A Boise cold case that remained unsolved for decades has finally been closed.
For 40 years, the identity of a man found dead inside a church in December 1982 was unknown. That mystery has now been resolved.
Known to true-crime followers—and to viewers of the 1990 Unsolved Mysteries episode about his case—as the “Unknown Wanderer,” the man was identified as Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski during an Ada County Sheriff’s Office press conference on Sept. 23.
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The case was revived in 2019 when Detective Tim Cooper found a crucial clue among the Unknown Wanderer’s belongings: a key marked as coming from a hardware store in Jacksonville, Fla.
The key carried another etching that pointed Cooper to Mills Court in Jacksonville. After reviewing property deeds from the late 1970s and 1980s, he found Betkouski’s name among the records. Betkouski had been declared dead in 1989, seven years after the Unknown Wanderer’s body was discovered.