In June of 1989, a 39 year-old woman wearing only her underwear was kidnapped from her home in Bluff Siding, Wisconsin. The woman's assailant raped her several times and finally abandoned her along the side of the road.

Police questioning focused on Fredric Saecker, who was found near the victim's home wearing a blood stained T-Shirt. He gave inconsistent versions of his whereabouts on the evening of the assault and made several incriminating statements. Although Saecker did not at all resemble the victim's description of the attacker, he was charged and convicted of burglary, second-degree sexual assault, and kidnapping. Saecker was sentence to fifteen years in prison.

In 1993 Saecker's mother paid for DNA testing by Genetic Designs, a private laboratory in North Carolina. Although the tests concluded that Saecker could not have possibly been the source of the semen found in the victim's underwear, his request for a new trial was denied until 1996. When the case was finally revisited, the district attorney dismissed all the charges against Saecker based on the new evidence and the insignificant amount of time left on the original sentence. DNA testing proved that Fredric Saecker was imprisoned for six years for a crime he did not commit.