Body of David Rodgers found in Wisconsin river

MURDER OR A MISSTEP?

After many fruitless searches the corpse of David Rodgers, 20, has finally been located this week, badly decomposed and snagged on debris in Wisconsin's Chippewa River. 

The University of Wisconsin sophomore inexplicably fell from a campus footbridge into the rushing waters below in mid April 2013 -- just one day before his former classmate Becky Kasper was bound and brutally bludgeoned to death by a psychotic boyfriend in Arizona.

 

Kasper and Rodgers were both 2011 graduates from Northfield High School in Northfield Minnesota, and are in fact shown together in a yearbook photo of the Varsity football team.

 

He as a player; her as a cheerleader. 

Murder most foul

 

In April 2013 Arizona State University student Becky Kasper was endeavoring to terminate her stormy relationship with Luis Soltero, age 22.

 

The two had lived together near ASU and neighbors describe their life together as one big argument. Indeed, Kasper's coworkers and employer said she often came to work covered with bruises.

 

After April 20th, however, she neither showed for work again nor attended any of her college courses, and a few days later her family, friends and neighbors learned the reason why: A deranged sounding Soltero turned himself into the police, telling them where they could find his murdered lover's remains.

 

The demented young man had handcuffed and tortured Casper before beating her face and head into a bloody pulp with an exercising dumbbell.

 

Police found Kasper's body in the couple's bathtub hidden beneath blankets and a yoga mat.

 

Soltero had also tied a plastic bag around his victim's mangled head and left a written confession before fleeing the crime scene to who knows where:

"I did not treat her right. She deserved better but never accepted it. So I had to make the choice for her. She died on 4/20 not because of drugs, but because a sociopath talked and treated her nice … I don’t know where to go from here. Do I kill again, end it with myself or become invisible."

 

Clinging for his life

 

On the evening of April 19, 2013, Wisconsin University freshman Jesse Kreger and friends were crossing a pedestrian bridge spanning the Chippewa River in Eau Claire when they spied David Rodgers desperately clinging to the guardrail.

 

"We pretty much were walking across the bridge and I saw this guy straddling the railing and I was like, this better not be what I think it is," Kreger said.

 

A spring thaw had brought the Chippewa to just a few feet below flood level and its waters were rushing and dangerous. When Rodgers fell into the deluge he disappeared with the current and hadn't been seen or heard from since.

 

It is still a mystery as to how or why the youth became so precariously poised on the footbridge to begin with...

 

EPONYMOUS ROX