Elderly killer sentenced to consecutive life terms

Ray Vannieuwenhoven’s actions on July 9, 1976, were “cold, calculated and absolutely brutal,” the Marinette County district attorney said Aug. 26, and for that he will spend what is left of his lifetime under the care of the Wisconsin prison system.

The Lakewood man, 84, was sentenced to consecutive life sentences for the shooting deaths of David Schuldes, 25, and Ellen Matheys, 24, at McClintock Park in the Town of Silver Cliff.

Matheys had been raped, then shot to death, after witnessing the shooting death of her fiance, and DNA preserved from her body was linked to Vannieuwenhoven in March 2019, nearly 43 years after the murders.

A jury deliberated a little more than an hour before finding Vannieuwenhoven guilty July 27 after a seven-day trial.

The couple was engaged to be married Sept. 10, 1976, and they were starting a weekend camping trip when the attack occurred, District Attorney DeShea Morrow said.

“They had their lives completely in front of them, and he took that from them,” Morrow told Judge James A. Morrison.

After being caught and charged in 1957 for attempting to drag a girl into a cemetery, the defendant made sure he wasn’t going to be identified when he struck again 19 years later, she said.

“And through this whole process, there’s really been no sense of remorse from Mr. Vannieuwenhoven,” Morrow said. “Certainly when it was brought up in the visit that was recorded, there was laughter, maniacal laughter, no remorse.”

Three family members and Matheys’ best friend made statements describing the impact of their loved ones’ deaths, all of them saying the murders had irrevocably changed their lives and haunted them 45 years later.

“The image of my grandmother holding the coffin and sobbing uncontrollably is etched in my mind and will be there forever,” said Laurie Smith, Ellen Matheys’ niece who was 13 years old when the murders happened.

Given a chance to speak before the sentence was imposed, Vannieuwenhoven said, “The whole damn works has been rigged, everything, right from the word go when they put me in that jail,” and launched into a mostly incomprehensible speech for two minutes.

“I think Mr. Vannieuwenhoven was claiming some sort of wrongdoing on the part of the district attorney – I think,” Morrison said. “I reject that out of hand.”

Before imposing sentence, Morrison said the defendant’s actions were “like dropping a boulder in a pond,” affecting the lives of the victims’ friends and families forever.

“This is the impact of these two senseless, awful, heinous, idiotic, unspeakable crimes,” he said, his voice rising with each adjective.

“I don’t think there was any reason to believe that Mr. Vannieuwenhoven even knew these two young people. From what I can see and tell, they were selected at random, even less understandable than if he had killed somebody with whom he had a dispute. Now that would not be acceptable, but at least we could get our brains around that and understand somehow how that could happen … It’s unfathomable, I do not have words to describe how horrible this is.”

Morrison said the message of Vannieuwenhoven’s arrest, trial and sentencing should be that people understand that when unspeakable crimes are committed, the system will not rest until justice is done.

“You are never safe when you’ve done something evil,” the judge said. “Nor should you be.”