Within 24 hours of Wisconsin Watch publishing a story Friday about a long-hidden suspect in the 1987 disappearance of a 23-year-old Price County pregnant woman, social media commenters brought up the name of a notorious murderer who — as far as we can tell — had nothing to do with Shelly Hansen’s disappearance.
Our investigation uncovered a 2008 search warrant application that identified Michael D. Raskie, Hansen’s supervisor at Marquip Corp., as law enforcement’s top suspect and the likely father of her unborn child.
The sworn statement revealed publicly for the first time that Raskie’s pickup truck was spotted at Hansen’s apartment in the early morning hours before her vehicle turned up at a tavern 10 miles away. Raskie’s brother rented a house a half-mile from the tavern, and Raskie stored some vehicles there, giving him a potential getaway if in fact he planted her vehicle at the tavern.
But in the last two years at least three true crime podcasts connected a different person — John R. Weber — to Hansen’s disappearance. Those accounts noted what is likely a coincidence: Hansen disappeared one year to the day after Weber killed his sister-in-law Carla Lenz. Weber was arrested in September 1988 after torturing his wife, Lenz’s sister.
Some speculated that Weber was a serial killer. One even suggested Weber was the father of Hansen’s unborn child, despite there being no evidence connecting them. Wisconsin Watch spent months developing sources in Price County, conducting dozens of interviews, scouring old newspapers at the Wisconsin Historical Society and reviewing public records.
The disturbing truth we uncovered is that two men in picturesque Price County were suspected of murder in the 1980s and within two years brutally assaulted their wives.
Wisconsin Watch uncovered new clues in a nearly 40-year-old Northwoods missing person case. (Video by Hongyu Liu and Trisha Young / Wisconsin Watch)
Weber is still serving a life sentence for murdering Lenz and attacking his wife. Raskie was convicted of attacking his wife in February 1989. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and paroled in 1991, even though Raskie was investigators’ top suspect as early as 1989.
Raskie was never charged in Hansen’s disappearance before he died in 2015. Law enforcement officials told Wisconsin Watch they lacked enough evidence to charge him as of 1991 when he was released from prison.
A key breakthrough came in 2003 when a retired police officer shared the information about Raskie’s truck being at Hansen’s apartment the night she disappeared. Based on that and other evidence, investigators quietly convinced a court to let them obtain Raskie’s DNA in 2008. State and local officials have so far refused to provide test results showing whether Raskie’s DNA matched unknown male DNA found in Hansen’s vehicle.
Wisconsin Watch obtained the DNA search warrant doing what we do best — meticulous shoe-leather investigative reporting that is time-consuming, expensive and increasingly rare.
For months, I interviewed sources about the Hansen case, talking to former sheriffs, Hansen family members and witnesses who interacted with Hansen the last day she was seen alive. The Price County Sheriff’s Office refused to talk about the case because it remains an “ongoing criminal investigation.”
One thing that was surprising: Most people in Price County who I talked to don’t think it was Weber. And Raskie’s name being in the search warrant didn’t come as a major surprise.
Wisconsin Watch co-founder and longtime investigative reporter Dee J. Hall and I recently visited the Price County Courthouse to obtain records. Dee searched for Raskie’s name on the court’s public computer terminal, and the search warrant file showed up with both Raskie’s name and Hansen’s name. The record doesn’t show up if you search CCAP, the statewide online court records system, from anywhere except the courthouse in Phillips.
This was the first time I had seen any public document connecting Hansen and Raskie. For a case that was shrouded in mystery for almost 40 years, this was a huge scoop!
Another thing I found surprising: Investigators have never put Raskie’s name out to the public. They haven’t even told the public that they were investigating Hansen’s disappearance as a homicide. When Price County Sheriff Brian Schmidt gave an interview to WSAW in 2024, he provided no new information about the case, even though the search warrant affidavit with loads of new information had been sitting unsealed in the clerk’s office for seven years.
We don’t know for certain why Raskie hasn’t been named previously, but former Sheriff Richard Heitkemper acknowledged that investigators had to be “very, very, extremely careful” because Raskie was well-connected to wealthy people in town. His wife’s brothers founded Phillips Plating, one of the county’s largest companies.
But if the Price County Sheriff’s Office is trying to find Hansen’s body, wouldn’t it help to release the name of the person they think may have disposed of her somewhere?
Why not give accurate, available information to WSAW, rather than allow the news outlet to speculate that Weber was a suspect?
There are still lots of unanswered questions about this case. Why did it take 16 years for a police officer to provide key evidence? Did Raskie’s DNA match the unknown male DNA on the steering wheel of Hansen’s car? If it didn’t, what other efforts were made to obtain more evidence?
We don’t know because officials have refused to answer those questions. They’ve also blocked the public from seeing the records that might help answer them.
We’ll keep seeking the records and asking those questions. And when we learn more, we’ll report the answers, how we found them and the evidence behind them.
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