The Decades

In July 1976, a young couple camping in a Wisconsin state park were both shot dead. For forty years, investigators had a sketch, a plate number, a blood type — and not enough DNA to test. The investigation would span decades until the truth eventually surfaced. View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-decades

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Deambra, and the case I'm going to share with you today takes place in McClintock Park in Marinette County, Wisconsin. Today's episode struck me the moment I saw it. It's a double homicide that happened at a campground in the summer of 1976. It was such a vicious and shocking crime that I initially thought, surely, it's been solved. Well, it was, but not for a very, very long time. And it's in the decades in between the murders and the fulfillment of justice that I want to take you step by step through in this episode. I was able to obtain the entire public investigative file for this crime. And as I started reading, it was like looking into a time capsule.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  There were handwritten police reports, grainy 1970s photographs, documents that appeared to have been produced on typewriters. But then, everything in the file enters the modern era. There were references to DNA and genealogy, terms I know usually lead to the most important thing in an unsolved homicide investigation: the truth. This is Park Predators.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Shortly before 3:30 in the afternoon on Friday, July 9, 1976, a deputy with the Marinette County Sheriff's Department in Wisconsin was on patrol when he heard a call come over his radio that I imagine made him straighten up in his cruiser. Headquarters told him that he needed to head straight to McClintock Park because a staff member there had found a young man shot to death on a dirt trail behind the women's restroom building next to the park's campground. In general, the 10 or so campsites at McClintock Park weren't used very often at that time. The sheriff would later tell the Green Bay Press Gazette that normally, no one camped there, but this particular Friday, someone had camped there.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  When the deputy arrived on scene shortly after 4:00 PM, he met up with several area rescue workers, the park's foreman, and an off-duty police officer from the city of Marinette, who were already all there. According to police reports and court records, the foreman explained that shortly after 2 o'clock, while checking up on the park's campsites, he found the victim and asked the Marinette officer, who had just happened to pass by, to stay with the deceased young man while he went to call in to the sheriff's department. When the victim was found, he was laying face up, sort of on his left side, and it was obvious he'd been shot in the neck. He was dressed in jean shorts, a striped shirt, white socks, and tennis shoes. There was also a brown hat crumpled on the ground just a few inches from his head, and

• 3:55Speaker 01

  a black camera case and camera lying near the back of his legs. Based on the photos I saw in the case file, it appeared he'd been gunned down right after walking past the women's restroom building, seemingly on his way to the men's restroom building, because in the crime scene photos, it's clear that he would have had to pass the small wooden hut with the word "women" written on it before arriving at the men's toilets. Likely realizing the situation was very serious, the first responding deputy quickly radioed for an investigator to come to the scene. And in short order, one arrived, followed by the sheriff and a lieutenant. The crime scene was quickly cordoned off, and right away, the sheriff's department got to work processing the scene, trying to determine who the young man might be and searching for additional clues.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Not too far away from the outhouse buildings, investigators found a campsite with a blue and yellow tent set up, and next to it was a red AMC Gremlin sedan. Inside the tent, investigators found a large sleeping bag, two pillows, a book, a small suitcase, two paper grocery bags, and what appeared to be either a jacket or maybe some fabric that might have contained the sleeping bag. It's hard to tell from the photos what exactly that last item was, but either way, all those things were neatly organized. Even the sleeping bag and pillows had been flattened, exactly how someone would make a bed. Registration information for the AMC Gremlin came back as belonging to 25-year-old Green Bay resident David Shuldees.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And pretty quickly, investigators put two and two together that he was the victim who'd been shot in the park. However, inside his vehicle, deputies found a woman's purse with papers inside it that belonged to a 24-year-old woman named Ellen Mathies. Ellen, as it turns out, was David's fiance, and it seems as soon as authorities realized she was missing, they immediately organized a search for her. At the time, they were the only two people using McClintock Park's campground, so unfortunately, there were no nearby campers to speak with or other visitors to interview to glean more information from. Deputies and forest rangers scoured the campground and surrounding woods for the rest of the day and evening, trying to find Ellen, but they had no luck.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  They resumed their efforts the following morning, Saturday, July 10, and shortly before noon, a lieutenant who'd been part of the investigation the previous day made a gruesome discovery. Lying in a loose fetal position in a field several hundred yards away from where David had been found was Ellen. She was nude from the waist up, and her face had been covered with a yellow and brown knit shirt. Her shorts were open at the zipper, and she was wearing tennis shoes with no socks. She didn't have a bra or underwear on, but investigators eventually found those items discarded a short distance from her body. She had one gunshot wound to her chest and another to her abdomen, and it was clear she'd been dead for a while. Meanwhile, back in the area where David had been discovered, investigators found several

• 6:49Speaker 01

  bullet fragments embedded in the outside wooden wall of the women's restroom facility. In total, authorities collected two metal jackets from his scene and the scene where Ellen had been found. They also collected several pieces of trash from the campground's receptacles and made sure to bag all the various camping supplies and personal hygiene products that were in the couple's tent. While processing David's car, they collected two pairs of sunglasses, a soda bottle, a gas can, a camping stove, and several latent fingerprints. All of those items were then sent to Wisconsin's crime lab in Madison for further examination and testing. From the jump, the sheriff's department treated this case as highly suspicious. Whoever the killer or killers were had made no attempt to hide the victims' bodies or steal anything from them.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  For example, when David was found, he still had a nice-looking silver watch on his wrist, and in his pockets was about $15 in cash that hadn't been touched. Ellen's purse had also been left in their car, so all those things being there didn't point toward robbery as a motive. From reading the reports produced by the sheriff's department in 1976, it seems that the agency pretty quickly moved to sexual assault as being the primary motive for the attacks. I'm not sure exactly what led authorities to hone in on that theory initially, but it likely had to do with the state of undress that Ellen had been found in and the fact that she was located so far from her companion, David. Two days after the murders, a forensic pathologist at what was then called the University of

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Wisconsin Medical School conducted the couple's autopsies. And according to those reports, Ellen's official cause of death was the gunshot wound to her chest. She also had bruising on her genital area, and the pathologist found sperm present, which of course, he made sure to swab and preserve. He also located some pubic hair, which he compared to both Ellen and David, and it wasn't a match to either of them, which suggested it had likely come from the perpetrator. The pathologist also found four head hairs on the shirt that was used to cover Ellen's face, and none of them matched her or David either, again, suggesting they could have come from whoever killed her. David's examination revealed he'd been shot once in the front-left side of his neck,

• 9:00Speaker 01

  and based on the catastrophic damage the bullet had caused to his spinal cord, he died instantly. The pathologist took fingernail scrapings and fingerprints from both victims to, I assume, give to law enforcement so they could compare them against the latent ones that had been found in David's car. An article Ellen Zettel wrote for the Green Bay Press Gazette explained that law enforcement's best-working theory at that time was that Ellen had maybe seen or heard David's murder occur, then tried to get away but was caught, and then she was sexually assaulted and murdered. When news of what happened to them reached their loved ones in Green Bay, people were shocked and saddened. David worked part-time in the circulation department for the Green Bay Press Gazette

• 9:41Speaker 01

  newspaper, and Ellen was a technical services employee for the University of Wisconsin Green Bay's main library. She and David had both graduated from that campus a few years earlier, but she'd stayed on working as an employee at the library because she seemed to like the job. Her neighbors told the Green Bay Press Gazette that she was a quiet person who kept to herself. Coverage by United Press International explained that the two were planning to get married in the fall of 1976. What exactly led them to camp at McClintock Park that fateful Friday in early July isn't something I could find in the available source material, but what I do know is that investigators determined they'd left their separate residences in Green Bay around 10 o'clock in the morning that Friday.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Initially, they'd gone to Goodman Park, but it was full, so they left and headed to McClintock Park. When they arrived, they set up their camp sometime not long after that. The Green Bay Press Gazette reported that neither of them had formally registered at the park to stay overnight on Friday. So I don't know if that means they didn't intend to camp or if they were just killed before they got the chance to register. I lean more towards they died before registering, just given the fact that they had all those camping supplies, but again, I'm not 100% certain. A theory law enforcement would later put forward was that the couple, after setting up their camp, might have intended to go for a walk, but they didn't get very far because Ellen had stopped to use the restroom. And while David was waiting outside for her, he'd been shot, which likely caused her to

• 11:08Speaker 01

  either flee or comply with the killer. And after that, you know what happened. A few days after the crime, the sheriff's department got a huge break in the case when two men came forward to report seeing a gun-toting man in the park before David's body was even discovered.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts. On July 12th, four days after David was found and three days after Ellen was located, a lieutenant with the sheriff's department and an official from Wisconsin's Department of Justice interviewed two men who said they'd been at McClintock Park the afternoon of Friday, July 9. These men were Robert Swanson and Kim Hemphner. And they claimed they'd heard a gunshot ring out sometime between 2:00 and 2:30 in the afternoon. Robert's recollection of the incident went like this.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Around 1:00 PM or so, he and Kim were out joyriding in the county when they decided to visit a few local parks. He told investigators that sometime between 2:00 or 2:30, while they were walking back from the Peshtigo River and passing through the park's picnic grounds, they heard what they immediately recognized as a single gunshot. Robert said he was certain the sound was a rifle gunshot because he personally owned several firearms, including a rifle. And he was confident that the specific sharp percussion noise they'd heard had come from a rifle. However, because he and Kim were in an outdoor space surrounded by woods, they didn't really think the sound was that concerning. So they got back into Kim's car and drove off.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  As they left and pulled onto the main road, they passed a shorter offshoot road that led toward the park's campground, but they didn't go down that road. Not too far up from there, Robert spotted a young white man in an unbuttoned shirt carrying a short rifle in his left hand. The guy was walking at a fast pace through the woods, and Robert estimated that in relation to their car, the man was about 40 to 50 feet off the roadway. Unfortunately, though, Robert never got a good look at the guy's face. At the time, he'd remarked to Kim that the man was probably just a hunter. However, that was kind of odd to the two of them since they knew there weren't any hunting seasons open at that time. Still, after that, they didn't think much more about the sighting and carried on with their day.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  When the investigators interviewing Robert asked him if he'd seen a car parked along Parkway Road near where they'd spotted the mystery man, he told them he hadn't, but Kim had. In his interview, Kim said that he'd spotted a vehicle parked on the side of the roadway and believed it had Michigan plates and was either a 1968 or a 1969 Chrysler Plymouth. In hindsight, Robert said he and his buddy suspected the guy with the gun was likely walking back to that vehicle because it belonged to him. When asked to describe the gun-toting man, Kim said the guy was white, probably 23 to 28 years old, weighed somewhere between 150 to 160 pounds, and was 5'11" to 6' tall. He said he also had dark hair combed to the side and a mustache.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  A few days later, the sheriff's department asked him to undergo hypnosis, and he agreed. During that session, he recalled significantly more details about the mystery man with the rifle. Kim said that the guy had been wearing black boots, dark-colored blue jeans, and appeared to have dirt on the left side of his face. In general, he described the man's gait or style of walking as taking extremely long steps. As far as what he remembered about the car parked near the roadway, Kim said it was a dark color and had a lot of rust on it. He said the Michigan license plate was on the center portion of the vehicle's front bumper, and it had the letters MLB and numbers 114 in it. Now, when investigators ran that information, they found it was registered to a man who lived in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  However, per letter reporting by Dick Carbon for the Green Bay Press Gazette, authorities tracked that man down and realized he wasn't involved. So using the information Kim and Robert had provided about the gun-toting man, authorities then developed a suspect composite sketch of his likeness and created an informational flyer that was distributed publicly. That poster went out in early August and featured a breakdown of the man's general physical characteristics. It also stated that he might have been driving a dark-colored Chrysler Plymouth or a Dodge Vintage, which is slightly different information than what investigators had gotten from Kim and Robert. So I don't know if that means authorities had found other potential witnesses by that point or what. But either way, with such detailed information out there about the mystery man and his

• 16:41Speaker 01

  reported vehicle, investigators were likely hoping they'd get some new leads to follow. But that didn't happen. The only concrete information authorities had to work off of at that point was that a high-powered .30 caliber rifle was the murder weapon. They'd come to that determination because of what they deduced from the firearm evidence that deputies had collected at the crime scene. At one point early on, they thought a bloody boot that was found in the park might be linked to the crime, but turns out it wasn't. It had actually been in the park prior to the murders, so as good as that clue initially looked, it turned out to be a dead end. As the days and weeks ticked by, sheriff's deputies, state crime investigators, and representatives from the district attorney's office routinely met to go over information in the case.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Officials were dispatched to link up with other law enforcement agencies throughout the Green Bay area to try and make headway on possible suspects, but progress was slow. I can see in some of the investigative reports that authorities did identify a few potential persons of interest in the case, but they tested those individuals' hair samples against the pubic hairs and head hairs found on Ellen's clothing, and none were a match. Come the end of 1976, the case was still unsolved and seemingly growing cold with every passing day. But a small glimmer of hope came in mid-March of 1977, when a woman in DePere, Wisconsin, which was about 90 miles south of the park and much closer to the city of Green Bay,

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  reported to police that she'd been sexually assaulted by a man who resembled the composite sketch. According to coverage by the Green Bay Press Gazette, this victim said she'd let her attacker into her home because he'd flashed a badge at her and claimed he was a cop. When investigators compared a suspect sketch that the DePere victim had helped develop to the man witnesses in Ellen and David's case had seen, the resemblance was uncanny. Unfortunately, though, the DePere investigation seemed to stall, and the two cases were never formally linked. In October of that year, the sheriff's department's chief deputy, who'd worked on the case, told Press Gazette reporter Dick Carbon that it was both frustrating and troubling that Ellen and David's murders remained unsolved.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  He said they'd been able to pretty quickly rule out a personal motive, meaning a love triangle or something, because as far as the investigation uncovered, the couple had been dating for like four years prior to their murders, and they were about to get married. So it wasn't like either of them had had a recent bad split with an ex or something. The chief deputy said that it really seemed like a situation where they just bumped into the wrong person at the wrong time. He also shared this ominous opinion with the newspaper when he said, quote, "Definitely a psychopath. It's hard to believe if he murdered, raped, and murdered that he would not do it again. The pattern is to keep repeating until he gets caught," end quote. It also came out in that article that the original people who'd found the victims' bodies,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  the park's foreman and the off-duty marionette police officer, had arrived on scene just minutes after the murders occurred. According to court records, the off-duty police officer had come by on a whim with his girlfriend, and the caretaker was just starting his rounds to check on the campground's firewood supply. So had either of them just been a few minutes earlier, they might have seen the killer, or worse, potentially been victims themselves. Based on everything that was known up until that point, the chief deputy said it was the sheriff's department's opinion that Ellen and David likely were about to take an afternoon walk when they were attacked, and it was possible their killer had even been watching them from the moment they arrived and began setting up their campsite.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  The crime, by all accounts, was a brazen, random attack that occurred in the middle of the day in very close proximity to the main road anyone would have had to drive to access the park. Interestingly, one other tidbit of information that the chief deputy told the Green Bay Press Gazette, which I don't think was information that had previously been known, was that two to three days prior to the killings, people who'd been camping or staying in residences in the area near the park, had reported a prowler snooping around at all times of the day and night. For example, one witness, who was actually a police officer, said he'd seen a mysterious man walking around at like 11:30 at night, and then again at like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  When asked what that guy looked like, the officer provided a description that closely matched the one that had been established for Ellen and David's alleged killer. However, once again, the case pretty much languished after that, and remained stagnant for the next few years. In 1979, though, the sheriff's department announced it was taking a much closer look at the double homicide, after state crime lab technicians decided to implement new ways of analyzing blood. Turns out, back in September 1976, so this would have been about two months after the murders, a technician at the crime lab had concluded that after conducting blood tests on the seminal fluid found in Ellen's body and on her shorts, the suspect was a type

• 21:47Speaker 01

  O secreter, meaning that they were a person who secreted what their blood type was in their bodily fluids like saliva, mucus, and semen. Whereas a non-secreter wouldn't secrete their blood type in those kinds of bodily fluids. But apparently, the conclusion that Ellen and David's killer was a type O secreter with O blood was wrong, because according to reporting by the Green Bay Press Gazette, the technician who'd come up with those results had actually omitted a certain type of blood test, which meant none of their findings could be trusted. As a result, the sheriff's department realized that some 200 people they'd previously checked out in relation to the case would need to be reinvestigated.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Anyway, when that issue was addressed, the crime lab basically told authorities they didn't need to only look at men who were type O secretors, they also needed to consider other suspects who didn't have that blood type, which, to me, feels like kind of going back to square one. But at least investigators were no longer operating off flawed information. Now, for reasons I can't explain, about a year after that, the sheriff's department signed off on an evidence destruction order, authorizing the state crime lab to destroy a number of pieces of physical evidence in the case, including a swab that had been done on Ellen's shorts, her vaginal swab, several of her and David's tissue and organ samples, and blood samples.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  The person who signed the order was the same chief deputy who just a few years earlier had told the Green Bay Press Gazette he was frustrated by the lack of progress in the case, which is a detail that literally made my eyes pop out of my head when I read it. But that is what happened. Why? I do not know. But what I can confirm is that despite the destruction order moving forward in 1980, there were still several pieces of physical evidence hanging around that investigators could test. Because come July 10, 1996, which was 20 years after Ellen and David were killed, Wisconsin's then attorney general signed an order to have Ellen's knit top and denim shorts tested

• 23:55Speaker 01

  for DNA, which obviously was not something that could be tested for back in 1976. Those findings showed there was a semen stain in the crotch area of her shorts and a blood stain on her top, but neither of those samples had enough DNA present to develop a profile. The lab tried again a few years later in the year 2000, and this time, they got a little bit more information. Turns out, the blood stain on the shirt was determined to likely belong to Ellen, which wasn't all that surprising, given the nature of her injuries. But the DNA profile from the semen stain was determined to belong to an unknown male contributor. After it was developed, the lab entered that genetic profile into local, state, and national known offender DNA databases, but they didn't get a hit.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Investigators kept after it, though, all the way into the early 2000s, through the 2010s, and so on, until finally, in 2018, 42 years after the crime, the sheriff's department announced that thanks to advances in DNA science and technology, they now had the best profile of the suspected killer to date. And not only that, they had an updated rendering of what he likely looked like.

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  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms, with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. That's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 26:25Speaker 01

  I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts. In July 2018, investigators with the sheriff's department, which by that point had actually undergone a slight name change and was now the sheriff's office, told the media they'd been working for a while with Parabon Nano Labs to develop a DNA phenotype image of David and Ellen's killer. This method further narrowed down the perpetrator's suspected features, like probable heritage, eye color, hair color, and so forth.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And because so much time had passed, they'd actually made two renderings of the guy. One was a composite of what he likely looked like around the age of 25, and the other was an image of how he would have appeared in his mid-60s. He was said to be fair-skinned, with some freckles, had reddish-brown or black hair, and had blue-green eyes. Up until that point, mostly what the sheriff's office had to go off of was the description from Kim and Robert about the rifle-toting man they'd seen in the woods in 1976. But with this updated information, the then sheriff told the press that his investigators were much more confident about the specific features of the unknown killer. He told Fox 11, quote, "This is no longer an artist conjecture based on what some witnesses

• 27:51Speaker 01

  are telling them in a sit-down interview. This is science at work," end quote. According to coverage by WSAW News Channel 7, within days of making this announcement about the phenotyping results and distributing the two images, the sheriff's office got flooded with tips, some of which included names of people who investigators had never heard of before. They also worked with a genealogist at Parabon Nano Labs, who spent the next few months studying the suspect DNA in the case and exploring DNA matches in a public DNA database called Jedmatch, and they were looking for folks with ties to the Green Bay area. In mid-December 2018, investigators learned from the lab that a couple named Edward and

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Gladys Van Evenhoven might know who the suspect was, because it seemed that one of their four sons, or even possibly a grandson, might have been involved. The couple had six kids in total, but the sons, Edward, named after his dad but not a junior, Francis, Raymond, and Cornelius, were where authorities focused their attention. Cornelius was the youngest, and then they went up in age from there. Edward was the eldest, Francis was after him, and then Raymond, and so forth. But by 2018, Francis had already died, which left just the other three to surveil. In early January 2019, authorities covertly took some trash out of Cornelius's garbage can, including a used inhaler.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  When techs at Wisconsin State Crime Lab tested swabs taken from the mouthpiece of that inhaler against the unknown male DNA profile that had been found on Ellen's shorts, they determined that Cornelius was not a match. However, his DNA indicated that he was a close familial match through his dad's side of the family, meaning Cornelius wasn't their guy, but a man he was related to might be. So the following month, February 2019, authorities looked into Edward. Through investigative means, deputies collected a coffee cup that Edward had used and then discarded. Lab techs swabbed and tested it for his DNA. However, he too was excluded from being the contributor of the unknown DNA found in Ellen's shorts.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  But investigators knew they were in the right family, because just like Cornelius's DNA had shown, Edward's was a close familial match to the foreign suspect DNA in the case to at least indicate to authorities that they were in the right ballpark. So the following month, they went after the next brother in line, Raymond, who at that time was 82 years old and living in Akonto County, Wisconsin, which is about 50 minutes south of Marinette County. According to a criminal complaint in this case, a detective for the sheriff's office decided to ask the chief deputy in Akonto County to go to Raymond's home and pose as if he was conducting a survey about policing in the area. When he was done, he was instructed to ask Raymond to seal his survey answers inside

• 30:47Speaker 01

  an envelope, which Raymond did. Right after that, Marinette County had the envelope sent to the state crime lab so it could be tested for DNA. And wouldn't you know it, when Raymond's profile was compared to the suspect DNA profile from the semen in Ellen's shorts, it came back as a match. So finally, the sheriff's office had someone who they could forensically tie to the crime scene from all those years ago. It also didn't help Raymond that when detectives executed a search warrant at his house just days after receiving the DNA results, they found a 30-30 lever-action rifle in his garage, along with four 30-caliber shell casings. Those had seemingly been tucked away inside a tin can on a shelf above his washer and dryer.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  But when law enforcement had Raymond's rifle tested and ballistically compared to the firearm evidence in the case, it was not determined to be the murder weapon. There's no mention of what, if any, testing was done on the shell casings found in the tin can. Just a few days after conducting that search, Marinette County's district attorney filed a criminal complaint against Raymond, charging him with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree sexual assault for the crimes against David and Ellen. The sexual assault count was later dropped, though, because the statute of limitations to prosecute for that offense had passed. In the criminal complaint, though, a detective for the sheriff's office laid out his probable cause statement, which explained everything that had led up to Raymond's identification

• 32:17Speaker 01

  and arrest. I've covered most of that information already in the episode, but I just want to say that of all the casework on so many investigations I've covered on this show, I'll say this case seemed very well put together and airtight. And that certainty was reinforced in April 2019, when a cheek swab authorities obtained from Raymond during a police interview once again confirmed that he was the source of the DNA found in Ellen's shorts. But the questions many people had were, who was Raymond Van Evenhoven? And what had he been up to for more than four decades? And why had he allegedly done this to Ellen and David? Well, some of those inquiries had answers.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  First off, Raymond sometimes went by his middle name, Lawrence, aka Larry. So in some of the reporting, he's referred to as either Raymond or Lawrence, like in the Green Bay Press Gazette, all the way back in 1957. That year, he'd been arrested for attempting to assault two underage girls on the same day in different areas. The first victim managed to evade him and provided law enforcement with a description of her attacker and the type of car he was driving. The second victim, it seems, had gotten into his car but then jumped out of it while it was still in motion to avoid being attacked. It's unclear if Raymond had used a ruse to lure either of these girls, but something makes me think he probably did, because otherwise, I'm not sure why the second victim would

• 33:44Speaker 01

  have voluntarily gotten into his car. Anyway, the second victim happened to tear a piece of his shirt off as she got away. And when police confronted him about the two incidents later that day, he admitted to being involved and was immediately taken into custody. At that time, he was just 20 years old, married to his wife Rita, and had one kid. For one of the offenses, he was eventually sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to pay a $200 fine, which, if he didn't pay, would trigger another six months in jail for him. It doesn't appear he faced any criminal charges for his attempted assault on the other victim. The then-district attorney of Brown County, where Raymond was living at the time and

• 34:26Speaker 01

  where the crimes occurred, described what he'd done to the girl as a "unprovoked attack", but there was no evidence of sexual molestation, which, of course, there wouldn't be, because the victim literally hurled herself out of his car to get away. Who knows what could have happened if she hadn't been able to escape? Fast forward, though, a bunch of years, and Raymond continued living his life in Wisconsin. He remained married to Rita, had four more children, and found work as a handyman. Coverage by the Associated Press explained that after his wife died in 2008, he spent most of his free time camping, hunting, and fishing. His brother-in-law told the news service that Raymond was always a loving father and husband, as far as he was aware.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  But some neighbors who spoke to the Associated Press explained that whenever Raymond drank, his temper would flare up very badly. When he was arraigned for the first time in court in mid-March 2019, Raymond repeatedly told the judge that he was not guilty of David and Ellen's murders. However, the court set his bond at $1 million, and the case was scheduled to go to trial pending a preliminary examination. At said preliminary examination, though, in June 2019, his defense attorneys mostly argued the credibility and legal admissibility of the DNA evidence in the case. The attorneys also argued that investigators had no real proof Raymond had ever shot David or Ellen, but the judge disagreed and ordered the case be bound for trial.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  About six months later, in January 2020, it seems that perhaps due to Raymond's age and hearing problems he was dealing with, the court ordered he undergo a competency exam. And come March of that year, a judge actually ruled that he wasn't competent to understand the court proceedings or able to assist in his own defense. So for the time being, he was ordered to an inpatient treatment program while his mental status was reviewed. Now, that didn't mean the court thought he was incompetent at the time of the crime, just that as of 2020, he was not able to understand what was going on in court or work with his defense attorneys to build a defense. His competency was reevaluated again, and he underwent a second exam.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  And by November 2020, it was determined he was competent to stand trial for the murders. However, when it came to what the defense planned to argue, it boiled down to this: Someone else did it, not Raymond. Fox 11's coverage explained that Raymond and his two attorneys had previously filed motions that pointed to two other men as possible suspects, one of whom was a county parks worker who didn't have an alibi for the timeframe of the crime, and another man who'd reportedly been in McClintock Park on the day of the crime but who died in the year 2000. In the end, though, the presiding judge ruled that neither of those alternative suspects could be supported by the evidence, and he denied the defense's requests. There was back and forth on this issue, though, because the defense appealed that judge's

• 37:22Speaker 01

  decision to a higher court, it underwent more review, and things just got kind of messy. But the trial date never changed. That proceeding got underway in July 2021. And something that was noticeably absent from the evidence jurors could consider was Raymond's previous arrest for the 1957 assaults on those two underage girls. According to coverage by Fox 11, the judge presiding over Raymond's trial ruled that those incidents were too old and unrelated to David and Ellen's murders, so nothing related to that situation would be permitted as evidence at trial. Which, from a legal standpoint, I can understand. But from a journalist's standpoint, I think that stuff from 1957 is super important in

• 38:06Speaker 01

  terms of understanding what may have motivated Raymond and how far back his violent tendencies seem to go. When the murder trial opened, the linchpin of the prosecution's case, of course, was the DNA evidence. They also had some of Ellen and David's close friends testify about how much their murders impacted their loved ones. One of Ellen's friends told the court that Ellen was a quiet, smart young woman who'd been like a sister she never had. David's younger sister later remarked to the Green Bay Press Gazette that their mother, who was still alive and in her early 90s, had articulated that "it wouldn't be over for her until David's killer was in prison for the rest of his life." Other people who testified at the trial included the former chief deputy who'd signed

• 38:51Speaker 01

  that evidence destruction order back in 1980. As you'd expect, the defense was not going to let that go unnoticed. Raymond's defense attorney questioned the former deputy chief about why he'd done such a thing, and he responded that the sheriff's office simply no longer needed that evidence at that time. Which, again, is logic I can't wrap my head around, but whatever, we'll leave it at that. When the trial concluded on July 27, 2021, evidence destruction order and embarrassment and all that, the jury still found Raymond guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. And in the court, the judge who sentenced him stated in part, quote, "This conduct was depraved in the worst sense.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  The injuries to these two people, horrible. The crimes, if there were a scale, would be 100 on a scale of 1 to 10, when we talk about evil and damage, aggravated in every respect." End quote. Less than a year after Raymond was found guilty, he died in prison at the age of 85. There are still so many questions I have about this case. Not so much regarding the who, what, when, where, and how, but the why. And now that the perpetrator is dead, we may never truly know. At the time of the crime, Raymond would have been 39 years old, so not exactly the age range the eyewitnesses Kim and Robert had described to police, but close.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  What I really want to know, though, is what the heck Raymond was up to in the years between his 1957 arrest and David and Ellen's murders in 1976? And furthermore, all those decades after 1976, leading up to his arrest in 2019? That is a very long time, where it's hard not to wonder if perhaps there are other victims out there, possibly connected to Raymond. I didn't have time to get into a lot of things in this episode, but for example, in the summer of 1972, a 17-year-old girl named Cynthia Allen was found nude and stabbed in Marinette County. Her body was left in a field hidden beneath some branches. And to date, that case remains unsolved.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  The one truth I've settled on with this is that Ellen and David were innocent victims. They could have been anyone in that park that day, and they had their whole lives ahead of them. Bright futures that were violently ripped away. According to Ellen's find a grave, she's buried in a mausoleum in Green Bay, and David was laid to rest next to her in that same facility. So, together, just as they were in life. Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  I think Chuck would approve. In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow, a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week, wherever you get your podcasts.