The Phones, the Remains, and the Interrogation

Crystal Rasch filed for divorce to get out of her marriage. The last time anyone can say for certain where she was, she had spent the day bumming around with the husband she was leaving. A Goodwill. A pawn shop. A flea market up north. Then her phone went quiet, and the next time the state can account for her, she is not a person anymore. She is a handful of burned bone fragments and a tooth, scraped out of the ground behind the property where Zachariah Rasch was living.

Friday was Day 5, and it was the state's case at full strength. Three witnesses, three different kinds of evidence, all of it pointing the same direction. The phones. The bones. The man's own recorded words. By the end of the day, the picture the state has built is hard to look away from. And by the end of the day, the one thing that picture still cannot show you was clearer than it has been since opening statements. Nobody in that courtroom has told this jury how Crystal Rasch died. On Day 5, the witness who came the closest was the state's own.

The Phones

The state finally put up the witness it had been promising the jury for days. A criminal intelligence analyst out of Missouri, Tyler Anderson, whose job is to take raw cell phone and Google location data and turn it into a map of where the phones went. The state spent the better part of two hours laying his foundation, so that when the animations played, the jury would trust the dots on the screen. Then it slowed everything down for one day. June 11, 2024. The last day anyone can place Crystal alive.

What the map showed is the beat the state wanted the jury carrying into the weekend. Rasch's phone and Crystal's phone moved together that day, south into the Milwaukee suburbs and then back north to the Wood Road property by 4:16 in the afternoon, sitting so close on the overlay that Anderson said you could barely tell them apart. After that, only one of those phones moved again. His popped north toward Juneau late that night and came back. Hers produced one last point just after midnight and then went dark. Nothing after. Two phones travel to the end of the road together, and then only one of them keeps going.

The defense did not argue with the maps. It argued with who drew them. Anderson does not pull records himself and has no power to subpoena anything. He mapped only the window the sheriff's office handed him, June 11 forward, and he admitted on the stand that he had received data from before June 11 and never looked at it, because nobody asked him to. He could not even say whether that earlier data reached into May, or April, or March. And his own caution ran through the whole morning: a phone reaching out to a tower is not a person doing anything, and a dot on his map is an estimate, not a pin.

Here is what the phones can do. They can put two devices in the same place and show one of them stop. Here is what they cannot do. They cannot tell you what happened to the woman who owned one of them. That is placement. It is not cause of death. Keep that line in your head, because the whole day runs along it.

WATCH: DAY 5, PART 21 Phone Analyst Testifies Rasch's and Crystal's Phones Moved Together, Then Hers Went Dark

The Bones

If the phones placed her, the next witness told the jury what the property gave up. Dr. Jordan Karsten is a forensic anthropologist, the person the state crime lab calls when remains are burned or broken past what a pathologist normally handles. The first thing he did was correct the language everyone in this case has been using. This was not a burn pit, he testified. It was a surface burn, ash and scorched earth scraped across the ground rather than a deep hole. And then he walked the jury through what that fire did.

Fragment after fragment. Bone charred black. Bone burned all the way to calcined gray and white, chalky, with everything organic cooked out of it. He confirmed that sulfuric acid destroys human tissue, which matters because of the six bottles of drain cleaner and the acid in the soil from earlier in this trial. He agreed that once bone is calcined and chalky, it can be broken down further, that a shovel could do it, that a hammer could do it, depending on how far the burning had gone. He found a straight saw cut on one bone, though it was gnawed so badly by rodents that he could not even confirm it was human, and it was never matched to any saw. And he explained why the October dig turned up more than the June dig. The remains had been buried shallow next to the burn, and animals had dug them up and scattered them across the property, leaving tooth punctures on the bone as proof.

And then came the exchange that decides this trial, and it cut both ways inside a few minutes. On the state's redirect, Karsten agreed that the skull fracturing he documented looked like fracturing he has seen at gunshot scenes, that a person with those injuries would be dead, and that the brain would not have stayed in the skull. That is the closest anyone in this trial has come to gesturing at how Crystal died. But the same witness, minutes earlier on cross, had drawn a hard line. A forensic anthropologist does not determine cause or manner of death. That is a pathologist's job, a medical examiner's job, and it was never his role here. And on the state's own redirect, he went further. With a body burned down to fragments, he said, even a pathologist might not be able to say.

Consistent with a gunshot is not a cause of death. And a gunshot is consistent with the state's theory that Rasch killed her on purpose. It is just as consistent with the defense's theory that a gun went off by accident and a frightened man spent the next weeks hiding what happened. The state's strongest forensic witness walked the jury right up to the edge of the one question this whole trial turns on, and then told them his science cannot answer it.

WATCH: DAY 5, PART 22 Forensic Anthropologist Testifies Crystal Rasch's Body Was Burned to Fragments

The Interrogation

The state closed the week with its most damaging material, the recorded interrogation of Zachariah Rasch, played for the jury by the lead detective, Justin Kontny. He cleared a few things up first. A phone-app tip that claimed to be Crystal checking in from a small town in Minnesota turned out to be worthless, because anyone can type a location into that app, the address belonged to a domestic violence shelter that could not confirm anything, and the sheriff up there had never had contact with anyone by her name. The neighborhood canvass put her last sighting at roughly June 7. Hospitals, accident reports, nothing.

Then the jury heard Rasch. The pattern was the same thing over and over. The detective lays down a fact, and Rasch denies it, dodges it, or cannot remember. He could not say where his repossessed car ended up, the one last seen parked in the woods up north. The six bottles of drain cleaner from Menards were for chipmunks and gophers, he said, something he had read about online a while back. And then the moment the detective had been building toward. That purchase ran on Crystal's bank card. The detective reminded him that he had asked, point blank and earlier, whether Rasch had ever used her account, and that Rasch had said no. Now Rasch admitted he had one of her cards. Why hide it? He did not know. He should have said so.

It kept going. He denied recent trips to Adams County, then admitted them, a flea market, a Goodwill, a pawn shop, the same kind of day Crystal was last seen alive on. He had signed away his parental rights to his children right before all of this. His wedding ring was held on with tape, and he said he still wore it and still loved her, even though she had filed to divorce him. And when the detective asked what he had been burning in the fire pit by the house, Rasch said all kinds of things, garbage, and a blue suitcase his mother had burned, with another suitcase inside it.

Through every minute of it, every time the detective said he could prove a lie, Rasch went back to the same place. He did not know where she was. He did not know what happened to her.

Here is the thing. For Rasch's credibility, this tape is brutal, and a jury watching it is not going to believe much of what comes out of his mouth. For the concealment charge, the hidden card and the suitcase and the lies do real work. But the interrogation that catches him in lie after lie never once catches him in the thing the state actually needs. He never says he killed her. He never says how she died. And that silence is exactly where the defense is standing, because a man who concealed a death he caused by accident, who panicked and lied because he knew how all of it would look, would sound a great deal like the man on that recording.

WATCH: DAY 5, PART 23 Detective Catches Rasch in Lie After Lie in His Own Interrogation

What Day 5 Did Not Prove

Put the three of them side by side, and they share one feature. Not one of them tells the jury how Crystal Rasch died. The phones are placement, not cause. The anthropologist who pointed at a gunshot is the same one who said cause of death is not his to determine and may not be anyone's, given what is left. The interrogation is lie after lie and not one word about the death itself.

So look at what the state is actually asking. It has built an overwhelming picture of a man who hid a death and lied about it for weeks. What it wants twelve people to do is take the sheer weight of that picture, and the silence sitting in the middle of it, and fill in the rest. To decide, with no cause of death, that he intentionally killed her. That might be a reasonable thing to conclude. It might even be the truth. But "might" is the entire problem in a case with no eyewitness, no confession, and no body left to examine.

My father spent his life on the unglamorous side of this. The side that insists the state has to prove all of it, not most of it. Reasonable doubt is not a loophole and it is not a technicality. It is the thing that stands between a powerful story and a conviction, and it does its job precisely when the story is strong and the proof still has a hole in it. The state does not get to win on volume. It has to close the gap. As of Friday, with its best evidence already in front of the jury, it has not.

What Comes Next

On Friday the state told the court that the lead detective is its last witness, and that it expects to rest its case on Monday. There is a fight to get through first. The state filed a motion late Friday asking the judge to reconsider an earlier ruling on some messages, and that gets argued first thing Monday morning, before the jury comes in. Once that is settled and the last of the interrogation plays, the state is done.

And then it is the defense's turn. We have watched the state spend two weeks building a web, blood, purchases, searches, phones, remains. The real question now is what the defense does with the one thread the state never tied off. If they put on a case, that is where it begins.

If you want to watch Day 5 the way it actually unfolded, the entire thing is up, start to finish, with nothing cut out.

WATCH THE FULL DAY, NO BREAKS EDITION Wisconsin v. Rasch, Day 5 in Full, Uncut

You can also watch the complete Day 5 live broadcast here, the raw stream just as it aired from the courtroom.