Robert Leroy Anderson knocked on the door of the Stryley home. He was surprised when Vance Stryley answered, because Vance should have been at work. Anderson stammered something about a camper and a Bible camp, and Vance, noticing the flat black Bronco in the driveway—black paint, black rims, black bumpers—asked the stranger for his name and phone number. Anderson handed it over, and Vance put it in a drawer.
Anderson came from a dysfunctional family. He and his two brothers and his father had all been locked up in the state penitentiary at the same time. He was taught that women were objects, not to be respected, and he had warped desires from a young age. He grew up near the prison, went to the same high school as many others, and was actually intelligent, an engineering major with good grades.
But he shared fantasies of abducting, binding, raping, and murdering women with friends as young as fourteen. Most friends dismissed it as extreme talk. That Monday, July 29th, he came back with a 9mm handgun and a plan. If Vance opened the door, he would shoot him.
But it was Piper who came down the hall, and Anderson pushed his way inside. Little Shaina, almost four, answered the door first. Anderson yelled at Piper to get on the floor. She refused.
He wrestled her to the ground in one of the children’s bedrooms, handcuffed her hands and ankles, and she screamed to her kids, “Run and hide. Run and hide. ” He carried her out over his shoulder. When she fought him by the vehicle, he fired the gun near her to frighten her.
A spent shell casing hit the driveway, and Anderson couldn’t find it. He threw Piper into the Bronco and drove off toward a secluded spot along the Big Sioux River. Piper tried to appeal to him. She told him she was menstruating.
He said he didn’t care. She said her husband was the only man she’d ever been with, and pleaded to be let go. He laughed. Anderson had prepared a board with metal clamps and straps for bondage.
He brought handcuffs and duct tape. He slowly strangled Piper, raped her repeatedly, and sexually tortured her before she died. He wrapped duct tape around her head and mouth. Hours passed before anyone realized Piper was missing.
Vance came home to find a police officer waiting with his children. His daughter talked about a mean man in a black vehicle who took her mommy. Investigators set up roadblocks and searched the area, but no one had seen anything. Then a county road worker came forward.
He had met a black vehicle three times near the Stryley home that morning, a flat black Ford Bronco. When he passed it once, it turned around and went the other way. It was parked by the Stryley house around lunch. Vance remembered the man from Friday, the one who left his name and phone number.
Police tracked down the name overnight: Robert Leroy Anderson. They contacted his father’s home in the early morning hours, and the investigator made up a story about wanting to buy a car. Anderson’s mother said her son was at work at Morrell’s. That name, Morrell’s, brought back memories of Lissa Demansky, who vanished from the same meat packing plant’s parking lot two years earlier.
Police went to Morrell’s and found Anderson’s vehicle. But it wasn’t black. It was royal blue with a white racing stripe. It didn’t match any witness description.
They decided to keep an eye on him. When Anderson got off work, they followed him home and then asked him to come down to the station for questions. He agreed calmly, without asking why. That was a red flag.
At the station, he said he had painted his vehicle about six weeks ago and hadn’t washed it to let the paint set. But the suspected vehicle had been spotted flat black just one day earlier. The story didn’t add up. Police told Anderson and his family to stay at a motel while they searched his residence and his Bronco.
In the vehicle, they found tool boxes. One was called the torture box. It contained ether, eye rings, bindings, and a homemade bondage board. Inside the Bronco was property with black paint on it, and they found runs of black paint in the cracks of the vehicle, like soap suds that couldn’t be washed away completely.
They also found a receipt for craft paint purchased on Thursday. It was a 16-ounce bottle of black water-based finger paint. Investigators took the receipt to the hardware store and asked the clerk what it was. She said it was water-based paint, and when they asked if it could be thinned and used to paint a car and then washed off, she said, “You’re the second person this week who’s asked me that.
” The other person said they were painting a friend’s car as a prank. When they showed her a picture, she identified Robert Anderson as the man who bought the black paint the previous Thursday. Police weren’t sure a half-bottle of that paint could cover an entire Bronco. So they bought another bottle.
The lab guys borrowed a red and white Bronco, thinned the paint out, and painted it black in about twenty minutes. Then they took it to a car wash and cleaned it off with a wand in seven minutes. Within an hour of testing that theory, the case against Anderson built without a doubt. He was guilty.
The monster was locked behind bars.
