Wyoming 1975 Cold Case SOLVED — Arrest Shocks the Community

49 years ago, a school teacher in the farming township of Hawk Bluff, Wyoming, disappeared on a Friday afternoon in March, leaving behind a classroom of 32 arithmetic papers she had graded the night before, a pot of pinto beans simmering on her kitchen stove, and a collie dog named Fletcher, who sat on the front porch of her rented house for 3 days before a neighbor finally brought him inside.

Authorities at the time believed she had grown restless. A single woman in her 30s, they said, the kind of person who sometimes simply moves on. Her family, a brother and two sisters in Laramie, told investigators that was impossible. She had a job she loved. She had a contract signed through the following June.

She had a dog. The case was logged and set aside. And the high plains moved on the way the high plains always has, quietly, under an enormous sky, carrying its silences without complaint. Then, in the summer of 2023, a retired Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation Agent named Earl Briggs submitted a biological sample from a 48-year-old evidence kit to a forensic genealogy laboratory in Colorado.

 The technology that processed that sample did not exist when the teacher disappeared, did not exist when Briggs first worked the case in 1991, and barely existed when he retired in 2012. But in 2023, it existed. And within 3 months, it returned a name. And when that name was announced in the Platte County Courthouse on a November morning, the people who had lived alongside that name for half a century needed a long moment before they could speak.

But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to March of 1975. Because to understand what was lost from Hawk Bluff, you first have to understand who Miriam Jean Stokley was. Miriam Jean Stokley was 34 years old in the winter of 1975. A lean, sharp-eyed woman who had come to Hawk Bluff 3 years earlier from Cheyenne, taking the only teaching position available at the township’s single schoolhouse, a two-room building that housed grades 1 through 8, and had been doing so since 1931.

She taught the upper four grades, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. 21 children in one room, spread across four years of curriculum, which required the kind of organizational mind that Miriam had in abundance, and that Hawk Bluff had never managed to find in a permanent hire before she arrived. She had a teaching certificate from the University of Wyoming, and a previous posting in Rawlins that had ended when the school district consolidated.

 She drove a tan 1971 Dodge Dart with a cracked rear tail light she kept meaning to fix, and a back seat permanently occupied by stacks of textbooks, a thermos, and a worn canvas bag of worksheets. She wore her dark hair in a braid she could complete in under 2 minutes, which mattered on mornings when the temperature outside dropped below zero, and her water pipes took half an hour to run clear.

 She had been known in Rawlins for staying after school until 5:00 or 6:00 to work with students who were struggling, and she had carried that habit to Hawk Bluff without anyone asking her to. The township in 1975 held about 400 people spread across a wide, flat country where the nearest traffic signal was 30 miles east in Wheatland and the nearest hospital was 60 miles north in Casper.

Families ran cattle, winter wheat, and sugar beets on land their grandparents had homesteaded. Neighbors tracked each other’s movements not out of nosiness, but out of necessity. A broken-down tractor in February, a missed meal delivery, a light that stopped coming on in a window were all things the community noticed and responded to because out here distance could turn a small problem into a serious one before anyone realized.

People looked out for each other on the high plains. It was not sentiment. It was survival. Miriam had become part of the fabric of that community faster than anyone expected. By her second year, she was helping the Grange women organize their annual fundraising auction. She attended services at the First Lutheran Church on the highway and had taken on the role of teaching Sunday school to the younger children on alternating weeks.

 She had learned which families were struggling and which students needed an extra sandwich in their lunch without anyone having to say so aloud. The parents of her students had a phrase for how they talked about her. She stayed. Most teachers passed through Hawk Bluff in a year or two. Miriam had signed her third consecutive in January of 1975.

She told the school board president, a rancher named Don Haskell, that she planned to stay as long as they would have her. That conversation took place 8 weeks before she disappeared. The last Friday of her life was the 14th of March 1975. She dismissed her students at 3:30 as usual, reminded three of them about overdue library books and told a seventh grader named Alice Prentice who had just turned in a beautifully written report on Wyoming statehood that she should think seriously about becoming a writer someday.

Alice Prentice, who is now in her 60s and still lives near Wheatland, has not forgotten that. Miriam drove the Dodge Dart 3 miles to her rented house on Cut Bank Road, stopping briefly at the Hawk Bluff Mercantile to buy a bag of dried beans and a can of tomato paste. The owner, a man named Carl Ostrander, remembered that she had seemed her ordinary self, unhurried, pleasant, remarked that the weather was holding nicely for March.

She left at approximately 4:15 in the afternoon. The pot of beans was on the stove by 5:00. A neighbor driving past at 6:00 saw a light in her kitchen window. By Saturday morning, the light was off. Fletcher was on the porch and the Dodge Dart was gone. It was Don Haskell who first raised the alarm. He had tried to reach Miriam on Saturday to discuss a scheduling matter for the following week and gotten no answer.

He tried again Sunday morning. On Sunday afternoon, he drove out to Cut Bank Road and found Fletcher on the porch, thin and anxious, and the front door unlocked. The pot of beans had been on a low burner for 2 days. He turned off the stove, fed the dog from the sack of kibble inside the door, and drove to the county seat in Wheatland to find a sheriff’s deputy.

The Platte County Sheriff’s Office opened a welfare check on the morning of Monday, March 17th. Two deputies drove to the house. They noted the unlocked door, the cold beans, the dog. They noted no signs of a struggle inside the house. The arithmetic papers, 32 of them, graded in red pencil with Miriam’s characteristic marginalia, were stacked neatly on the kitchen table, ready to be returned Monday morning.

Her purse was not in the house. Her winter coat was not on the hook by the door. The initial assessment, she had left under her own power, likely over the weekend. A woman who had perhaps made a decision. By Tuesday, investigators had located the Dodge Dart. It was parked at the Greyhound Depot in Wheatland, 60 miles south of where Miriam had last been seen.

The keys were in the ignition. A Greyhound ticket agent working that weekend could not confirm whether he had seen Miriam or not. It had been a busy weekend, and 3 years before, he could not be expected to remember a particular face. Investigators focused on the bus angle for the better part of 2 weeks, tracing Greyhound routes east and west, contacting terminal agents in Cheyenne, Denver, Salt Lake City.

No record of Miriam Stokely appeared on any manifest. Nobody matching her description was recalled at any stop. Meanwhile, in Hawk Bluff, her brother Gerald had driven up from Laramie, and was not satisfied with what he was hearing. He sat in front of Platte County Sheriff Len Pool and said flatly that his sister had signed a teaching contract 2 months ago.

That she had a dog. That there was no reason on earth she would leave that dog on a porch for 3 days without arranging for someone to care for him. Fletcher, he said, was not a detail investigators should overlook. Sheriff Pool listened. He acknowledged Gerald Stokely’s concerns. He did not change his assessment.

By April, with no new leads and no confirmed sighting, the investigation narrowed to the car at the Greyhound Depot and the absence of a body, both of which Pool noted publicly suggested a voluntary departure rather than a crime. The case remained open in a technical sense. In a practical sense, it was over before the spring thaw.

A man named Randy Coulter had briefly attracted attention during the early investigation. He was 27 years old in 1975, worked on a ranch east of Hawk Bluff, and had been seen driving past the schoolhouse on several occasions. A woman who lived near Cut Bank Road mentioned that she had seen his truck near Miriam’s rental house one evening in February.

Coulter was questioned. He said he had been driving that road because it connected to the eastern ranch property. His employer confirmed it. He had no prior record, no connection to Miriam that investigators could establish, and no physical evidence linked him to anything. He was cleared and the inquiry moved on.

Gerald Stokely drove back to Laramie carrying a box of his sister’s belongings that the school board had gathered from her classroom. The 32 graded arithmetic papers were inside. He kept them. The years settled over Hawk Bluff the way snow settles on the high plains, quietly, completely, and for longer than you expect.

By 1980, 5 years had passed without a word. The little two-room schoolhouse had cycled through four teachers, none of whom stayed more than two years. Fletcher had lived out his days with Don Haskell’s family and been buried in their yard. Miriam’s rented house on Cutbank Road had a new tenant, a young couple with two children who knew nothing about who had lived there before.

By 1990, 15 years on, the Hawk Bluff Mercantile, where Carl Ostrander had rung up dried beans and tomato paste, had closed. The building sat empty. Gerald Stokely had married, had children of his own, and kept Miriam’s photograph on the mantelpiece in his living room in Laramie. He called the Platte County Sheriff’s Office every 2 years, without fail, and asked whether anything new had come in.

The answer was always the same. In 1991, a detective with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation named Earl Briggs requested the case file as part of a state-level review of long-term missing persons cases. He found it thin. The original evidence collection had been limited, but noted that a biological sample had been secured from inside the Dodge Dart in 1975.

A partial handprint on the passenger side window glass lifted and preserved. The technology in 1991 could not do much with it beyond confirming it was human biological material. Briggs filed a supplemental report recommending that the sample be retained with proper cold storage protocols and reviewed again when technology permitted.

He followed that recommendation himself for the next 21 years. Every 3 years, he checked. Every 3 years, the answer was the same. The science was not yet there. He retired in 2012. He did not stop checking. Don’t let stories like this one disappear. Every case on this channel is built from records, documents, and families who waited decades for someone to keep asking.

If that matters to you, take a moment to like this video and subscribe, and leave a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. Your support is why we keep going. Now, let’s get back to Earl Briggs and the sample he never stopped following. In the summer of 2022, Briggs read a newspaper article about a cold case in Idaho that had been resolved through forensic genealogy, the uploading of unknown DNA to public ancestry databases to trace a contributor through living relatives.

He had read about the technique before. But, this case was 46 years old, and the DNA had come from evidence collected in the 1970s. He called the Wyoming D the following morning. He explained the situation. He explained that the Stokley sample had been in cold storage since 1975, and asked whether the new genealogy process could be applied to a partial handprint lift from nearly half a century ago.

It could. It took 14 months to arrange the funding, the laboratory contract, and the submission. On a Wednesday afternoon in September 2023, Earl Briggs was sitting in the kitchen of his home outside Laramie when the phone rang. It was the investigator who had taken over the Stokley case at the DCI, a woman named Detective Sergeant Camille Fox.

She did not lead with small talk. She said, “Earl, we have a name. The forensic genealogy process had extracted a usable DNA profile from the 1975 handprint sample. A result that the laboratory described as uncommon but not unprecedented for material preserved under consistent cold storage. That profile had been uploaded to a public ancestry database, traced through a network of second and third cousins, and narrowed through a combination of age, gender, geographic records, and historical documents to a single individual who had

been living in Platte County, Wyoming for the entirety of the last 49 years. His name was Howard Dale Mercer. He was 76 years old. He was a retired ranch hand who had spent the last 15 years living in a small house in Wheatland, volunteering at the local food pantry on Tuesday mornings, and attending the same church he had attended since the 1980s.

His neighbors knew him as a quiet man who kept his property tidy, helped with fence repairs when he was asked, and could be relied upon to plow out his street after a heavy snowfall before anyone else was up. He had also, in 1975, been 28 years old, working on a ranch 12 miles east of Hawk Bluff, and driving a route that took him regularly past the two-room schoolhouse on the township road.

His name had never appeared in the original investigation. Detectives moved carefully. They gathered Mercer’s current DNA through material he discarded at a gas station, a paper coffee cup left in a trash can. The laboratory comparison against the 1975 handprint profile required three weeks. The result was unambiguous.

On November 7th, 2023, Detective Sergeant Fox and two uniformed officers arrived at Howard Dale Mercer’s house in Wheatland at 7:45 in the morning. He came to the door in work clothes as if he had been awake for hours. He looked at Fox. He looked at the officers behind her. Then, he stepped back from the door and sat down at his kitchen table without being asked.

And he did not say anything for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was to say that he had wondered when this would happen. He had wondered for a long time. He did not say more than that. His attorney arrived within the hour and advised him to stop talking, and he did. The arrest was processed that morning.

By noon, the name Howard Dale Mercer was circulating in Hawk Bluff and Wheatland, and in the corridors of the county courthouse. And the community’s reaction arrived in waves. First, disbelief. Then the kind of silence that precedes a heavier reckoning. Then something that might be called grief at one remove.

The grief of understanding that you have been living alongside something terrible without knowing it. Howard Dale Mercer had been at the food pantry the previous Tuesday. He had helped carry boxes for an elderly woman who could not manage them herself. He had waved at neighbors from his front porch, had been polite to the checkout clerk at the grocery store, had fixed the fence line along his property in October so that it would be in good order for the winter.

He had done all of this while in Laramie, Gerald Stokely had been calling the Platte County Sheriff’s Office every 2 years for 48 years and asking the same question. Mercer was charged with first-degree murder. He entered a guilty plea in March of 2024 and was sentenced to life in prison. He will die there. He has not, as of his sentencing, offered any explanation for what happened on the high plains in March of 1975, not to investigators, not in court, not in the single brief statement he gave at sentencing, which consisted of five words spoken in

a flat voice to no one in particular. “I am sorry for everything.” Miriam Stokley’s remains have not been found. Miriam Jean Stokley was 34 years old. She could complete her braid in under 2 minutes on a cold morning. She knew which students needed an extra sandwich without being told. She signed her third contract in January of 1975 because she planned to stay in Hawk Bluff for as long as they would have her.

And she told a seventh grader named Alice Prentice that she should seriously consider becoming a writer. And Alice Prentice did not forget that and has been carrying it for 50 years and perhaps will carry it for the rest of her life. Miriam had 32 graded arithmetic papers on her kitchen table ready to hand back on Monday morning.

She signed a teaching contract because she planned to stay. She left Fletcher a bowl of water. The case that nobody in official Wyoming treated as a crime in 1975 was resolved 48 years later because a retired investigator read a newspaper article, made a phone call, and refused to accept that what the technology couldn’t do in 1991 or 2003 or 2012 was what it couldn’t do forever.

Earl Briggs is not a young man. He did not need to keep checking. He kept checking anyway. There are questions this case leaves behind that are worth sitting with. What would the investigation have looked like in 1975 if Miriam Stokley had been a married man with children rather than a single woman in her 30s that authorities decided had simply moved on? How many other cold storage evidence samples from the 1970s are waiting in evidence lockers for a retired investigator willing to make one more phone call? And what do we owe to the families?

The Gerald Stokleys of this country who have been calling every 2 years without fail and not giving up. Justice found Miriam Johnson Stokley after 49 years. It found her because one investigator would not let the file go cold all the way. If stories like this one matter to you, the ones where the truth survives longer than anyone expected it to, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.

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