Irene Vasquez was a young woman in her mid-twenties to early thirties, a Hispanic female whose life intersected with the long ribbons of American highways and the anonymous world of roadside truck stops. By the early 1990s, her family had lost contact with her; a half-sister would later tell investigators that she had not heard from Irene since around 1990, when Irene was believed to be drifting and hitchhiking from place to place.
On the afternoon of March 1, 1992, that unsettled, transient life came into focus in the most tragic way. A female truck driver named Barbara Leverton pulled her rig off Interstate 80 near the Bitter Creek turnout in Sweetwater County, about forty miles east of Rock Springs, Wyoming, to change her fuel tanks. Looking down the snowy embankment, she saw a naked body lying face down at the bottom of the slope, frozen in place on a bed of snow.
Deputies from the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office and the county coroner quickly converged on the scene. They found the body completely frozen, resting atop roughly nine inches of snow, suggesting it had been there for weeks before discovery. Although the woman was nude, she still wore a plain gold-colored wedding band on her left ring finger and a simple gold necklace. Nearby, investigators recovered a pair of pink underwear and a pair of sweatpants they believed had belonged to her; no other clothing was ever found. The woman had dark brown hair and brown eyes, stood around five feet eight inches tall, and weighed in the neighborhood of 120–130 pounds. A scar on her abdomen revealed that she had once undergone a cesarean section, and another scar marked her left calf. Most distinctive of all was a tattoo of a rose on her right breast, later traced to a tattoo parlor in Tucson, Arizona.
The autopsy painted a picture of intense violence. The medical examiner documented trauma to her neck and face consistent with manual strangulation, along with severe beating to the jaw. There was evidence of sexual assault to both lower body cavities, indicating a brutal and prolonged attack. An object, possibly an ice pick or similar tool, had penetrated her left nostril and driven into the sphenoid bone at the base of the skull—though forensic reports have differed on whether this injury occurred during the attack or during recovery of the body. The accumulation of snow beneath her, combined with the condition of the remains, led investigators to conclude that she had likely been killed elsewhere, then dumped over the embankment from a vehicle sometime between the late fall of 1991 and the winter months leading up to her discovery in March 1992.
With no identification on the body and no missing-person report that matched her description, authorities turned to the public. Sketches of her face and of the rose tattoo were circulated widely, and the press began calling her “Bitter Creek Betty”—a name that echoed both the lonely rest area where she was found and the anonymity that shrouded her life. Detectives tracked the rose tattoo to a shop in Tucson; the artist remembered a young woman wearing a brown dress with yellow flowers who said she was hitchhiking from place to place. That recollection fit the emerging picture of a traveler moving along interstate corridors, vulnerable to those who prowled them. For years, investigators suspected that her killer might be a long-haul truck driver, using the constant motion of cross-country routes to hide his crimes. Despite tips generated by the sketches and the unusual tattoo, however, no one could put a name to the face, and the case joined a cluster of unsolved highway homicides in the region.
As time passed, the mystery deepened rather than faded. Another woman, later dubbed “I-90 Jane Doe,” was found murdered in April 1992 near Interstate 90 in Sheridan County, Wyoming, and both killings came to be viewed as part of a possible serial pattern. In 2012, a pivotal forensic breakthrough arrived: DNA evidence from the I-90 Jane Doe scene was matched to DNA recovered in the Bitter Creek Betty investigation, conclusively linking the two Wyoming murders to the same unknown male perpetrator. Then, in 2019, that same male DNA profile was connected to evidence in the 1991 rape and murder of a pregnant woman named Pamela McCall in Spring Hill, Tennessee. The three cases—two along Wyoming interstates, one in Tennessee—suddenly pointed to a single offender who seemed to live on the road.
Investigative genetic genealogy finally gave that offender a name. By tracing the unknown DNA through public family-tree databases, authorities identified the suspect as Clark Perry Baldwin, a former long-haul trucker who had spent the early 1990s driving routes through Wyoming, Tennessee, and surrounding states. In April 2020, FBI agents covertly collected Baldwin’s DNA from a shopping cart handle and trash in Iowa; laboratory analysis confirmed that it matched the profile from all three crime scenes. On May 6, 2020, agents and state investigators arrested him at his apartment in Waterloo, Iowa. Prosecutors in Wyoming charged him with first-degree murder in the two interstate cases, while Tennessee authorities charged him with the murder of Pamela McCall and her unborn child. Detectives believed that Baldwin had used his trucking job to select and transport vulnerable women, then discard their bodies along remote stretches of highway where jurisdictional boundaries and the randomness of the locations would hamper investigations.
Even as Baldwin’s name emerged as the alleged killer, the woman he was accused of murdering in Sweetwater County was still officially known only as Bitter Creek Betty. That changed in May 2022, when genealogical work on her own DNA profile led investigators to a half-sister. The sister told authorities that she had once had a sibling named Irene Vasquez and had not heard from her since about 1990. The physical description, the estimated age, and the family DNA all aligned: the Jane Doe from Bitter Creek was finally identified as Irene Vasquez. The identification, though made in 2022, was not publicly announced until May 2025, by which time the case had already been tied to Baldwin and his wider pattern of violence.
In May 2025, Baldwin was convicted in Tennessee for the murder of Pamela McCall and sentenced to life in prison, clearing the way for his expected extradition to Wyoming to stand trial for the killings of Irene Vasquez and I-90 Jane Doe, who by then had been identified as 21-year-old Cindi Arleen Estrada. But events overtook the legal process. On July 17, 2025, Wyoming authorities publicly revealed Estrada’s identity, and the next day, Baldwin died in prison after suffering a heart attack, never having faced a jury for the Wyoming murders. For law enforcement, the DNA evidence and the arrest have effectively answered the question of who killed Irene along Interstate 80, even if the formal trials will now never occur. Irene, long buried under the placeholder name of Bitter Creek Betty and later interred in a Rock Springs cemetery, is no longer anonymous; her story has been reclaimed from a cold hillside beside the highway, even as the full account of her final hours remains locked away with the man who is believed to have taken her life.
