Vanished in Vermillion: TV reporter writes book on missing girls

“There are some things worse than death. Not knowing.”

That statement from the mother of a teenage girl who went missing in 1971 stuck with Lou Raguse.

The television news reporter, who worked at KELO-TV from 2005 to 2008, has spent a chunk of his career covering the cops and courts beat. He has seen and reported on tragedies for almost 20 years.

Raguse couldn’t move on, however, from the story of two missing Vermillion girls, Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson, even as he pursued his career in larger markets. He had accepted a job in Tucson, Arizona, as a trial in the case was pending, even though he was reluctant to leave without answers.

Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson

“You don’t turn down a job opportunity because of a story lingering on, but how I felt, I almost didn’t want to take it. I had the feeling they were finally going to figure out what happened,” Raguse said.

The words Pam’s mother, Adele Jackson, had told Randal J. Hunhoff for a story in the January/February 1993 issue of South Dakota Magazine haunted him: “There are some things worse than death. Not knowing.”

Eventually, answers in the case did surface, after whiplash-inducing twists and turns over decades. The girls went missing. Authorities didn’t take the disappearance seriously. Family and friends conducted searches. They sought help, but the case went cold. The South Dakota attorney general’s office created a cold case unit. A suspect with a prior record was identified. A fellow prisoner offered a full taped confession. A trial date was set. The other prisoner was discovered to have fabricated the recording. The case went cold again with finger-pointing and suspicion causing further grief and despair among surviving family members.

Even from a distance, Raguse followed the case. One of the girls’ family members called him when the case against the suspect, David Lykken, was dismissed, and from Buffalo, New York, he contacted his former colleagues at KELO with the tip.

David Lykken

Then, on Sept. 23, 2013, a car was found in a creek near where the girls were last seen. The Studebaker was identified. The bodies inside were confirmed as those of Cheryl and Pam. And Raguse, who had learned about the case in his earliest days at KELO when the only news was a raid at a farm near Vermillion, has put it all together in book form. Post Hill Press of Tennessee has accepted Raguse’s manuscript for publication; it will be released in 2023. Raguse, now a reporter for KARE-TV in the Twin Cities, conducted more than 200 interviews for the book.

It began on a light-hearted evening. Pam and Sherri, as the two girls were known, were heading to a keg party on Memorial Day weekend in 1971 when they apparently took a wrong turn, and the car entered the creek. They did not run away. They were not kidnapped. They were not assaulted by a young man named David Lykken or anyone else.

But even after so many years and so much written about the case, Raguse learned, some people do not believe that’s the whole story.

“So many people believed David Lykken or the Lykken family was involved,” Raguse said. “With the way authorities handled the investigation, they blurred the lines enough in a small community where rumors run rampant. Lots of people, even the ones I interviewed, said you’re never going to convince me they weren’t involved.”

Law enforcement isn’t spared in Raguse’s retelling of the story, but he puts the motives behind their actions in what he calls a gray area.

“A lot of people are going to see the (state Division of Criminal Investigation) investigators are not necessarily trying to find the truth but rather trying to close a case,” he said. “When somebody believes something even if they are wrong, they may not be bad, they might think they are right, and that clouds their judgment. They’re not objective.”

The true bad guy in this case was the prisoner in the state penitentiary who fabricated the recording, Aloysius Black Crow, Raguse said. In most accounts he is identified as Lykken’s cellmate. That is based on erroneous information initially shared by the then attorney general and widely disseminated.

Lykken had been convicted of rape and kidnapping in 1990 and was sentenced to 227 years in prison. A search warrant of Lykken’s property in 2004 did turn up women’s clothing, jewelry and a purse. It never was connected to the missing high school juniors, however.

Two years later, Black Crow said Lykken had confessed to him. He agreed to wear a wire and gave authorities a recording that he said proved the other man’s guilt. Lykken was charged with murder and kidnapping; a trial date of March 2008 was set.

Shortly before the case was scheduled to be tried, however, officials learned Black Crow had fabricated the recording with another inmate’s help. Officials dismissed the charges against Lykken. The case went cold until the car was discovered in the creek, the day Oscar Jackson, Pam’s dad, was buried.

Kay Brock of Sioux Falls is Pam’s older sister. Now 77, she said the discovery of Pam and Sherri’s bodies has brought peace to the family.

Dexter and Kay Brock

“When someone is missing and you don’t know where they are, you think about it all the time,” she said. “Now that they’ve been found, there’s a peace that’s come across.”

Brock has read Raguse’s manuscript, and she said his interviews with people involved with the case have answered questions she didn’t even know she had. Her father and her aunt’s husband met every day to search for the girls, and not knowing what had happened caused the families unspeakable pain. Brock calls Black Crow the villain in this story. She can feel sympathy for Lykken, who might have been telling stories in prison to build up an intimidating reputation. Ragus said Lykken is adamant that he  never bragged about killing the girls.

Brock never has talked publicly before about what happened to her sister and Sherri. She feels gratitude toward Raguse for telling their story and filling in the gaps she and other family members had.

Raguse constructed the book in three sections. He focuses on the original mystery and how the girls’ disappearance was handled in 1971 in the first section. Rumors swirled that the girls had run away to California, and their parents had to take the lead in the initial investigation.

“The best thing they did was write a letter directly to the attorney general at the time, complaining authorities were not doing anything,” Raguse said. The attorney general “assigned a DCI agent and sent someone. The Clay County sheriff was offended that the attorney general would go over his head. He refused to help. That was small-town politics and law enforcement in the late 1970s.”

The manuscript’s second part reviews how the mystery was handled when it came to the cold case unit’s attention. The magazine article from 1993 played a big role in that.

“I couldn’t believe the impact this South Dakota Magazine article had on authorities reviving the case and pushing it to the top,” Raguse said. “Even though the cold case unit in the DCI screwed up so bad, the car might not have been found if it wasn’t for this whole thing happening. The guy who found the car, he was literally out there looking for it based on what he had heard about this case.”

In the book’s last third, Raguse focused on finding the truth: How could the car be in the creek for so long without anyone noticing? How could witness memories be totally false? How could the wiretap recording fool authorities for so long?

“I went to experts to find out how it happened,” Raguse said.

He viewed his work on Pam and Sherri’s story as a pursuit of the truth. Raguse, who continues to pursue cold case stories in his current position, said that like police officers, he has his own coping mechanism when covering sad stories.

“I let myself be fully emotional when I’m with the people involved, then I go home, wipe my hands and be with my family,” said Raguse, who is married to a Realtor and the father of two children, age 8 and 5.

With the story of Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson, his hands were never wiped totally clean. He couldn’t forget. The girls’ families never gave up, and Raguse formed connections with them that have lasted for more than a decade. Brock and her husband, Dexter, attended his wedding several years ago in fact.

The Lykken family also draws his sympathy. He describes them as the third victim in the case with the finger-pointing that went on during the investigation.

Raguse finds it difficult to accept the missteps made in this case. Even though Black Crow lied and the case against Lykken was dismissed, authorities never shut the door on future charges against Lykken, he said. Their belief they had the answer blinded them to other solutions.

“They had something that looked good to them,” he said. “All they had was suspicion based on his other offenses.”

What the Miller and Jackson families now have, on the other hand, is an answer.

“It was a heavy weight that was on them most of their lives,” Raguse said of the torment caused by “things worse than death.”

“At a certain point, they were resigned to the fact the girls were not alive anymore, but they never gave up hope of bringing them home.”

Note: An earlier version of this story identified David Lykken and Aloycius Black Crow as cellmates. They were not.