You Still Here

[{"type":"text","text":"When the anchor trolls the weatherman...."}]

Mix Collage 24 Sep 2025 03 54 PM 3439

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Bonus Video 2: Thursday, September 25, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

When the anchor trolls the weatherman....

Bonus Video 2: Thursday, September 25, 2025

 When the anchor trolls the weatherman....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Dave Nutter looks back on a life in broadcasting with stories to tell.

The 74-year-old who spent much of his working career talking into microphones and turning dials has to stop periodically to cough as he fights idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease doctors say will eventually claim his life.

His working resume covers call letters of radio stations from Casper to eastern Nebraska, Rawlins and even short stint in Portland, Oregon, before returning home for a long stint at K2 Radio and Television. 

Along the way, he collected broadcasting equipment and memorabilia that represents Wyoming’s golden-era airwave history.

But how a 13-year-old got on the air and parlayed his teen years into gigs at Casper radio stations in the 1960s and early 1970s seems a Top 40 tale worth spinning again. 

It all began with a fifth-grade trip to the K2 TV station where he was a member of the choir singing Christmas carols. 

He noticed the guys behind the big cameras pointing the lens at him and others.

“It just really looked enticing to me,” Nutter said. “I decided I wanted to be a TV cameraman.”

From that point on he also started paying attention to radio and made it a point when he learned that a Casper radio station was doing a remote broadcast to drop in and hang around. 

He got to know the players, talked with those at the controls and behind the mic, and became a “radio pest.”

Mostly, KVOC, a country station, did the remotes and Nutter recalls being at the annual Casper summer parade downtown in 1964 when he was 13 and standing by the live broadcast guys who included Dave “Woody” Woodside, the program director, at the microphone and the new station owner’s son who was manning the broadcast board controls.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"First Gig"}]

The station owner’s son and Woodside got into an argument and the son walked off. Woodside, who had gotten to know Nutter, looked at him and asked if he could do the job.

“I said, ‘Sure,’” Nutter recalled. “So, that was my very first day probably 1964, I don’t remember exactly, but it was summertime and I ran the controls and helped pack up the equipment. 

"They didn’t give me any pay, but that that’s how I started working at KVOC at 13.”

That impromptu introduction to the board led to more opportunities on remotes that summer and the next where he would ride his bike or hitch a ride with the station crew to the remote location and help set up microphones, the board, and landlines to the station for a remote broadcast.

Because he had no broadcast license, he could not work inside the station, but at 15 that changed. He studied for the third-class FCC license, the minimum requirement, that would allow him to work inside a station with broadcast equipment and the transmitter.

He convinced his parents that he could pass the test and the nearest place to take it was Denver. His family took a vacation with a swing through Denver and at 15 he joined the 20- and 30-year-olds looking for their ticket to a broadcast career by taking the multiple-choice and more than an hour-long exam.

After finishing the test, he rejoined his family and went on the rest of their vacation.

“I came home from vacation and my license was in the mailbox,” Nutter said. “I immediately got on my bicycle and rode to the radio station with the license. It was like my graduation.”

Woodside and the owner were at the station, saw the license, and told him he could go to work the next Sunday. 

It was July 1967. He operated the two turntables, cart machines for ads, reel-to-reel recorders and the broadcast board that controlled which machine sent content on the air.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Blue-Light Specials"}]

Sundays involved playing 15-inch records from the Salvation Army and other church-related programs that were serialized. 

It also meant going to church locations and setting up remote broadcasts. The station alternated churches during the month, so it might be a Baptist congregation one week and Pentecostal the next.

Nutter said when Kmart came to town in the fall of 1965, the city’s first box store paid to have a three-hour live afternoon broadcast every Sunday from the store. 

It was the first time a store was open on Sundays and lines would form outside the doors before it opened at noon. He and the announcer would go to the store and set up for a 12:30 p.m. start. 

Nutter initially just ran the controls with the on-air personality who called himself the “Deacon Speakin’.”

But then the “deacon” got fired because Kmart did not like the job he was doing. His replacements also got fired. 

Woodside asked Nutter if he thought he could do the announcing part of the broadcast. It involved playing music on the turntable at the store and reading a stack of “blue light” and other specials over the airwaves to bring Sunday shoppers to Kmart doors.

Nutter said the store occasionally did a “99-cent special” that involved putting a small 99-cent sticker on an expensive item such as a barbecue or even a washer or dryer. The draw was no one knew where or what it was.

“People would literally tear up the store looking for those 99-cent specials,” he said.

Nutter told his boss he would try the role. And store management was pleased with the results.

Nutter said he found out that Kmart paid KVOC about $1,200 a month for the broadcasts, which represented the biggest advertising account the station had at the time.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"KATI Calls"}]

While doing the Kmart show he was noticed by a competitor at KATI in town. The station’s program director asked him to come in and talk. 

He was offered a job and took it. His first shift running the board from midnight to 6 a.m. at the Top 40-centered station was June 5, 1968.

“That was the date that Bobby Kennedy got shot in California,” Nutter said. “CBS maintained a network alert system and we got the CBS network alert signal.”

For the next few hours he played instrumental music between CBS News bulletins updating listeners on Kennedy’s fate.

It was also at KATI that the program director told him he could not use his real name and gave him three options of monikers to choose from. 

The one that kind of had a nice ring was “Don Steele.” He chose it.

And as the “Real Don Steele” soon realized, there was another one on the air.

When he went back to the school in the fall, he remembers a girl asking him if he was “this guy?” She pointed to a fan magazine that said a Don Steele was the number one rated disc jockey in the country — he worked at a station in Los Angeles.

“This guy was the real Don Steele and I learned later he came from Portland, Oregon and Omaha,” Nutter said. “So I’m assuming (his program director) gave me three names of three big disc jockeys someplace else in the world.”

Nutter’s time at KATI also involved continuing the Kmart show. When he left KVOC, he brought the account over with him.

Following high school graduation, Nutter’s career took him to Rawlins and then for a stint in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and then back to KVOC. 

He spent a few years traveling the country in a good-paying job installing kitchen equipment for McDonald’s Restaurants before returning to Casper as a McDonald’s store manager.

A K2 radio salesman convinced him to check out a Sunday radio gig opportunity and lured him back. 

“I started full time at K2 on Jan. 15, 1980 and for all intents and purposes that was the last radio stop,” he said. “That was my last place of employment.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Personality Role"}]

He spent the next 25 years until 1994 working for K2 in various roles, including as a radio personality, and program and music director. 

He later founded and operated the Wyoming News Network for five years, a radio service that offered radio stations in Wyoming and South Dakota news, special events, sports, and weather.

Nutter said his on-air shows were more a “personality broadcast” where he offered little features and sometimes did interviews of various people.

“I tried a lot of different things that seemed to work,” he said. “I remember my ratings were better than anybody else in town for that time period, even though we never really ever worked for ratings, they were there.”

In addition to on-air work, Nutter fascination with the broadcast equipment led him into a collection of broadcast gear headed for dumpsters at an early age. 

He remembers one day at KVOC when the station engineer called him and said they were taking a bunch of equipment to the dump.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Collecting Artifacts"}]

Nutter went to the station and gathered the first microphone he ever spoke in as well as the remote radio board that he used at 13 and some cart machines. 

During his K2 career, he remembers coming back from Laramie after a football game broadcast and finding a bunch of old equipment in the dumpster behind the station.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He rescued it."}]

Among  the items was the first studio camera used at K2 TV in 1957 that weighed nearly 140 pounds.

After being diagnosed with his illness, he knew his collection of things was going to end up back in a dumpster unless he could find a place that wanted it. 

He contacted the Texas Broadcast and Communications Museum and ended up taking two trips down to deliver the 1,400 items he had collected over the years.

The K2 camera was something unique among the other 109 cameras in the museum’s collection. Instead of storing in a corner or closet they put it on the floor in their main lobby, Nutter said.

“I’m proud to say that it is within 15 feet of the TV camera that covered the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department,” he said.

Much of Nutter’s present day involves trips to doctors and procedures to help prolong his life. His pulmonary fibrosis continues to harden his lung tissues making breathing more difficult.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"But he keeps pressing on."}]

“They’ve got a couple of medications out there that prolong you breathing,” he said. “But the only real cure is a lung transplant.”

Dave Nutter Inset David Nutter 1967 Age 15 KVOC edit 6 7 26

<title>Attention Kmart Shoppers: Casper's Dave Nutter Reflects On 45 Years On The Radio | Cowboy State Daily</title>

For 45 years, Dave Nutter was a familiar voice on Casper radio. Now, fighting for his life, Nutter reflects on his unique experiences in radio, including broadcasting blue light specials from Kmart. He most recently donated 1,400 radio items to a museum.

Attention Kmart Shoppers: Casper's Dave Nutter Reflects On 45 Years On The Radio

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

Law Enforcement

Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part series on the infamous "Rawlins Rodeo Murders." Part one 

 and focused on the disappearances of four young girls that remain unsolved 52 years later.

In the early 1970s, the small, rugged city of Rawlins, Wyoming, was in the dawn of an energy boom.

The summer of 1974 arrived like any other, but then between July and August, 

Two of then — 10-year-old Jaylene Banker and 19-year-old Christine “Christy” Gross — were eventually found dead.

The other two teens, 19-year-old Carlene Brown and 15-year-old Deborah Meyer, were never found at all.

All their murders and disappearances remain unsolved, and more than 50 years later law enforcement has yet to publicly named any suspects or persons of interest.

Carbon County Sheriff Alex Bakken, who wasn’t born at the time the murders took place, admits that his knowledge is limited on the cases. He took over as sheriff four years ago and inherited these among other cold cases.

He said the files are securely stowed in an offsite storage facility that he plans to retrieve.

other cash-strapped agencies throughout the state

 with large jurisdictions and limited staff, is “slowly but surely” working to digitize older case files in accordance with state statute passed in 2024.

It requires agencies to report cold cases dating back to January 1972 to the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s 

[{"type":"text","text":"To date, only Banker appears in the database."}]

This work is being done around their current workload, Bakken said, but it doesn’t mean that they’re forgotten, he said.

Retired homicide detective and Powell-based cold case investigator Janet Franson likewise believes there’s still work to be done.

She’s been looking into these cases for 25 years, specifically trying to locate the remains of the missing girls.

“I know people would say it’s so old,” Franson told Cowboy State Daily. “But two girls are still missing and need to be found.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Possible Suspects?"}]

The first two teens vanished on July 4, 1974, which was a big year for Rawlins.

Fireworks were returning to the town’s Fourth of July celebration after being absent for several years, according to local reporting at the time.

Two friends, 19-year-olds Carlene Brown and Christine “Christy” Gross, attended the Little Britches Rodeo, a local favorite annual event. Gross had been visiting from Bowdle, South Dakota.

Details surrounding their disappearances are vague, but former Carbon County Deputy Sheriff Jeff Faycosh reported that their van was found parked at the fairgrounds, according to a November 1983 Casper-Star Tribune story.

Gross’s remains were found nine years later near Sinclair, a small town of around 350 residents located about 6 miles from Rawlins along Interstate 80.

At the time, Faycosh said his office had turned up a “few new leads” from the crime scene and indicated that a suspect had been identified after looking at “all possible suspects,” according to local media reports.

He further stated that his office was in the process of attempting to locate the suspect, who he declined to name.

[{"type":"text","text":"Faycosh also said that he hadn’t given up hope of finding Brown."}]

“You spend nine years sweating a case like this and you think you are at a dead end. Then you get a new lead,” he told a Rawlins 

Times reporter in a November 1983 article.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Likely Not Bundy"}]

It’s not clear what “suspect” Faycosh was referring to or if any suspects have ever been publicly named.

Many in the community, including Brown’s longtime friend Mary Kay Albrechtson, believe that 

Theodore “Ted” Bundy may be responsible for the murders.

However, former Carbon County Sheriff Chuck Ogburn dispelled that speculation, telling reporters that his office had looked into Bundy, but he’d been incarcerated in Colorado when Gross and Brown vanished.

That timeline, however, appears to be off, according to 

 that say Bundy was not arrested in Utah until August 1975, when he was taken into custody for kidnapping and assaulting a teenager in that state.

He faced additional murder charges in Colorado and was moved to an Aspen jail in January 1977.

Bundy later escaped from the jail in June 1977 from a second-story window while using the jailhouse law library but was captured five days later.

Authorities believe Bundy’s killing spree began in 1974, as he confessed before his 1989 execution to the murders of more than 30 women and young girls.

In July 1974, however, it’s likely that Bundy was still in Washington state, where he abducted and killed Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish on July 14, 1974.

Bundy may have been in the Rawlins area, however, when Meyer and Banker disappeared in August — the same month he relocated to Salt Lake City to begin law school and continue his prolific killing spree.

He’s thought to have killed at least eight young women during his time in Utah. His latest victim there was 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime, 

which the Utah County Sheriff’s Office solved in April after 52 years

This discovery also allowed authorities for the first time to upload Bundy’s full DNA profile with more murders expected to be linked to the notorious serial killer.

He’s known to have killed victims in at least seven states — including Utah, Idaho and Colorado — but so far, Bundy has not been tied to any murders in Wyoming.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Tracking A Suspected Murderer"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"A more likely suspect for some is Royal Russell Long, said Janet Franson."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“I’d put my money on this guy,” Franson said."}]

Franson, a retired Lakeland, Florida, homicide detective now living in Powell, has been studying Long’s connections to the Rawlins murders since 2001.

After retiring from the Lakeland Police Department, Franson continued investigating cold cases.

She worked as a volunteer cold case investigator for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and later for the Human Identification Lab at the University of North Texas.

It was this work that sent her to Wyoming and other states to investigate cases and procure DNA from victims’ families for identification.

Long’s name popped up a lot in her investigation into Brown’s disappearance.

He was a long-haul trucker known to carry equipment to carnivals and fairs. In 1984, Long was arrested for kidnapping and raping two teen girls.

The girls had been hitchhiking when they were abducted by Long, who tied them up at gunpoint and took them to his home in Evansville, Wyoming.

The 15-year-old was able to escape and call for help, but Long fled with 12-year-old Sharon Baldeagle.

Long was eventually caught in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Baldeagle was not with him, however, and remains missing to this day.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Predilection For Pairs"}]

Long has never been charged with murder. He pleaded guilty to the two counts of kidnapping and received two life sentences, according to legal documents.

He was also charged with the kidnapping and murder of two 13-year-old girls whom he’d abducted from the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds in September 1981.

Despite having several witnesses that recognized Long as well as hairs of one of the girls in the trunk of his car, authorities were unable to make the charges stick.

Long died in a Wyoming prison of a heart attack in 1993, taking his secrets to his grave.

Though never charged, Long is suspected of multiple rapes and murders across many states, Franson said.

She firmly believes that not only did he murder Baldeagle and dispose of her body, but he’s also responsible for the deaths of all four Rawlins victims.

Franson notes the similarities of the abductions and Long’s predilection for taking victims in pairs, which is rare, she said.

Though there’s no record of address that Cowboy State Daily could locate, Franson was told by a local she interviewed years ago that Long had been staying in Rawlins at the time of the murders at a residence within blocks of the fairgrounds.

Long, who is originally from Indiana, has a long rap sheet dating back to the early 1950s when he was still in his late teens.

This includes a charge for assault with a deadly weapon in Reading, California, in 1952, and also escaping from jail, forged checks and burglary, among other charges, according to a criminal record shared with Cowboy State Daily.

Franson believes Long escalated to murder, and that the Wyoming incarceration was preceded by a trail of victims.

Long was considered a suspect but not the “only viable” one, said Ryan Cox, commander and head of cold cases for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI).

He did not share information about additional suspects or whether there is any DNA or any evidence still on file. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Finding Brown’s Family"}]

With justice for the “Rawlins Rodeo Murder” victims is likely not possible at this point, Franson thinks the next best thing is finding the remains of Brown and Meyer.

Meyer’s DNA is in the national database, so she can be identified should her remains be found.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Brown, however, is a different story."}]

She and her brother Rick Brown were adopted by Carl Brown and Catherine T. Gutsch, who split up when the kids were teens.

[{"type":"text","text":"Carl remained in Rawlins while Gutsch moved to Colorado."}]

Both Brown’s adopted parents and brother are now deceased, so Franson has taken it upon herself to attempt to track down Brown’s biological parents or family to procure a DNA sample from them.

[{"type":"text","text":"She’s been trying for years in vain to track this information down."}]

A spark of hope came this spring when Sheriff Bakken was able to get Brown’s birth certificate from the Colorado Department of Vital Services. However, the birth certificate contained the names of her adopted, not biological, parents.

Franson said she’d never seen that before nor did the genealogists with whom she consulted on Brown’s case.

Now, it’s back to the drawing board with Bakken in the process of seeing if he can attain an amended or earlier birth record.

Anyone who might know Brown’s biological family or have information about her birth is asked to contact Sheriff Bakken at the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office.

For now, both Bakken and Franson will continue to try to piece together the mystery while keeping the girls’ names alive.

Rawlins Rodeo Murders Old Welcome to Rawlins sign Jimmy Emerson via Flickr 6 7 26

<title>Rawlins Rodeo Murders, Part 2: Did Ted Bundy Kill Four Wyoming Girls 52 Years Ago? | Cowboy State Daily</title>

In the second of a two-part series on the infamous "Rawlins Rodeo Murders" of 1974, many in the community believe serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible for the deaths of the four girls. Others pin the blame on long haul trucker Russell Royal Long.

Rawlins Rodeo Murders, Part 2: Did Ted Bundy Kill Four Wyoming Girls 52 Years Ago?

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

[{"type":"text","text":"As a young girl, Debbie Rude wondered if she had imagined it."}]

Growing up in a tiny rental house on Walnut Street in Rock Springs during the 1950s, some of her earliest memories are of standing at the fence line beside her family’s yard and staring up at what looked to her like something pulled from the pages of a storybook.

The building towering beside her family’s modest home was Schlacter Castle — a hulking stone fortress with rounded turrets, battlemented towers and thick, gray masonry that seems better suited for Germany's Rhine Valley than the windswept coal country of southwest Wyoming.

Its heavy arches and castle walls rise above the hillside with a dreamlike absurdity, as though a medieval stronghold had somehow wandered into Rock Springs and decided to stay.

The fence separating the properties made it feel, Rude said, “as though I lived in two separate worlds.”

On her side sat a hard-packed dirt yard scattered with toys and lined with a clothesline fluttering with work shirts and bedsheets in the Wyoming wind. 

Beyond it rose another world entirely — emerald grass trimmed neat beneath the shadow of stone turrets, flower beds bursting with color around a castle that seemed impossibly elegant against the coal-dust grit of Rock Springs.

“I’d dream of going inside and of living in that castle, like a real princess,” Rude said.

More than a century after German immigrant John Schlacter finished building the castle in 1914, the strange stone fortress still clings to the hillside above Rock Springs, keeping a medieval eye on the city below while generations drift through its halls and the city changes around it.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Castle In Coal Country"}]

Nobody seems entirely sure why Schlacter decided to build a literal castle on a hill overlooking Rock Springs.

That mystery is part of what has kept the building embedded in local imagination for generations.

Born in Germany on Feb. 23, 1866, Schlacter came to the United States in 1886 and eventually married Viola Van Kaiser in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1890. 

The couple raised several children before moving West, first to Diamondville in 1899 and later to Rock Springs in 1907.

By then, Schlacter had already established himself as a master stonecutter.

Historical accounts credit him with helping build the Carnegie libraries in Rock Springs and Green River, along with foundations, homes and churches throughout southwest Wyoming.

With their grand stone facades, towering arched windows and stately symmetry, the libraries Schlacter helped build carried an almost cathedral-like permanence onto the Wyoming frontier — monuments to knowledge and ambition rising from dusty mining roads.

He also built portions of the local Episcopal Church, stone foundations on D Street and C Street, and homes across the city alongside fellow stoneworkers.

According to local historian Helene B. Novotny’s self-published history “The Days After Abraham Lincoln 1943-1949,” Schlacter once bid unsuccessfully on the stately Taliaferro home on Cedar Street.

One local theory suggests Schlacter responded by buying property across from it on Walnut Street and building an even grander stone residence to prove “what an excellent stonecutter he was.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Tall and imposing on the hill, it certainly accomplished that."}]

Construction on the castle began in 1909 and took roughly five years to complete. 

The stone reportedly came from the same local quarry used to build the old Rock Springs City Hall, now home to the Rock Springs Historical Museum, though the quarry itself has since been lost to time.

Schlacter hauled much of the stone himself using two horses and a wagon, according to the Rock Springs Historical Museum.

No one knows why German immigrant and master stonemason John Schlacter built a castle overlooking Rock Springs more than a century ago. He spent five years building it by hand, hauling locally quarried stone by horse and wagon before finishing it in 1914.

Bonus Video 2: Thursday, September 25, 2025

In case you missed it

More in You Still Here

Today In Cooking: Monday, June 8, 2026

Bonus Video 2: Monday, June 8, 2026

Bonus Video 1: Monday, June 8, 2026

Steve Inman: Monday, June 8, 2026

Most read