For 44 years, he lived a life he didn’t deserve. He watched TV, he grew old, he moved to a different state, and every single morning he woke up. Lyana A Donk and Eric Goldstrand did not. That injustice was finally broken by something he never saw coming. Not a confession, not a witness, not a tip line call, a stranger’s spit in a mailed in DNA kit.
But, we are getting ahead of ourselves because before we get to how he was caught, you need to understand exactly what he took. Eugene, Oregon, June 9th, 1977. This is a town where people leave their doors unlocked, where teenagers drive out to the river on school days and nobody thinks twice, where nothing bad is supposed to happen.
That belief is exactly what made what came next so hard to survive. Lyana A Donk is 16 years old. Her cousin Kathy is her best friend, not family, close, actually close. Every Saturday morning, while other teenagers sleep in, Lyana is already up and out riding horses through the Oregon countryside. That one detail tells you everything.
She was disciplined, present, fully alive in a way most people never figure out how to be. Eric Shawn Goldstrand is 17. His best friend Todd Proudfit laughed every time he talked about him because Eric had something that made him a legend in their friend group, a truck, a beat-up old Ford pickup, rough around the edges, but his, and he used it the way genuinely good people use whatever they have, generously.
Always offering rides, always the one to say yes. Todd said in two years of friendship, he could not remember a single time Eric was in a bad mood, not once. In the North Eugene High School yearbook, they appeared together, two good-natured, fun-loving students, above-average, outgoing, the couple everyone recognized from the hallways, simple, happy, and completely unaware that their last normal day had already begun.
The plan was a picnic at Broken Bowl, a quiet spot along the banks of Fall Creek east of Eugene on Highway 58. Eric had invited a few friends, including Todd. Todd stayed for class that day. The others dropped out one by one. By the time Eric and Leanne pulled onto the highway in that Ford, it was just the two of them.
They told their families back by 10. Sometime in the early evening, Eric stopped at a payphone along Highway 58 and called his stepfather Ted. He said the truck was giving him trouble. He said, “If we’re not home by 10, come find us at Fall Creek.” Now, stop because that phone call is not what it sounds like. When Ted arrived at Broken Bowl later that night and checked the truck, it started fine, ran perfectly.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. So, Eric did not call because of a mechanical problem. A 17-year-old boy stopped on the side of a highway, found a payphone, and built a trail home. A specific location, a specific deadline, “Come find us if we don’t make it back.” He was not describing a broken engine. He was describing fear.
Something out there, something he saw, something he felt, something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, pushed him to that phone. He wanted someone to know exactly where they were. He never got the chance to explain what it was, and that unanswered question has haunted everyone connected to this case for nearly half a century.
10 o’clock came, no sign of them. Ted and Donna drove out Highway 58 into the dark, no streetlights, no other cars, just headlights cutting through black trees on both sides of the road. They expected to find the truck broken down somewhere on the shoulder. They drove the entire length of the highway without seeing it. When they pulled into Broken Bowl, Eric’s Ford was sitting right there, parked, quiet. It was nearly midnight.
Donna walked up and looked to the window. Eric’s wallet was under the driver’s seat and their clothes, both sets, everything they’d been wearing when they left home that morning, still folded inside the truck. She said it herself years later in words that never left anyone who heard them. When we got into his truck, we found their clothes, so we knew they only had their swimsuits on, no shoes.
Swimsuits in a pitch black forest at midnight, no way to call for help. No way for anyone outside those trees to know what was happening inside them. Ted called the police. A deputy arrived. They moved through the tree line with flashlights, beams cutting thin lines through the dark. The forest was silent. Nothing moved. And then, about a hundred feet from where Eric’s truck was parked, the deputy stopped walking.
He had found something, and what he found is the reason this story does not end on a summer afternoon in 1977. The flashlight beam stopped moving. 100 feet from Eric’s truck, a clearing near a picnic table, and there was Leanna. The deputy did not need to check for a pulse. She had been the victim of a targeted and fatal attack. The silence of the forest now carried a heavy, tragic weight.
He realized he was standing at the site of a tragic crime. He radioed for backup and then did something that took every ounce of professionalism he had. He walked back to Ted and Donna, and he told them nothing. He sent them home, not because he didn’t care, because the moment he told them what he had found, the scene would become chaos.
Parents don’t stay calm at moments like that, and every footstep in that forest was potential evidence. So, he kept his face neutral, kept his voice steady, and he told them to go home and wait. Donna went home not knowing whether her son was alive or dead. She sat in that house through the rest of the night.
No answers, no phone call, just the kind of silence that gets louder the longer it lasts. The next morning, a group of people showed up at her door, officers and their family pastor. You don’t bring a pastor to deliver good news. Donna said it herself years later. I had an idea it was the worst I could think. She was right.
They told her they had found Eric. They told her he was gone. In one night, a family that had waved goodbye to a 17-year-old boy with a smile that filled a room became a family that would spend the next four decades looking for answers that never came fast enough. At first light, officers moved back into the forest in full numbers.
23 ft from where Liana was found, in dense brush almost hidden, they found Eric. He had also been met with the same fatal force, but the evidence suggested something about his final moments was different. Liana had been shot up close. Eric had been shot from a distance, approximately 30 ft away, and his body was 23 ft from hers, deeper into the brush, away from the picnic area.
So, why was he so far away? Detectives looked at that distance and built a theory. The most likely explanation was this. Eliana was the primary target. Eric had walked down to the river, which ran a little way from the picnic area, while she stayed behind. That was when the attacker moved in. Then Eric came back, and the moment he came back, the shooter had a problem.
So, he fired from distance, a reactive shot, not a planned one. Eric was not supposed to be part of this. He was a witness who came back at the wrong moment. That one detail, 30 ft shot from a distance, is what tells you Eric didn’t run. He came toward the sound, toward her. And it cost him everything.
Crime scene technicians worked the area methodically. What they recovered was both promising and completely useless for the time. One fingerprint, unidentified, location undisclosed. Biological sample recovered from the scene. Bullet fragments pulled for ballistic analysis. The evidence pointed to a specific type of small-caliber weapon, one that could easily go unnoticed in the dense woods.
Here is the brutal reality of 1977. That biological sample, the one piece of evidence that would eventually solve everything, could tell investigators almost nothing. DNA profiling did not exist yet. Blood typing existed, but it narrowed suspects to millions, not one. The fingerprint was compared against every person they looked at. No match.
The bullets were analyzed. The caliber was common. Everything they had led nowhere. Police threw everything at it anyway. Roadblocks on every road out of the forest that same night trying to catch someone while the trail was still warm. Nothing. Dozens of interviews in the days that followed. Polygraph tests.
Firearms collected and tested. Tips came in from across the city. Eugene was shaken to its core and people were calling with anything they could think of because this town did not have murders like this. This was the place where you left your front door unlocked. Where you let your teenagers drive out to the river without a second thought.
Where nothing bad was supposed to reach you. After June 9th, 1977, people started locking their doors. That fear, that permanent shift in how a community felt about its own safety, that was Ronald Troy’s first consequence. Not prison. Not justice. Just a town that quietly stopped trusting the dark. Every lead dried up.
Every tip went cold. Every suspect they looked at had an alibi or no evidence or both. The case had almost nothing to hold on to. One unmatched fingerprint. One biological sample that science couldn’t yet read. And two bodies in a forest that gave up almost no secrets. We dedicate hundreds of hours to researching these cold cases to ensure that victims like Leana and Eric are never forgotten.
If you value deep dive investigative storytelling that honors the truth, please subscribe and let us know in the comments where in the world you are watching from. If this story moved you, you must see the equally haunting 1956 Montana case of Lloyd Dwayne Bogel and Patricia Kalitzke. It is another story of a young couple frozen in time and the link is waiting for you in the description below.
Now, back to the case. By 1983, six years after the murders, the file had been passed through multiple hands and made no meaningful progress. That year it landed on the desk of a detective named Kurt West. He picked it up. He read every page, every interview, every dead end, every note written by detectives who had tried and failed before him.
He read about Leanna and Eric, two teenagers who went to a picnic and never came home, and something in that file refused to let him go. He worked it every way the era allowed, more interviews, more analysis, more attempts to find the thread that everyone before him had missed. He found nothing. Not yet, but he didn’t put the file down, either. West eventually retired.
His hair went gray. The Lane County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit became a volunteer operation, no salary, no obligation, just retired detectives showing up unpaid because some cases don’t let you walk away. West kept showing up. The killer thought he had disappeared. He didn’t know that for the next 38 years, a man who had never met him was memorizing his every move.
While Donna Burbach woke up every single morning carrying a hole on her chest that never closed, Ronald Albert Schroy was eating breakfast. He was watching TV. He was getting older. He was living in the warm Arizona sun, in a house, in a neighborhood, like any other person who had never done anything wrong.
He wasn’t hiding in a cave. He wasn’t looking over his shoulder every second. He was hiding in plain sight, inside a completely ordinary life that he had built on top of two graves. That is the part that is hardest to sit with. Ronald Albert Schroy was born on April 4th, 1955, in Lane County, Oregon, the eldest of three brothers.
And from the very beginning, the people closest to him knew something was wrong. His younger brother Daniel described him in words that don’t leave you easily. Ronald always wanted to be dominant. He was a very abusive person. He enjoyed it. He had some sexual appetites that were really out of line. This was not a man who committed one terrible act and spent the rest of his life haunted by it, the record shows something else entirely, a history of violent and predatory behavior in Colorado already documented on his official record. An aggravated
assault charge against his own brother in the 2010s. Decades apart, different states, same pattern. Ronald Troy was not a man who made one dark mistake in a forest in 1977. He was a predator who made it to old age without being stopped. Sometime in the early 1980s, just a few years after the murders, Ronald left Oregon.
No dramatic exit, no one chasing him. He simply moved Colorado for a while, then eventually Mesa, Arizona. By 2008, he and his youngest brother Daniel were living together in a gated community on the outskirts of Phoenix. A gated community. Think about that choice for a moment. Unemployed, rarely left the house.
Days spent on the couch in front of the television. Neighbors who likely knew nothing about him except that he was a quiet older man who kept to himself. Was that just the lifestyle of someone who had aged into isolation, or was it something else? Was the gate at the entrance of that community as much about keeping the world out as it was about keeping him in? That question has no clean answer, but the behavior fits a man who had been waiting for 44 years for a knock on the door that never came.
Meanwhile, the science was moving. In 1995, detectives sent the biological sample from the Broken Bow crime scene to the lab. For the first time, they were able to extract a full DNA profile from the evidence collected in 1977. They entered it into the FBI database. No match, which meant one of two things. Either the killer had never been caught in any other crime since 1977, or he had been caught before DNA collection became standard practice and his profile simply wasn’t in the system.
Either way, another dead end, another year, another door that didn’t open. The file kept moving. The technology kept advancing, and in July of 2020, 43 years after two teenagers went to a picnic and never came home, Detective Kurt West and his volunteer cold case team made a decision that would change everything. They resubmitted the DNA to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia.
One of the most advanced forensic genetics labs in the world. Here is what Parabon did, and pay attention because this is the part that should genuinely amaze you. From the DNA alone, nothing else, just the biological material recovered at a crime scene in 1977, their scientists extracted physical trait information, hair color, eye color, skin tone, estimated facial structure, and they built a composite image of what the unknown suspect most likely looked like.
Detective West said it directly, they actually gave us a picture of the individual, a face built from DNA 43 years after the crime. But the face was only the beginning. Because Parabon also did something else. They ran that DNA through public genealogy databases, the same ones where ordinary people submit spit kits to find out where their great-grandparents were from, millions of profiles.
People who had no idea their curiosity about their own family history was about to help solve a double murder. The lab found partial matches, distant relatives of the unknown suspect, people who shared enough genetic material to build a family tree, and from that tree, they worked backwards to narrowing, eliminating, connecting.
They landed on a family from Oakridge, Oregon, a small town in Lane County, right in the same area where the murders happened 43 years earlier, three brothers. Police moved carefully, they needed DNA from each brother without tipping anyone off. The middle brother was still living nearby. Undercover officers followed him, waited, and eventually watched him throw a cigarette butt out of a car window.
They picked it up, sent it to the lab, not a match, but a very relative of the killer. Two brothers remained. Ronald and Daniel, both now living together in Mesa, Arizona. Detectives pulled their backgrounds, and one fact stood out immediately. In 1977, Daniel Shroyer was serving in the United States Navy. He had no opportunity to commit the crime.
That left one name, Ronald Albert Shroyer. Detectives now had a name. They had a DNA trail. They had an address inside a gated community in Mesa, Arizona. They were finalizing the paperwork to present the case to a grand jury, days away, maybe less, from making an arrest. Ronald Shroyer had survived 44 years without a single consequence.
He had one move left. Ronald Shroyer was 65 years old. He was sitting in his house in Arizona, same couch, same TV, same routine he had built over four decades of borrowed time. And somewhere in Oregon, a retired detective who hadn’t collected a paycheck for this work in years, was finally ready to end it. Neither man knew how close they were to each other.
At some point in the months before February 2021, Daniel was sitting in that same living room watching television. A commercial came on, one of those Ancestry DNA kit advertisements, the kind that had been running for years by then. Mail in your sample, find out where your family comes from, discover distant relatives you never knew existed.
Daniel thought out loud, said he might want to try it someday. Just to find distant relatives, just out of curiosity. Ronald exploded, not discomfort, not a casual objection. He came off that couch and he screamed at his brother, told him it was incredibly stupid, told him never to do anything like that, ever. Daniel didn’t understand the reaction.
It seemed completely out of proportion to a TV commercial. He filed it away as another example of Ronald’s temper and moved on. He didn’t understand yet, but he would, because Ronald understood exactly what that commercial was describing. He had been watching the news about genetic genealogy for years.
He knew what it meant when a stranger’s DNA entered a public database. He knew that every distant cousin, every second relative, every person connected to his bloodline who mailed in a spit kit was potentially building a road that led directly to his front door. He had been living with that fear for a long time, and Daniel almost just opened the gate February 2021.
Mesa, Arizona. The details of what started the argument that day don’t matter as much as how it ended. An argument between the brothers escalated into a physical confrontation. The police were called as the situation spiraled out of control. Officers were on their way. Ronald walked into the other room.
Moments later, the situation reached a tragic end. By the time help arrived, Ronald had taken his own life, choosing to end his story on his own terms before the law could reach him. The autopsy would confirm what was already obvious. He left no note. Not a single word of explanation. No confession. No apology. No answer to any of the questions that Donna Berbach and Kathy Kloster had been carrying since 1977.
He took every answer with him deliberately, finally, completely. Think about what that means. Even at the very end, Ronald Schroy chose control over everything else. He had dominated people his entire life, and when the walls finally closed in, he made one last decision that guaranteed he would never have to answer to anyone. He didn’t run this time.
But he made sure no one would ever hear him explain himself, either. Oregon detectives got the call from the Mesa Police Department shortly after. Their suspect was dead. The arrest they had been preparing for, the grand jury presentation that was days away, was gone. After 44 years, after 38 years of Kurt West carrying that file, after a volunteer cold case unit funded by community donations finally cracking it open with technology that didn’t exist when the crime happened, Ronald Schroy had walked through the only door they
couldn’t follow him through. For 6 months after his death, the DNA work continued. There was still a case to close, still a confirmation that needed to be made official, and then it came. Ronald Albert Schroy’s DNA, extracted from the man who had watched TV, grown old, and lived an ordinary life in Arizona, was a full and confirmed match to the biological evidence recovered at the Broken Bow picnic area on June 9th, 1977.
No margin, no doubt, it was him. The Lane County Sheriff’s Office officially closed the case in September 2021. 44 years, 3 months, two families who had waited that entire time for a name. When detectives called Kathy Closter to tell her, she already half knew. West had called her a month earlier and told her they were closing in, told her not to say anything, told her he would call when there was a conclusion.
When the phone rang and she saw his name on the screen, she said she knew, but knowing and hearing are two different things. Donna Burbach, Eric’s mother, said something that stopped everyone who heard it. It feels good that I don’t have to go to a trial. I would have been terrified that he would have gotten off.
Sit with that for a moment. This woman waited 44 years, and what she felt at the end of it was not triumph. It was relief that she didn’t have to watch him walk free. That is what four decades of living with an open wound produces, not joy, just the quiet, exhausted relief that it is finally, officially over.
Kathy said something different, something that carried a different kind of pain. There’s a part of us who wanted to see him and know why, and all those things were never going to know. He made sure of that. Now, here is the part that should stay with you. Ronald Schroy ran for 44 years. He left Oregon. He crossed state lines.
He built a quiet, invisible life in a gated community in Arizona. He screamed at his own brother for almost handing the key to a stranger, and in the end, none of it mattered. He was not caught by a witness who finally came forward. He was not caught by a confession or a tip line call or a lucky break in an old file. He was caught by people who had never met him.
People who mailed a small tube of saliva to a lab because they wanted to know where their great-grandparents were from. People who had no idea their curiosity about their own history was quietly, invisibly, building a road straight to a killer’s front door. His own blood gave him up. The thing he tried hardest to control, his family, his secret, his name, is exactly what ended him.
Her name was Liiana Gay Adank. She was 16 years old. She got up every Saturday morning before anyone else was awake and went riding through the Oregon countryside because that was what made her feel alive. His name was Eric Shawn Goldstrand. He was 17 years old. He had a beat-up old Ford pickup that he used to give everyone rides because that was just who he was.
They went to a picnic on a Thursday afternoon in June. They were supposed to be home by 10. They deserved so much more than 44 years of waiting. But their names are no longer attached to an unsolved case. They are attached to a story that ends with the truth and nobody, not even a man who spent his entire life running from it, could stop that from happening.
Justice doesn’t always arrive on time, but it arrived. Before you go, I want to hear from you. Ronald Schroy died before he could ever be arrested, charged, or sit in a courtroom. He never heard a verdict read out loud. He never had to face Donna Burback or Kathy Klooster. Is that justice or did he escape the one thing he deserved most? And think about this.
Daniel Schroy lived with his brother for years, watched him react to that DNA commercial, and had no idea what his brother had done. If you were Daniel, how would you live with that knowledge? And finally, Kurt West, a retired detective, no paycheck, no obligation. 38 years of showing up for two kids he never met.
Is there someone in your life or in a story you’ve heard who showed that kind of quiet, relentless commitment to something that mattered, leave your answer below. This community always has something worth reading.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
