Wyoming history: The 1968 homecoming murders of teen girls that shook Lander

Two Lander teen girls vanished on homecoming night in 1968, touching off a massive and desperate search. The discovery of their bodies four months later shook the city, as did the shocking trial of another teen convicted of their murders.

Vicki Mather, 16, and Dee Ann Smith, 15, disappeared on Nov. 1, 1968, after attending a homecoming pep rally at Fremont County Vocational High School. According to trial testimony, the pair were picked up by a carload of teens and taken to a cemetery. When the boys turned off the lights, the girls became frightened and walked to town. They called their parents from the A&W Drive-in and then got into the car of Lander High School junior Craig Sims, 17. That was the last time they were seen.

Sims, an athlete on the cross-country ski and track teams and the son of a prominent businessman, took the girls for a ride, stabbed them to death, and dumped their bodies in ditches along Tweed Lane north of the city. Their bodies were not found until the following spring.

“The seeds of the wild 1960s were sown and growing in the little mountain community,” said Buzz Thurber, a Las Vegas resident who was president of the school’s senior class in 1968. “There was a lot of drugs and drinking going on with the high school crowd. Lander was well ahead of everyone else in the state of Wyoming, we were well known for drug possession.”

Thurber, now 75, remembers the girls as having “a lot of personality” and being “a little bit wilder” than the Mormon girls at the school. “They liked to party, but so did most everybody else,” he said. “My thought when it first happened was that maybe they decided to hitchhike and go on a little trip somewhere.”

The bodies were found in April 1969 after a Sunday school class did a cleanup along Tweed Lane. One of the children discovered Mather’s body. Smith’s body was found nearby in a culvert where snow had plowed over her. Mather’s body had several stab wounds. Smith had one stab wound.

Sims was arrested on April 9, 1969. According to court records, seats from a car once owned by Sims had blood stains sent to the FBI for analysis. Sims pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent for psychiatric evaluations. He escaped from a Denver hospital but returned on his own. He was later sent to a Florida psychiatric hospital and then a Maryland treatment center, from which he escaped in May 1970. He was arrested in Sausalito, California, in July 1970 carrying LSD and hashish. “I know I am perfectly sane. I did not kill those girls,” he told the San Francisco Examiner, adding that he “faked” insanity using LSD.

At trial in Worland, a witness testified she saw Sims emerging from the brush where Mather’s body was found on the night of the killings. Another witness, a teen in a jail cell next to Sims, testified that Sims told him about killing the girls. A 16-year-old girl testified that Sims had picked her up weeks before the murders, taken her to Tweed Lane, and tried to remove her clothes while saying, “We’ll rape them and ditch them.” The jury convicted Sims of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 35-50 years in prison.

Sims’ sentence was reduced by Gov. Ed Herschler in 1979, and he was released in 1986. He married in 1990. He was found dead in a Utah apartment in December 1997 from what officials believed was an internal hemorrhage.

Lander native and author Sandra Miller Linhart, who is writing a book about the case, said the girls’ photos were removed from the high school yearbook before it was published in spring 1969. “But Craig Sims’ picture is still in there,” she said. “That tells you a lot.” Longtime Fremont County Sheriff Tim McKinney, then a Lander patrolman, helped search for the girls. “It shook the community, it really did,” he said.