Identity of Idaho's Dead "Unknown Wanderer" Solved After 43 Years

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One Boise cold case isn’t on ice anymore.

In the four decades since an unidentified man was found dead in a church in December 1982, his identity has remained a mystery—until today, that is.

Formerly known solely as the “Unknown Wanderer” to true crime lovers, as well as viewers of the 1990 Unsolved Mysteries episode chronicling his story, the man was identified as Dr. Mathew Francis Betkouski in an Ada County Sheriff’s Office press conference on Sept. 23.

The breakthrough came after Detective Tim Cooper reopened the case in 2019 and discovered a key found in the Unknown Wanderer’s belongings had a marking indicating it was from a hardware store in Jacksonville, Fla.

That same key also featured an etching that led Cooper to the Jacksonville street of Mills Court, where he obtained the property deeds from the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Among the names in those documents was Betkouski, who had been declared dead in 1989—seven years after the discovery of the Unknown Wanderer’s body. 

Cooper was then able to locate Betkouski’s brother living in Los Angeles, learning that the man had gone missing in 1982.

Once investigators compared the brother’s DNA to DNA from the Unknown Wanderer’s possessions—which included two keyrings with nearly 30 keys, a wallet with no ID cards and an envelope containing close to $2,000—they were able to link Betkouski to the body. 

Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

According to authorities, Betkouski came from a prominent Los Angeles family and eventually moved to Jacksonville in 1975 to work for a flavors and fragrances company. He later worked as a scientist at Lockheed Martin, but his obsession with poison and putting it into pill capsules led to his firing in 1982, police said.

And though his dismissal occurred in the same year as the unsolved Chicago Tylenol murders, authorities—who previously were unable to match the Unknown Wanderer’s fingerprints to anyone on file in Idaho or in the FBI databases—aren’t connecting Betkouski to that cold case at the moment.

"While our office may have identified some connection to 1982 events, we're not naming him as a suspect," Cooper said during the Sept. 23 press conference. "Our goal today is to generate new leads to this case and possibly others." 

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