On the afternoon of March 1st, 1992, a truck driver named Barbara Leverton, who had pulled over to the side of Interstate 80 in Sweetwater, Wyoming to change out her fuel tanks, beheld the appalling sight of a naked, frozen corpse lying face down at the bottom of a slope off the roadside, near an area known as Bitter Creek.
The victim—who would eventually be nicknamed Rose Doe or Bitter Creek Betty—was believed to be white or Hispanic, between twenty-four and thirty-two years of age, standing about five-foot-eight and weighing approximately one-hundred-twenty-five pounds. She had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a tattoo of a rose on her right breast. Other distinguishing marks included a scar from a former Caesarean section, and a scar on the calf of her left leg. She wore a gold necklace, and a gold ring on her left ring finger. In addition, a pair of pink underwear and a pair of sweat pants were recovered near the body and presumed to belong to the victim.
A post-mortem examination revealed that Bitter Creek Betty had endured unimaginable suffering before her death. She had been raped and sodomized, severely beaten about the face, and partially strangled, before finally being dispatched by being stabbed through the nostril with an icepick or similar implement. The coroner determined that the victim had been dead for anywhere from a few weeks to five months, and that her body had likely been dumped from a moving vehicle.
During the course of the ensuing investigation, it was discovered that the victim had obtained her tattoo at a shop in Tucson, Arizona. The artist who inked the tattoo remembered the girl had been wearing a brown dress with yellow flowers on it when she came in the shop, and also that she had told him she had been hitchhiking from place to place.
All that was known at the time about the killer of Bitter Creek Betty is that he had type O blood, and was probably responsible for yet another murder in Wyoming, which would take place shortly afterward, in mid-April.
Crime Immemorial 