Feature On Cold Case

FEATURE ON COLD CASE

Cold-case team working to solve 1972 Huntley murder By GREG TUTTLE Of The Gazette Staff On a sunny afternoon nearly four decades ago, Bill Dugan slowed and then stopped his car near the entrance of a cemetery outside Billings. Dugan's young stepdaughter, Lora Jean, hopped out of the car and skipped away into the cemetery. The girl stopped at the first grave and silently read the name, and then moved to the next marker, then the next. Dugan shook his head. A stop at the cemetery was not in his plans for a Sunday drive in the country. But you never knew what Lora Jean would do next, so Dugan waited patiently while she moved from grave to grave. As Lora Jean made her self-appointed rounds, Dugan remembered the time not long before when the girl's interest in cemeteries landed her in trouble. A groundskeeper had shown up at the house with Lora Jean in tow. The girl had been taking flowers off graves, he informed her stepfather. Sternly, Dugan asked why she would do such a thing. "There was a bunch of graves that didn't have any, and these others had so many that I thought they could share them," Lora Jean answered briskly. Dugan chuckled at the memory as Lora Jean returned from the cemetery and jumped back in the car. "Why'd you do that?" Dugan asked as she settled into the seat. "How else you gonna know who's dead?" she answered. Dugan couldn't bring himself to attend Lora Jean's funeral a few years later at the Huntley Cemetery. The images of the 14-year-old girl's murder were overwhelming, as were the still-raw emotions of his recent divorce from Lora Jean's mother. Dugan did visit the cemetery alone. He stood quietly over the simple grave marker that read: LORA JEAN SEPT. 26, 1957 APR. 1972 "She was one of the most beautiful little things in the world," Dugan, now 80, recalled recently. "She was just like a little butterfly." More than 33 years after her death, Dugan and other family members still don't know who killed Lora Jean sometime after she ran away from home on April 7, 1972. The teenager was last seen in Huntley that morning by a school bus driver as she walked toward Interstate 94. Her body was found three weeks later near Medora, N.D., a short distance off the same highway. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed. Nothing is known of what happened between the time Lora Jean was last seen in Huntley and when her body was found 250 miles away. Now, some family members say they are hopeful that a renewed effort to catch Lora Jean's killer could bring some measure of justice after all these years. The investigation into the girl's murder was reopened in late November when North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem announced the creation of a cold-case investigations

squad. Lora Jean's death is one of 15 unsolved murders and missing-persons cases in North Dakota selected for review by the team. The cold-case investigators have retrieved the original case file and located the evidence collected where Lora Jean's body was found, including her clothing. At the time of Lora Jean's murder, the routine use of DNA technology by law enforcement was still about two decades away. Today, investigators rely on the technology to identify suspects using tissue and body fluids. DNA evidence has been used to solve numerous cold cases, including the 1988 murder of a Billings woman abducted in Wyoming. DNA testing also has resulted in the release of dozens of inmates convicted of crimes they did not commit. "Cold case investigations will utilize advances in forensic and DNA technology and new investigative techniques to re-investigate evidence and explore new leads," Stenehjem, the North Dakota attorney general, said in a press release announcing the formation of the cold-case squad. Law enforcement authorities in North Dakota have declined to discuss details of the cold cases under investigation, but members of Lora Jean's family believe DNA from the girl's clothing could point to her killer. Stenehjem said all 15 cases would be investigated "until either a charge is filed or all new leads are exhausted." Lora Jean's mother and one of her sisters have given tissue samples for DNA analysis to help the investigators. A member of the North Dakota cold-case squad has arranged to visit Lora Jean's family in Billings in the coming weeks. Reopening the 33-year-old murder case has been met with mixed reactions among the family. Lora Jean's siblings -- Victor Martin of Belgrade, Sherrie Kautz of Billings, and Ella Dugan-Laemmle of Huntley -- said the new interest in their sister's murder creates a tantalizing hope that answers will be found to the most painful chapter of their childhood. But for her parents, the effort to find the killer offers little solace. For everyone in the family, the murder investigation means revisiting a troubled past. *** Lora Jean was the third of Betty's four children with her first husband, a cattle wrangler who moved his young family throughout central Montana. Victor, the oldest, was born in Billings in 1954. Sherrie was born in Hardin, and Lora Jean was born in Livingston on Sept. 26, 1957. The fourth child, a girl born with one lung, died at the age of 9 months. Betty -- who asked that her last name not be used in this story -- and the wrangler divorced. She moved her three children to Billings, settling into a small house on Sugar Avenue. Betty worked as a waitress at the airport cafe, where she met Dugan, a mechanic for Northwest Airlines. The couple married in 1962, and the family moved to Milwaukee and then Minneapolis when Dugan was transferred for his job. Ella was born in Minneapolis in 1964. In 1969, the family moved back to Montana, where they bought a house and acreage along the Yellowstone River in Huntley. Dugan continued to work for the airline in Billings. Lora Jean was the tomboy of the three girls, chasing bugs and creating mischief at every turn. "She was very adventurous, extremely so, and never afraid of anything," said Betty, now 70. "She caught butterflies. She chased boys with snakes and creepy crawlers. She caught bees in her hands and turned them loose on people." After nine years of marriage, the couple separated and divorced in 1971. Dugan moved to the Heights in the fall of that year.

About that time, Victor joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany, leaving 16year-old Sherrie to watch over the two younger girls as their mother worked late nights tending bar. Sherrie called it a chaotic time for the family, with several men vying for Betty's attention. Family strife escalated in the spring of 1972 when Lora Jean, who was usually less confrontational than her older sister, began to assert herself, Sherrie said. On the morning of April 7, Lora Jean and her mother argued about one of the men Betty was dating, Sherrie said. Lora Jean liked the man and wanted her mother to marry him. Betty shot back that she would never marry that man. Lora Jean left in a fury and walked her younger sister to the street corner two blocks away, where they climbed aboard a waiting school bus. Sherrie said she watched her sisters from a window and then left the house to catch her own bus to school. It was the last time she saw Lora Jean. Betty recalls the morning differently. She said Lora Jean had asked to stay home from school because she was ill. Betty didn't believe that Lora Jean was sick and told her to go to school. The other girls had already left, Betty said, and the mother and teenage daughter argued before Lora Jean left the house. Lora Jean rode the bus to school, but she never made it to class. "Apparently, she handed her books to one of her friends and took off up to the freeway," Betty said. A school bus driver said later that he saw Lora Jean walking toward the highway. But no one knows for sure where she went or what happened next. It was not the first time Lora Jean had run away, Betty said. Shortly before the previous Christmas, she said, her daughter had hitchhiked to Forsyth and called home from the Sheriff's Office. Betty drove through a snowstorm to pick her up. On the trip home, Lora Jean said she was trying to return to Minneapolis. So Betty was not overly alarmed when Lora Jean did not immediately come home. She figured her daughter eventually would call for a ride like the last time, probably from Lame Deer, where the family had close friends and where the girls had recently visited. Two days later, Betty said, on a Sunday morning, she was gripped by a sudden, certain knowledge that Lora Jean was dead. "I knew exactly," Betty said. "I heard it. I heard the screams. I knew exactly. And then there was peace. She wasn't suffering any more. And she did suffer terribly for those 2½ days." Ella, who was 7 then, said she has no clear memory of the day Lora Jean left home. But she does remember the fear that grew when she realized her sister was missing and might be lost. After learning that Lora Jean was dead, Ella began to fear that the killer would come for her. The only place she felt safe was in a hay barn, hiding between the bales with her dog Princess. Sherrie learned of Lora Jean's death when she was called out of biology class to the principal's office over the school intercom. Before she reached the office, she was met by her mother and a sheriff's deputy in the hallway. Sherrie was angry that more was not done to find her sister before she was killed, she said, and she directed that anger at her mother. She is still angry. "It's hard to forgive," she said. "Very hard." *** A few days after Lora Jean's body was found outside Medora, Bill Dugan, Betty and a female friend flew to Bismarck to identify the body and make arrangements for its return to Montana. Before they left, Dugan had her dental records sent to authorities in North Dakota. Betty said she was told her daughter had received numerous superficial cuts and that she

died of strangulation. They promised Betty that her daughter's killer would be caught. That evening, Betty said, she distinctly felt Lora Jean's presence. "She was in the motel room that night," Betty said. "The curtains fell off the wall, and stuff happened that night. We could not get stuff to stay on the walls. What she was trying to say, I don't know. I just couldn't pick up on it, but something was going on." Betty and her friend returned to Billings the next day. Dugan stayed another day before he returned to Billings. Neither Betty nor Dugan recalls speaking at length to investigators about the murder. Lora Jean's memorial was held at Smith's Funeral Home on the morning of May 5. Betty recalls the service as "standing room only," and a similar crowd followed the procession to the Huntley Cemetery for the burial. Donations to the family were used to build a basketball court at Huntley Park. The family hopes to place a memorial to Lora Jean near the court. Betty remains grateful for the kindness shown to her family after Lora Jean's death. "This community has been absolutely wonderful to me," she said. "They've been very, very supportive of me all these years." For weeks after the funeral, Sherrie said, she rode Lora Jean's bike to the cemetery two miles from her home, sometimes twice a day. She cried at Lora Jean's grave and screamed at the hills, at the evil that took her sister. *** Dugan returned to North Dakota a few months after Lora Jean's body was found to see for himself where she had been killed and how the investigation was progressing. He met Ted Cornell, the sheriff of Billings County, N.D., and together they went out to the spot. Lora Jean had been found by a rancher checking his cattle on rangeland adjacent to Interstate 94, Dugan said. Nearby, a scenic stop off the highway overlooks the North Dakota badlands. Cornell surmised that the killer had stopped at the lookout and Lora Jean tried to escape by running toward some buildings in the distance. She was caught at a barbed-wire fence. Her body was found under an old cedar tree a few paces off a worn cattle path. A cross she wore around her neck was found dangling in the tree, and her clothes were strewn on her body. She had been strangled and stabbed in the abdomen, Dugan said. Cornell apologized, Dugan said, for not having the money or resources to commit more effort to the investigation. Betty said she spent several years after Lora Jean's death trying on her own to find the killer. The death of another child was an unbearable grief, she said. "I wanted to die," she said. "That old saying that God never gives you more than you can stand is not true." The investigation into Lora Jean's death never resulted in any solid suspects, Betty said. "I have been told there wasn't enough money or influence in the family ... for this to be pushed through," she said. "To me, that doesn't make sense. A murder is a murder, and that's what cops are supposed to do." Betty is skeptical of the new effort to solve the crime. "I didn't think there'd ever be a solution to it, and there may not be anyway; and this may just be some more heartache to go through," she said. "The loss is still there, and it will be there until the day I die." Dugan said he also sees little benefit to opening the painful wounds of Lora Jean's death that, at least for him, have been cauterized by time. "It was just a shock that they'd bring it back up again," he said. "It's something I've been trying to forget for years. I've more or less buried it." But the siblings welcome the renewed attempt to find Lora Jean's killer.

"It's caused a tremendous amount of grief, and it's never healed," Victor Martin said. Sherrie Kautz and Ella Dugan-Laemmle said they hope to finally put a name to the faceless killer who has haunted their dreams for three decades. "All our lives, all the stories we've been told (about Lora Jean's death) were reminders that this pure demonic thing is out there," Kautz said. "I've been sleeping with the lights on ever since." Knowing who killed Lora Jean would end years of suspicion, Kautz said, and give resolution to a family tragedy. "It's about justice," she said. "She needs her justice." The murder has had a profound influence on their lives, said Kautz and Dugan-Laemmle. Both chose careers that involve working with children. Both have reached out to young girls who may need help before making a wrong choice. Finding Lora Jean's killer would do more than simply answer a mystery that has lasted their entire adult lives.