Helen Wronski, a 79-year-old White/Caucasian woman, was killed inside her Milwaukee home in November 1979. She had last been seen alive on November 8, and on November 9 her son went to her East Side residence and discovered her body. Investigators determined that Wronski had been beaten to death in her living room. After the attack, the killer covered her body with a sheet and went into her bedroom, where drawers in a dresser had been opened and searched.
Despite the apparent rummaging, investigators did not believe anything had been taken from the dresser.
Police recovered partial fingerprints from the scene, but at the time they could not match them to anyone known to investigators. With no immediate identification of the person responsible, Wronski's killing remained unresolved while additional violent attacks occurred in Milwaukee over the following months. Detectives eventually recognized similarities among a series of killings and attacks in which victims were assaulted inside their own homes. The crimes were later attributed to David Allen Van Dyke, whose victims included four women and two men killed between July 1979 and April 1980.
The break in the investigation came in May 1980. Van Dyke was arrested following an attempted burglary, and police compared his fingerprints with evidence associated with the homicide investigation. The fingerprint evidence connected him to the murder series, including the investigation that had begun with unidentified partial prints. During questioning, Van Dyke eventually confessed to the killings, although he later disputed the legitimacy of those confessions. Prosecutors charged him with six counts of first-degree murder, along with attempted murder and armed robbery charges arising from a surviving victim's attack.
Van Dyke went on trial in early 1981. He took the witness stand in his own defense and acknowledged committing numerous burglaries but denied being the murderer police portrayed him to be. He accused investigators of manufacturing his confessions and attempted to explain away evidence concerning the surviving assault victim. The jury rejected his account after deliberating for approximately four and a half hours and found him guilty on all charges. He received six life sentences for the murders, along with an additional 40 years for the other offenses. Helen Wronski's killing, which had initially left detectives with an unidentified set of fingerprints and few immediate answers, was therefore ultimately resolved as one of the murders committed by David Van Dyke during his 1979–1980 Milwaukee killing spree.
