GUILTY WI - Brittany Zimmermann, 21, Madison, 2 April 2008 *arrest in 2020*

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cheko1 said:
I'm sure all my Wis friends will scalp me for this statement. I moved here 22 yrs ago. Apologizing before I start here goes:

I moved here 22 yrs ago. I've always stood up for what I thought was right. As you all know. But..... When I 1st moved here to Wis I noticed the friends I met & encountered would complain & complain but never do a thing about anything.Some had never registered to vote. Yet persistently complained about the school taxes going up & up. Til I could take it no more & said Quit complaining if you don't go down & sign up to vote against these maniacs building new schools. Vote & help get the officals out of office creating these messes.

Unless the trouble knocks on there door they won't do nothing. I'm sure Ang & others on here will agree with me & knows many just like that. If I'm wrong I apologize.
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cheko, I respectfully disagree. Most people I know are actively involved in making changes to better this city. However, I think anywhere you go, you will find people like the ones you describe.

Madison is a wonderful city, I really love it here. We don't have that much murder here and maybe that's part of the reason this isn't being dealt with the way we want. I'm not making excuses for anyone, just thinking out loud. I know that I personally don't feel any less safe here than I did before. But, I'm not a college student living off campus either. My sister lives down there and is taking appropriate precautions to make sure she's safe.
 
Shamrock said:
cheko, I respectfully disagree. Most people I know are actively involved in making changes to better this city. However, I think anywhere you go, you will find people like the ones you describe.

Madison is a wonderful city, I really love it here. We don't have that much murder here and maybe that's part of the reason this isn't being dealt with the way we want. I'm not making excuses for anyone, just thinking out loud. I know that I personally don't feel any less safe here than I did before. But, I'm not a college student living off campus either. My sister lives down there and is taking appropriate precautions to make sure she's safe.
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I agree with things you both said Shamrock and Cheko. I know both types of people. There is nothing worse than a complainer who takes no action. Someone who just waits for others to do it. I have been out of town on family business all week, but right before this murder, I had sent out several rounds of emails to the local talk radio hosts asking them to please raise the topic of Kelly Nolan. No replies.

And Shamrock, I agree with you with respect to the safety that Madison affords us all. I don't live anywhere near campus either though. I am isolated out in the burbs, so I don't feel less safe. If I were college age, living on campus, etc... I would be VERY nervous.

When I was in college in another state, there was a college girl murdered very close to the house I was renting with several roommates. We were scared. Very scared. It changed everything we did. We began taking care to keep the doors locked, walking or riding together, etc... Before the murder we were just free and easy, we walked alone and never thought anything of it. Sadly, it took a young woman's death to wake us all up.
 
Heading to Madison to see my son tomorrow! Will keep following this with interest. Thanks to all for info.

Eve
 
I wonder if this homicide is also related.

http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/280418

As police combed the Downtown area Friday for clues about the murder of a UW-Madison student, more details were released about another unsolved homicide, that of a 65-year-old South Side motel resident known as the "tire man."

George L. "Jody " Thomas died from multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma wounds to the head, according to a search warrant unsealed Friday by Dane County Circuit Court officials. The cause of Thomas ' death was a detail that authorities had declined to release.
Police spokesman Joel DeSpain said he was not aware of any connections investigators were making between the murders of Thomas and Brittany Sue Zimmermann, a UW-Madison student whose body was found in her apartment Wednesday.
 
cheko1 said:
I'm sure all my Wis friends will scalp me for this statement. I moved here 22 yrs ago. Apologizing before I start here goes:

I moved here 22 yrs ago. I've always stood up for what I thought was right. As you all know. But..... When I 1st moved here to Wis I noticed the friends I met & encountered would complain & complain but never do a thing about anything.Some had never registered to vote. Yet persistently complained about the school taxes going up & up. Til I could take it no more & said Quit complaining if you don't go down & sign up to vote against these maniacs building new schools. Vote & help get the officals out of office creating these messes.

Unless the trouble knocks on there door they won't do nothing. I'm sure Ang & others on here will agree with me & knows many just like that. If I'm wrong I apologize.
Click to expand...

This statement could be applied to anywhere in the United States. It's not unique to Wisconsin or Madison. Sorry. Just look at U.S. voting behavior over the last 50 years. Voter participation is abysmal, with the only possible exception being the oldest age groups.

OT: I've never seen or heard of this guy, but he's a local Madison reporter and has written a couple posts about the recent murders. I think his blog is worth a read...
http://dustinchristopher.blogspot.com/
 
From The Isthmus:
“I've lost confidence in the police,” Lou Marino tells Isthmus. “These guys, I've given up on them. They're in over their heads. They don't have the resources. I don't think they have the expertise.”
Marino is referring to the case's lead detective, Matt Misener of the Madison Police Department’s south precinct. He and Debbie say police -- with both the city of Madison and the university -- failed to ensure that UW-Madison students received timely notice of their son's murder, to generate information and protect safety. And they say Madison police have dallied in following through on a promising lead about a man who closely resembles a police sketch of the main suspect.
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I posted this on Joel Marino's thread as well, but this one seems more active. I think it's a very bad sign that the families don't even trust the police at this point. The story about the man at the Crystal Corner is pretty disturbing. I mean, you're likely to encounter some nut jobs any day of the week on Willy Street, but they're usually of the transient or granola variety (I say that lovingly). They wouldn't normally fit the profile of a clean cut soldier type. And this is not just some random lookalike. This is a guy that drunkenly admits that he loves to kill people. Why release the composite if you're not going to follow up your leads, MPD???
 
But the biggest botched opportunity, say the Marinos, was over the identification of a potential match to the man in the sketch. Indeed, they wonder if police would have looked into this lead at all, if they hadn't intervened.

Late on the evening of April 1 -- actually past midnight and into the early morning hours of April 2 -- Madison resident Bregan Fuller noticed that a patron at the Crystal Corner Bar bore a strong resemblance to the sketch of the suspect in Marino's killing. The man, says Fuller, “wanted to fight my friend and I for no apparent reason.” He says he was told by other patrons that the man had earlier shouted, “I can’t wait to get back to Iraq so I can kill more f---ing Iraqis.”

Fuller happened to have a digital camera and was able to snap several pictures of the man.

The next day, Fuller contacted Det. Misener to report what he had found. “He seemed rather disinterested on the phone,” relates Fuller. He says Misener “was so ambivalent about the subject it really blew me away.”

http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=22304

Wow! This article says it all about MPD!
 
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/281396

Kelly Nolan. Joel Marino. Now Brittany Zimmermann. Madison police have been unable to crack those and two other homicide cases in the last 10 months.
Why not?
Police believe that at least three of the five recent unsolved murders were committed by strangers. Experts say murders like that can paralyze a community -- and are generally harder to solve than garden-variety crimes of passion and rage.

"What 's unique to Madison is not that we have three (high profile) homicides, " Madison Police Chief Noble Wray said last week. "What 's unique to Madison is that we have three homicides that have the element of being a stranger homicide, and it 's taking a little longer to solve.
<SNIP>
 
Hi everyone. In my search to find ANY news on Brittany over the last several days, I found absolutely nothing. :furious:

The one thing I did run across was another interesting local forum discussion you might find insightful. This seems to be the sentiments of the entire community, and the police and media are simply ignoring it and praying it will go away. :mad:

http://www.madison.com/wsj/forums/viewtopic.php?t=44726

Some forum quotes you will read at this link are:

cfx794
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Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 2:51 pm Post subject: Time to bring in the FBI. This case is going cold.
******http://www.madison.com/wsj/forums/posting.php?mode=quote&p=380487
Theghost
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Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 4:20 pm Post subject: It appears MPD is grasping at straws at this point. First they arrest some homeless individuals and now they are looking at panhandlers. Who's next...the neighborhood nursing home residents? I agree with the original post that another agency could do a better job.
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uwalumni
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Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 8:24 pm Post subject: Couldn't agree more cfx. Why are people not concerned about the length of time it has taken MPD to solve THREE murders in our city? I have no doubt MPD is trying very hard to apprehend the culprit but claiming MPD is just building a case for three horrendous unsolved homicides borders on the ludicrous. I'm very concerned for the student body of UW and citizens of our city.
 
Thanks, Mssheila! At least someone is blogging about it there! I did have to laugh when they brought up the nursing home residents tho. However, they do make a good point.

Rounding up all the homeless was such a waste of time and waste of DNA testing in dealing with these murders, imo. No wonder so many cases go unsolved when they overload themselves this way on purpose! They need the labs to be handling evidence and DNA from people who are deemed to be viable suspects and not just people randomly picked up for being homeless!
 
My daughter was in Madison Saturday and witnessed some homeless down at that park on State Street being arrested and taken away. My sister who lives in a Madison suburb confirmed that LE is really "cracking down" on the homeless.

Hoppy
 
Shamrock said:
I just heard on the radio that the police did find evidence of a forced break in at her home. So maybe it's not the same guy that was just walking into random homes in the area?
Click to expand...

My sister who lives in a Madison suburb said that it was her impression that this information slipped out and that LE was trying to keep it from reaching the media/public.

Hoppy
 
Has the sketch of the suspect been released yet? Sounds similiar to the man who the University has a restraining order out on minus the moustashe. (link in this thread)


http://www.dane101.com/current/2008/04/04/zimmerman_homicide_media_updates_april_4_12_30_p_m[/quote]

Quote:
Holly Davis, a 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison junior told WISC-TV reporter Linda Eggert that she has six roommates but all were gone just before 1 p.m. Wednesday when she said an intruder opened her front door, walked in and halfway up the stairs to her room.
Davis said that she didn't know she was home alone and said that she came out of her bedroom to find a "grungy" looking man. She said that intruder was white, appeared about 40 years old, about 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall, and was wearing a gray T-shirt and blue jeans.
She said that the man said he told her had a flat tire on East Washington Avenue with his wife and thought his friend lived on her block. Then, she said the man asked her for $40, then for her to go with him and then finally left after she told him to get out of her house.


WISC also reports that police have a sketch of the man who was invading homes in the area. Just a thought, it may help finding the guy if they released that sketch to the public.
 
They need to post a new sign coming into Madison!

Welcome to Madison:
The only town in the USA where you truely can get away with murder!
 
This article is only tangentially related - it talks about how students are moving out of the neighborhoods and into larger high-rises nearer to campus that are being built. (Of course, the city APPROVED those high-rises, and now are going back moaning about students moving out of the neighborhoods...)

Anyway - if I had a UW-Madison student on campus, I'd probably shell out the extra $$ for the security and other benefits of a high-rise IF the cops can't solve this case...

front_need_hed.gif
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http://www.gmtoday.com/ten_things/main.asp#1
Student flight causing Madison neighborhood headaches
6:04 a.m.
MADISON (AP) - New student apartments around the University of Wisconsin-Madison have the potential to create a new housing spiral in neighborhoods left behind, some officials warn.
The worry is that as competition increases, older apartment houses will bring in lower rents or go vacant and that landlords will postpone maintenance in nearby neighborhoods.
City building inspector George Hank said that as students leave, some landlords won’t be able to have the cash flow to maintain the buildings.
 
Not sure if we have this one on the thread, so just in case:
http://www.madison.com/archives/read.php?ref=/wsj/2008/04/12/0804110314.php

Saturday, April 12, 2008
By ED TRELEVEN etreleven@madison.com 608-252-6134


Madison police said Friday that they have yet to find any links between Brittany Zimmermann's homicide and another that happened about two months previously and a mile away.
While it appears that Zimmermann's killer on April 2 broke into her West Doty Street apartment, police said Friday that they found no signs of forced entry in the Jan. 28 murder of Joel Marino, which happened at his home on West Shore Drive.
Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said, however, that police are still looking at similarities in the two cases. Both people were killed inside their homes during daylight hours, neither had any known enemies and neither was involved in a risky lifestyle that would make them a more likely victim of a homicide, DeSpain said. Different detectives are working the homicides, but they are sharing information with each other, DeSpain said.
<SNIP>

And this is the latest article with actual news in it:

http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/282521

MON., APR 21, 2008 - 10:11 PM
Sex offender considered witness in UW-Madison student death
Associated Press, State Journal staff

A convicted sex offender jailed on suspicion of violating his probation is considered a material witness in the death of 21-year-old UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann, court records show.
Documents seeking to revoke David Kahl's probation quote him as telling police he entered a home near Zimmermann's apartment on the day she was killed and knew two homeless men he identified as "Hank" and "Mitchell" who were running scams and breaking into houses, WKOW-TV reported.
The revocation documents said police were treating Kahl as a witness, not a suspect.

<SNIP>
 
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