37 years ago, in the middle of wheat harvest, a 34-year-old farm wife and school bus driver was killed in her own kitchen 11 miles outside Virna, Kansas, on the evening of June 21st, 1978.
22 days later and 61 miles north, a 19-year-old girl who worked the scale office at a grain elevator in Talmage Springs was killed walking to her car after closing.
Two counties, two sheriffs, two investigations that each ran for years and each produced a local man who was talked about in his own town for the rest of his life and charged with nothing.
Neither sheriff ever telephoned the other. Neither knew the other case existed in any detail.
There was no reason either of them would have. In 1978, Kansas had 105 counties and 105 separate filing cabinets and nothing in between them.
The two files sat 61 miles apart for 36 years. Then in 2014, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation began scanning every unsolved homicide in the state from before 1990 into a single searchable system.
And an analyst reading two summaries on one screen noticed that both women had been found with a specific and unusual thing done.
And that both had happened during the same 6 weeks. And that both farms had shipped wheat to elevators on the same custom cutting circuit.
But to understand what came up that road in the summer of 1978, you first have to understand who these two women were.
Virna, Kansas in 1978 was 3,800 people in the wheat country of the central plains.
And Talmage Springs was 1,900 people, 61 miles north. And in every respect that matters, they were the same town.
June smelled like wheat dust and diesel and hot metal. When the cutting is on, the chaff hangs in the air over a whole county and gets into everything and everybody’s eyes.
And the elevators run day and night, and there is a line of trucks on the scale from 6:00 in the morning until after dark.
Thunderheads went up in the west most afternoons and mostly did not come to anything.
And when they did, everybody stopped and watched because hail in the third week of June is the difference between a year and no year.
It was the Carter administration and the first bad wind of the farm crisis was already blowing.
Interest was climbing. Everybody had a CB in the truck. The radio out of Wichita played the ball game.
And every June, the harvest came up from the south. Custom cutting crews start in Texas in May and follow the ripening north, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and finish in Montana in September.
In 1978, there were something like a thousand crews working Kansas, four to eight men each, living in trailers on the edge of towns for two or three weeks and then gone.
They were essential. They were welcome. And they were completely invisible. Delores Steckle was 34 and everybody called her D.
She and Wendell Steckle farmed 900 acres of wheat and Milo 11 miles southeast of Varner.
They had two boys, Craig, 12, and Ross, nine. She drove a rural school bus route from September to May, 51 miles, morning and afternoon.
42 children, 8 years, which in that county meant that essentially every family within 20 miles knew her, and every child under 18 had been shouted at by her at some point.
She kept a coffee can of butterscotch discs on the dash of that bus, and the rule was one on Fridays.
Rhonda Keel was 19. She had graduated from Talmadge Springs High in 1977 and worked the scale office at the co-op elevator, which during harvest meant 12-hour days weighing trucks in and out and writing tickets and dealing with a line of men who had been up since 4:00.
She was the youngest of four and the only girl. She was engaged to a boy who was in the Air Force at Wichita, and the wedding was set for the following April, and she had a folder.
The thing people said about her was that she was fast, not friendly, not chatty, fast.
Every truck driver on that circuit knew that the Talmadge Springs scale in the summer of 1978 was run by a 19-year-old girl who could turn a truck around in 90 seconds, and there were men who drove past two closer elevators to use hers.
Wednesday, June 21st, 1978 was 97°. At about 6:30 p.m., Wendell Steckle and both boys were in a field 4 miles from the house, cutting with a custom crew of five running two combines and two trucks.
At about 7:15 p.m., a neighbor telephoned the Steckle house about a fence and got no answer and thought nothing of it because it was harvest and nobody answers a telephone in harvest.
At 9:50 p.m., Wendell Steckle came in. D. Steckel was in the kitchen. Nothing was taken.
Her purse was on the counter with $60 in it. The screen door was unlatched, which meant nothing because it always was.
Sheriff Verlin Oaks of Corbin County had the case within the hour. Then, 22 days later, Monday, July 10th, 1978, was 94°.
At 8:40 p.m., Rhonda Kuhl locked the scale office at the Talmadge Springs Co-op. The elevator manager left 10 minutes before her.
Her car was parked 80 yd away across the gravel on the far side of the drive-thru scale where the office staff parked so that the trucks could get around.
At 11:30 p.m., her father drove down. She was between the scale house and her car.
Her handbag was beside her. Her keys were in her hand. Sheriff Dwayne Fickle of Pawnee Butte County had it by midnight.
Both women had been killed the same way. And in both cases, the offender had done a specific thing afterward that neither sheriff released, that neither sheriff had ever seen before, and that neither sheriff had any way of knowing had also happened 61 mi away.
Each of them held it back as the detail only the killer would know. Each of them held back the same detail from each other.
Verlin Oaks worked the Steckel case for 11 years. He looked hardest at a man named Loyal Brubaker, 41, who farmed adjoining ground, and who had been in a boundary dispute with Wendel Steckel since 1974, and who could not account for 2 hours that evening.
He interviewed him nine times. He searched his property twice. He never found one thing.
And the county attorney declined every time. Correctly, Loyal Brubaker lived in Corbin County until he died in 2003.
He was never charged with anything. He was also, for 25 years, the man in that county.
Dwane Fickel worked the Keel case for six years. He looked hardest at a 19-year-old who had gone out with Ronda Keel twice in 1977 and had taken it badly.
He put that boy through it for a year and a half. The boy left Kansas in 1980 and has never come back and gave one interview in 2015 in which he said very little and was entirely within his rights to.
Both sheriffs did the same correct thing with the custom crews. And both got the same nothing.
Folks took the names of the five men on the crew in the Steckle field that night.
But those men were 4 miles away in a wheat field together on machines and they cleared each other.
Fickel went to the elevator manager and asked for a list of who had been through the scale.
He got the scale tickets for the day. 206 trucks. He looked at the last 30 and interviewed nine drivers he could locate and let it go.
Because a list of 206 trucks in July is not a lead and because most of those tickets recorded the farm and the truck and not the man.
He wrote a line in a supplemental in September 1978 that is painful to read now.
He wrote that the harvest population was not practicably investigable with the resources available and he was right, and it was the correct professional assessment, and it was also the end of it.
And here is the failure, and it is entirely structural. Nothing in either investigation was wrong.
Both sheriffs were competent. Both worked their cases far longer than they had to. And both correctly identified that a transient harvest workforce was a problem they could not solve with the resources of a county with four deputies.
What neither of them had was the other file. In 1978, there was no statewide database, no linkage analysis, no requirement to report an unsolved homicide anywhere.
And no reason on earth for a sheriff in Corbin County to telephone a sheriff in Pawnee Butte County about a killing 61 mi away in a different judicial district.
Two women 22 days apart in the same harvest, and the two men investigating them each thought he had the only one.
By 1990, the farm crisis had been through, and Verner had lost 800 people. By 2005, the Talmage Springs Co-op had merged into a regional, and the old elevator was a satellite with nobody in the office.
Verlin Oaks retired in 1992 and died in 2007. Dwayne Fickle retired in 1988 and died in 2011.
Wendell Steckel raised two boys and farmed until 1996 and died in 2000. Craig Steckel was 12 in 1978.
He is the one who kept his mother’s case alive in the low, unglamorous way most of these are kept alive.
A letter every few years, a phone call, a name on a list. He farmed the same ground.
He drove past that house every day of his adult life because he built his own a quarter mile from it.
He has said the thing he could never get past was the school bus. 42 children rode with his mother and after 1978 the route went to somebody else and he and his brother rode it and for 9 years he got on a bus every morning in the seat he had always sat in.
Rhonda Keel’s parents both died in the 90s. Her brother Gary kept a scrapbook. Every newspaper item, of which there were 11 in total across 36 years, the last one in 1988.
Her fiance married somebody else in 1983 and has never spoken publicly. And neither family had ever heard of the other.
That is the thing about this case that people find hardest to take in. 61 miles, 22 days and for 36 years the Steckles and the Cools did not know the other family existed.
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The case had been cold for 36 years when Kansas put its filing cabinets on one screen.
In 2013 the Kansas Bureau of Investigation began a project to scan, index and make searchable every unsolved homicide file in the state from 1950 to 1990.
County files, sheriff’s files, everything that could be located. It took 2 years and it was not glamorous work and it was done largely by two analysts and a grant.
In November 2014, an analyst reading summaries flagged two. The two cases had never been compared because nobody had ever been in a position to compare them.
The moment they were on one screen, three things were obvious inside a minute. The 22-day gap, the 61 miles, and the specific unreleased detail that both sheriffs had been protecting from a public that included each other.
KBI Special Agent Nadine Ochoa took it in January 2015. The linkage did not name anybody.
What it did was transform the shape of the problem. One killing in Corbin County is a local matter with a local suspect pool.
Two killings in two counties, 22 days apart during harvest, is not a local matter at all.
It is somebody who was moving. And in Central Kansas in June and July of 1978, the people who were moving were on the harvest.
Ochoa went looking for the intersection of two lists. The Corbin County file had the five names of the crew in the Steckl field on the 21st of June.
Men who had been cleared correctly of the Steckl killing, but who had never been asked about anything else because there had been nothing else to ask about.
The Pawnee Butte file had 206 scale tickets from the 10th of July. Scale tickets record the truck, the farm, the weight, and the time.
Most do not record the driver. But the co-op’s harvest payroll and equipment records for 1978 had gone into a regional archive when the elevators merged in 2005.
And they were in a warehouse outside Salina and they did record who was hauling for whom.
It took four months. One name appeared on both lists, a 25-year-old combine operator and truck driver on a custom crew running out of Altus, Oklahoma who had been in the Steckle field on the evening of the 21st of June and who had hauled six loads across the Talmadge Spring scale on the 10th of July.
The last of them at 8:05 in the evening. 35 minutes before Rhonda Keel locked the office.
Dallas Ray Pickrel was 62. He had cut wheat for 11 summers and had stopped in 1984.
He had lived in the same small town in southwestern Oklahoma since 1986. He drove a fuel truck for 22 years and retired in 2008.
He had been married twice and had three children. He had one conviction in his life, a 1991 driving offense which was not the kind that took a sample, which is why he had never appeared in any database and why the profiles developed from both 1978 scenes in the mid-2000s had searched against millions of people and hit nothing.
Ochoa did not go to him. She went to Oklahoma and a detective collected a discarded cup outside a hardware store in April 2015.
The profile from the Steckle kitchen matched. The profile from the elevator gravel matched. He was arrested in Oklahoma in June 2015, extradited and charged in two Kansas counties.
He made no admissions. He was convicted in Corbin County in 2017 of the murder of Dolores Steckle and in Pawnee Butte County in 2018 of the murder of Rhonda Keel and sentenced consecutively.
He was 65. Investigators reviewed the harvest circuit he worked between 1974 and 1984 across five states.
Two other unsolved cases have been formally linked to him, and neither has been charged.
And the KBI has said publicly that it does not expect that number to be final.
Loyal Brubaker had been dead for 12 years. His daughter, 61, gave one interview in 2017 and said that her father had been asked about it by somebody almost every year of his life until he died, and that he had answered every time.
Delores Steckle was 34 years old. She drove 51 miles of gravel twice a day for eight years with 42 children on the bus, and she kept butterscotch discs on the dash, and the rule was one on Fridays.
And there are men and women in Corbin County in their 50s who still cannot look at a butterscotch disc.
Rhonda Kuhl was 19. She could turn a truck around on that scale in 90 seconds, and there were drivers who went out of their way to use her elevator because of it.
She was getting married in April. There was a folder. Craig Steckle and Gary Kuhl met for the first time in a KBI office in Topeka in the spring of 2015.
Craig was 49, and Gary was 63. They were told what had been established and were shown, side by side, two files that had been 61 miles apart for 36 years.
They sat through both trials, each in the other’s county. Gary Kuhl gave a statement at the Corbin County sentencing about a woman he had never met, and Craig Steckle did the same in Pawnee Butte County.
And both families have said that this was not planned, and that it simply seemed like the obvious thing.
Kansas has since completed the digitization and cross-referencing of every unsolved homicide file in the state from 1950 onward.
Nine additional linkages between cases in different counties have been identified. Three have resulted in charges.
Here is what a case like this leaves you with. There is no villain in the investigative half of this story.
Verlin Oaks and Duane Fickle both worked their cases with everything they had for years, past the point where anybody would have blamed them for stopping.
Each of them identified the same critical detail, and each of them made the same correct professional decision to hold it back.
And because they held it back from the public, and the public in 1978 was the only way information moved between two Kansas counties, each of them personally guaranteed that the one fact capable of linking these two women stayed hidden for 36 years.
So, tell me what you think. Was holding that detail back the right call twice over?
Or is the whole practice built for a world where cases don’t travel? What sits worse with you?
206 scale tickets nobody could work? Or a man in Corbin County who answered the same question every year until he died?
And how many unsolved cases are sitting in two different filing cabinets right now waiting for somebody to put them on one screen?
Justice found D. Steckle and Ronda Keil after 37 years. Stories like theirs are why this channel exists.
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