By Steven Elbow
Capital Times
March 3, 2002

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The case has spawned numerous theories, wild speculations, and agnawing sense of frustration.

Despite thousands of police interviews and innumerable reports, theinvestigation into the death of the Rev. Alfred Kunz four years ago today hasled to few leads and no arrests. And the trail of whoever murdered the village of Dane priest is getting colder all the time."Certainly, the longer it goes the colder the trail gets," said Dane County Sheriff Gary Hamblin. "We're still working on it, but we've been working on it ever since it happened."

Hamblin said new leads in the case were "few and far between."

Kunz, 67, was found with his throat slit on March 4, 1998, at St. Michael Catholic Church school in Dane, where he had been pastor for 32 years.Detectives have been pursuing the case ever since, to no avail. A $50,000 reward was offered, but it expired at the end of 1999.

"There are people who look good for a day or so, but no one person has risen above the rest" as a suspect, Hamblin said. "From time to time we get aphone call from somebody, but none of them have been concrete leads."

But Hamblin refuses to call it a "cold case."

"In my view, a cold case is one where no one's worked on it for a long time," he said. "We've had somebody going through this case the whole time."

According to Village President David Wipperfurth, the killing still looms large in the community, but time, and a diminishing of media attention, has had a healing effect.

"There's some frustration that it hasn't been solved," he said, "but people around here are trying to put that terrible incident behind them and just moveon."

Complicating the investigation is the fact that Kunz served a church community that extended well beyond Dane County. The conservative priest had a wide following, with some traveling from distant communities to hear his Latin Mass. He was one of the few priests who still performed the Latin service.

But an FBI profile, compiled months after the murder using evidence from the crime scene, suggests that the killer is probably from the Dane community and had problems that he or she felt would be solved by the priest's death.

The Sheriff's Office at one point infuriated many in the community by suggesting that Kunz had several intimate relationships with women, and the killer might have been motivated by jealousy.

Hamblin, in a recent interview, seemed to back away from that assertion.

"The angle we're pursuing is that it was somebody that knew him and that he knew," he said. "Beyond that it's pure speculation."

Of the many possible motives that have been suggested, the jealousy theory is one of the least bizarre. Other theories speculate that he was killed by vengeful Satanists who were enraged by the exorcisms Kunz had performed; and that his murder was contracted by higher-ups in the Catholic Church for exposing misbehavior by priests at other Midwestern parishes.

"Just the fact that the victim was a priest conjures up certain ideas,"Hamblin said. "If you or I were murdered those kinds of things wouldn't come up."

Reports of other priest killings have led to several dead ends. Detectives Kevin Hughes and Randall Burmeister have followed up on murdered priests on the East Coast, in the Deep South, and recently in New Mexico, where Madison native Rev. Michael Mack was found hacked to death at a retreat for Catholic priests in December.

Investigators concluded that that killing occurred during a robbery and that the suspects had no connection with the Kunz case.

But Hamblin is still holding out hope for a break in the case, and the investigation remains active.

"A lot of it is based on a complete review of the file so we can see if we missed anything the first time around," he said, adding that he is still encouraging people who may know something of the murder to contact the department.

"We certainly haven't given up on it by any stretch of the imagination."

Sheriff Gary Hamblin believes someone in the community has information that could lead to a break in the Rev. Alfred Kunz murder case. He urges anyone with information to call the Dane County Sheriff's Office at 284-6900.