A mysterious South Dakota cold case that has dogged investigators for years is now a book

CATHY WURZER: Thanks for listening to Minnesota Now. I'm Cathy Wurzer. It remains a mystery that has dogged investigators for years. It's now a new book from a Minnesota author who's also a TV reporter. Here's the thumbnail. Memorial day weekend, 1971, two 17-year-old girls hopped in an old car to go to a kegger in Vermillion, South Dakota. They took a wrong turn near the gravel pits and were never seen again.

Lou Raguse is with us right now. He's a reporter for KARE 11 in the Twin Cities. He's also the author of Vanished in Vermillion, The Real Story of South Dakota's Most Infamous Cold Case. He's on the line. Hey, Lou. How are ya?

LOU RAGUSE: I'm good. How are you, Cathy?

CATHY WURZER: Good, good. Thanks for joining us. This is a fascinating story. Your book begins with the stories of these two teenage girls. Tell us, who were they? What was their life like before they vanished?

LOU RAGUSE: Well, Pam Jackson and Sherri Miller were both high school juniors in Vermillion, South Dakota. And that is where the University of South Dakota is located. Pam was just from a conservative farm family. Sherri had a very tumultuous home life. Her father was no longer in the picture. He was abusive when he was, and her mother was an alcoholic.

And so they came from very different backgrounds, but they became friends that junior year in Vermillion, South Dakota. They weren't really part of the popular crowd, but that was part of what they wanted to do on this end of the year Memorial Day weekend party was show up at a party that they usually wouldn't go to and try to make more friends.

CATHY WURZER: OK. So what happened that night?

LOU RAGUSE: They kept getting lost. So this party is held out in the country at a rural gravel pit location, which is a common party location for underage kids out in the country. They keep getting lost. They keep asking people for directions. And then finally, they follow some some boys from their class out there. But the boys lose track of them, and the girls are never seen again.

CATHY WURZER: Hm. Wow. OK. So in your book, you write that Pam's parents went to bed that night. They left the porch light on. They got up in the morning, and they thought something was wrong because the light was still on, right? So the significance of which is that light. Did both families know that something might have happened right off the bat?

LOU RAGUSE: Yeah, it was one of those things where Pam would shut the light off when she came home, and then her mom wouldn't need to worry if she woke up in the middle of the night. She could see that the light was off and everything's OK. That light remained on, and the parents reported the missing girls to the sheriff's department the very next day. However, the sheriff did not take them seriously. Basically told them that the girls ran away and did little to no investigation about their disappearance back in the 1970s.

CATHY WURZER: It would clearly be handled differently today.

LOU RAGUSE: Yeah, I mean, you can imagine, with social media and everything, they literally have to ask people to not come out and search because so many people come out and almost disrupt what law enforcement is trying to do when they do these grid searches these days. That's how different it is now.

CATHY WURZER: Say, Pam's dad, Oscar Jackson, he's a prominent figure in this book. How did he handle things?

LOU RAGUSE: So he was a quiet farmer, and he took it very, very, very hard. He would work during the day and then spend his evenings driving all the country roads looking for Pam and Sherri and this 1960 Studebaker Lark that they disappeared in. And it was just something that haunted him. And he lived to be into his 100s. So he lived a long life and really never gave up hope of finding them.

CATHY WURZER: Oh my goodness. Now, well, hey. Here's a question. Were the bodies ever found?

LOU RAGUSE: Yes, they were. And well, we can go into as much as you want to, but there is a resolution by the end of the book. The real crux of the book though is that the case got reopened in the mid-2000s as a cold case with the idea that they had been murdered because investigators had a murder suspect in mind.

CATHY WURZER: OK, because I was going to ask. Instead of this was a missing persons case, and then it became a homicide case. So let's just back up just a little bit. How did that happen?

LOU RAGUSE: Well, it actually took 30 years for it to become a homicide case. There was a newspaper reporter for the Vermilion Plain Talk that wrote, at the 20-year mark, an anniversary story. And those were not as common. We read those types of stories every week now. But back then, the story had disappeared off the radar of people in town other than those that remembered it. And this newspaper reporter, he did a really good job interviewing the last people that saw Pam and Sherri alive, gave an idea of where exactly they were driving because people actually didn't really know.

And that rekindled interest. And there was this detective who read that article who had just solved a disturbing rape case. And this guy named David Lykken got convicted and got sentenced to 225 years in prison because he had other women in his life that said he basically did the same things to them. And they got to testify at the sentencing hearing.

So this detective thought, well, this guy, David Lykken, he was the same age as Pam and Sherri, and he was living on a farm near that gravel pit that they were trying to reach on the night they disappeared. He started putting these pieces together. And then that's how this guy surfaced as a potential suspect.

CATHY WURZER: Oh my goodness. How did you get involved with this case?

LOU RAGUSE: When I started my career after graduating from the University of Minnesota, I worked in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and I was the cops and courts reporter. It was my beat. And this is 2004, 2005. This is when cold cases were a little more novel because DNA technology was really ramping up at that time. The local departments were improving their technology and testing capabilities.

And so when a cold case came along, it was more of a novel thing. And that was our cold case there at the time. And it got reopened by-- South Dakota formed a cold case unit specifically with this being one of the first two cases they wanted to solve. And it was just a huge case that I covered there at the time.

CATHY WURZER: Did you think that Lykken was guilty of murdering the two girls?

LOU RAGUSE: I think I did, and I think everybody did that followed the case for the most part, based off of what we were being told and what surfaced in the charges and so forth.

CATHY WURZER: Wow. This is a heck of a story. So there's always something that spurs anyone to write a book. What spurred you to do this?

LOU RAGUSE: Well, eventually, there is a resolution that find out what happened to Pam and Sherri. I stayed in contact with the family. In fact, Pam Jackson's sister and her husband came to my wedding as guests in 2010. So a couple years after that, when they found out what happened, I was the first call that they made. And I was working in Buffalo, New York, at the time. And so I'm following it from afar, and I really expected an explanation of why the cold case unit messed up so bad because remember, a man is charged with murder here.

And instead of receiving an explanation, I felt like it was more of a defense of the cold case unit that was given by the South Dakota Attorney General. So I had all these countless questions of my own. But it really wasn't my story anymore. But then as I started hearing more from Pam and Sherri's families, then I find out that they still don't know exactly what to believe.

That reinforced my take on the whole thing, plus believing that the community and the state of South Dakota and really, I mean, citizens of the United States deserve investigative journalism into why things like this happen. And that's really what I dove into when I had the support of the families, including the family of the suspect, to write the book.

CATHY WURZER: Wow. How in the world did you have the time to write a book and be on the street, reporting for KARE 11.

LOU RAGUSE: Yeah, it was not part of my daily job as a reporter for KARE 11. So it was-- my wife, Emily, was very generous with my time when I was able to spend time on the book and made several trips. My wife's family is from Sioux City, Iowa, so that's pretty close. That's within an hour from Vermillion. So when we'd be out there, I would take a day, part of a day, to go there and work on it more. But really, it took me the better part of five or six years to get the whole thing done because of lack of time.

CATHY WURZER: Oh my gosh. You did a great job with this. I know you're busy. Are you not covering the Lazzaro case today?

LOU RAGUSE: Yeah, the Lazzaro case-- the Lazzaro case, it's done now, and the closing arguments begin tomorrow morning.

CATHY WURZER: OK. So thanks for taking time and talking today about your book. I appreciate it, Lou.

LOU RAGUSE: Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: Good job. Thank you so much.

LOU RAGUSE: Thanks.

CATHY WURZER: Lou Raguse is the author of the new book, Vanished in Vermillion, The Real Story of South Dakota's Most Infamous Cold Case. It's available online and, of course, at your local bookstore. And as you know, he's also with KARE 11.

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