CONNECTCOMMENTEMAILMORE
TOWN OF SILVER CLIFF – David Schuldes and Ellen Matheys had set up camp near the Peshtigo River on a beautiful early Friday afternoon in July 1976.
They were the first campers to arrive at McClintock Park in northern Marinette County that day, the start of the first weekend after Americans celebrated the bicentennial.
The young Green Bay couple had stopped first at Goodman Park, about 4 miles north, hoping to camp there. All the sites were full, so they drove down to McClintock Park.
They took one of the first spots available near the entrance to a loop of campsites. It was warm, about 80 degrees, but a gusty southeast breeze would keep the couple cool as they headed out for a hike on the park’s rustic trails and dense woods.
They swung by the outdoor toilet first. They never reached the trail.
About 2:30 p.m., a county parks worker found Shuldes’ body outside the bathroom entry way. He had been shot in the neck with a .30-caliber firearm.
Authorities found Matheys’ body the next morning, hundreds of feet away in a stand of trees beyond an open field across from the campsites.
She had been raped and appeared to have been putting her shirt back on when she was shot twice in the chest.
Schuldes was 25 and worked in the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s circulation department. Matheys was 24 and had a job at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay library. They were engaged to be married.
“It was obvious it was a sexually motivated murder,” said Gary Hamblin, who worked on the case as a special agent with the state Division of Criminal Investigation. “It was kind of a crime of opportunity, where two young people happen to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time.”
No one knew the couple would be at McClintock Park, Hamblin said. There was nothing to indicate they knew their assailant.
RELATED:Oconto County man arrested, suspected in 1976 murders of Green Bay couple
RELATED:Police probe 1976 murder suspects attack of two teens in Suamico in 1957
RELATED:Sex assault charge dismissed as attorneys wrangle over DNA evidence
Investigators collected genetic evidence at the scene, but it would be 42 years before technology sufficiently advanced to unlock its secret.
In March, after police tricked him into providing a saliva sample, an elderly Oconto County man was arrested for the murders. Raymand Vannieuwenhoven, 82, will appear in Marinette County Circuit Court on Wednesday for a preliminary hearing, where District Attorney DeShea Morrow will present evidence to show Judge James Morrison that a felony was committed and that it was probably committed by Vannieuwenhoven.
Police tracked down Vannieuwenhoven after a genetic genealogist was able to compare DNA found in Matheys’ shorts with DNA profiles uploaded to open genomic databases, most notably GEDmatch.com. The website was established in 2010 to help researchers and genealogists, as well as people searching for birth parents.
The website has been increasingly used by law enforcement in the past 18 months to look for matches to crime-scene DNA, allowing experts to identify relatives of a suspect and eventually zero in on a specific person.
GEDmatch.com has about 1 million profiles available. Most were provided by people who had used home DNA testing kits, which were introduced in May 2012 by Ancestry.com. By the end of 2018, nearly 12.3 million people had bought the kits from Ancestry.com and other companies, according to MIT Technology Review.
Authorities in Sacramento used GEDmatch.com to lead to the arrest in April 2018 of Joseph D’Angelo, who is charged with 13 murders and 13 rapes in six counties. Investigators suspect he’s responsible for a rampage of slayings, more than 50 sexual assaults and over 100 break-ins attributed to “the Golden State Killer” in California between 1974 and 1976.
Vannieuwenhoven was arrested March 14, just under a year after Sheriff’s Detective Todd Baldwin first contacted Parabon Nanolabs, the Virginia company that matched the crime-scene DNA to relatives of Vannieuwenhoven, eventually leading to him.
Parabon says its technology has led to the identification of numerous criminal suspects in just over four years — including at least one unsolved homicide more than 50 years old.
A handful of those suspects have been convicted after entering plea agreements with prosecutors. The first trial of someone charged using similar evidence began last week in Washington state.
40 years of detective work came first
The relative speed of this break in the Marinette County case belies the dogged investigation that explored, without success, numerous leads and suspects over the first four decades.
Hamblin recalled that two young men had reported seeing a man coming out of the woods the afternoon of the murders. They were driving by the park when they heard a shot and saw the man farther down the road, though Hamblin wasn’t sure how far away they were.
A short distance away, the men also saw a vehicle backed into a road or a trail. They believed the vehicle had Michigan plates.
At Hamblin’s suggestion, officers conducted a re-enactment of that report.
“Their account would have been pretty consistent with the entire story,” he said.
Investigators also learned that two nights before the slayings, two Brown County officers might have seen the killer while they were sitting around a campfire in the same area, Hamblin said. One of the officers looked up and saw a silhouette of a person in the woods. They got up see what was going on and the person ran away.
“Later in the same evening, they saw the same individual, or what they believed to be the same individual … and that time they went to their tent to retrieve a firearm, and when they came back, he was gone, which led us to believe that somebody had been lurking in that area for a period of time before the homicide,” Hamblin said.
In another incident a few days before the murders, a man inside his pickup camper heard a noise and was rattled enough to open the door and fire a shot, Hamblin recalled. The man thought it might have been a bear.
Hamblin said investigators were hopeful all the details gleaned from those encounters would help lead them to a suspect.
“We did spend a lot of time in the U.P., as well as northern Wisconsin, running down leads,” he said. “A lot of things looked promising on day one, but by day two, they were no longer promising.”
All the leads previously led to nowhere
In 1976, James Kanikula was not yet a member of the Marinette County Sheriff’s Office, but he heard about the murders of David Schuldes and Ellen Matheys almost immediately.
Kanikula had been with the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office for about six years, his first job in law enforcement, but he was born and raised in Marinette County and had camped at that park.
“It was big news,” he said. “It hit Milwaukee papers. … Forty-three years ago we didn’t have that many murders.”
Kanikula returned home and joined the Marinette County department in 1980 and recalls discussing the case many times with then-Sheriff Joe Larson.
At one point, a friend of Kanikula’s became a focus of the investigation.
“They kind of raked him over the coals a little bit, but he didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said.
Kanikula became sheriff in 1993, serving over two periods for 12 years ending in 2012. Detectives continued to hunt for the killer during his tenure.
“There were a lot of false leads, a lot of potential suspects we did major investigations on and we couldn’t put it together, we couldn’t quite say ‘Hey, this is our man,’” he said.
Investigators generally are optimistic that they will find a perpetrator and solve a case, Hamblin said, but that feeling waned as the years passed.
“It was an extremely frustrating case from the very beginning, particularly when you have two people who believe they saw the assailant and actually saw him coming out of the woods,” Hamblin said.
In 1991, on the 25th anniversary of the murders, the sheriff’s office released an age-enhanced version of a sketch based on a description from that report.
That brought in 50 leads, and investigators conducted numerous interviews, Sheriff Jerry Sauve said in March.
Hamblin said investigators even looked into serial killers arrested in other parts of the country, working with other agencies in other states and trying to reconstruct their backgrounds after their arrest.
“There was a lot of effort expended to see if that person could have been in northern Wisconsin at that time of the homicides,” he said. “Over the course of time, we just went on the hope that, someday, you’re going to see somebody arrested you could link back to this case.”
As the years rolled by, Hamblin would read the paper at home and occasionally see stories about serial killers who’d been arrested. He would check their age and do the math, and often conclude that they would have been in elementary school in the summer of 1976.
Kanikula remembers wondering why they couldn’t solve the case.
“I thought, wow … what are we missing here? Every lead we had over all the years kind of puked out,” he said. “They lost steam and we couldn’t put a case together.”
Still, Kanikula noted, investigators continued to build the case.
“As time progresses, technology improves, and as it improves, things start to materialize a little bit,” he said. “Every five years things improved, and investigators got more knowledge.”
More: Supreme Court upholds 2013 murder conviction from 1998 Oconto County homicide
More: Family members had early suspicions James Prokopovitz was involved in wife’s disappearance
Technology evolved but not quite enough
In the years after the case, science didn’t allow for much to be determined from bodily fluid analysis. But the assailant in the Schuldes-Matheys deaths was found to be a “secretor,” someone whose blood type can be detected in saliva and semen, Hamblin said.
“The technology was limited,” he said. “It did help us eliminate some suspects. … It didn’t help us identify anybody, but it did help eliminate a lot of people.”
In the 1990s, as DNA profiling began to emerge as a tool for law enforcement, Detective Craig Bates — who had spent years on the case — sent evidence to private labs and to the State Crime Lab for analysis.
Those labs determined the evidence came from a lone male, and an analysis of the genetic material was uploaded into the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, where it could be compared to other profiles from through the country.
There were no matches.
Detective Baldwin was assigned to take over the investigation in 2001 and submitted multiple DNA samples of possible suspects.
“Again, all samples did not match the profile developed from Matheys’ shorts,” says the criminal complaint filed against Vannieuwenhoven.
Hamblin’s career, meanwhile, took a detour before he came back to the case. He was appointed Dane County sheriff in 1997 and retired from that job in 2007. Then he rejoined the state Department of Justice, this time as administrator of the Division of Law Enforcement Services, which included oversight of the State Crime Lab.
More than three decades had passed since he first joined the search for the campground killer as a state crime investigator, but Hamblin retained some optimism.
“You hoped that sooner or later, someone will be arrested, and DNA evidence will be collected, and we’ll get a match that way, so I was optimistic that we would get a DNA match with somebody,” he said.
A sealed envelope seals a brother’s arrest
The key to unlocking the mystery started with Baldwin’s phone call to Parabon Nanolabs on March 28, 2018. The company received the DNA profile from a state crime lab analyst two weeks later.
On June 12, 2018, Parabon notified Marinette County investigators that its analysis showed that the suspect’s DNA had ancestry mainly from northern Europe. He was thought to have a fair to very fair skin color, blue eyes, reddish brown hair color, and some or few freckles.
The company provided an image of what the man might have looked like at age 25, as well as one enhanced to age 65 to account for the decades since the homicides. Parabon has created hundreds of such profiles and composite renderings for police with its “Snapshot” service, which evaluates parts of the genome that code for the differences in physical appearance among people.
Parabon contacted Marinette County investigators four months later to say a staff genealogist had looked at the case and thought she could possibly come up with a suspect.
By Dec. 21, the genealogist had narrowed the suspect pool to a specific family with ties to the Green Bay area. She provided the names of Vannieuwenhoven’s parents, Edward and Gladys, and their four sons. She said the killer could be one of those brothers or one of four grandsons.
From there, it was a matter of clandestinely collecting DNA, then submitting it to the State Crime Lab for testing.
Baldwin surveilled the home of one brother, Cornelius, in the town of Suamico in Brown County on Jan. 2 and 3. He and another investigator then took a bag of garbage sitting outside his home on Jan. 7 and sent three items to the crime lab that day for DNA analysis.
About two weeks later the lab determined the DNA didn’t match the DNA from the murders, but was in the same paternal line.
Investigators then focused on Edward, who happened to live next to a Florence County cabin belonging to recently retired Oconto County Sheriff’s Detective Thom Shallow.
Shallow told investigators that Edward — also known as Sylvester — usually stops by for coffee when Shallow is at his cabin. He agreed to keep the cup from Sylvester’s next visit, which happened on Feb. 2.
The lab result on Feb. 21 was the same as the first brother’s.
Baldwin turned next to Raymand Vannieuwenhoven, enlisting the help of new Oconto County Chief Deputy Darren Laskowski.
“He lived in a remote area … he didn’t have garbage out at the curb,” Laskowski said in an interview. “We had to come up with a strategy that was a little bit outside the box.”
They came up with a plan to go to Raymand’s house with a bogus survey, which Baldwin prepared.
On March 6, Laskowski knocked on the door, introduced himself and explained to the double murder suspect that the sheriff’s office was looking for the public’s opinion on local law enforcement.
Inside, Laskowski wrote down Raymand’s answers to general questions such as “are you pleased with law enforcement in the community and area?”
When the survey was completed, Laskowski asked Vannieuwenhoven to seal the envelope so he could return it to Sheriff Todd Skarban.
“I watched him lick the envelope,” he said.
Laskowski took the survey from Vannieuwenhoven, shook his hand and thanked him for his time.
Vannieuwenhoven was cordial and “not at all” suspicious, said Laskowski, who previously worked for two decades as an investigator with Oconto County.
He turned over the envelope to Baldwin, who was in a car down the street. The whole process had taken less than 20 minutes.
The envelope was submitted the next day to the State Crime Lab, where, according to the criminal complaint, the saliva was determined to match the profile from the semen found at the original crime scene.
On March 14, police searched Vannieuwenhoven’s home and took him into custody. Deputies said they found a .30-30 lever action rifle, the same caliber as the murder weapon, in a cabinet in the garage and .30-30 shell casings in a tin can on a shelf above the washer and dryer.
Defense wants to delve into DNA link
Vannieuwenhoven was charged the following week with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree sexual assault. The latter charge was dismissed at a hearing last month, as attorneys on both sides agreed that Wisconsin’s six-year statute of limitations for rape had long since passed.
His defense attorneys had wanted to subpoena the state’s crime lab analyst to testify at the preliminary hearing on Wednesday. Defense attorney Lee Schuchart wanted to explore several points in the report — including one that says that one in every 499 people in the Caucasian population has the same DNA profile.
“I don’t think we’re overstating (that) the DNA evidence in this case … truly is the piece of evidence that the state will try to use to say Mr. Vannieuwenhoven did this crime,” Schuchart said.
Judge Morrison denied the request, noting preliminary hearings have “an exceedingly low bar” in finding probable cause to advance a case and aren’t the time for that sort of testimony.
“Everything that you want to challenge in respect to the DNA evidence, every question that you have phrased, (are) very important, critical questions that need to be determined, (just) not at the stage of a preliminary examination,” Morrison said.
Schuchart’s early challenges of the DNA evidence signal that the defense will continue to challenge the evidence, not just at the upcoming hearing, but also at trial and most likely on appeal if Vannieuwenhoven is found guilty.
No matter how the Vannieuwenhoven case shakes out, genetic genealogy — which has been also called “family tree forensics” — has made a believer out of Hamblin, the former state investigator.
“I’m just kind of blown away by the technology,” Hamblin said. “I wish I had that when I started in my law enforcement career.”
Hamblin said that doesn’t take anything away from the long investigation in this case, or the Marinette County Sheriff’s Office’s “diligence and tenacity” over nearly 43 years.
“They have worked hard on this case ever since day one and have never given up,” he said. “They put a lot of effort into it and they are to be commended for what I think is an outstanding job over the years. … If they hadn’t been pursuing it all those years, they wouldn’t be where they are today with this case.”
Contact Kent Tempus at (920) 431-8226 or ktempus@gannett.com.
CONNECTCOMMENTEMAILMORE
Read or Share this story: https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/local/oconto-county/2019/06/17/wisconsin-campground-killer-evaded-police-43-years-but-not-genealogy-shuldes-matheys-murder-case/1446792001/
