Gary Hirte

Behind the Footlights

Back home, he dabbled in community theater, and even appeared as the baker in the Waupaca Community Theater production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," said Marcel Van Camp, one of the theater's directors. But even in that environment, Kopitske was the odd man out. Most of the cast members were friends, and many of them were younger, high school students.

"He was kind of a loner," Van Camp remembered in an interview with the men's magazine. "It was kind of a young crowd ... There were many high school students from Waupaca who played most of the roles ... in the production."

Van Camp would try to strike up a conversation with him, usually about Greek and Roman mythology, a subject Kopitske claimed to know well. "He was very intelligent," Van Camp said. "But he never really fit in. He simply wasn't the type to go out for a beer or a Coke with the rest of the cast."

For the most part, Kopitske "did his part, he did his role ... and backstage (he was) very solitary," Van Camp said.

Solitary is a noble word. It implies a choice and imparts dignity. The truth is, Glenn Kopitske was lonely, Shirley Kopitske said. "When you live alone and you're 37 years old and you're not married and everyone else is, why would he ... not be lonely?"

Here's a measure of Glenn Kopitske's loneliness: He was dead for at least two days before his mother, who had been in Milwaukee at a wedding and worried when she couldn't reach him by phone, drove out to his house.

She doesn't talk about finding the body. But she will say that it still puzzles her that when she went to the back door of Glenn's house that night, it was locked, something he would never take the time to do. "We never knew why," she said, "We don't have an answer to that."

The cops were puzzled too, Verwiel said. They first speculated that Kopitske had locked it himself, perhaps out of fear, but quickly rejected that theory. There was no evidence that Kopitske had done anything to defend himself. Even when death was certain, Kopitske didn't struggle. Perhaps that was another aspect of his character that made Kopitske the perfect victim.

Maybe, the cops surmised, the meticulous killer locked the door almost reflexively, an unconscious bid to perhaps buy a little more time so Mother Nature could erase all the damning evidence of the crime.