Author of 'Vanished in Vermillion' to speak on famous cold case in Sioux Falls

Lou Raguse, a former reporter in Sioux Falls, will present his book “Vanished in Vermillion” at the Downtown Library on June 26 at 6 p.m.

For those interested in tracing one of the South Dakota's most well-known cold cases, Raguse will share excerpts from the original tape that led to the indictment of an innocent person and other materials exposing the investigation's errors. Raguse used to cover the investigation as a KELO reporter. 

“The cold case fell apart while I was working,” said Raguse. 

More:'Vanished in Vermillion' takes in-depth look at 1971 cold case in South Dakota

While the account of the two teenagers — who went missing in Vermillion in 1971 on their way to a party in a rural gravel pit before being discovered along with their car in Brule Creek in 2013 — is an enticing story by itself, for Raguse it's more than that.

For him it is also a compelling example of the importance of the authorities' accountability to the public.

“I don’t like when the government tries to shut out the public,” said Raguse. “I feel that in this case they really tried to shut out the public.”

The reason for that, Raguse said, was covering up their own past mistakes.

“They charged a man for murder, and there never even was a murder,” said Raguse.

In the story of Sherri Miller and Pam Jackson's disappearance that kept unfolding for more than 40 years, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

The police were not searching for the missing teenagers for decades, the cold case reopened in 2004 was investigated through false leads and hypnosis, and the tape that led to the indictment of an innocent was later found to be false.

Even after it was determined what had happened to Miller and Jackson, there were still a lot of unanswered questions and no explanation about how the authorities got everything so wrong, said Raguse.

“There were a lot of people that were confused about what had happened,” said Raguse.

For that reason, he decided to write a book to set the record straight and let the truth out. 

One of the assumptions Raguse debunks in his book was the one made by the Clay County Sheriff Arnie Nelson that the girls must have run away.

“The parents knew that they didn’t run away, and their best friends knew that they didn’t run away, but the sheriff started spreading the rumor among the community that that’s what happened,” said Raguse.

That gave the police grounds not to investigate the case properly, Raguse said, and it also added to the parents' confusion and gave them false hope.

“Back when the case was active, the families of Pam and Sherri believed what the investigators were telling them,” said Raguse.

When opening the cold case, Raguse said the police made another erroneous assumption that convicted rapist David Lykken must have been guilty of murder of Miller and Jackson based on the facts that he lived nearby and was of the same age as the missing girls.

Rather than investigating the case, the authorities followed incredulous leads that kept driving them deeper through that rabbit hole, said Raguse. They also never verified the voice from the recording made by police jail informant Aloysius Black Crow of Lykken, allegedly confessing to the murders. 

As it turned out later, Raguse said, Black Crow asked a friend in jail to make up the details of the murder pretending to be Lykken. Having realized their assumptions were far-fetched, the police dropped the case before trial.

The June 26 event is free, although copies of Vanished for Vermillion will be available for purchase for $20. Reservations can be made at the library's website.