Bitter Creek Betty

In 1992, when truck driver Barbara Leverton pulls onto the Bitter Creek truck turnout on I-80 in Wyoming, her mission is to take a break and drink her cup of coffee. While there, she spots what looks like trash bags in the distance but has a distinct shape like the curve of a body. To her horror, that’s what she finds: the nude body of a woman, face down in the snow.

With no identification on her, investigators have little to go on to help them identify the woman beyond her distinctive rose tattoo. They soon learn, though, that she’s been sexually assaulted and had injuries to her face and neck.  They believe she could have been murdered with a weapon, perhaps an icepick, inserted into her nostril, damaging the bone below.

In the years since she was found, police find little to help them identify her besides a tattoo artist who says he remembers giving her that tattoo when she passed through Tucson, Arizona. He believed she may have been one of the many women who travel by tractor trailers throughout the country, passing through one space to the next with anonymity.

With new scientific evidence, police are eventually able to connect her to Sheridan County Jane Doe, a woman found in Sheridan County, Wyoming one month after Bitter Creek Betty. Their killer’s DNA is found on both of them. These two unidentified women are also linked to Pamela/Rose McCall, a woman murdered by the same man in Tennessee.

Soon, that man is arrested in Iowa. A long-haul trucker, he faces murder charges in all three cases. Sheridan County Jane Doe and Bitter Creek Betty are no longer listed in NamUs. It’s possible they have been identified at the time of our podcast airing.