UWO professor dig up secrets behind local murder from 1983

Starkie Swenson pedaled away on a bicycle on a typical late summer evening in 1983, never to be seen again. His case lay cold for 10 years before his murderer was caught, and his body was never recovered. Nearly 40 years later, a group of students led by UWO Professor Dr. Jordan Karsten now revisit the case in an attempt to recover the victim's body. 

“The case itself, it’s just really interesting,” he said. “It’s got a lot of twists and turns and a lot of interesting characters. I don’t want to necessarily say story, because it’s people's lives, but it certainly makes an interesting investigation.” 

Karsten got the chance to dive into the case thanks to a new revelation discovered by the local police. 

“The Winnebago County Sheriff who I've been working with has been able to get some new information on the case that seems to point in the direction of one piece of land as potentially, with regional probability, having Starkie Swenson’s body on it,” he said. “We’re going to go investigate it.” 

This isn’t the first collaboration between Karsten and law enforcement. The two have previously worked together to get to the bottom of cases for roughly seven years. 

“Whenever they have cases with human skeletal remains, I tend to get involved,” Karsten said. “This is one where somebody’s been missing for 40 years, it is undoubtedly a skeleton, and they asked if I could help.” 

A major link between these collaborations is the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Department’s acknowledgement of Karsten’s unmatched expertise and wide-range of experience in the field. 

photo from UWO

Professor Dr. Jordan Karsten examines a human skull. Karsten has been leading his students on the search for Swenson’s body

“Most of my academic work is focused in archaeology,” Karsten said. “My background as an archaeologist who focuses on excavating human burials, sets me up to be of help in this kind of case.”

Karsten often brings his students along for the journey to get them more hands-on experience and to bring more workers to the job site. 

“We’ve done a few cases for them before and outside of Winnebago county, and we’ve worked on many cases outside the state of Wisconsin,” he said. “You have to take the lectures, you definitely have to read the books and the articles and all this kind of stuff, but anthropology to me is something that you learn best if you get to go do it.”

The students are brought to the site with a set of base skills and knowledge, well-prepped to be useful on the scene. 

“Students are trained in osteology, so they know what the human skeleton is like,” Karsten said. “Some of them have a lot of archaeological experience, and so when we excavate, we look for clues in the soil that tell us if somebody had dug there before. Or, maybe not necessarily dug, but was there a tree there that fell? Did the coyote ever burrow there? Having that archaeological knowledge is also something that’s key in a search like this.” 

Obtaining these base skill sets can prove to be a more difficult task when exploring beyond a surface-level view. 

“If it’s a skull, people can tell if it’s a human skull or an animal for sure,” he said. “But what if it’s ribs, or bones in your arms and legs, hands and feet, or even teeth? A lot of times people don’t have the anatomical knowledge to tell humans from non-human animals.” 

Karsten and his group of students recently began to complete the excavation of the possible site, working on some preliminary searching in the winter and planning to continue digging in May if necessary. Karsten looks forward to the dig, but is less excited to face off slithery spectators. 

“This property is full of snakes, and I don’t really like snakes personally,” he said. “For me, that’s not going to be very fun, but it’s not something that’s going to be overly challenging either, just kind of a little bit of a nuisance.” 

The main obstacle the excavation team will face in the coming days will be the physical hardships of the intensive nature of digging. 

“Anthropology and archaeology are science, but they’re really physically demanding,” Karsten said. “And so, we’ve got to dig. A lot. And it can wear you out.” 

photo from UWO

Starkie Swenson poses for a photo. Swenson went missing in 1963, his case remaining cold until a tip obtained 10 years later.

When Karsten isn’t busy digging up secrets of the past, he can sometimes be found in high school classrooms, spreading his passion and joy for archeology. Science teacher Sara Dobish noticed a significant amount of student interest in forensic anthropology when she invited Karsten to her classroom three years ago. 

“I think they didn’t realize that there are so few forensic anthropologists,” she said. “He’s actually the only one in Northeast Wisconsin, so they call him all the time to go look at bones that are found out in the woods to determine if it's human or animal.” 

Karsten himself first picked up interest in the field of anthropology at a young age in college. 

“I just happened to, for a gen-ed, take an anthropology class and I was just hooked right from the very first class,” he said. “I knew that it was the only thing that I really wanted to do, was to pursue the study of anthropology and I did it for a long time, and now here I am.”

Students are often interested and first drawn to the topics thanks to the help and influence of popular mystery shows. 

“When you watch shows on TV, it’s a little different than it is in real life,” Dobish said. “But mixing something like science and criminalistics together; it’s a really cool combination.”

More details on the Starkie Swenson case can be found in Karsten’s podcast, Cold Case: Frozen Tundra. It is available on most major streaming platforms and their associated website, frozentundrapodcast.com. 

“If you want to learn more about anthropology, and forensics in this case, right in your backyard, take a listen,” he said. “We’ll go through the background of the case. We also talk to individuals who have helped break the case open in interviews in upcoming episodes. We’re going to give updates from the search. How it’s going at the search, what we’re doing, what sites we are using, and potentially if we find something or not.” 

Karsten believes that the curious and unknown nature of these sciences keeps drawing in individuals to explore the field. 

“In the world of archaeology and crimotology and paleoanthropology is the study of human fossils; there are so many discoveries that are still waiting to be made,” he said.  “If you’ve got an adventurous spirit, it’s a great field to get into.”

One of Karsten’s favorite aspects of the field is the new findings constantly updating the archeology environment.
“It might sound crazy but new primate species are discovered on a yearly to every couple of years basis,” he said. “We discover new human ancestor species we never knew existed from millions of years ago. Archeologists discover spectacular finds of ancient buildings and sometimes literal buried treasure and ritualistic finds that just blow your mind. To me, being able to see those discoveries makes it so you don’t have a lot of dull days.” 

The field of palaeosciences is an expanding field with a large outreach in individuals' lives; it’s more than digging up stereotypical treasures and new species. 

“Forensic anthropology can also help people, and in this way, help bring about justice and help bring about closure for families if somebody is missing,” Karsten said. “It’s not just a cool science where you can discover ancient stuff, but it’s also a science where you can really help people.”

By Hannah Chung

Published April 30, 2021

Oshkosh West Index Volume 117 Issue VII