New book takes a deep dive into the 1981 Mathis triple murder in Mount Vernon

Noel Hamiel couldn’t get the 1981 triple homicide case out of his head. Even though the born and bred South Dakotan was living in Kansas at the time, working at a daily newspaper, he kept reading the coverage of the Mathis murders in Mount Vernon.

“I’ve been fascinated with the case,” Hamiel said. His fascination led him to write “South Dakota’s Mathis Murders: Horror in the Heartland,” which published on April 25.

Early on the morning of Sept. 8, 1981, John Mathis called the Mount Vernon police to report that his 30-year-old wife Ladonna and their two young sons, ages four and two, had been shot and killed while they slept. Mathis had been attacked and shot in the arm by a masked assailant who he said killed his family.

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But, in May 1982, Mathis was acquitted of murdering his family and 40 years after the murders, it remains unsolved.

“I think I was haunted by the horrendousness of the crime because of the children,” Hamiel said. “I just couldn’t get over that.”

In the non-fiction book, Hamiel, who has worked across South Dakota as a journalist and was a former state legislator, takes case files, newspaper clippings and interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys and investigators to pull together a new look at the case. The research started two years ago.

“I felt a sense of time ticking and not just for me. I knew a lot of the other principals were like me, they were getting older,” he said, adding that the judge and jury foreperson had both died.

The interviews were also critical, especially since there were no transcripts of the trial available on hand. Hamiel said it would’ve cost thousands of dollars for the notes to be found and transcribed.

So he went straight to the source, speaking with Gary Lutgen, the court reporter who was in the room during the month-long trial in Yankton.

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“The Mathis trial was ‘The worst one I had to sit through,’” Lutgen told Hamiel in the book. “‘I saw my judge cry and I saw every juror cry at one time and I know I did.”

In a highly unusual move for the South Dakota Department of Criminal Investigation, they allowed Hamiel access to the Mathis murder investigation documents. He said that he’d been previously denied requests to look at a 1990 arson investigation at the historic Taft Hotel in Chamberlain.

“That made quite a difference,” he said.

That evidence was used at trial and the defense used it to their advantage, highlighting the contradictory information, from blood samples and to the bullets that were discovered at the scene, to even the broken watch Mathis was wearing when he said he was attacked.

No one could figure out what Mathis’s motive was and throughout the course of the investigation, the murder weapon was never found.

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“It’s a high bar. The burden was on the state,” Hamiel said of the challenge the prosecutors, one of them including the South Dakota attorney general, faced. “It was kind of a lot of fascinating contradictions in this case."

“I looked at this case for two years and what I came up with was maybe more questions than answers," he added.

While the last few chapters offer more information than was originally reported on in the early 1980s, including interviews with Mathis’s surviving son, Hamiel hopes that readers walk away understanding a bit more about South Dakota history.

“It’s a dark chapter in our state’s history. There’s been many gruesome murders in our state’s history, I still maintain that this one is unique,” he said.

Follow Annie Todd on Twitter @AnnieTodd96. Reach out to her with tips, questions and other community news at atodd@argusleader.com or give her a call at 605-215-3757.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Mathis Murders book takes deep dive into 1981 triple homicide