Never Coming Home: the 1968 Homecoming Murders that Shattered Small Rural Town of Lander, Wyoming

On the evening of November 1, 1968, Homecoming bonfire celebrations gave way to every parent's worst nightmare. Fifteen-year-old Dee Ann Smith and sixteen-year-old Vicki Lynn Mather vanished from the small Wyoming town of Lander, leaving behind frightened families and friends, unanswered questions, and a community struggling to believe that such a thing could happen there. For five long months, hope battled despair as winter buried the landscape beneath snow and silence. Then, on Good Friday, April 4, 1969, following a church Easter egg hunt, a group of Sunday School children and their teacher made a discovery along a rural county road that would forever change the town's history. By the following morning, both girls had been found, and the tragic truth could no longer remain hidden. In Never Coming Home, author Sandra Miller Linhart revisits one of Wyoming's most haunting and controversial murder cases. Drawing from court records, autopsy reports, newspaper accounts, interviews, and previously overlooked testimony, this carefully researched true-crime investigation examines not only the murders of Vicki and Dee Ann, but also the questions that lingered long after the conviction of their seventeen-year-old classmate, Craig Sims. More than a story of violence, this is a story about two young lives cut short, the families who never stopped grieving, and a community forever marked by loss, secrets, influence, and the search for truth.