She was 20 years old. She was a business student at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, living on campus in Watson Hall, building the ordinary life of a college sophomore in a mid-sized Wisconsin city in the middle of a fall semester.
On October 11th, 1984, Janet Robe left Watson Hall. That fact is documented, reliable. The last clear data point in a timeline that becomes murky almost immediately afterward.
Passing motorists saw her walking south of Stevens Point at approximately 1:30 in the afternoon.
A month later, on November 17th, 1984, hunters found her body in a wooded area near State Highway 54 and County Highway J South, approximately 15 miles from the campus she had left on foot 5 weeks earlier.
She had been dead for some time. The decomposition that the Wisconsin fall had worked on her remains made a specific cause of death difficult to establish.
Though investigators operated on the assumption that she had been strangled. The case was worked as a homicide for nearly four decades.
Hundreds of people were interviewed. Numerous persons of interest were developed and cleared or not definitively cleared.
The body was exhumed in 2002 for advanced DNA analysis that produced no actionable result.
An anonymous letter arrived at the Portage County Sheriff’s Office in 2013 with enough specific knowledge that investigators became convinced the writer knew something about what had happened to Janet.
And that letter, like so many promising developments in a case that had been running for decades, led nowhere that produced a to In 2022, Detective Dustin Kitzmann, assigned to the cold case in May 2020, announced that the investigation had reached a new conclusion based on a comprehensive review of all available evidence.
The determination had been made that Janet Robison’s death was most likely an accident rather than a homicide.
That conclusion, reached after nearly four decades of investigation as a murder case, was not welcomed by a family that had spent those decades waiting for a different kind of answer.
Before we examine what the evidence supports and what the 2022 reclassification means, you have to understand who Janet Robison was and what her death did to the family and the Portage County community that never stopped looking for whoever killed her.
Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in October 1984, was a college city of moderate size, organized around the university and the paper valley economy that the surrounding region sustained.
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point campus is set in a city of approximately 25,000 people in central Wisconsin, far enough from the major metropolitan centers to feel distinctly small city, close enough to the agricultural and forested landscape of central Wisconsin to have the specific quality of a place where the outdoors is always nearby and the seasons make themselves known with force.
October in Wisconsin is a month of compressed beauty and rapid transition. The leaves at their peak color, the temperatures dropping, the daylight shortening, the hunters going into the woods as the animals they seek go into their fall patterns.
The hunting season that was underway in November 1984, when when body was found, was the context in which the discovery was made.
Hunters moving through the wooded area near Highway 54 and County J South found what the autumn had hidden through its weeks of covering.
Janet Rosch was the daughter of Leland and Nancy Rosch. She had grown up in the Merrill area north of Stevens Point in a family that had the particular quality of Midwestern rural families.
Rooted, agricultural adjacent organized around the rhythms of work and church and community. Her sister Nancy was 21 in October of 1984.
A year older and close enough to Janet in age to have shared childhood in a specific and remembered way.
When Nancy received the phone call from the Portage County Sheriff’s Office at approximately 5:00 in the evening on November 17th she and her father had just come in from deer hunting.
She picked up the phone. She heard the deputy’s voice. The memory of that moment would stay with her for the rest of her life in the precise and indelible way that these moments stay.
Janet was dead. The body had been in that wooded area since some point in October.
The cause had not been established. The person responsible had not been identified. The initial investigation was conducted by the Portage County Sheriff’s Office with the resources and methods available in 1984 a time before DNA analysis before electronic case management systems before the internet that would later allow investigators to conduct public appeals and generate tip volume that was previously impossible.
Investigators interviewed hundreds of people. They developed persons of interest who were subjected to polygraph examinations and background checks and the various investigative pressures that 1984 law enforcement applied.
They took statements from people who had seen Janet on October 11th, who had seen a vehicle in the area where she was found, who had knowledge, real or speculative, about what might have happened to a 20-year-old woman walking south of Stevens Point on a fall afternoon.
No one was charged. The case went cold in the slow way that cold cases go cold before the phrase cold case existed as a standard designation.
The leads ran out. The investigation scaled down. The file went to the archive. Detective Kurt Schwieters spent much of his career working the Rosh case.
He became, in the community’s understanding, the man who had made the Rosh case his mission, who returned to it periodically across decades, who re-interviewed witnesses as years passed and circumstances changed, who applied each new forensic development to the evidence that had been preserved from 1984.
In 2002, under Schwieters’ direction, Janet Rosh’s body was exhumed from St. Paul Lutheran Cemetery in Marathon County.
The exhumation was conducted in the hope that modern DNA analysis could extract genetic material from the remains that would identify a suspect.
The state crime laboratory analyzed the samples. No DNA profile that could generate an identification was produced.
Schwieters continued working the case after the exhumation produced no result. In 2013, a letter arrived at the Portage County Sheriff’s Office.
The letter was anonymous. It contained specific about Janet Ross’s disappearance. Information that investigators assessed as being of a kind that a person with direct knowledge of the circumstances might possess.
The specificity of the letter’s content convinced investigators that the writer knew something real about what had happened rather than speculating from public information.
Detective Ostrowski, who had taken on portions of the investigation alongside Schweers, spoke to media about the letter, indicating that it was the kind of lead the investigation was actively pursuing.
An appeal was made to the letter writer to come forward directly. No one came forward.
The letter, like many promising developments in the Ross case over four decades, opened a door that led to another closed door.
Detective Dustin Kitsman was assigned the Ross cold case in May 2020. He conducted what investigators described as a comprehensive review of the entire case file, the statements, the physical evidence, the forensic results, the persons of interest, the letters and tips that had accumulated across 36 years of active and semi-active investigation.
In October 2022, the Portage County Sheriff’s Office announced that based on Detective Kitsman’s review, the official determination of the case had been revised.
Investigators believed that Janet Ross’s death was most likely accidental rather than homicidal. The announcement described the conclusion as the result of a thorough examination of all available evidence.
The family’s response was not acceptance. Nancy Ross, who had been waiting for four decades for the answer she expected, did not accept the reclassification as the final word.
The community of people who had followed the case across those decades, including retired detective Schwiers, who had spent much of his career working it as a homicide, did not uniformly accept the reclassification.
The specific evidence that led Kitzmann to the accidental death conclusion was not fully detailed in public statements, which left the family and the public in the position of being told the answer had changed without being given a complete account of why.
What the Roush case illustrates in this specific and painful way is the particular difficulty of cold cases where the evidence was limited from the beginning and has degraded further across the intervening decades.
A cause of death that was never specifically established, that was assumed to be strangulation, but could not be confirmed from the remains as found, is a foundation on which two different conclusions can be built depending on which way the investigator reads the available evidence.
A 20-year-old woman found dead in the Wisconsin woods 15 miles from her campus after a month is either a victim of violence or a person who died of exposure or accident and was found by hunters where she fell.
The evidence that would definitively settle which of those is true has either never existed or has been consumed by four decades of Wisconsin winters.
Janet Roush was 20 years old. She was a business student at UW-Stevens Point. She had a family that loved her and a sister who received the worst phone call on a November evening in 1984 and has been waiting for the right answer ever since.
The investigation that ran as a homicide for 38 years was reclassified in 2022 as most likely accidental.
Her family does not accept that conclusion. The case remains, for them, open in the way that matters.
The way that says someone knows what happened to their sister and daughter and has not yet said so.
Say her name. Janet Ross. 20 years old. Stevens Point, Wisconsin, October 11th, 1984. Still waiting for the truth.
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The 2013 anonymous letter deserves more attention than it typically receives in accounts of this case because it represents a specific kind of knowledge that is difficult to explain away.
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. Subscribe and bear witness to the cases that don’t end cleanly.
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. Subscribe and keep the attention on the cases that need it most. 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.
