On June 25, 1982, Lee Gunsalus Rotatori, a 32-year-old American woman, was sexually assaulted and murdered in her hotel room by Thomas Oscar Freeman in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The murder went unsolved for nearly 40 years, until it was announced by authorities in 2022 that the perpetrator had been identified as Freeman using investigative genetic genealogy.

Around July 1982, Freeman himself was murdered by an unidentified perpetrator in Cobden, Illinois. His decomposing body was found in a shallow grave around three months after his murder. As of 2025, the murder of Freeman remains unsolved and the case remains open, and investigators believe the two murders were connected.