On June 25, 1982, Lee Gunsalus Rotatori, a 32-year old American woman, was sexually assaulted and murdered in her hotel room by Thomas Oscar Freeman in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

The murder went unsolved for nearly 40 years, until it was announced by authorities in 2022 that the perpetrator had been identified as Freeman using investigative genetic genealogy.

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.

[1][2] An Omaha World-Herald article dated July 4, 1982, published 10 days after Rotatori's 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.

His conviction was later overturned on appeal, with the Supreme Court of Illinois ruling that Nemke's preliminary hearing was not conducted fairly.