Show to feature local murder solved after 35 years

The 35-year investigation by the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Office into who killed Traci Hammerberg is the subject of a television program to be broadcast in the Milwaukee area next month.

The case is the subject of “Murder in the Snow,” the second episode of the series “Bloodline Detectives,” narrated by true-crime celebrity Nancy Grace.

The episode interviews Ozaukee County Sheriff Jim Johnson, former Undersheriff Jeff Taylor, Detective Scott Heller and former Detective Fred Mueller, who responded to the murder scene.

The episode recounts the murder of Hammerberg, an 18-year-old Saukville girl whose snow-covered body was found murdered in a driveway in the Town of Grafton in December 1984.

Investigators determined she had been raped, strangled and bludgeoned to death. Despite an extensive investigation that included the collection of DNA samples from more than 400 men — the largest such collection ever in Wisconsin — no one was ever charged for the crime.

That is not until a method, called geneological, or familial, DNA, was developed by the FBI that was used to arrest and convict Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former police officer, known as the Golden State Killer, who comitted at least 50 murders and 13 rapes in Southern and Northern California in the 1970s and 1980s.

The method enters an unknown suspect’s DNA into a database and looks for people who are connected genetically. A family tree of sorts is built in reverse, leading investigators to the perpetrator.

Neil McGrath, a state Department of Criminal Investigation special agent working with the Ozaukee County Sheriff’s Office contacted the FBI in California in March 2019.

“They were very interested. They said it was one of the tougher ones,” McGrath said.

“I was impressed with their willingness to work with us,” Johnson says in the program.

By October 2019, investigators had their man, Philip Cross, a Port Washington resident in 1984 with a criminal history who died of a drug overdose in 2012 in Milwaukee.

A DNA sample collected at his autopsy provided a perfect match to DNA found at the 1984 crime scene.

Cross had just recently gotten out of prison before the murder and none of the crimes he had ever been convicted for had required submitting a DNA sample.

“He was never on our radar,” Johnson said.

Sheriff’s investigators are lauded in the program for their “dogged” pursuit of the Hammerberg’s killer, despite decades of fruitless investigation, and how the murder and its brutality shook Ozaukee County residents.

“All law enforcement officers take cases home,” Johnson says on camera. “There are those that stay with you. Then you want to help and make sure there is closure for the family, and in Traci’s case we needed closure for the community.”

The series, “Bloodline Detectives,” is set to debut nationally Saturday, Oct. 3, with the Hammerberg episode airing a week later. 

It is narrarated by Grace, a former a prosecutor who has hosted several real crime programs.

The same program, with a different narrator, aired in the United Kingdom earlier this year. It can be viewed online at www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ufrut.

The show will appear on streaming platforms in 2021, according to a news release.

Not mentioned in the program is that the investigative team was awarded the 2020 Meritorious Service Award by the Wisconsin  Association of Homicide Investigators.