Gary Hirte

Womans Intuition

Olivia Joy Thoma does not want to discuss what led her to approach authorities with her suspicions about Gary Hirte. Perhaps someday, she says, she'll tell her story. But for the moment, she refers reporters to the official record compiled by police and prosecutors. The record that seems to show her as a strong and quietly heroic young woman.

In the summer of 2003, Olivia, then 19, was every bit as smart and accomplished as Gary Hirte. A brilliant student, enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, she was as beautiful as she was bright. In August, she was chosen "the Fairest" at the county fair. Hirte, though he had a 14-year-old girlfriend, appointed himself her unofficial bodyguard at the fair, according to some accounts.

Gary Hirte

One evening, Jorgensen said, Hirte and Thoma drifted into one of those soul-searching conversations that only seem to happen to people at the end of the summer and the end of their teens. By all accounts, as they chatted through a starry August night, they started to swap their deepest darkest secrets. There is no record of the secret Thoma told Hirte, but there are court documents that detail what Hirte told her.

According to those documents, Hirte, the honor student and Eagle Scout who won kudos from the mayor for almost single-handedly raising the funds to refurbish the "Welcome Weyauwega" sign, admitted that he had murdered a lonely eccentric in his own bedroom just to see if he could get away with it.

The truth is, Thoma was not the only person Hirte had confessed to.

Two weeks or so after the killing, Hirte telephoned his best buddy, Eric, who, police say, accompanied him on the dry run past Kopitske's house. "I asked him if he knew about the murder or whatever 'cause it was pretty close to my girlfriend's house," Eric told Stuff Magazine. Jokingly, Eric added, "It sounds like something you would do."

"I did," Hirte replied.

He went even further, showing the knife and blood-splattered sheath to Eric and at least one other friend. In Eric's case, he showed him the knife over and over again. He even showed Eric the keys he claimed to have taken from Kopitske's kitchen table. Eric insisted, however, that nothing could convince him that Hirte was telling the truth. "The keys ... to me they were just keys," Eric told Stuff Magazine.