My mom was Lesa Otberg. I'm glad these cases have come back to light. My money is on DNA!!!
Lesa Otberg, 23, was last seen around 4:30 a.m. Jan. 2, 1994. Police say she had gotten into a vehicle at Division Avenue and Cottage Grove Street. That’s about a mile north of the party store where McHugh’s boyfriend had arrived to find her gone.
Like McHugh, Otberg was stuck in the vice grip of the crack cocaine epidemic.
“I think she had a lot to deal with herself,” Kandi
Katerberg, Otberg’s daughter, said. “She didn’t have the best childhood. I think that all just snowballs, especially when you introduce drugs.”
Katerberg was 9 when her mom vanished.
“(My mom) was feisty,” Katerberg said. “She had an opinion, and she’d let you know it, but she had the biggest heart. She would help anybody. … She was 23, and she had her whole life ahead of her. Until she didn’t.”
Three months after Otberg’s disappearance, on March 28, 1994, a grandmother walking home in Muskegon spotted feet sticking out of a bush near Hackley Avenue and Stein Street.
Lesa Otberg was missing no more.
Muskegon police said Otberg was found naked. She had been strangled.
Katerberg learned the news watching TV.
“I remember everyone was kind of looking at me, but I was excited that they had found my mom,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize finding her body meant that she was dead.”
If I look back at who I was when I was 23, I’ve had many years to grow and change and develop and make better choices in my life, and she just didn’t have that option,” Katerberg said. “Somebody took that option away.”
Katerberg, who wants to know everything she can about her mom’s murder, had no idea if Muskegon police were actively working it. She told Target 8 she wanted to know if there’s even a chance police have DNA evidence in her mom’s case, even if it never leads to an arrest. We shared that with Muskegon police and they agreed to take Katerberg’s phone call.
Minutes later, as she listened to the police sergeant on the other end of the line, a single tear slid down Katerberg’s face.
“So, they do have DNA,” she said. “That’s awesome. That gives me hope. I haven’t had hope in a long time… These are happy tears, I promise.”
Now, she’s setting up a Facebook page for families of the murdered and missing women, hoping to generate leads.
“The mystery isn’t better,” Katerburg said, referring to not knowing what her mom endured. “Me putting in whatever my brains come up with that she may have suffered at the end. I want to know the facts. That’s how my brain works.”
If you have any information about the deaths or disappearances of the 17 women, their families hope you’ll share it with Silent Observer and help them secure the justice they so desperately seek. The number to call is 616.774.2345.
In the mid-1990s, 17 women, many of them sex workers, went missing or were murdered in Grand Rapids, most vanishing from the red-light district along Division Avenue South. Among all those cases, o…
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*I’m so sorry hon. She’s at peace now. I don’t know what to say except that we do care.
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