A Face in the Crowd: Who Killed Renee Welka?
The student was shot and an arrest was made, but the suspect later walked free. Nearly 30 years on, can police ever find the real murderer?
It was the summer of 1994, and 22-year-old Renee Welka was looking forward to starting her senior year at Eastern Michigan University. The lively marketing major was a sorority sister and also worked part-time at a restaurant to pay her way through her studies.
However, she would never return to school that fall. Instead, she was senselessly killed by a single gunshot — and the gunman was never apprehended. Almost three decades later, can Renee’s family ever hope to get answers?
The night of the killing
At around 2:00 AM on July 29th 1994, Renee and a friend of hers were just returning from a night out to their apartment within Ann Arbor’s Glencoe complex in Renee’s white Ford Escort. She had been about to park in the parking lot when a man walked up to the driver’s side window.
To the girls’ horror, he pulled out a gun and shot once through the window, shattering the glass and hitting Renee in the back. She frantically hit the accelerator in a bid to get away, but made it only 300 yards before losing consciousness and…
