The call came in just before midnight, and the officers who responded found the pickup truck exactly where the parents said it would be, sitting in the dark lot near the picnic area of the state park. Eric’s parents had driven out there after their son and his girlfriend failed to come home, expecting to find the truck broken down along the road. Instead, they found it locked and empty, with Eric’s wallet and jacket still visible through the window. They called his name into the trees and got nothing back but silence.
The first officer who swept the area with a flashlight spotted something near a picnic table about a hundred feet from the lot. It was a girl’s body, naked, her swimsuit lying nearby. Gunshot wounds marked her skin. She was sixteen-year-old Leanna Dayek, and she had been shot three times with a .
22 caliber handgun. There were also signs of sexual assault, and the medical examiner recovered the attacker’s biological sample. But DNA testing didn’t exist yet, so that evidence sat in storage, useless, for years. As the sun came up, searchers found Eric Goldstrand’s body in a patch of brush about twenty-five feet from where Leanna had been lying.
He had been shot twice from a distance of roughly thirty feet. The detectives pieced together what they believed happened. The couple had skipped school that warm June day in 1977 and driven out to the river to fish and swim. Eric had probably gone into the water while Leanna waited by the picnic area.
The killer attacked her there. When Eric came back, the killer shot him, too. They set up roadblocks on every road out of the forest that night. Nothing.
They checked criminals with violent histories, chased down a tip about a man who had been on the opposite bank of the river that day, a man who had reportedly bragged about wanting to assault the girl he saw swimming with her boyfriend. They brought him in, dusted him for fingerprints, gave him a polygraph. Nothing matched. There was no confession, and no real evidence against him.
They let him go. One unknown fingerprint had been lifted from the scene, but it didn’t match anyone in the system. The case went cold, and for years, it stayed that way. In 1995, detectives reopened the case.
DNA testing had become standard, so they sent the attacker’s biological sample to the lab. They got a DNA profile and entered it into the FBI’s database. There were no matches. The killer had either never been arrested for anything, or he had been arrested before DNA collection became routine.
The case went cold again, and it stayed that way until 2014, when a cold case detective picked it up. He looked at the circumstances and wondered if this double murder had been the killer’s first crime, or just one of many. He started digging through the files of known serial killers who used a . 22 caliber handgun.
That’s when he found Thor Christensen. Between 1976 and 1979, Thor had murdered four young women in California. His pattern was always the same. He picked up hitchhikers, shot them with a .
22, and only then assaulted them. The detective dug into Thor’s movements and found that in June of 1977, Thor had actually been in Eugene, Oregon, not far from the park where Eric and Leanna were killed. Thor had been caught in 1979 after a victim survived a point-blank shot to the head. She escaped, recognized him weeks later in a bar, and called the police.
He was sentenced to life in prison, but a year later, another inmate killed him. There was no way to compare Thor’s DNA to the killer’s profile. His belongings were gone. His relatives refused to cooperate with investigators.
So the detective tried a new technique called DNA phenotyping, which uses genetic material to estimate what someone might look like. He sent the killer’s sample to a company called Parabon NanoLabs. When the experts sent back the image they had created, investigators were stunned. It looked almost exactly like Thor Christensen.
But they still had no proof. Then detectives learned that Thor’s brother had just died, and they managed to obtain his DNA sample. The lab results came back with an unexpected twist. The killer of Eric and Leanna was not related to Thor’s brother at all.
Thor was not their murderer. Back to square one. The case went quiet again until 2020, when the detective learned about genetic genealogy. This technique searches public genealogy databases for relatives of an unknown person’s DNA, and uses those connections to identify them.
Investigators sent the killer’s sample to Parabon again. A few months later, the company narrowed it down to one family that had lived near Eugene at the time of the murders. Three brothers with the last name Schroyer. Based on their ages and locations, any one of them could have been the killer.
The detective moved carefully, trying to collect DNA samples from each of the brothers without tipping them off. The middle brother was the only one still living nearby. Undercover officers followed him until they saw him toss a cigarette butt out of his car window. They picked it up and sent it to the lab.
The DNA did not match the killer’s, but it proved he was a close relative of the murderer. That left the two other brothers. The oldest was Ronald, and the youngest was Daniel. Both were living together in a gated community in Arizona.
Investigators learned that Daniel had been serving in the military when Eric and Leanna were murdered, so he had no opportunity to commit the crime. That left Ronald. Ronald had a long criminal history, including battery and sexual assault. Everything pointed toward him.
But he lived inside a gated community, and detectives couldn’t get in without a pass. Ronald barely left the house. He was sixty-six years old and spent most of his time at home. Getting his DNA without him knowing was almost impossible, and getting a warrant without direct evidence was going to be difficult.
While the detective was still working on that problem, he got a call that changed everything. On February 24th, 2021, Ronald Schroyer was found dead inside his home. He had gotten into an argument with his younger brother, walked into another room, and a second later, Daniel heard a gunshot. Ronald had shot himself.
After forty-three years, police had finally gotten close to catching the man responsible for Eric and Leanna’s murders, and then they lost the chance to arrest him by just a few days. Still, the DNA testing they were finally able to request confirmed what everyone now suspected. Ronald’s DNA was a full match to the sample recovered from the crime scene. Daniel was genuinely shocked when he heard the results.
He told detectives that Ronald had always been short-tempered and aggressive, constantly getting into fights, never the most stable person. But he never imagined his brother could commit a double murder. He also remembered something strange. He and Ronald used to watch true crime shows together, mostly about old cases solved years later.
One night, a show mentioned how public genealogy databases were being used to identify killers. Daniel casually said he wouldn’t mind uploading his own DNA to find distant relatives. Ronald jumped up and started yelling at him. He told Daniel it was incredibly stupid, and that he should never do anything like that.
At the time, Daniel didn’t understand why his brother reacted so emotionally. After the detectives showed up, he finally understood what Ronald had been so afraid of. Ronald may have spent his entire adult life knowing that technology would eventually catch up to him, and living with the fear that an arrest was coming. He never went to prison for what he did, but the decades of waiting for a punishment he knew might one day arrive may have been its own kind of sentence.
For the families of Eric and Leanna, the news brought mixed emotions. Finally, they knew who was responsible. But Ronald had lived his whole life free, and the police had missed the chance to arrest him by just a matter of days. Still, the case is now officially considered solved.
The DNA evidence leaves no doubt that Ronald Schroyer killed Eric Goldstrand and Leanna Dayek. He never stood trial, and he never spent a day behind bars for what he did. But he died in that bedroom in Arizona, alone, having never outrun the truth that was finally catching up to him.
