JUNEAU, Wis. (Court TV) — A Wisconsin man is standing trial on charges he killed his wife and burned her body on their property, but his attorney says the victim took her own life.
Zachariah Rasch appears in court on June 1, 2026. (Court TV)
Zachariah Rasch, 44, has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse in the death of his wife, Crystal Rasch, 37.
Prosecutors say Crystal Rasch was last seen alive on June 11, 2024, going out to eat and running errands with her husband. During opening statements, prosecutor Shawn Woller showed surveillance video of the defendant and victim together before she disappeared. “Crystal was a dead woman walking,” Woller said.
In June 2024, Zachariah Rasch and Crystal Rasch were going through a divorce. The couple also had children, but the state had removed the kids from their custody and was in the process of terminating their parental rights. Despite that, Woller said that Crystal Rasch was optimistic about her future. “She was not a woman phasing out of her own life, but a woman still trying to hold onto the parts that mattered most,” the prosecutor said.
Crystal Rasch was reported missing by her stepmother on June 23. When officers arrived at the Rasch home to investigate, they said Zachariah Rasch was in the area of a burn pit. After talking to the defendant, they moved on to talk to a friend of Crystal Rasch’s, who began receiving strange messages purporting to be from the victim while speaking with deputies. “These messages did not sound like Crystal,” Woller said. “The wording is wrong, the styling was wrong, and whoever was sending these messages wouldn’t do the one thing that would have proved it was Crystal: which is get on the phone, get on video and show themselves.”
Detectives soon determined that while Crystal Rasch hadn’t been seen, there had been continued activity on her debit card. Surveillance video obtained by detectives allegedly shows Zachariah Rasch using his wife’s debt card on multiple days and locations, buying cleaning products that included eight 32-ounce bottles of drain cleaner. They also noted several cash withdrawals.
When officers searched the couple’s property, they found multiple burn areas. In one of those burn pits, they found a tooth and fragment of skull known as the “Petrus Pyramid.” The tooth matched Crystal Rasch’s dental records and the skull fragment matched her DNA.
A Mitsubishi Eclipse belonging to the defendant was found at his family’s property. Detectives who searched the vehicle said a seatbelt, the front passenger seat and front passenger door were saturated with blood and it “looked like someone had tried to clean, but not nearly well enough.” The DNA was a match to Crystal Rasch’s profile.
Woller said that a dump of Zachariah Rasch’s phone records revealed he had been making a number of disturbing searches, beginning weeks before the victim disappeared. Those searches included, “Do you die instantly from a gunshot to the head,” “How long can you get widow’s benefits if taxes were never filed,” and “Do raccoons at bones?”
“The evidence will show a progression,” Woller said. “Evidence will show that before Crystal disappears, the defendant is searching about fatal headshots and widow’s benefits. After Crystal is gone, he’s searching about cleaning, bones, replacing parts of a vehicle, sulfuric acid, how quickly police can get a warrant and about missing persons alerts.”
Zaki Zehawi, one of Zachariah Rasch’s defense attorneys, told the jury that prosecutors had the case all wrong and that Crystal Rasch had “tragically killed herself” while handling a gun in front of the defendant. “Mr. Rasch believed that he would be blamed for the death, as it was his firearm and the divorce that was pending,” Zehawi said in his opening statement. “He panicked and made a series of incredibly poor decisions. He lied to his friends and family, he raised suspicions, he was targeted by law enforcement and eventually he was prosecuted for her death.”
Zehawi told the jury that his client doesn’t know exactly what happened to the victim, only that “he did have a 9 mm in his vehicle and then as he was driving, the gun discharged.”
Zachariah Rasch faces a potential life sentence if he’s convicted as charged.
