Man charged in 2008 killing of UW-Madison student
MADISON – A 53-year-old man was charged Friday in the 2008 killing of a University of Wisconsin-Madison student who was found strangled and stabbed in her downtown apartment after she returned home from class.
David Kahl was charged with firstdegree intentional homicide as a party to a crime and by use of a dangerous weapon. The charges come 12 years after the April 2, 2008, death of 21-yearold Brittany Zimmermann, whose killing rocked Madison. Kahl was in custody Friday on a drunken driving offense and did not yet have an attorney in the murder case.
Kahl’s name had been mentioned in connection with Zimmermann’s death before, but police did not name him as a suspect. It wasn’t entirely clear from police or the criminal complaint as to why Kahl was being charged now. But the complaint says that last April, authorities took a letter out of evidence and had it tested for DNA. In August, they learned that Kahl’s DNA matched the DNA found on the seal of the envelope.
That letter, received by authorities in April 2009, had a return address of Fox Lake Correctional Institution and indicated it was from an inmate who said he overheard another inmate discuss being involved in Zimmermann’s death.
Zimmermann was studying medical microbiology and immunology when she was killed. At the time, police said she had just returned home from classes when someone followed her into her apartment. She lived with her fiancé and their three cats at the time, and her fiancé discovered her body. An autopsy determined that she died of “complex homicidal violence.”