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Anonymous letters in cold case investigations are not unusual.
Cases that receive sustained media attention generate correspondence from people with varying levels of actual knowledge.
From genuine tipsters who fear retaliation to people with oblique or tangential connections to the case to individuals who have consumed a great deal of media coverage and have convinced themselves they know something they don’t.
What distinguished the 2013 letter, in investigators’ assessment was its specificity.
The kind of specific detail that media coverage of a case does not typically provide.
The kind of detail that a person who was present at or adjacent to the crime would know.
Investigators who read the letter and assessed its content concluded that the writer knew something direct about Janet Ross’s death rather than something derived from public accounts.
They appealed to that person to come forward.
No one came.
What the person who wrote that letter knows is something that the formal investigation has not been able to access.
Whether the writer is still alive in 2026, whether the knowledge they possessed in 2013 has been shared with anyone else.
Whether the circumstances of their life have changed in ways that might make coming forward now feel possible when it didn’t in 2013.
None of these questions have been publicly answered.
What can be said is that the letter exists in the case file and that investigators took it seriously.
And that the person who wrote it chose silence over accountability.
And has maintained that silence for more than a decade.
If that person is reading this now or watching this video, the Portage County Sheriff’s Office is still reachable.
The case is still a case.
Janet Rusch’s family is still waiting.
The reclassification of 2022 does not change what the anonymous letter suggests.
It does not change what Schweitzer believed across the decades of his work on the case.
It does not change the family’s knowledge of who Janet was and whether she was the kind of person who would walk 15 miles from her campus on a fall afternoon and die accidentally in the woods without anyone knowing she was gone for a month.
The reclassification is a legal and investigative conclusion reached by a detective who reviewed the case file comprehensively.
It is not a certainty.
In cold case work, certainty is often the thing that never arrives.
And the conclusions that replace it are always provisional in ways that feel permanent to the families waiting on the other end of them.
Nancy Rusch, who was 21 when she got the phone call on the evening of November 17th, 1984.
is in her 60s now.
She has spent four decades grieving a sister who went missing on an October afternoon and was found a month later in Wisconsin woods.
And then four more years accepting a revised conclusion that contradicts everything the official investigation told her for 38 years.
That is a specific and compounded loss, not just the loss of Janet, but the loss of the narrative that had organized the grief.
The answer she expected has been replaced by a different answer that she doesn’t accept.
She is waiting for the truth the way families wait when they know that the answer they’ve been given doesn’t feel like the right one.
Janet Ross was 20 years old.
She studied business at U Stevens Point.
She walked south of campus on October 11th, 1984 and was found in the woods 15 miles away a month later.
Four decades of investigation as a homicide.
A 2022 reclassification as most likely accidental.
A family that does not accept it.
An anonymous letter from 2013 whose writer has not come forward.
And a retired detective who spent his career on this case and still believes what he believed when he started.
That someone knows what happened to Janet Ross and has not yet said so.
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Janet Ross deserves the truth, whatever it is.
The Portage County community has been living with this case for 40 years.
It is the only unsolved homicide or the only case that was treated as an unsolved homicide for nearly four decades in the department’s history, which gives it a specific weight in the community’s self-understanding.
Communities that carry an unsolved murder carry it differently than communities that have resolved their worst case.
The Rosch case was resolved in the legal sense in 2022 by the reclassification to accidental death.
The community is living with what that resolution feels like, which is imperfect and contested, and not the ending that anyone expected.
The family is living with the gap between the official conclusion and what they believe happened to their daughter and sister.
There is a particular quality to the grief of families in cases like Janet Rosch’s, cases where the investigation ran for decades as one kind of case, and then was reclassified as a different kind of case, where the official accounting changed in ways that the family did not anticipate and did not consent to.
The family of a homicide victim who is told their case has been solved by a conviction has a specific ending to organize their grief around, even if that ending is inadequate to the loss.
The family of a homicide victim who is told after 40 years that the investigation no longer believes it was a homicide has a different and more destabilizing experience.
The anchor that held their grief in place, the belief that someone had done this, that someone was responsible, that justice was owed and might eventually be delivered, has been pulled up.
They are left with a death and an explanation they don’t believe, and a question that will not be answered the way they need it to be.
Janet Rosch, 20 years old, business student at U Stevens Point, October 11th, 1984, found in Wisconsin woods, 40 years of investigation.
A letter from someone who knew something.
A reclassification that her family won’t accept, and a sister who still gets tearful when she talks about the phone call on a November evening in 1984.
Remember her.
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What does the reclassification mean for the anonymous letter writer? If Janet Ross’s death was an accident, then the letter writer’s specific knowledge, the detail that convinced investigators in 2013 that the writer knew something real, describes an accident rather than a murder.
That is a different kind of knowledge and a different kind of silence.
A person who witnessed an accidental death and chose not to report it or come forward is in a different legal and moral position than a person who witnessed a murder.
But the silence is the same silence.
The letter is the same letter.
The knowledge is still knowledge that the family doesn’t have.
Whatever the person who wrote that 2013 letter knows about October 11th, 1984, in the area south of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, whether it describes a murder or an accident, it is knowledge that would give Janet Ross’s family the specific account of what happened to their daughter and sister that they have been waiting 40 years to receive.
The Portage County Sheriff’s Department can still be reached.
The case is still a case.
The family is still waiting.
And the person who wrote that letter in 2013 still has something to say that would matter to people who have been waiting for four decades to hear it.
Janet Ross, say her name.
Keep saying it.
20 years old.
Stevens Point.
October 1984.
Still waiting for the truth.
