. One advocate calls adult missing persons “the nation’s silent mass disaster.”
“Police don’t even want to take the reports,” Kraemer says. “I’ve heard this from parents all across the United States.”
If a family does persuade police to investigate, the case can drag on for months, even years – a far cry from TV’s “Without a Trace,” where cases are tidily wrapped up in an hour’s time. In real life, most cases are never solved. It falls to the families to do the legwork themselves and search for answers.
In Kraemer’s search, she sometimes crosses the line. She admits it. While Carl was alive, she posted fliers at Union Grove racetrack and monitored his racing schedule. In a trial run before one race – just days before his suicide – Carl’s car engine blew up. “Someone,” Kraemer smiles knowingly, put fine-grade sugar in his car’s gas tank.
Kraemer became convinced she could prove Carl’s guilt if she got into his e-mail account. She had his e-mail address, but needed his password.
In her pursuit, she’d heard that Carl’s dog had been picked up one day by the Wisconsin Humane Society. On a hunch, she called the pound and started asking questions: “When was the dog picked up?” she asked an employee. “What type of breed was it? And do you happen to know the dog’s name?”
“Dominator,” answered the employee.
She logged onto Carl’s account and typed the word “Dominator.”
“And boom! Up came all his e-mails,” she says.
Kraemer, meanwhile, had set up an e-mail account with a bogus name at a public library (with the help of a former Department of Homeland Security agent) so her online snooping couldn’t be traced. Using this account, she logged on to Carl’s e-mail every day. “I controlled that guy’s computer for three months.”
Kraemer was let into Carl’s house during a police search. She made the most of the opportunity. Rummaging through his dresser, she found health documents showing he had contracted several STDs. She scanned the documents and, using her fake e-mail account, sent them to more than 300 people from his address book, followed by another e-mail tying Becky’s abuse and disappearance to Carl.
“I know it was illegal to break into his e-mail, but who gives a shit?” she now says. “He killed my daughter.”
Twenty-nine women responded to the e-mail, saying Carl abused them or gave them an STD, Kraemer says. “The police said there was nothing they could do unless they had contracted AIDS, and because they didn’t report the abuse at the time, they couldn’t open an investigation,” she says.
Haunted by recurring dreams of her daughter calling out to her, Kraemer pushes herself to the edge. “Karren is 100 percent obsessed,” says a close friend. “Nothing is going to stop her.”
As an outlet for her near-manic frustration, in 2008, Kraemer co-founded the Broken Wings Network, a nonprofit advocacy group for families of missing people and victims of domestic violence. She speaks at schools and prisons around the state. Her group worked on legislation with the U.S. State Department and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, she says, to change the system of categorizing missing people. She’s working with an Oconomowoc church and an Appleton nonprofit to start a battered women’s shelter in Ixonia.
But Kraemer’s group seems a bit slipshod in its organization. The board of directors of Broken Wings has never met, says a board member. The organization has not registered with the state as a nonprofit, according to the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing, but it does have a tax-exempt status from the IRS. And Kraemer uses funds raised by Broken Wings to pay for her speaking expenses and investigative projects – including her search for Becky – according to the former board member.
Even some of Kraemer’s friends and supporters question her methods. “She gets a lot out of being the mother of the missing girl,” as one friend puts it. Others say she plays loose with the facts. “She twists things in a way she thinks will get the most attention,” says someone involved in the Milwaukee police investigation.
Kraemer wrongly singled out police officers for being friends to Granville Rodgers, says the investigator. She also got it wrong that Carl Rodgers II parked his pickup in front of his uncle’s funeral home on the night Becky vanished; in fact, it was the vehicle of his father, Carl Rodgers Sr., a Chevy Suburban that was sometimes used as a hearse. And Kraemer’s claim that blood spots in Carl’s closet were identified as Becky’s blood is untrue, investigators say. “None of the samples tested positive as being Becky Marzo’s blood,” says police spokeswoman Schwartz.
“As much as I feel for Karren Kraemer,” the investigator says, “she’s alienated a lot of people in her quest to find out what happened to her daughter. We did everything we could, and she made us out to be the bad guys.”
Karren Kraemer is an expert at working the system. “She knows how to deal with law enforcement,” says her friend Fred Carsky, a retired Wauwatosa police detective who now trains search dogs, “and can really relate to the victims’ families. She plays both sides of the street.”
But where does the role of victims’ advocate end and the role of vigilante begin?
A year ago, Carsky put Kraemer in touch with a woman in Tomahawk, Wis., whose brother went missing in 1996. Ben Wilberding was 21 when last seen. “He was on the family property, staying with his older brother,” says Candie Wetenkamp, Ben’s sister. The investigation stalled, she says, and she confided with Kraemer about her frustrations with the police.
In late July of 2010, Wetenkamp finally got investigators with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department and the State Crime Lab to agree to search the family’s land, including the dilapidated mobile home where Wilberding and his older brother once lived. Kraemer made the four-hour drive to help out. “They needed someone to shake things up a little bit,” she says.
Police found no human remains. But days later, Wetenkamp’s family continued to search with private investigators.
Kraemer decided to talk to Arthur “Artie” Wilberding, 41, Ben’s older brother and presumed to be the last person to see him alive. “The rumors have always been that Artie killed him and hid the body on the property,” Kraemer says. “So I just went and knocked on his door.” After more than an hour, with Candie Wetenkamp waiting in her car, Kraemer walked out with what she says was an admission from Artie Wilberding.
“He was very remorseful,” she says. “He said he knew where the body was, but that [his friend] had killed him.” Kraemer and Wetenkamp went to the house of the friend, an older man and surrogate father to the Wilberding siblings. “He was canning pickles,” Kraemer recalls. “So I’m eating cucumbers and telling him what Artie had told me. He tells me Artiekilled Ben and the body was under the trailer.”
Back they went with the team of private investigators to the family property. And in the ground where the mobile home once stood, they found what appeared to be human bones. “God am I excited,” Kraemer said, hours after the discovery. “It almost feels like I found Becky. I know that must sound crazy…”
The county sheriff was alerted and Arthur was taken into custody on an outstanding warrant for a drug offense. Convicted in August 2010 of possession of THC and theft, he remained in jail in early October but hadn’t been charged with causing harm to his brother. The remains found beneath his mobile home had yet to be identified as human.
Kraemer’s freelance tactics, though, angered Lincoln County deputies. “They told me not to bring the media into it,” she says. But Kraemer did, claiming credit in one TV interview for solving another cold case.
Candie Wetenkamp bristles when asked about Kraemer. “She can’t take all the credit,” she says. “I’ve been the one working this for the past 14 years.”
In another case, Kraemer got a call from a woman who had seen her on “20/20.” The woman, who asked not to be named, lives in a western suburb of Milwaukee. Her daughter went missing two years ago after becoming addicted to heroin.
Kraemer took the mother to a Milwaukee police station to report her daughter missing. (The mother suspected the daughter was in Milwaukee.) They got a “cool reception,” the mother says. “It was like, ‘So what if your daughter’s missing. We can’t do anything.’ ”
Then the woman heard her daughter might be living in Chicago. With Kraemer leading the way, they went to Chicago police and filled out a missing person report. Police records showed she’d been arrested for prostitution, “and within 24 hours, they found where she lived,” Kraemer says.
Kraemer and the mother teamed up with two former prostitutes who now work as undercover investigators with the Cook County Sheriff’s Department. Texting and phoning her daughter, the mother persuaded her to meet at a Denny’s. There, the two investigators intervened, telling the daughter their own horror stories of drugs and prostitution.
But the young woman was living with her pimp and was not ready to come home, she told her mother. Every couple months, the mother and Kraemer drive to Chicago to try to convince her to change her mind.
“I’d like to just kidnap my daughter and have her detoxed,” the mother says. It’s something she’s seriously considering. Kraemer has told her of an intervention group that forcibly subdues people who have fallen into addiction and spirits them away to a center in Tennessee. Kraemer is helping her raise the $4,000 fee.
Kraemer travels outside of Wisconsin to connect with victim’s families. She met Beverly Tallent, a nurse from Louisville, Ky., at a forensics conference in Chicago. They talked for hours. Tallent’s 46-year-old sister, Nancy, disappeared on June 17, 2002. “She walked out of a Walmart in Rushville, Ind., and was missing for four months,” Tallent says. Her remains were found in a soybean field 40 miles away.
“My sister’s case is unsolved,” Tallent says. She has strong suspicions of who killed her, though, and, like Kraemer, has made it her life’s mission to bring the suspect to justice.
Tallent was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after her sister’s death. Kraemer says she, too, was diagnosed with PTSD after Becky was lost. “As part of the post-traumatic stress, there’s that vigilante phase,” says Tallent, “and I see that in Karren. My psychologist calls it the warrior state.
“You begin to you lose yourself,” Tallent continues. “That’s the collateral damage of being a vigilante. You’re stuck in a vacuum. Everybody around you seems to have moved on. But we can’t.”
On many days, the disappointments and roadblocks leave Kraemer feeling like a very weary and defeated warrior.
“Sometimes I can’t believe I can help all these families and I can’t help myself,” she says. “All I can think of is, why can’t I find Becky?”
It’s been seven years since Kraemer’s daughter went missing. At times, you’d swear she is getting over it.
The public Kraemer exudes a practiced bravado, all cuss words and tough talk. She gets her kicks riding an all terrain vehicle – and never wears a helmet. She carries a loaded pearl-handled .22-caliber handgun in a purse holster and laughs unabashedly at the moniker of Pistol-Packin’ Mama that someone gave her.
“I believe in the right to carry. I believe in the death penalty,” she states. “But I also believe in forgiveness, and in second chances.”
Even for Carl Rodgers?
“I’ve forgiven him for what he’s done,” she says. “He’s dead and he’s in hell.”
Once she went to the graveyard where she believed Carl was buried. She brought black roses to toss on his grave, but was disappointed to find Carl had been cremated.
But there’s another side to the Pistol-Packin’ Mama – the more vulnerable mother whose seven-year war has taken its toll. Six years ago, she had her thyroid removed, which she says led to heart damage. A huge hematoma grew on her stomach, and part of her stomach was surgically removed. Since the surgery, she has lost 100 pounds. Legally disabled, Kraemer collects Social Security benefits. Her car, a 2001 Infinity with 265,000 miles on the odometer, has handicapped plates and a poster of Becky in the back window.
“She runs herself ragged, trying to help everybody she possibly can,” says her sister Susan Dietz, who lives in Orlando, Fla. “That’s how she deals with it. Until she finds closure, I don’t think she’s going to be happy again.”
Kraemer lives with her husband and their oldest daughter on a quiet cul de sac near Oconomowoc. The three-bedroom rural home is a bucolic respite from the ills of the world. In the backyard, a wooden deck overlooks 3 1/2 acres of old-growth forest owned by a state conservancy. Three dogs have the run of the place.
Dave Kraemer – a maintenance engineer, avid sportsman and the family chef – seldom talks publicly about his lost daughter and tries to get his wife to slow down. “My husband is like, ‘Can’t you just do nothing?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I would die.’ ”
Karren Kraemer is on the road three or four days a week, spreading the word about her missing daughter and domestic violence. She’s become a practiced public speaker. Almost three years ago, when addressing a dozen new police recruits, she stood timidly in a classroom at the Milwaukee Police Academy, fiddling nervously with the controls to a VCR and choking back tears as she talked of Becky’s childhood. Today, she’s poised and persuasive, accentuating her story with dramatic gestures, rolling her eyes and smiling conspiratorially as she reveals how she read through Carl’s divorce records to find his Social Security number.
One August day, she made a regular stop at the Ellsworth Correctional Center for women in Racine County. She sat in the visitation room with a small group of inmates dressed in olive green. Gazing through a window, past razor wire at an empty playground outside, she told her life story:
“I was one of nine children, born in Texas and raised in Milwaukee. My father abused us, physically and sexually. My mother was a battered wife. She died of cancer at 56, but I think she died partly because she gave up on life.
“When I was 15, my dad beat me so bad, I had a sinus hemorrhage. I warned him if he came into my bedroom again, I would kill him. One night, he came into my room and got in bed with me. He started grabbing my butt and I beat the holy shit out of him. I took the keys to his Dodge Dart and I ran.
“I lived on the streets in Milwaukee and did a lot of things I’m not proud of. I had to steal to eat, prostitute myself to survive.
“When I was 17, I met Dave, my husband. We moved in together, and my life became normal. My first piece of furniture was a bean bag chair.
“Dave and I moved to Oak Creek and got married. We were what you would consider an average family. We were strict parents. When the streetlights came on, the kids had to come home.” As Kraemer spoke, she passed around a small stone shaped like an angel, a token she gave to Becky on her 15th birthday. “I want you to meet a little bit of Becky.”
“My whole goal in life was to break the cycle of abuse. When I got married, I thought I broke the cycle. But I really didn’t. My own daughter was abused and killed by her boyfriend.”
In the spring of 2010, without informing the police, Karren Kraemer organized a team of volunteers to search an underground bunker behind the house once occupied by Carl and Becky. For years, Kraemer had been suspicious of the bunker, which was sealed tight with cement. Police said they had no reason to open it. Now, she got permission from the landlord and brought her own excavation crew – a backhoe operator and a mom-and-pop company from Michigan with a tractor-like machine fitted with ground-penetrating radar.
The radar picked up unusual shapes in the bunker, and by the middle of the first day, the site resembled a small archaeological dig. Or really, a grave. Lifting off a cement cover, the backhoe operator broke into the bunker, uncovering buckets of detritus – liquor bottles, food wrappers, lacy fabric, a woman’s purse.
Word eventually leaked to police and media, who watched and waited in the yard. Carefully, with rakes and shovels, the volunteers dug deeper. Suddenly, a patch of dark dirt – a sign, said one volunteer, of decomposition. Then a layer of lye, often used to hasten the decomposition of animal carcasses.
On hands and knees, sifting with their fingers through dirt and mud, the volunteers found what they believed were human bone fragments, and what looked like a tooth and a strand of hair.
“We found a piece of bone,” Kraemer told reporters excitedly, tears welling in her eyes. “I pray to God my baby’s down there. I’ve waited seven years.”
Police huddled with Kraemer and her volunteers, and yellow crime-scene tape was put up from tree to tree along the sidewalk, where a crowd of curious neighbors had gathered.
But Kraemer’s hopes faded into gloom. By the time the TV news reporters went live for their 5 p.m. stand-ups, the Milwaukee County medical examiner had determined the bones were, in fact, “non-human remains.”
Visibly crushed, Kraemer tried to put on a brave face. “Am I disappointed? Yes. Am I going to stop? Absolutely not. … If I don’t find Becky, I cry and feel disappointed. I sleep a lot, I drink a bottle of wine, and then I move on. … This is something I might have to do for the rest of my life.”
The following afternoon, the yard was deserted. The TV crews were gone, the yellow tape was torn down, the neighbors had gone back home to resume their lives. Toward evening, workers arrived to backfill the open bunker with dirt and rocks and tree branches. It was not a grave after all, just an empty hole in the ground.
Kurt Chandler is a senior editor for Milwaukee Magazine.Write to him at kurt.chandler@milwaukeemag.com.
