Probe Produces New Leads

By GIL BRADY
Special to the Casper Star-Tribune,

Originallly published 3.20.06

JACKSON, Wyo. (CT) -- News of police reopening a 20-year-old murder investigation has reminded many here of Jackson’s notorious past -- a past that is producing new leads on two other cold cases from the same era.

Ever since Eric James Cooper, Jon William Rice and Lisa Miles Ehlers all turned up mysteriously shot dead or missing over an eight-month span between October 1983 and June 1984, questions about a drug-fueled conspiracy have persisted among those old enough to remember in this affluent mountain hamlet.

Did the victims know one another? Was this the work of a lone killer or a hit squad of pros? If the latter, did the killers know one another or their victims? How might these slayings be connected? And what, possibly, could have been the motive?

Publicity about the reopened Cooper case, and the possibility his killer is still alive, has provided Teton and Sublette county investigators with new information on the unsolved homicides of Rice and Ehlers and hope of solving at least one of the three soon.

“The noose is tightening,” Teton County sheriff’s Sgt. Lloyd Funk said regarding progress in the reopened Ehlers and Rice investigations.

Until recently, only musty police records, old newspaper clippings and the purveyors of darker local lore offered vague clues about drugs and money behind all three execution-style slayings. No arrests have ever been made in any of the killings, and early investigations pointed toward a North or South Dakota drug ring with Wyoming connections to a local associate of Jon Rice.

Strange coincidences between the now-dissolved Jackson bank where Rice, 26, worked as a loan officer and Florida, where Ehlers’ husband had moved and to where she was traveling when she was killed, also drew the attention of earlier investigators.

In 1994, the Denver Post reported that Cooper, Rice and Ehlers “knew each other, and officials have said they believe the murders are related.”

Though no current official has said physical evidence connects the murders, there is hope that solving one will lead to the swift resolution of the others, because new leads and so many odd coincidences among ostensible strangers are hard to ignore.

"Everything goes back to Florida," Sgt.-Det. Todd Smith of the Jackson Police Department said recently.

On the same day Rice was killed in his Jackson condominium by a gunshot to the back of his head, his acquaintance, a landowner in the Redtop Meadows Subdivision here, was shot dead in the back in Florida. The Florida man’s wife, her jailhouse lover and a hired hit man were all convicted for his murder. One suspect, the St. Petersburg Times reported, allegedly told Florida officials the wife promised him land “out west” for killing her husband.

Funk said these coincidences were too tenuous for authorities at the time to shift the focus of their investigation away from their Dakota drug traffickers’ theory.

Authorities have confirmed that Ehlers, 27, a Jackson restaurateur along with her husband, also rented a safe-deposit box at the same Jackson bank where Rice worked. Shortly after Rice’s killing on May 12, 1984, another of the bank’s safe-deposit boxes shared by Rice and his roommate was found containing $30,000. Sheriff’s investigators later determined the money belonged to the roommate and not Rice, thus eliminating one motive for killing him.

But another motive, Funk said, has never been ruled out.

Corrupt lawyer link

Before he was killed, sheriff’s reports say, Rice was investigating on behalf of the bank and prosecutors Cabell Venable, a Jackson lawyer who was indicted in 1985 for stealing about $1.5 million from numerous citizens. With the help of Venable, Mr. Ehlers had started a local restaurant association. Rice, Mr. Ehlers and Venable were seen at a bank meeting that Rice’s roommate said occurred weeks before Rice was slain. Rice had also reportedly said that he had “stuff in a briefcase that would blow the bank wide open.”

Funk said that witnesses saw, but not necessarily together, Rice and Lisa Ehlers at parties hosted by Venable. Funk added that Rice was known to frequent Venable’s gambling den at a restaurant Venable owned on the outskirts of town. Ehlers reportedly told friends before leaving for Florida in June 1984 that she did not know Rice, whose recent death had shocked the town. She did, however, reportedly tell her husband that she did not like Venable because he frequently made unwanted advances toward her.

Jackson attorney W. Keith Goody, who has practiced law in Wyoming for more than 30 years and represented Cooper before his death, said Venable had a reputation of being connected with the drug trade. After being paroled from his embezzlement sentence, Venable practiced law in Florida and eventually died, Goody added.

Efforts to reach Venable's surviving family members were unsuccessful. Sheridan attorney Jeffrey J. Gonda, who briefly represented Venable in the 1990s and has practiced law in Wyoming since 1977, remembered his client as “a charismatic, nice guy. Very bright, spoke well.”

Latest leads

But all these intrigues, Funk said, were before new leads began pouring in around 2000 and 2001 and Jackson police recovered a two-decades-old gun from a safe-deposit box last summer. The gun’s spent and unspent .22-caliber rounds brought to mind the shattered .22 slug police recovered from inside Cooper’s skull, found by hikers near a shallow, forested grave in 1986.

Traced to a Florida pawn shop, the gun was stashed in another safe-deposit box that dates to the same bank where Rice once worked, Smith said. Analysis on the gun and bullet fragments continues at the bureau’s lab in Quantico, Va, the FBI confirmed.

"The gun might turn out to be the Cooper murder weapon, or it might not be anything connected," Smith said. “But then you've got to ask yourself: Why hide something of almost no value and pay for a box that would wind up costing more than the gun?”

Smith added that the safe-deposit box owner and the purchaser of the gun share the same last name and first initial and likely traveled between Wyoming and Florida in the 1980s. Last month, Smith theorized that the gun in the safe-deposit box might have been an “insurance policy” to protect an informant or witness to Cooper's killing.

Now all the old suspicions and rumors -- from hidden caches of drug money to a corrupt lawyer’s shady business dealings -- are back in play. Funk said that his investigation is focusing on a “local conspiracy,” including the activities of Venable in Jackson before 1988.

Psychic visions

Also entered into evidence: the uncanny visions of a psychic consulted by relatives of Lisa Ehlers 10 years after her death.

In the predawn of June 21, 1984, Ehlers and her packed Volkswagen Jetta with a windsurf board tied to its roof departed Jackson for Panama City, Fla., to rejoin her husband.

Authorities say sometime around 6 a.m. she stopped on a turnout in Hoback Canyon, about 30 miles south of here near the town of Bondurant. Within minutes she was shot and left by the roadside. Investigators reported that Ehlers was not physically assaulted before she was shot; none of her possessions were taken, and nearly $500 was found on her. Earlier investigators had eliminated robbery as a motive. But Funk thinks what happened might have been more complicated.

"(The killer is) not going to take the time to search her vehicle or search her person once she gets out holding what that person is expecting to get,” Funk said, addressing why Ehlers stopped, why some of her valuables were left untouched, and his theory that she was robbed of drugs or money, or both.

Sublette County Undersheriff Jim Whinnery, whose office has jurisdiction over the Ehlers investigation, studied her killing for 10 years while working for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation.

"I don’t know if any ties to this investigation connect with Cooper’s," Whinnery recently said, adding that suspects were interviewed over the years but never arrested and no murder weapon was ever recovered. "(Ehlers') murder is the only unsolved homicide in Sublette County,” he added.

Whinnery described evidence collected at the scene that fits with reports by passing motorists about a “dark sedan” parked behind Ehlers’ still-running car as two white men stood near her body on a roadside turnout. The eyewitness accounts also closely match what Funk said a psychic, holding only a photograph of Ehlers, told Ehlers’ sister in 1994 about Lisa’s body lying near a river and mountains.

"A dark car with two occupants … the person that killed Ehlers had dark hair was about 6 feet tall and had a nickname,” Funk said, reading from the sister’s testimony regarding the psychic. "The suspect wears a suit or uniform at work. The psychic also stated that the suspect had seen Lisa Ehlers the night of her death."

Funk added that he had never given much credibility to psychics beforehand.

Whinnery said the eyewitness testimony of motorists could have also described two Wyoming Department of Transportation employees who discovered Ehlers minutes after she was shot in the chest and head with a large-caliber handgun.

Rumors that law enforcement might have been involved in Ehlers’ death have never been entirely ruled out, due to eyewitnesses and the psychic describing one of the men as wearing a uniform. They are also inspired by the fact that U.S. Highway 189 was lightly traveled at the time and the right blinker to Ehlers’ car was found flashing when authorities arrived -- implying she might had been pulled over by law enforcement, Funk said.

Dispatch records show that no on-duty law enforcement officer was in the area at the time of Ehlers’ death, Funk added.

Some authorities believe unmasking Ehlers’ killer might be easier than ever proving in a court of law what, if anything -- besides approximate age, race, lifestyle, proximity, drug use and violent death -- links her to Cooper or Rice.

"I believe that Ehlers’ murder was money, drug-related … I believe she pulled over there with the intention to meet somebody and to do something with drugs or money … and it ended up being a homicide," Funk said.

Seeking information

Regarding Cooper’s unsolved homicide, Goody said he was one of the last known people to talk with him. Though he would not disclose what was discussed, he did say a felony marijuana charge against Cooper might have factored into his death.

"What do you think? Felony charge. He’s going to cut a deal and name names ... I will never forget, specifically, what we talked about. And I think it might be very, very helpful to the investigation," Goody said.

Former Jackson lead investigator Jim Williams, who Smith says knows more about the Cooper homicide than anybody, said Cooper, 23, was last seen alive at the now-out-of-business Highlander bar in Jackson.

Williams encouraged anybody who was at the bar on or about the night of Oct. 14, 1983, to envision what they saw, no matter how trivial, and share it with authorities.

Williams doesn't think the three murders are linked to one killer. Each killing, he explained, had different “signatures,” and whoever murdered and later buried Cooper near Signal Mountain demonstrated both “organized and disorganized traits,” which are classifications the FBI uses to profile a suspect based on evidence collected in a crime.

Funk thinks the passage of time explains why people are now coming forward and said informants have been granted amnesty about their participation in Jackson’s 1980s “party scene.” People are deciding, he said, to do the right thing if it helps to catch a killer.

Tipsters are encouraged to call their local police or sheriff's department, or (307) 577-TIPS.

(Photo Credits: Lisa Miles Ehlers, courtsey of Sublette County S.O.; Jon William Rice, courtsey of anonymous source; Hoback River, Bondurant, WY, courtsey of Sublette.com and Pindedale on-line ).