Terry A. Dolowy was a 24-year-old woman from the La Crosse, Wisconsin, area whose life was interrupted in the early morning hours of February 14, 1985. She was last seen at the trailer home near Barre Mills where she lived, after returning sometime around 12:30 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. from her job at Piggy’s restaurant in La Crosse. At the time, Terry was building a future for herself: she was a senior studying finance at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and worked as a bar manager at
Piggy’s. She was reported missing from the Bostwick Valley Trailer Court mobile home by her boyfriend, Russell Lee, and the details left behind were immediately unsettling. Terry’s personal belongings, including her purse and vehicle, were still at the residence, the door was ajar, and both Terry and her white poodle, Suzie, were gone.
What began as a missing-person investigation soon became a devastating homicide case. Four days after Terry disappeared, on February 18, 1985, passersby found a burning body near a culvert on Mohawk Valley Road in Vernon County, several miles south of La Crosse. Authorities later identified the body as Terry’s. Reports from law enforcement and local historical records state that her body had been burned and decapitated, and that an accelerant had been used. Her head was never recovered, and Suzie, the small white poodle who vanished with her, was never found. The brutality of what happened to Terry left her family, friends, classmates, coworkers, and the wider Coulee Region with grief and unanswered questions that endured for decades.
In the years after Terry’s death, her case became one of the region’s most painful unsolved murders. Local archives described it as an unsolved Coulee Region murder, and Wisconsin missing-person materials continued to circulate basic information about her: she was 24, female, White, missing from La Crosse, and later found in Vernon County. The public summaries emphasized the last known scene at the trailer home near Barre Mills: Terry returning from work after midnight, her dog disappearing with her, the door left ajar, and her personal items still inside. Those details suggested a sudden and alarming break in ordinary life, the kind of absence that offered few simple answers and left investigators searching through fragments.
For nearly forty years, no one was convicted in Terry’s killing. The case remained open in public memory through old newspaper archives, missing-person records, and law-enforcement attention. Then, in September 2024, authorities announced an arrest. Michael Raymond Popp, of Tomah, Wisconsin, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in connection with Terry’s death. Reports citing the criminal complaint stated that Popp had lived near Terry and her fiancé at the time, knew them socially, and had been identified as a person of interest after genetic genealogy work. Investigators later obtained a buccal swab from Popp, and the complaint alleged that his DNA matched seminal fluid collected from Terry’s body during the 1985 autopsy. Popp denied killing Terry, and the charge remains an accusation unless proven in court.
Terry’s story is not only a record of a case file, but the story of a young woman whose life included school, work, relationships, responsibilities, and a beloved dog who disappeared with her. She had returned home from a late shift, apparently expecting the ordinary rhythm of another day, and instead became the center of a tragedy that haunted western Wisconsin for decades. Her case moved from a missing-person report to the discovery of her remains, then into a long cold-case investigation, and finally to a modern prosecution after advances in DNA and genetic genealogy brought new attention to old evidence. The overview of the case is this: Terry A. Dolowy, a 24-year-old female University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student and Piggy’s employee, was last seen on February 14, 1985, at her trailer home near Barre Mills in the La Crosse, Wisconsin, area; she vanished along with her white poodle Suzie, her personal belongings were left behind, her burned and decapitated body was found days later in Vernon County, her head and dog were never recovered, and decades later a man who had lived nearby was charged with first-degree murder while the memory of Terry remains central to the pursuit of accountability.Last Seen: Feb 14, 1985
