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Lisa Ehlers

Details faded and some witnesses died, but in the 25 years Lisa Ehlers’ homicide went unsolved, two things never changed.

Troy D. Willoughby’s name kept coming up as a suspect, and the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office never gave up on the case.

A jury on Friday found Willoughby, 46, guilty of first-degree homicide after hearing seven days of testimony and viewing more than 80 exhibits. According to testimony, Willoughby followed Ehlers as she drove south on Highway 191, got her to pull over by flashing his lights and shot her twice because she left a party in Jackson just before dawn without paying him for drugs.

A sentencing hearing has not yet been scheduled.

Sublette County Sheriff Wayne Bardin said when he took office in 2005 he inherited a promise from former Sheriff Hank Ruland, who investigated the scene in the Hoback Canyon where Ehlers’ body was found June 21, 1984.

“It has always stuck with him to get that solved if that was the last thing he did,” Bardin said of Ruland.

Bardin said he asked Capt. Brian Ketterhagen to take another look at the file after an office reorganization in 2008.

“I told him that Ms. Ehlers was back there on a shelf,” Bardin said. “Even though she’s passed away, we need to bring her back to life so we can find out who killed her.”

Ketterhagen said that’s when he assembled a team and everyone started reading old reports.

“After an hour we had a direction, not a suspect,” he said.

He said Willoughby’s name showed up in as many as eight reports, including one statement Willoughby’s former friend, Tim Bayse, made to Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agent Mark Hollenbach in April 1996 that identified Willoughby as a suspect.

However, key witnesses remembered few details by 2008, and others had died, including a Sublette County coroner and sheriff’s deputy who investigated the scene, the Teton County doctor who performed Ehlers’ autopsy and Robert Crews, the man who allegedly gave Willoughby the gun.

Ketterhagen said this case was unique because it happened so long ago.

“People aren’t sure,” he said. “They don’t remember, and so you have to question them and let them know that now’s the time to tell the truth about what really happened.”

John Ehlers, the brother of Lisa Ehlers’ husband, Peter, said in an e-mail that Willoughby’s conviction meant a great deal to his family. In a letter to the editor, John Ehlers writes that Sublette County has helped restore a sense of justice for his family and says the families of Eric Cooper and Jon Rice, who also were killed in 1984 but in Teton County, deserve the same.

Lisa Ehlers’ sister, Julie Applegate, and two friends cried after the verdict was announced Friday in Pinedale. Applegate said she was relieved and happy to finally have closure.

Suspect since the start

The first time Willoughby’s name came up in written reports was in 1986, after an investigator interviewed Willoughby’s ex-wife, Rosa Hosking, in Rock Springs.

Hosking testified last week she was still married to Willoughby at the time and didn’t recall the interview. She said they divorced in 1987.

Hosking remembered talking to Sublette County investigator Paul Rock in 1993 but said she didn’t tell the truth in 1986 or 1993 because she didn’t trust police.

Willoughby had been identified as a suspect just days after Ehlers’ murder, though.

Former Teton County sheriff’s Detective Gene Ferrin testified he reviewed an anonymous call to the unrecorded Crimestoppers line made days after the murder that identified Willoughby as a suspect. Ferrin said Bayse worked as an informant for him and he suspected Bayse because he was an associate of Willoughby’s.

Ferrin said he asked Bayse if he made the call several months later during an interview about the Jon Rice homicide in Teton County.

“I looked him in the eye and asked him if he was the one that made the call,” Ferrin said. “He turned very white and said, ‘I can’t talk to you about it. I’m not going to talk about it.’”

Ferrin forwarded information about the call to DCI shortly after he received it, he said, but he never wrote a report about the call or specifically about Bayse’s reaction to his questioning because it wasn’t his case; DCI and Sublette County sheriff’s officers were working it.

A break came in April 1996, when Bayse told Hollenbach during an interview in Inkom, Idaho, that he saw Willoughby shoot Ehlers.

Bayse recanted his statement a month later, saying he’d talked to an attorney who advised him not to talk until he was offered immunity from prosecution.

Bayse testified that he lied about details all along, even after Sublette County investigators offered him immunity in November 2008, because he was afraid he could be prosecuted.

“I thought, ‘If I give them enough wrong information they would think that I wasn’t there and this thing would just go away,’” Bayse said.

He made the Crimestoppers call in late June 1984 and was telling DCI’s Hollenbach the truth in April 1996, he testified.

Randy Hanson, an investigator for the Sublette County attorney’s office, said Bayse truly thought he could be prosecuted all those years.

“It wasn’t until just before the trial ... he finally realized that he wasn’t going to be charged,” Hanson said.

DCI investigators hit another roadblock when a representative at True Oil said in a phone interview in the 1990s that Willoughby’s name appeared on a drilling log the day of Ehlers’ murder. Last year,  Hanson contacted the DCI agent who wrote the report about the drilling log, and she told him she’d never looked at the original log or eliminated Willoughby as a suspect.

‘Didn’t take no for an answer’

Willoughby told investigators during an interview in February 2009 that they needed to look at records for True Drilling, not True Oil.

In December, Hanson received an original drilling log from June 21, 1984, that indicated Willoughby was at work.

Hanson spoke to other employees, who said it wasn’t unusual for the supervisor to write in someone’s name even if they were late or didn’t show up. Also, a handwriting expert found that one set of Willoughby’s initials had been written at two different times, which raised a red flag, Hanson said.

Hanson said investigators decided to talk to Bayse and Hosking again in November because both had previously given statements that indicated Willoughby wasn’t at work. After 24 years, the two witnesses finally told complete stories, Hanson said.

And then Willoughby’s son spoke to investigators in February 2009 and said his father told him he had some loose ends to tie up in Sublette County.

Investigators talked to Willoughby on Feb. 16 and 17 at a jail in Helena, Mont., where he was being held for failing to register as a sex offender. It raised another red flag. Willoughby told FBI Special Agent Stacey Smiedala and Sublette County investigator Sarah Brew on Feb. 17 that he was in the Hoback Canyon the morning of Ehlers’ murder and saw her car. He initially said he only saw her car but later said he saw her body.

Armed with full statements from Bayse and Hosking and Willoughby’s statement about being at the scene, prosecutor Lucky McMahon finally had enough to file charges, she said.

Willoughby was charged in March with first-degree murder. McMahon said prosecutors are seeking a sentence of life in prison with the possibility for parole, the maximum penalty under the 1984 statute.

McMahon said sometimes time is what it takes for witnesses to talk, but investigators had a feeling that if they didn’t go for it now they’d never get another chance.

Hanson said Bayse and Hosking both said Willoughby had threatened them about talking to police. He also said he understood why they were reluctant to offer information – because they feared prosecution.

“We just didn’t take no for an answer,” he said. “We told them you’ve got to come clean.”

He said it would be wrong to think Ehlers was just a party girl from Jackson who didn’t matter to Sublette County investigators and might have had it coming because she allegedly used drugs.

“Nobody deserves to be shot alongside the road like an animal,” he said. “Should she be into drugs? No. Nobody should. But nobody deserves to be shot like that.”

Hanson said it was heartwarming to see so much cooperation among law enforcement agencies.

“I have worked on lots of cases, and I was very proud of the fact that they never gave up,” he said “It’s very hard when you’re working on cases where some witnesses are no longer alive.”

Sheriff Bardin said he kept his thoughts about whether Willoughby would be convicted to himself.

“I just didn’t want to mainly get anybody else’s hopes up,” he said. “When they said ‘guilty’ then I could breathe.”

– Angus M. Thuermer Jr. contributed to this story.