Murders of Lee Rotatori and Thomas Freeman

Lee Rotatori was a 32-year-old American woman from Nunica, Michigan who had recently relocated to Council Bluffs to work at the nearby Jennie Edmundson Hospital in June 1982. She was new to the area and did not have permanent housing, so she stayed at the Best Western Frontier Motor Lodge hotel for several nights.[1]

On the morning of June 25, 1982, Rotatori's boss called to hotel because she had not appeared for her first formal day of work. When employees went to check on her room, they found her murdered and turned over the scene to investigators. They found that she had been murdered by a single stab wound to the heart, and that she had been sexually assaulted. There were no formal suspects for decades.[1][2]

Omaha World-Herald article dated July 4, 1982, published 10 days after his body was discovered, reported then-Sergeant Larry Williams as saying, "the killer could have been five feet away or a thousand miles away." In an attempt to find answers, her employer and other local organizations put up rewards for thousands of dollars, but with no success. As a result, a cold case with no suspects or answers began and no suspects were revealed for decades.[1]

In 2019, authorities submitted DNA evidence to Parabon NanoLabs in an attempt to identify a suspect. In February 2021, Thomas Oscar Freeman was found to be the apparent owner of DNA found at the crime scene. Freeman's daughter agreed to give a DNA sample, which confirmed him as the perpetrator of the murder.[1][3]

In 2022, it was announced by authorities that the perpetrator had been identified as Freeman. It was also revealed that Freeman himself was the victim of a murder around July 1982. His decomposing body was discovered on October 30, 1982. It was determined that his body has sustained multiple gunshot wounds before being thrown into a shallow grave. Investigators believe the two murders were connected.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

• List of unsolved murders