Once I heard that they called her Frozen Betty, I couldn’t unhear it. My heart cried for the woman. A woman I never knew even though her pain and abandonment rang through me, especially when I heard they called her Frozen Betty.
I learned about Bette Jean Kawczynski, aka Betty Wilson, while I was conducting research for an article on the 1987 unsolved murder mystery of Barbara Blackstone. I forget who was the first old timer cop to mention to me about Frozen Betty, but there has been quite a few since. They always felt Bette Jean’s murder was tied to Blackstone’s and some other assaults in Wisconsin.
At first, especially over a decade ago when I started digging into this story, information on Bette Jean was difficult to come by. But as the internet expanded and more archived news sites appeared I was able to gather some information about her.
Police believed her to be a prostitute and drug addict and from the Chicago area. She was found in Monroe County, Wisconsin near the Juneau County line off of Hwy A just southeast of Tomah and just outside of Clifton. She was found deposited in a culvert. The discovery was had by a couple of Amish kids on the way home from school.
A couple of them mentioned to how the investigation back then took them down to Chicago, a just over 3 hour ride from Mauston, Wisconsin. It was while there, in Chicago, they learned from some other working ladies that Bette used to talk about a male friend up in Wisconsin, Joe. They said sometimes he’d take her up there for visits. Bette didn’t drive.
That name, Joe, rang a bell with the Blackstone case and another case that happened in Juneau County, one that made national news in 1991 and was known as the Sex Slave Case of Lyndon Station.
As for which Joe those working ladies were talking about, police never were able to confirm. In their core, their gut and where the evidence led them, they told me they knew — but, they could never prove it and during a prime chance to have needed evidence, mistakes and mishandling of the case occurred — evidence was lost forever. That story will be told in a future post.
Sadly, one of two of the people who knew exactly what happened was Bette Jean and she was silenced forever. Those Amish kids found her on February 15, 1989, naked except for panties and knee socks, and truly she was frozen with a rope still around her neck, leaving no doubt how the life was squeezed out of her. An autopsy would give a deeper look into the torture she was forced taking a last breath experiencing, she also had a skull fracture.
Her mother was interviewed for an article and quoted as saying she hadn’t seen Bette in two to three years. She did say that while she hadn’t seen her they did still communicate and the last time she had heard from her was just a few months prior to her body being discovered- she hadn’t realized that Bette had been missing.
Police believed that she had been dead for about 6 weeks before being discovered. She was only 28 years old. Most likely a survivor of trauma, deep duried open wounds from a childhood. I always got the sense she felt everyone abandoned her — used her and tossed her away, starting when she was a little girl.
I have yet to find a photo of Bette but I imagine an attractive woman, sad wide set eyes, there’s a bit of wave in her hair, shoulder length, sometimes longer — a gaut hollowness to her although she was average size. That’s the image of her I get in my mind’s eye, whether she did or not, I doubt I will ever know — for fact.
And while not proven, my steps in digging into this story and all the other cases, I cannot help but feel they were touched by the same hand of evil- burned into them for all of eternity, waiting for justice and someone to tell their story of life. Unfortunately, I know more about their stories of death — the circumstances around them and the common threads.
Keep an eye out for more on Bette, Barbara and some more cases that intertwine with one another in ways that appear glaring. Like me, once seeing it all playout, you may find their voices haunting you to keep their memory alive in the name of justice.
