Jury Deliberations Continue Today In Brantner Homicide Trial

A Fond du Lac County jury continues deliberations today in a cold case homicide trial. The jury Monday spent more than four hours deliberating whether Dennis Brantner killed 18-year-old Berit Beck in the summer of 1990 in Fond du Lac. At one point the jury returned to the court room to listen to audio from an interview Sheriff’s detectives did with Brantner in his kitchen in Kenosha in March of 2014 and view the Kenosha Police video of an interview conducted with Brantner later that day. During closing arguments yesterday Brantner’s attorney, Craig Powell, told the jury no one could put Brantner in Fond du Lac when Beck was killed. He said it was just as plausible that Brantner met the man who killed Beck and that man may have given him a ride possibly in Beck’s van paying for a meal, drinks, and giving Brantner money for a hotel room in Kenosha. District Attorney Eric Toney said it was more likely Brantner came across Beck as she was changing her clothes in the van while it was in Fond du Lac. He says it’s likely he overpowered her and used a strip from a red t-shirt she had been using to blindfold her. He says she must have experienced sheer terror at the hands of Dennis Brantner a man who she had never met and was twice her age. The jury consists of 10 women and two men.