Families still mending decades after 1977 murders
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BY JoANNE YOUNG / Lincoln Journal Star
HASTINGS — For years, Jacki Rains thought it was her fault her mother was killed by the stranger.
When Judy Dangler dropped her two little girls off at their two-room Dawson County country school that morning in early February 1977, 9-year-old Jacki asked her mom to take her mittens home to wash them.
Her mom said no, Jacki would need them. The roads were packed with snow, and the temperature was forecast to rise to barely above freezing by the time the school day ended.
Bob Dangler wrote about his late wife to give his adult daughters a sense of the mother they lost at a young age. This is an excerpt from those stories.
“I could tell lots of stories but none of them would tell you what she was like and probably I just can’t do that. Like most people she was complex and like most people she changed a little as time went along. She naturally got more independent.
“When I gave her the (engagement) ring, I told her she could keep it if she quit smoking. She said she’d try and I think she did (or hid it very well) for about five years. But one night I did something to displease her, out drinking with some of the guys I think, maybe didn’t even call home, and when I came home she was sick and throwing up. She knew I wouldn’t like it if she started smoking again, so she had smoked a whole pack in about four hours. ...
“When her mom was dying in the hospital, she got up in the bed with her and held her head in her lap. Later she was crying and telling me she didn’t call for the nurses or anyone because ‘Mom had been through so much pain already I just held her and let her slip away.’ She had courage.”
Coming Monday
For the children of 1977 murder victim Ruth Eby, lightning struck twice.
But Judy Dangler never came back for Jacki and 5-year-old Robin.
If only she could have convinced her mother to take those mittens, Jacki thought for years. She would have been busy washing them and no harm would have befallen her.
Judy Dangler disappeared without a clue that cold February morning.
Seven months later, another family of children in the Lexington area lost their mom in the same way. But with Ruth Eby, there were lots of clues. And a local parolee eventually confessed to the murders of both women.
Two 32-year-old mothers ripped from their children.
Two husbands left to raise families without the women they loved.
Daughters with no role model to advise them or to someday help plan a wedding.
A son without a mother’s steady, gentle hand.
The aftershocks of one man’s crimes have rumbled through seven lives for more than three decades and undeniably altered their landscapes.
When Bob Dangler’s wife disappeared 31 years ago, he stifled his own pain and focused on his girls.
“My brother says for years I would always refer to her as ‘the girls’ mom’ rather than Judy,” he said recently.
For 11 months after she was plucked from their home four miles west of Lexington, he continued to work, eat, sleep, take care of family business and deal with the commotion surrounding her disappearance — all without her.
Sometimes his best effort, particularly when it came to the police work, was avoidance.
When the mounted drill team to which he belonged took more than 100 people to search the Platte River area — most likely for a body — he took his girls fishing.
“We stopped in to the Pamida store and I was going to get hooks or something, and the lady said, ‘Isn’t it nice they are doing that and are you going to join them?’ And I said I was just going to take the girls fishing.
“I’m sure they thought, ‘What kind of guy is this?’”
He’s sure people were suspicious.
“I just tried to stay so away from it. I tried very hard to just almost not pay attention,” he said.
After six months, because he needed to sell a house the couple owned jointly, he was forced to do what he had never imagined: He filed for divorce. He knew in his heart she was dead — she would never have just left.
He talked to his wife by phone that February morning, she saying someone had called about a camp trailer they had for sale; she told the man he could come by after 5 when her husband got off work. When he called again that morning, she didn’t answer.
Then he got word she had failed to pick up their kindergartner around noon. When she didn’t show up later to pick up their third-grader and he found her brown Dodge station wagon in the driveway, he called the sheriff.
Bloodhounds could not track her farther than the highway that ran by the house. Volunteers and law officers could find no answers.
Finally, in January, the killer led police to the spot outside of Eustis where he had killed Judith Dangler and buried her 5-foot-2, 115-pound body in a sandy, 1-foot-deep grave.
The father could no longer avoid his little girls’ question. No, he told them, Mommy isn’t coming home.
“I didn’t tell them what I found out, that she was shot in the stomach with a shotgun at pretty close range.”
He could see they didn’t grasp his simple words. He’s not sure he did either.
The family’s life twisted downward. He remarried quickly and divorced. Remarried again and divorced. And then again.
“I don’t know if that made me hard to live with, or not, I don’t know, do you think?” Dangler, 67, asked his daughters recently.
“I think you’ve always been looking for Mom,” the younger daughter answered.
Judith Carroll Story was working in Lincoln after graduating from high school in Fremont, and Bob Dangler was in college when they met in 1962. They married in 1966.
For 10 years, they moved around, having their babies and establishing their future: Detroit, Kokomo, Ind., where Bob worked for Chrysler, and finally, in 1975, Lexington, where the young husband became a production manager at the Sperry-New Holland.
“I really had set out to accomplish things in life,” he said.
Two years later, his wife was gone, and he didn’t care much anymore. But he continued to chase jobs: Aurora, Newman Grove, Hastings.
“Seemed like I had a knack for picking companies that were going to fail,” said Dangler.
For 10 years, his feelings came out in his dreams. In the privacy of night, he would beat someone until unrecognizable. He would find his wife’s killer in the Sandhills, pull out his gun and shoot him over and over.
“That’s gory. That’s not me,” he said. “Fortunately, those dreams have stopped.”
After three decades, he still is uneasy talking about his wife’s murder.
It shouldn’t be so tough, he says, but he can’t say the words without choking up. He promises to write them later.
“I think about her every time one of her girls accomplishes something, or something good, or bad, happens to them or one of her grandkids,” he says in an e-mail. “I think it’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to them. I so wish that her grandkids could have known her because she was such a fun-loving, and loving and giving person.
“Every night in my prayers, I thank God for sending her to me so that I could have those daughters and grandkids.”
Judy Dangler’s girls remember their mom in short takes.
Dancing with them to Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.
Playfully swinging them around if they got in her way while she was cleaning.
Leaving them each school day with the same words: See you later, alligator. After while, crocodile.
The cream-colored slacks and green, short-sleeved sweatshirt she was wearing the last time they saw her.
Bits and pieces.
“Something will happen or I’ll see something or smell something. And a memory might come back to me,” says Jacki Rains, who lives in Hastings.
They’ve heard their mom was assertive, not one to back down. That she would take just about any dare, had no fear.
After that morning in 1977, Jacki still set places for her at the dinner table.
Robin lived in a purgatory of knowing, but not knowing.
“I always did think she was coming back,” says the younger daughter, now Robin Patch of Texas. “And even after the funeral, I wasn’t totally convinced she was really gone.”
When Robin was 10, her grandmother gave her newspaper articles. She read them.
“I remember having very, very vivid nightmares. Horrible nightmares.”
In one, her dad died.
She worried he and her sister might disappear. She convinced herself she would live no longer than her mother did.
She turned 37 on her last birthday.
For years, Jacki Rains knew nothing about the crime that took her mom. When she was 14, her grandmother gave her the same collection of newspaper articles she had given Robin.
“Even then, I really didn’t look at them,” she said. “I just stuck them in a book and filed it away.”
The thought that she would die before her 21st birthday defined her adolescence.
“I hung out with a pretty rough crowd. … If someone dared me to do something, I’d do it. It was no big deal.”
She didn’t know what to do, who to be with, how to get out of that murky terrain.
Church offered no refuge, even though her mother had been active there.
“I remember thinking, ‘Why in the world would God let this happen to someone who was so good to him?’”
She wanted out of the house, away from her dad’s new wife.
She got pregnant at 16, became a mom at 17. She married her son’s father, but they divorced within three years.
She waited until she was 19 to go to her mother’s grave in Fremont.
“I was afraid to go,” she said.
Anger defined her for many years, said Jacki, now 40. It’s still there today, but it’s directed properly now, she said. It doesn’t take over any more.
Her sister has lived in the shadow of anxiety.
“I think I was a very nervous kid and am still kind of a nervous adult. That’s part of it, living in fear all the time,” Robin said.
Shame dogged Jacki, who couldn’t shake the idea they were the only children in the world whose mom had been murdered.
It hung over Robin, too.
“It felt like there was a big neon light over me all the time, flashing, advertising what had happened.”
It affected everything she did, every decision she made.
She is suspicious of people, overprotective of her 10-year-old son, she said.
Jacki keeps a close eye on her three kids — 14, 18 and 23 — too.
“If they’re not where they say they’re going to be, I panic.”
She said she trusts less, and tends to hold people she loves closer.
“We very acutely understand when we say, ‘Tell the people you love that you love them.’”
Five years ago, Jacki, who directs the Adams County Victim-Witness Unit, developed a growing need to know everything about what happened to her mom, and why Dennis Sell chose her family.
She sought out anyone who knew about the case. She collected court documents. She asked to meet with Sell, but was turned down.
Two years ago, she visited the sand pit near Eustis where her mother was murdered and buried. She took pictures of the spot, still visible after all this time.
“I don’t know why I’m just driven to find out all I possibly can,” she said. “I wish I had started this a long time ago.”
Both of Judy Dangler’s daughters studied psychology. Jacki got a degree in human services.
“I actually wanted to be a psychologist, but yeah, that didn’t happen,” she said.
She has been with the victim-witness unit since 2001 as a liaison between prosecuting attorneys and victims, telling them about court cases and assisting them.
Robin wanted to learn more about how people’s minds work.
“I wish I had it all figured out,” she said.
She got her bachelor’s degree in psychology and did patient evaluations for several years in a psychiatric clinic in Phoenix.
“With this one guy in particular, I remember sitting across the table from him, interviewing him, knowing he had murdered someone,” she said.
She worked in juvenile probation and parole in Omaha and as a parole officer at the Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Center in Kearney, where Sell spent some time as a young man.
Now she is a special education teacher, working with emotionally and mentally disturbed kids.
“It’s scary. I see little patterns in them and little red flags. I worry about what might become of some of these kids some day.
“I hope that I can help make a difference in these kids’ lives.”
For Sell, she says, it’s too late.
“I know I will never, ever forgive him. And I will never understand it. I think it’s because it’s so personal.”
Advocating for the death penalty fires her up.
“I know that sounds harsh, but I don’t feel like somebody should get to live when they took somebody else’s life.”
Sell pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and rape in the case of Ruth Eby, to avoid the death penalty. In addition to two life sentences, the state declared him to be an untreatable sexual sociopath.
He has been eligible for parole since 1999.
Robin worries he will get out some day, but Jacki has become defiant about Dennis Sell.
“Face me,” she said. “I’m prepared.”
She was mad he didn’t show up to a court date in 1993.
He wounded her family, but he fell short of destroying it, she said.
“He hasn’t beat us down.”
Bob Dangler wrote stories for his girls to tell them about their mother. He ended them this way:
“The one thing I’m as sure about as anything I can be is that your mom’s last thoughts in this world were about her girls —not about me — not about herself — not about the rest of her family, but about you.”
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
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This was painful to read. You girls are survivors. Your Dad sounds like my own father. Many times men can't deal with things unless they can "do" something. Then too, how could he be expected to make a new marriage work when he couldn't reconcile the irreconcilable? Just getting through all that must have been horrible for him. My heart goes out to your whole family. Sounds like your Grandmother really tried to pick up the pieces for you. I wish you and your Father all the best, you deserve it. "
avidreader wrote on July 20, 2008 5:06 pm:
Forgive wrote on July 20, 2008 9:50 pm:
JudysRobin wrote on July 21, 2008 7:16 pm:
Cynthia Heiden wrote on July 22, 2008 12:28 pm:
Thank you for letting me express myself. "
Jacki wrote on July 22, 2008 7:11 pm:
Jacki Rains "