The Riverton man accused of binding a man hand and foot, strangling him and fatally slitting his throat two years ago is headed to a felony-level trial court, after Fremont County’s top prosecutor showed proof Wednesday that he acted with premeditation.
John William Goodman, 31, will now be prosecuted in the 2023 killing of Gustave Yellowhair in the Lander-based Fremont County District Court.
He faces a first-degree murder charge, and an alternate theory of felony murder, or the claim that he committed a murder while perpetrating some other felony.
Fremont County Attorney Micah Wyatt gave probable cause supporting both theories, Riverton Circuit Court Judge Dan Stebner ruled after a preliminary hearing Wednesday.
Evidence meeting the probable cause standard is not necessarily enough to convict a man, but it is enough to vault a case into the felony-level court for a trial or plea negotiations, under Wyoming law.
Goodman stood after the finding, clad in orange, shackled and flanked by security deputies, and shuffled out of the courtroom to the farewell calls of family members.
“Love you,” one woman called to Goodman.
“Love you, auntie,” Goodman called back into the gallery, which was packed with around two dozen high school-age adolescents and others observing the proceeding.
Premeditated
Yellowhair died of a sliced carotid artery, sliced jugular vein and larynx sometime around the late winter of 2023. His body was found March 20, 2023, near a home in St. Stephens.
The FBI was reticent at the time, saying it was “aware” of the homicide victim found on the reservation.
Two years later, an evidentiary affidavit Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) Special Agent Pete McCall — which draws from the work of multiple investigators — compiled evidence that Wyatt said supports a first-degree murder charge.
Goodman’s public defense attorney Valerie Schoneberger stood in doubt of that.
She asked McCall as he sat at the witness stand Wednesday whether there was evidence that Goodman premeditated the alleged killing.
At first, McCall said no, but then reflected and said Yellowhair’s bound hands and feet indicate planning, as do witness-relayed and other evidence that Goodman was retaliating against Yellowhair for allegedly hurting Goodman’s sister.
Goodman believed Yellowhair had also “molested” his sister, McCall testified from case evidence.
Goodman’s sister died of suicide, according to a Fremont County Coroner’s docket on her death.
Her family has theorized that there was malicious activity involved in her death as well, McCall testified.
Schoneberger told Stebner the state had failed to show premeditation.
It had referred simply to the circumstances of the alleged crime itself, such as the hands and feet that could have been bound at any point in the act, the defense attorney said.
She pointed to Wyoming case law saying that to commit murder with premeditated malice, the defendant has to have a sufficient interval of time to form that intent.
The Wyoming Supreme Court has declined to give its court system a specific timeframe for that, she noted, but she said the state had failed to show such an interval here.
Schoneberger also asked Stebner not to let the state pursue its alternate theory of felony murder in the higher court.
She said Wyatt had presented no evidence of that: just a thin “argument of counsel” assertion that Goodman was attempting some other felony during the killing.
Stebner disagreed.
He referenced the low bar of probable cause, and said the state had met it.
To win at trial, Wyatt faces a much more rigorous standard of evidence: beyond a reasonable doubt.
Very Quiet When We’re Hunting …
Schoneberger pursued other chinks in the case.
She asked McCall whether, when investigators first interviewed Goodman at a motel room in Riverton, they first delivered his Miranda rights.
The answer was no.
Police can interview someone without Mirandizing them first, but if a court later finds that the person was harangued, mobbed, intimidated, over-handled or confined to such an extent that he didn’t believe he was a free man at that time, then whatever police found during that interview becomes invalid.
Pursuing this line of reasoning, which could come in handy to the defense in the district court, Schoneberger also asked how many investigators were at that interview.
Just two, McCall answered.
She asked how they got into the motel room in the first place to find Goodman under the bed.
The woman who answered the door let them in, McCall answered.
In Prison
Goodman was already in prison when charged. He’s now in Fremont County custody.
He was recently serving a four-year prison sentence on a federal conviction of being a felon in possession of a firearm and a Fremont County conviction of aggravated assault.
Those convictions stem from an April 2023 brawl Goodman instigated on a Riverton bike path about a month after his alleged murder victim, Gustave Yellowhair, was found on the reservation.
Yellowhair was wrapped in hotel bedding with his feet and hands bound and his throat slit, according to court documents.
Under The Snow
McCall’s affidavit says two juveniles on March 20, 2023, alerted the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has a Wyoming outpost in the Wind River Police Department, of a body on Rendezvous Road in St. Stephens, the affidavit says.
A man nicknamed “John-John” had showed the juveniles the body, and said he’d killed the man because the man had wronged John-John’s sister, the document says.
FBI Special Agent Scott Jensen processed the scene. He noticed the dead man’s feet were visible, protruding from the snow though snow covered his body.
The body was wrapped in bedding, and his feet were bound with a cord, says the affidavit.
“It was later learned the male’s hands were bound by a cord as well,” wrote McCall.
The man’s head and neck had “obvious injuries,” and authorities later identified him as Gustave Elmer Yellowhair, born 1985.
Investigators identified “John-John” as John William Goodman, says the document.
Jensen later found a Super 8 hotel key card, then a second Super 8 key card, in the bedding in which Yellowhair lay wrapped. It looked like hotel bedding, the document says.
In His Grasp
At a March 22, 2023, autopsy, “pertinent items of evidence” were documented.
Namely, a black USB cord that had bound Yellowhair’s wrists; a white USB cord from his ankles and human hair, some from Yellowhair’s own head and some “which did not appear to be his,” wrote McCall.
Later in the same affidavit, McCall noted that the hair had been held in Yellowhair’s hand.
The investigation also threw a curveball: The Super 8 key cards may not have been from the Super 8.
Jensen interviewed staff at the Motel 6 in Riverton, who said they ran out of key cards in February 2023.
Goodman didn’t have a stay history at the Motel 6, but Yellowhair did. He’d stayed there Feb. 2, 2023, says the document.
Motel 6 staffers confirmed the bedding that had bound Yellowhair’s body “did match” Motel 6 bedding, wrote McCall.
Knock Knock
Jensen and McCall went to the Motel 6 to find Goodman on March 25, 2023.
A woman who would have then been about 38 (now 40) answered the door after the agents’ “persistent knocking,” and told agents Goodman wasn’t in the room, says the affidavit.
The agents reportedly found Goodman hiding under the bed.
They interviewed him, and he “initially denied showing anyone Yellowhair’s remains,” says the document.
Goodman later said someone else told him about the remains, and he went to the site with some females and “checked on it” before someone called it in.
Goodman said he’d been house-sitting for his sister over the weekend, which agents took to mean the weekend of March 17-20, 2023.
“Initially, Goodman told agents he got within three to four feet of Yellowhair’s remains,” wrote McCall.
But when agents pressed him about whether his DNA would be on those remains, Goodman said he touched Yellowhair’s shoulder and the bedding in which he was wrapped, the affidavit adds.
Goodman consented to agents taking a cheek swab for his DNA, reportedly.
Soaking Through
Riverton Police Department personnel visited the Motel 6 on March 27, 2023, and RPD Detective Sgt. Eric Smits received consent to search empty rooms there, the affidavit says.
He found blood stains in two rooms: 131 and 125. And in room 125, the mattress bore what looked like a “blood smear,” which Jensen swabbed, says the document.
In room 131, Smits found a mattress turned upside-down.
Once flipped right side up, the affidavit says, Smits found “several blood stains” with one stain near the mattress’ center circular in shape, looking like it had “soaked down through something that was on top.”
Motel 6 staff gave consent for investigators to cut a gouge out of the stained mattress as evidence, and Jensen did, reportedly. Investigators sent the evidence to the Wyoming State Crime Lab.
In The Meantime, A Brawl
On the afternoon of April 12, 2023, RPD Sgt. Charlie Marshall overheard a radio call for city units to find Goodman and another man, Steven Oldman (then about 33 years old), as they were suspected of hurting a woman with a pistol.
Agents converged on the Murdoch’s store since the men were seen entering it.
Officers found and detained Goodman, and later found a Taurus 9 mm pistol in the garbage can in front of the Murdoch’s store, according to an affidavit written that week by RPD Officer Don Nethicumara.
Contacted later at a local bank where she’d taken refuge, the victim told investigators that Goodman had “f***ing held a gun to my head!” and that he’d pistol-whipped her brother on the bike path in central Riverton.
This kicked off a brawl involving numerous people who’d been on the bike path, the victim and other witnesses and victims said.
Goodman remained at the Fremont County Detention Center while he was being prosecuted on the aggravated assault and other charges stemming from the brawl, court documents say.
Such Chatter
DCI agents and RPD detectives stayed on the murder investigation while Goodman was in jail. They reviewed his phone calls from jail and interviewed his associates, says McCall’s affidavit.
On Aug. 4, 2023, the document says, DCI Special Agent Mike Phillips interviewed a confidential informant who said that while in jail, Goodman had said he’d beaten a man, stabbed the man in the throat, wrapped up the body and thrown the body out on the reservation.
Phillips interviewed another source Aug. 15, 2023, who said Goodman was recruiting people for a new gang he called the “Maniacs.”
The source also reportedly said that Goodman had said he’d tortured a man at the Motel 6. He called the source a “Yellowrobe” and described killing him with a machete after beating him, the affidavit relates.
Goodman also described jumping on the machete while it was in the man’s neck and trying “to get the head to come off,” says the document, relating from the source interview.
“Goodman told (the source) he even made a song about the murder entitled ‘who got the last laugh now,’” McCall wrote, adding that Goodman told the source he’d wrapped the body in blankets from Motel 6.
A third confidential informant told Phillips on Aug. 22, 2023, that Goodman was recruiting people for the “Midwest Maniac” gang and that Goodman had described killing a man at the Motel 6, says the affidavit.
These references to the gang roughly echo the victim’s statements to police during the investigation of the April brawl. She said that during the attack, Goodman shouted, “This is Midwest Menace, bitches!”
The Frigid River
Phillips and McCall on Aug. 23, 2023, interviewed two men living in the home on the property where Yellowhair’s body was found.
One of the men said Goodman is a family member and has been at the home before; and it’s common for family members to party near the river, which ran nearby, says the document.
The homeowner “commonly found stolen vehicles” left there, and said he believed Yellowhair was dumped close to the road because heavy snow then blocked the road leading to the river, McCall wrote.
Cut It Short
McCall reviewed more jail calls and found “several conversations” in which Goodman referenced starting the new gang, the “Maniacs.”
“On several occasions,” wrote McCall, “Goodman referenced murder by using hand signs to form an M with his fingers. He made statements about committing an ‘M’ to be in the gang.”
Goodman told one contact that he’d learned his hair was found with Yellowhair’s remains, so he cut his own hair short, the document says.
“That’s the reason I cut it, is, because, you know what I mean,” said Goodman, reportedly. “I didn’t think that nigga got jammed up then I wasn’t going to put anything on the mom’s grave 'n shit, so that’s why I cut it.”
McCall also related phrases that led him to believe Goodman was saying he believed Yellowhair was involved with his sister’s death.
While the sister for whom Goodman had claimed to be house sitting was still alive during the investigation, another sister, Jamie Dawn Goodman, died in 2021, her obituary says.
Jamie Dawn Goodman’s obituary lists a “John Goodman” as her brother.
The Lab Sends Results
Smits forwarded FBI laboratory results to McCall on May 10, 2024, the document says.
The hair found in Yellowhair’s grasp returned a DNA result indicating a “possible DNA association” with Goodman.
When investigators compared Goodman’s cheek swabs to the hair, results that surfaced April 24, 2025, showed an intense match probability.
It’s 13 sextillion times more likely that Goodman is a DNA “contributor” of the hair than that some other, unknown person, McCall wrote.
A sextillion is a 1 with 21 zeros behind it.
The affidavit says an analysis of DNA found on the Super 8 room keys and USB cords showed “very strong support” that it was a mixture of Goodman’s DNA, Yellowhair’s DNA, and the DNA of an “as-yet unknown individual.”
The match likelihood for that “very strong support” was greater than a 1 sextillion ratio of probability, wrote McCall.
Goodman’s case is ongoing.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
