Wisconsin map, with Winnebago

Most murders are solved because a thread links the victim to the killer. In Winnebago County, which, in 2002, boasted one of the lowest murder rates in the country, homicide is almost always a family affair. A husband kills his wife; a wife does in her husband. "When you have a homicide up around here ... generally it's an act of domestic violence to the extreme," said Verwiel, chief of detectives for the Winnebago County Sheriff's Department.

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That was not the case with Glenn Kopitske. Even now, months after the slaying, authorities can't say for sure how Glenn Kopitske wound up at the wrong end of a stranger's 12-gauge.

Maybe the killer picked him because he had no friends, except his dog, to speak of. Maybe it was that he lived in such isolation. The closest house was a quarter-mile away, according to court records, distant enough that no one could hear a plea for mercy or the blast from a shotgun.

Maybe it was the fact that Kopitske had a way of calling attention to himself, sometimes in odd and spectacular ways. In 1996, for example, he took $500 — money apparently drawn from the federal check he got each month as a result of his psychological disability, along with a few bucks he earned working at Wal-Mart and substitute teaching in nearby New London — and plunged into politics.

Kopitske was just 30 when he declared himself a candidate for president of the United States. No one, it seemed, had the heart to tell him that he was five years shy of the constitutionally mandated minimum age for the office, as if that would have mattered.

Needless to say, that electoral gamble didn't pay off, and Kopitske set his sights a bit lower, running instead for the state Assembly. He fared no better in that race and, according to election records two years later, he again tried for the 56^th District Assembly seat. Still no luck.

His mother, Shirley Kopitske, maintains that no one took his bid for office seriously. "It was really just an oddball thing," she told Stuff Magazine.

Simply put, "he was a well-known eccentric," said Assistant Winnebago County District Attorney John Jorgensen. He was also vulnerable and harmless, family members and friends say. He was the adopted son of a traditional Midwestern family that had already buried two children when Glenn was born. Throughout his life, whenever he felt that something was wrong, he would turn to his mother.

Kopitske's parents were, in the words of their family pastor, Rev. Tim Shoup, "the salt of the earth." Glenn's father, Virgil Kospitske was a taciturn man, a typical Midwesterner in many respects who found time to devote to the church and the community. Above all else, however, they were devoted to their son.

"Virgil and Shirley, I would say, kind of continued to play the parental role with Glenn because of his health situation," Shoup recalled.

And though Glenn Kopitske wanted some independence, he never really wanted to be too far from home, Shoup said. "He wanted to be independent, but Glenn knew that he needed Mom and Dad," Shoup recalled. "So there was an understanding that Glenn would live his life, but Mom and Dad were kind of there when he needed them. I think that says it maybe pretty well."

Despite his emotional difficulties, he was a man who liked to talk, sometimes more than people around him thought he should. "Virgil would say, 'Well, Glenn kind of always had his big ideas,' and he would chuckle," Shoup said to Stuff. "Somebody else might see Glenn and his big ideas and say, 'This guy is full of himself.'"

But no one ever took much offense from anything Glenn Kopitske said or did. Much of the time, it seemed that Kopitske was anxious to please others.

In fact, when he was younger, he even tried his hand at speaking to audiences.

He called himself a stand-up comic, something he had tried on open mic nights when he was an undergraduate at the University of Texas in Dallas. He gave it up, of course, when he moved back to Wisconsin to be near his parents. "They didn't have that kind of thing here," Shirley Kopitske said.

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