WISCONSIN 1976 Cold Case Solved After 45 Years — Justice for David Schuldes & Ellen Matheys
On the afternoon of July 9th, 1976, David Schuldes and his fiance Ellen Mathys drove from Green Bay to McClintock Park, a remote campsite deep in the pine forest in Silver Cliff, Marinette County, 85 miles north of the city.
He was 25 years old and worked in the circulation department of the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
She was 24 and a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
They planned to marry that September.
That afternoon, after setting up their tent, the two went for a walk on a trail in the woods.
Ellen stopped to use the restroom.
David waited outside.
A .
30 caliber bullet from a rifle struck him in the neck, killing him instantly.
Ellen ran.
The killer chased her through 200 yards of dense forest, overpowered her, sexually assaulted her, and then, while she was putting her clothes back on, shot her twice in the chest.
David’s body was found around 3:00 pm that same day, his camera still slung over his shoulder.
Ellen’s body was not discovered until the following morning, lying in the woods outside the park.
The killer took no money, no wallet, nothing at all.
He left semen on Ellen’s shorts, a biological evidence sample that investigators collected immediately.
But this was 1976.
DNA technology did not yet exist.
No one knew to whom that evidence sample belonged.
A composite sketch of the suspect was drawn from the account of a witness who saw a man carrying a rifle leaving the campsite.
Dozens of leads were followed.
None of them led anywhere.
The case went cold.
The DNA sample sat in the evidence locker for 43 years, tested periodically whenever new technology appeared, and each time returned the same result, no match.
Meanwhile, just 25 miles from the crime scene, the killer lived an ordinary life.
He married, fathered five children, worked as a handyman, and became a good neighbor in a small town of 800 people.
He lived free for 42 years.
It took genetic genealogy technology, a DNA company in Virginia, and a sting operation involving an envelope to finally drag him out of the darkness.
This is the story of how a 45-year cold case in Wisconsin was finally solved, and how justice finally came for David Schuldes and Ellen Matheys.
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To understand why the deaths of David Schuldes and Ellen Matheys haunted Marinette County for nearly half a century, you have to understand who they were.
David Schuldes grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, an ordinary young man from an ordinary family.
He worked part-time in the circulation department of the Green Bay Press Gazette.
Not a reporter, not an editor, just the person who made sure the paper reached readers on time.
He was 25, still young, still finding his way in life.
Ellen Matheys, 24, worked as a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
Family and friends called her by the affectionate name Ellie.
She was the kind of person people remembered for her gentleness more than for any noise she made.
David and Ellen were engaged.
They planned to hold their wedding in September 1976, only 2 months after that fateful camping trip.
Friends and family on both sides were eagerly awaiting the day they would begin their new life together.
That was all they were doing, two young people in love, planning a wedding, driving up to northern Wisconsin to pitch a tent and enjoy a summer weekend in the woods.
Nothing special, nothing dangerous, just a camping trip.
McClintock Park is located in the town of Silver Cliff, Marinette County, about 85 miles north of Green Bay.
It is remote country, dense pine forest, dirt roads winding between the trees, the kind of place people go to escape the city, to hear birds instead of traffic.
On the afternoon of Friday, July 9th, 1976, David and Ellen arrived at McClintock Park and set up their tent at a secluded spot in the campground.
They arranged their gear, settled in, and then went for a walk on a trail in the woods, the way any couple would on a warm summer afternoon.
That was the last moment their lives were still normal.
Ellen stopped to use the public restroom in the campground.
David waited outside on the trail, his camera slung over his shoulder.
He did not see the man in the woods.
He did not hear footsteps.
The bullet from the .
30 caliber rifle struck him in the neck from a distance far enough that David never knew where it came from.
He died on the spot.
No final words, no chance to run, to scream, to warn Ellen, just a gunshot and then silence.
Think about that for a second.
A 25-year-old man standing outside a restroom in a campground on a Friday afternoon waiting for his fiancee, and in an instant he no longer existed.
No one knows exactly what Ellen heard or saw in the moments that followed, but according to investigators’ conclusions, she ran.
The killer chased her.
She ran about 200 yards >> >> through dense forest beyond the park boundary into a wooded area outside.
200 yards.
That is about the length of two football fields.
Two football fields that a 24-year-old woman ran in desperation, knowing someone was chasing her, possibly having heard the shot that killed the man she loved.
The killer caught up with her.
He overpowered her in those woods.
He sexually assaulted her.
And then, while Ellen was putting her clothes back on, he shot her twice in the chest with the same rifle that had killed David.
He shot her while she was putting her clothes back on.
That detail tells you everything you need to know about the kind of person who did this.
He did not panic.
He did not flee after committing the crime.
He waited.
He waited for her to put her clothes back on and then shot her so there would be no witness left.
This was not an impulsive act.
This was cold calculation.
Another couple camping at McClintock Park that afternoon heard the gunshots around 2:30 pm They did not know what they were.
No one in the campground knew what was happening a few hundred yards away.
David’s body was discovered around 2:55 pm Less than half an hour after the shots.
He lay on the trail near the restroom.
Camera still over his shoulder.
No signs of a struggle.
No signs of self-defense.
Death came so quickly, he never even had time to raise his hands.
But Ellen was not there.
Police searched the surrounding area, but did not find her that afternoon.
Darkness fell.
The dense forest swallowed everything into night.
It was not until the next morning, July 10th, that Ellen’s body was found in the woods outside the park, about 200 yards from where David lay.
She had been sexually assaulted.
She had been shot twice.
And through that night, while the families in Green Bay still did not know what had happened, her body lay alone in the dark woods.
When the autopsy results were released, the picture became brutally clear.
David Scholdus, 25, died from a single 30-caliber bullet that passed through his neck, killing him instantly.
Ellen Matthews, 24, was sexually assaulted and then shot twice in the chest, dying at the scene.
The killer did not take Ellen’s wallet, which remained in the couple’s car.
He took no money.
He took no camera.
He took nothing of value.
This was not a robbery.
There was only one motive, and the biological evidence at the scene confirmed it.
Semen was recovered from Ellen Mathys’s shorts.
In the years that followed, prosecutor De Shame Maro would sum up the motive in three sentences.
He wanted to rape Ellen Mathys.
He killed David Schuldes to get him out of the way.
He raped Ellen Mathys and then killed her so there would be no witness.
Three sentences.
That was the entire case.
Two young people killed because a stranger saw an opportunity and decided to act.
No personal hatred, no conflict, no reason that an ordinary person could understand.
Just pure, random, and brutal violence that would haunt Marinette County for the next 45 years.
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The question now is very simple.
Who pulled the trigger? The answer, it turned out, would take nearly half a century to find.
But in the first days after the murders, the investigators of Marinette County did not know that.
They had evidence.
They had a witness.
And they believed this case could be solved.
The couple camping at McClintock Park that afternoon, the ones who heard the shots around 2:30, gave police the most important information of the early phase.
They reported that after the shots, they saw a man carrying a rifle leaving the campground.
Not in a hurry, not panicking, just walking out as if he had finished something that needed doing.
That was the detail that sent a chill through the investigators.
Not because it was strange, but because it showed the degree of calm in the killer.
A man who had just killed two people in the woods, and he walked out as if he were taking an afternoon stroll.
Based on the witness description, the Marinette County Sheriff’s Office had a composite sketch of the suspect drawn.
The sketch showed a white man of middle age with no distinctive identifying features.
That was the first problem.
The sketch was too generic.
It could have been any one of thousands of men living scattered across the small towns of northern Wisconsin.
Police printed the sketch, distributed it to law enforcement agencies in the area, ran it in local newspapers, and waited.
The calls started coming in.
Dozens of calls.
Each call was a name, a suspicion, a neighbor who looked like the sketch, a stranger who had been seen in the area around that time.
Detectives followed every lead, one by one.
They interviewed.
They checked backgrounds.
They cross-checked timelines.
And every lead, every name, every suspicion led to a dead end.
Not a single person matched the conditions closely enough.
Not a single person could be placed at McClintock Park on the afternoon of July 9th, 1976 with evidence solid enough to support a prosecution.
The case had one strong point that the investigators knew well, but could not yet exploit.
The semen recovered from Ellen Mathys’ shorts was direct biological evidence from the killer.
It sat there, carefully preserved in the Marinette County evidence locker.
A sample that contained the identity of the murderer, but with no way to read it.
In 1976, forensic DNA analysis technology did not exist.
The first DNA fingerprinting method in the world was developed only in 1984 by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys.
And it would take still more years before it became a standard tool in criminal investigations in the United States.
That meant the most important evidence sample in the case sat silent, waiting for a technology that had not yet been invented.
The investigators knew what they had.
They also knew they could do nothing with it.
Not yet.
Meanwhile, the case began to go cold.
Not from lack of effort, but from lack of breakthroughs.
Every path had been walked.
Every lead had been checked.
No witness had seen a license plate.
No one had recognized the man with the rifle.
No connection between the killer and the victims that police could find.
This was the kind of case that kept detectives awake at night.
Not because of a lack of evidence, but because the evidence was sitting right in front of them and they had no way to use it.
But the Marinette County Sheriff’s Office did one thing that many other law enforcement agencies would not.
They did not close the file.
The case was never classified as solved, nor was it ever filed away in a drawer and forgotten.
It remained open, officially still open.
Every time a new sheriff took office, every time a new detective was assigned, the Schuldes-Matthews file was pulled out again, read again, reviewed again.
And every time the conclusion was the same.
We have the biological evidence.
We cannot read it.
We wait.
>> >> The years passed.
1977, 1980, 1985.
Each year was a year the killer lived free.
Each year was a year the families of David Schuldes and Ellen Mattheys lived with questions that had no answers.
Who? Why? Where is he? Is he living a normal life? Going to work? Eating dinner with his family? Sleeping soundly every night while David lies in the ground and Ellen lies in the ground? The answer to that question, as we would later learn, was yes, exactly that.
Then the 1990s arrived and with them hope.
Forensic DNA analysis technology had matured enough to become a real investigative tool.
The FBI’s national DNA database, called CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, began operating allowing police across the country to compare DNA samples from crime scenes with DNA samples from people already convicted or arrested for other crimes.
The Marinette County detectives acted immediately.
The semen sample from Ellen Mathys’ shorts, the evidence that had sat in storage for nearly 20 years, was sent to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory for analysis.
For the first time in the history of the case, investigators could generate a DNA profile from the evidence sample.
The DNA profile showed it was the DNA of a single male, a single source, a single man on Earth who had left that sample on Ellen’s shorts.
Finding that man meant finding the killer.
The DNA profile was entered into CODIS.
The detectives waited, and the results came back.
No match.
No one in the entire FBI national DNA database matched the profile from the McClintock Park scene.
What did that mean? It meant the killer had never been arrested for any other crime serious enough for his DNA to be collected and entered into the system.
He had no criminal record in the database.
He was a ghost in the criminal justice system, a killer with no file, no trail, no criminal history that a computer could find.
CODIS only works when the perpetrator is already in the system.
The man who killed David and Ellen had never been in the system.
The hope from the new DNA technology, the hope the detectives had waited nearly 20 years for, led to another wall.
But the Marinette County detectives still did not close the file.
They continued sending the DNA sample for periodic testing every time CODIS was updated with new profiles, every time the analysis technology improved.
Each time the answer was the same.
No match.
No match.
No match.
2000.
2005.
2010.
2015.
Nearly four decades with no answer.
The DNA sample still sat there containing the identity of the killer and there was no way to attach it to a face, a name, an address.
Marinette County Sheriff Jerry Salve said he was prepared to chase the killer all the way to the gravestone if necessary.
He was not joking.
But by the mid-2010s, the case seemed to be heading that way, toward a gravestone.
Not the killer’s, but the grave of the hope of ever finding him.
42 years.
42 years that the DNA sample sat in the evidence locker.
42 years that the victims’ families lived with pain that had no end point.
42 years that the killer woke up every morning, drank coffee, went to work, and lived as if the afternoon of July 9th, 1976 had never happened.
Then, in 2018, a completely new technology appeared and everything changed.
But before talking about how that technology broke the case, you need to know the pain it would end.
For 42 years, the families of David Schuldes and Ellen Matheys lived with a kind of pain most people cannot imagine.
Not the pain of losing a loved one, though that was already devastating enough, but the pain of losing a loved one and knowing that the person who killed them was still free, somewhere out there, still breathing, still living, still enjoying every day that David and Ellen had been robbed of.
Joanne McKolsky, David Schultis’ sister, would say at the trial decades later that her family needed finally, finally to find peace.
She repeated the word finally twice.
That repetition was not rhetoric.
It was the voice of someone who had waited so long that even the words themselves were tired.
Kurt Schultis, David’s cousin, lived in Green Bay and followed the case from 1976 onward.
>> >> Every year, every DNA test that came back with no match, every lead that led to a dead end, he returned to the same question.
When? When will there be an answer? >> >> He was 68 years old when the case was finally solved.
He had been waiting since he was a young man.
But perhaps no one carried a deeper scar than Lynn Baumgartner, Ellen Matheys’ closest friend.
Baumgartner and Ellen had grown up together, sharing the years of youth that only best friends understand.
When Ellen was killed, Baumgartner did not merely lose a friend.
She lost a part of herself that no one could replace.
And that pain was not the kind that softens with time.
Baumgartner would recount that she woke up many mornings in a cold sweat for years, for decades, haunted by images of what Ellen had endured in those woods.
Nightmares, insomnia, a persistent fear that never completely disappeared.
The Matheys family remembered Ellen, whom they called Ellie, with love and pain so intertwined they could not be separated.
They described sleepless nights, recurring nightmares, and the fear that had clung to them since 1976.
Cynthia Chizick, Ellen’s niece, lived in Henderson, Nevada, thousands of miles from Wisconsin, but never escaped the shadow of the case.
When the news of the arrest finally came, she said only that she had been waiting a very long time.
Five words that carried the weight of 43 years.
That is what a cold case does to the families of victims.
It does not merely take one person.
It takes the peace of everyone around them.
Not for a few months or a few years, but for decades.
It turns every Christmas into an empty chair.
It turns every wedding anniversary that David and Ellen should have had into a reminder of what was taken.
It turns July 9th of every year into a day the whole family has to struggle to get through.
And it goes on and on because there is no ending.
No trial, no verdict, no one held accountable.
Only emptiness and questions with no answers.
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While the victims’ families lived in the dark, 2018 brought a ray of light no one had predicted.
The Marinette County Sheriff’s Office, under the direction of Sheriff Jerry Sov, began working with Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company based in Virginia.
Parabon is not an ordinary DNA laboratory.
They specialize in a field that in 1976 did not even exist in anyone’s imagination.
DNA phenotyping, the ability to predict a person’s physical appearance from their DNA sample.
Parabon took the DNA sample from the McClintock Park scene and ran it through the Snapshot Phenotyping Analysis System.
The results came back in the form of two composite portraits.
The first showed what the suspect looked like at age 25, near the time of the murders.
The second showed what the suspect looked like aged to 65, reflecting the reality that the killer, if still alive, was now an old man.
The DNA phenotype analysis provided an astonishing level of detail.
The suspect had fair to very fair skin with 93.
4% confidence, blue or green eyes with 92.
6% reddish brown or black hair with 97.
4% confidence.
For the first time in 42 years, investigators had a face to work with.
Not a faint sketch from a 1976 witness description, but a portrait generated from the killer’s own DNA.
Sheriff Steve held a press conference on the 42nd anniversary of the murders to release the composite portraits.
He said this was an exciting new development in the case.
The response was swift and substantial.
More than 60 new leads poured into the sheriff’s office.
Each lead was a name, someone they thought resembled the composite portrait.
Detectives interviewed every person reported.
They collected DNA samples from men who resembled the suspect.
Every sample was sent for testing and every sample came back with the same result.
No match.
No match.
No match.
60 leads, dozens of DNA samples, hundreds of hours of interviews and investigation and not a single result.
The hope from Parabon Phenotyping seemed to be leading to another dead end.
But Parabon had a second tool, a tool far more powerful than phenotyping and it was about to change everything.
Before getting to that tool, you need to know about the man it would find.
About 25 miles northeast of McClintock Park in the small town of Lakewood, a man named Raymond Lawrence Van Nuys and Hoven was living the kind of life anyone looking in from the outside would call normal.
Lakewood has about 800 residents, a town in northeastern Wisconsin surrounded by forest and small lakes, where people know one another, greet one another on the street, and leave their doors unlocked.
Van Euwenhoven had lived there for two decades.
He was a handyman, the kind of neighbor people knocked on when they needed a pipe fixed or a hinge replaced.
Fred Mason, 66, who worked at the town dump, often saw Van Euwenhoven rummaging through the scrap pile looking for small engine parts.
Robert Ganzel, 86, and his wife occasionally went out to dinner with Van Euwenhoven.
No one in the town had any reason to suspect anything.
Van Euwenhoven was a widower.
His wife, Rita, had passed away.
He had five grown children.
He went to church.
He fixed things for neighbors.
He lived the life of an ordinary older man in an ordinary small town in northern Wisconsin.
And for 42 years, no one, not a neighbor, not a friend, not family, not police, knew that on the afternoon of July 9th, 1976, when he was 39 years old, Raymond Van Euwenhoven had driven to McClintock Park, shot a 25-year-old man in the neck, chased that man’s 24-year-old fiance into the woods, sexually assaulted her, and then shot her twice in the chest.
42 years.
He married, had children, raised them, went to work, retired, became a widower, and kept living.
All while the Schuldes family and the Mathys family woke up every morning with pain that had no end.
He lived only 25 miles from the crime scene.
25 miles.
For 42 years, the killer lived only 25 miles from the place where he had killed two people, and no one knew.
Think about that for a second.
A killer, a rapist, living right in the community, liked by his neighbors, trusted by his friends, and every morning waking up and looking in the mirror while no one but him knew whose face that was in the glass.
That was the truth hidden behind the ordinary life of Raymond Van Nu Hoven, and it was about to be exposed.
Parabon’s second tool does not predict faces.
It finds family, and it works on a principle so simple it borders on genius.
You do not need to find the killer in a criminal database if you can find his relatives in a genealogical database.
The technique is called genetic genealogy, and it has completely transformed the way American law enforcement approaches cold cases.
To understand how it works, you need to know about GEDmatch.
GEDmatch is a free public genealogical database that at the time contained roughly 1.
2 million DNA profiles.
All of those profiles had been uploaded voluntarily by people who had used consumer DNA testing services such as ancestry.
com and 23andMe.
These people were not criminals.
They were ordinary people who wanted to learn about their family origins, find distant relatives, or were simply curious about their genetics.
They uploaded their DNA results to GEDmatch to compare with others and find family connections.
What many of them never anticipated was that the same database could also be used to find killers.
The principle works like this.
Parabon uploads DNA from a crime scene to GEDmatch.
The system does not look for exact matches the way CODIS does.
Instead, it searches for partial matches, people who share enough DNA with the crime scene sample to be distant relatives of the perpetrator, third cousins, fourth cousins, even fifth cousins.
People the killer may never have met, never known the names of, but who share a portion of DNA because they share common ancestors from generations earlier.
Once those distant relatives are identified, genealogists begin building the family tree backward from the distant relatives up to the common ancestors, then down the other branches, gradually narrowing the field until only a small group of people remains who could be the source of the DNA sample.
The technique was not entirely new.
In 2018, California police used exactly this method to arrest the Golden State Killer, one of the most notorious serial killers and serial rapists in American history after more than 40 years of eluding capture.
The Golden State Killer case proved that genetic genealogy could do what CODIS could not, identify killers who had never been in the criminal justice system.
Parabon has identified 55 suspects in cold cases nationwide since May 2018 through this method.
The Scholdys-Matthys case was about to become one of them.
Parabon experts uploaded the DNA sample from the McClintock Park crime scene to GEDmatch and began the reverse tracing process.
They found partial matches, distant relatives who shared enough DNA to begin building the family tree.
From those distant relatives, they built upward, then downward, then sideways, tracking family branches across generations, across states, across decades.
By the end of December 2018, the family tree was complete.
Parabon experts concluded that the suspect’s parents had lived in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area, and that family name was Van Euwenhoven.
Now, the detectives needed confirmation.
The Van Euwenhoven family had four brothers.
Any one of them could be the source of the DNA sample.
The detectives needed DNA samples from each of them to compare and exclude.
Two of the four brothers were eliminated first.
The DNA samples were collected secretly, not by court order or formal request, but by a method police call surreptitious collection.
One brother’s DNA was taken from the trash bags outside his home.
Another brother’s DNA was taken from a discarded coffee cup he had thrown away.
Both samples were close enough to confirm that the Van Nieuwenhoven family was the right one, but they were not exact matches.
The killer was not either of those two men.
That narrowed the field to the remaining two brothers, and one of them was Raymond Lawrence Van Nieuwenhoven, the kindly repairman in Lakewood.
Now the detectives faced the final challenge.
They needed a direct DNA sample from Raymond Van Nieuwenhoven.
They could not ask him for it because that would alert him.
They could not obtain a search warrant based solely on the family tree because there was not yet enough direct evidence.
They needed a way to obtain his DNA without him knowing the real purpose, and they devised a plan that would later become the center of years of legal controversy.
Officers went to the Van Nieuwenhoven home in Lakewood.
They were not wearing investigative uniforms.
They did not mention the murders.
Instead, they said they were conducting a survey about the effectiveness of local police.
A short survey, a few simple questions, the kind of paperwork any citizen would fill out without thinking twice.
Van Nieuwenhoven filled out the survey.
When he finished, the officers asked him to place the survey in an envelope and seal the envelope with his tongue.
A completely ordinary request, an action that took less than two seconds.
Van Nieuwenhoven licked the envelope, sealed it, and handed it back to the officers.
He had no idea that he had just handed his own DNA to the people trying to prove he was a murderer.
The envelope was sent to the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory.
The saliva on the envelope was extracted and analyzed.
The DNA profile from Van Nieuwenhoven’s saliva was compared to the DNA profile from the semen on Ellen Matthys’s shorts, the evidence sample that had been preserved for 43 years.
The results came back, a match, a complete match.
The DNA profile from the saliva on the envelope was the only male DNA profile developed from the semen found on Ellen Mathys’s shorts.
The probability that the result was wrong, the probability that any other man on Earth could be the source of that DNA sample was 1 in 29 sextillion.
29 sextillion.
That is the number 29 followed by 21 zeros.
To put it in perspective, the estimated number of people who have ever lived on Earth in the entire history of the human species is about 100 billion.
29 sextillion is billions of billions of times larger than that number.
There was no room for doubt.
There was no room for coincidence.
No other man on this planet in the history of the human race could be the source of the DNA sample on Ellen Mathys’s shorts.
Only Raymond Vannieuwenhoven.
Marinette County District Attorney Du Chaine Moreau would later tell the jury that Raymond Vannieuwenhoven was the only man on Earth, by many orders of magnitude, who could be the source of that sample.
Eight days after Vannieuwenhoven licked the envelope, in March 2019, detectives returned to Lakewood.
This time, they did not bring a survey.
Raymond Lawrence Vannieuwenhoven, 82 years old, was arrested and booked into the Marinette County Jail.
He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree sexual assault.
After 43 years, the DNA sample on Ellen Mathys’s shorts finally had an owner.
After 43 years, the faint composite sketch from 1976 finally had a real face.
And after For years, the Scholdus family and the Mathase family finally had a name to attach to their pain.
News of the arrest rippled through Lakewood like a shockwave.
In a town of 800 people where everyone knows everyone else’s name, where neighbors borrow tools from one another and wave to each other on the street, the revelation that the kindly repairman everyone knew had turned out to be a murderer and sex offender who had been on the run for 43 years was something no one could process immediately.
Wayne Sankey, a Lakewood resident, remembered the moment he heard the news.
He said he blurted out that it had to be a joke.
Then he told his wife and she could not believe it either.
It was not just him.
Many people in the town reacted the same way.
Fred Mason, who often saw Vay Nu Hove at the town dump, said it was not just him.
A lot of people were shocked.
Robert Ganzel, 86, who had once shared dinners with Vay Nu Hove, >> >> had almost nothing to say.
He was a neighbor, an acquaintance, a man Ganzel had sat across from at the dinner table without knowing that the man on the other side of the table had killed two young people in the woods and then lived an ordinary life for more than four decades.
Richard Lerquin, the twin brother of Vay Nu Hove’s late wife Rita, refused to believe the charges.
He said his brother-in-law had been a very loving father to his wife and children.
He was certain Vay Nu Hove was innocent.
That was the reaction of a man who had watched Vay Nu Hove raise children, care for a sick wife, and live a life that anyone looking from the outside would have called respectable.
But on the other side of town, on the other side of the story, the victims’ families received the news with an entirely different kind of emotion.
Kurt Scholdus, 68, a cousin of David’s, welcomed the arrest but could not hide his bitterness about the time that had passed.
He said the man had gotten away with it for far too long.
It was unfortunate.
Far too long.
43 years.
Kurt had been a young man when David was killed.
Now, he was an old man and most of his life had gone by while the man who murdered his cousin lived free 25 miles from the crime scene.
Cynthia Chizick, a niece of Ellen Mathys who lived in Henderson, Nevada, said they had waited a very long time.
Five words.
No drama, no loud outrage, just the exhaustion of someone who had carried the pain so long that there was no energy left for anything except relief.
And as investigators began digging deeper into Raymond Van Nuynhoven’s past, the outwardly ordinary life began to crack.
After the arrest, authorities appealed to the public for information about an even older case, a case from 62 years earlier in which Van Nuynhoven had been accused of assaulting two teenage girls, 116 and 117 in unprovoked attacks.
Van Nuynhoven had a history.
Not a history in the CODIS system, not the kind of history a computer could find, but the kind of history a community knows and then forgets.
The kind that paper records capture and then gather dust in a drawer.
He was not just a one-time killer.
He was a man with a decades-long pattern of violence against young women.
The ordinary life the neighbors saw was only a shell.
Inside that shell was something entirely different.
Legally, Van Nuynhoven faced three charges, two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree sexual assault against Ellen Mathys.
However, from the very beginning of the proceedings, Judge James Morrison dismissed the sexual assault charge because the statute of limitations had expired.
Wisconsin has a statute of limitations for sexual assault and 43 years far exceeded that limit.
But murder is different.
There is no statute of limitations for murder in Wisconsin.
Never.
Whether 10 years or 100 years, if you kill someone in Wisconsin, you can be prosecuted at any time.
That meant the two first-degree murder charges remained, and Van Nuynhoven faced the possibility of life in prison for each count.
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The road from arrest to trial was not simple.
It stretched more than 2 years, slow and full of obstacles.
Van Nuynhoven, by then in his 80s, went through multiple competency hearings.
The question was whether he was mentally competent enough to understand court proceedings and assist in his own defense.
By November of that year, the judge determined that Van Nuynhoven was competent to stand trial.
But the delays were not over.
The defense team kept filing motions.
They asked the appellate court to intervene so they could introduce evidence linking another possible suspect to the crime.
They challenged the legality of the way police had collected the DNA through the fake survey.
They argued that the method of collecting the DNA violated constitutional privacy rights.
Each motion was another delay.
Each hearing added more months that the victims’ families had to wait.
Finally, in July 2021, 45 years after the murders and more than 2 years after the arrest, the trial began in Marinette County Circuit Court.
Raymond Van Nuynhoven, now 84, sat in the courtroom before Judge James Morrison.
The trial lasted 9 days.
9 days in which 45 years of waiting were compressed into testimony, evidence, argument, and rebuttal.
Special prosecutor Mark Williams opened with an opening statement aimed straight at the jury’s emotions.
He said the story began as a weekend that two people in love went camping.
Then told the jury that the deaths of Schultis and Mathys were worse than any horror movie they had ever seen.
The prosecution strategy rested on three pillars.
The first pillar was DNA.
Marinette County District Attorney D.
A.
Morrow told the jury that the semen recovered from Ellen Mathys’s shorts in 1976 contained the only male DNA profile that matched Van Nu en Hove’s DNA completely.
Rebecca Bohr, a DNA analyst at the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory in Madison, presented the technical analysis.
The probability of error was 1 in 29 sextillion.
Morrow told the jury that no one else in the world could have left that semen stain on Ellen Mathys’s shorts.
The second pillar was eyewitnesses.
Two campers at McClintock Park in 1976 testified that they heard a single gunshot around the time Schultis and Mathys were killed and afterwards saw a man carrying a rifle leaving the campground.
The third pillar, and perhaps the decisive blow, was a recorded telephone call.
Morrow closed his closing argument with a recording of a call in which Van Nu en Hove appeared to say that he had taken down Schultis and Mathys and then mocked the charges against him.
Taken down.
That was the phrase he used.
Not killed, not shot.
Taken down.
As if two human beings were targets on a shooting range.
The defense, led by attorneys Le Shu Hart and Travis Crowell, chose an unusual strategy.
They did not dispute that the semen on Mathys’s shorts belonged to Van Nu en Hove.
Shu Hart told the jury straight out that there was no dispute about that.
Instead, the defense argued that DNA was only one piece of the case, and that the presence of semen did not prove that Van Nuys and Hoven was the person who shot David and shot Ellen.
Schuhart pointed out that a DNA analyst cannot say when, how, or why the semen ended up on Mathes’ shorts.
The defense also offered two pieces of counter evidence.
First, records showed that Van Nuys and Hoven drove a Ford at the time of the murders, not the type of vehicle the witnesses described.
Second, and more notably, investigators had examined Van Nuys and Hoven’s rifle and confirmed that it was not the weapon that killed David Schultes and Ellen Mathes.
The murder weapon was never found.
Schuhart put the question directly.
They have not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Ray shot David and shot Ellen.
That was the defense’s argument.
DNA proved sexual contact.
It did not prove murder.
But the prosecution had the telephone call.
And they had the DNA.
And they had witnesses who heard a gunshot and saw a man leave.
And they had one question the defense could not answer satisfactorily.
If Van Nuys and Hoven did not kill them, then why was his semen on the shorts of the woman who was shot to death right after being sexually assaulted? Maros summed up the case in his closing argument.
He wanted to rape Ellen Mathes.
He killed David Schultes to eliminate him.
He raped Ellen Mathes and then killed her so there would be no witnesses.
Today is the day of long-awaited justice for Ellen and David.
Nine days of testimony.
45 years of waiting.
The jury retired to deliberate.
The jury took only two hours.
Two hours to decide a case that had taken 45 years to come to light.
When the 12 jurors returned to the courtroom, the air thickened until it could be felt on the skin.
The verdict was read.
Guilty.
First-degree murder of David Shuldes.
Guilty.
First degree murder of Ellen Matthes.
Unanimous.
12 people, one voice, two words the victims’ families had waited 45 years to hear.
The courtroom erupted.
Lynn Baumgartner, Ellen’s closest friend, who for decades had woken in a cold sweat from nightmares about what Ellen had endured in those woods, said her heart was pounding.
After 45 years of pain, 45 years without answers, 45 years living with the image of her best friend murdered in the forest, finally, someone was being held responsible.
A relative of one of the victims told a reporter that 45 years is a very long time to wait, >> >> but that day had come and now they could celebrate.
Celebrate.
Not a word most people associate with a courtroom.
But when you have waited nearly half a century to hear those two words, when you have lived with pain that had no end since 1976, guilty is not just a verdict.
It is release.
Five weeks after the verdict, on August 26th, 2021, Raymond Vannieuwenhoven, 84, stood before Judge James Morrison to hear sentencing.
Before the judge spoke, the victims’ families were given the right to address the court, and they did.
Joanne McKloskey, David Shuldes’s sister, told the court that her family needed, finally, finally to find peace.
She asked for a life sentence.
The Matthes family remembered Ellen, whom they called by the affectionate name Ellie, with words of love that 45 years had not dimmed.
>> >> They described sleepless nights, nightmares, and the fear that had followed them since July 9th, 1976.
Lynn Baumgartner stood before the court and spoke of the pain of knowing what Ellie had gone through.
She asked for the harshest possible punishment for the man who killed her friend.
She said she had woken many mornings in a cold sweat, not a few times, not a few years, many mornings across decades.
That was what Raymond Van Nuys and Hoven had done to the lives of everyone around Ellen and David.
Not only killed two people, but destroyed the sleep, the peace, and the ability to live normally of everyone who loved them for 45 years.
District Attorney Desha Morrow spoke before sentencing.
She described the crime as cold, cruel, and brazen.
She said two lives had been extinguished for a few minutes of Raymond Van Nuys and Hoven’s gratification.
A few minutes.
That was all the time he needed to destroy two lives and poison dozens of others for nearly half a century.
Van Nuys and Hoven’s youngest daughter, Dorothy, spoke on her father’s behalf.
She told the court she did not believe her father had committed this crime.
She said he was still her father and always would be, that she would always love him.
That was the tragedy on the other side of the story, the tragedy few people talk about.
Five adult children watching their father, the man who raised them, attended their graduations, held their children, being convicted of murder and rape.
Some believed, some did not.
Dorothy belonged to the second group.
Van Nuys and Hoven was given the chance to speak.
Most of what he said was unclear, mumbled, and hard to hear.
But he appeared to say that the case against him was a setup.
A setup.
A man whose DNA matched the crime scene evidence at 1 in 29 sextillion.
A man recorded apparently saying he had taken down the victims, sitting in a courtroom and saying everything was a setup.
Judge James Morrison did not take long.
He sentenced Raymond Van Nuys and Hoven to two consecutive life sentences, one for each murder count.
He said the sentence was appropriate given the depraved and unspeakable nature of the crime.
Consecutive.
That meant that even in the impossible scenario that he lived long enough to complete the first sentence, the second would still be waiting.
Vanuivenhoven would die in prison.
That was not a possibility.
That was a certainty.
But the legal story did not end at sentencing.
Immediately after the conviction, Vanuivenhoven’s defense team filed an appeal.
The central argument of the appeal did not target the DNA, did not target the witnesses, did not target the telephone call.
It targeted the envelope ruse head-on.
Attorney Anna Babcock, in a brief supporting the appeal, argued that Vanuivenhoven had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his DNA.
She argued that the deception police used, the fake survey, the request to seal the envelope with his tongue, could not reasonably be understood as consent to create a DNA profile in a murder investigation.
Vanuivenhoven agreed to fill out the survey.
He agreed to seal the envelope.
He did not agree to provide DNA for a murder investigation.
That was the heart of the appeal.
And it raised a far deeper legal question than the case itself.
Do police have the right to use deception to obtain DNA? If a person voluntarily hands over an item that contains his DNA, such as a licked envelope, does that person forfeit any privacy interest in the DNA on that item? Even if the reason for handing over the item is completely different from the real purpose? In April 2024, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals issued its ruling.
They upheld the conviction.
The court concluded that case law supported the conclusion, despite the fact that Raymond had agreed to give the envelope and its contents to law enforcement under deception.
The court held that nothing in the case indicated that the law enforcement ruse rendered Raymond’s surrender of the envelope involuntary.
He voluntarily handed over the envelope.
He voluntarily licked it.
No one forced him.
The deception was in the purpose, not in the act.
And when you voluntarily hand an item to law enforcement, you surrender any privacy interest in it, regardless of what you think they will do with it.
That ruling created an important legal precedent for future cold cases nationwide.
But by the time the appellate court issued its ruling, Raymond Van Euwenhoven was already dead.
He died on June 17th, 2023 at the Oshkosh Correctional Institution at the age of 85.
He had lived free for 42 years after killing David Schuldes and Ellen Matheys.
He lived in prison for less than 2 years before he died.
42 years of freedom.
Less than 2 years in prison.
That is not perfect justice.
But it is justice.
And for the Schuldes family and the Matheys family, the difference between having justice and not having justice is the difference between living with pain that has no end and living with pain that at least has an answer.
Van Euwenhoven’s attorneys continued the appeal even after he died.
The appellate court still issued its ruling because legal precedent is more important than the lifespan of any defendant.
The 1976 double murder conviction still stands.
It will always stand.
The legacy of the Schuldes-Matheys case extends far beyond the borders of Marinette County.
Parabon NanoLabs has identified more than 55 suspects in cold cases nationwide since May 2018 through genetic genealogy.
Every case solved is a family released from darkness.
Every arrest is a warning that in the age of DNA, no case truly stays cold forever.
Genetic genealogy technology has completely changed the rules of the game.
Before genetic genealogy, if the killer’s DNA was not in CODIS, the case stopped.
After genetic genealogy, police no longer need the killer in the system.
They only need a distant relative.
Someone curious enough to send a DNA sample to ancestry.
com or 23andMe, and the path to the killer opens by itself.
That is the new world.
A world in which a fourth cousin can unknowingly solve a 45-year-old murder without ever knowing it.
On the afternoon of July 9th, 1976, David Scholdus and Ellen Mathys drove to a campground in the woods of northern Wisconsin.
He was 25.
She was 24.
They planned to marry in 2 months.
They never left that forest together.
It took 45 years, a semen sample preserved from 1976, a genealogical database that no one in 1976 could have imagined, and an envelope ruse to bring justice to them.
A cold case that stayed cold for 45 years.
A family that never gave up.
A DNA sample waiting for technology to catch up.
And on the day the verdict was read, 45 years compressed into two words, guilty.
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