Cold Case Files - REOPENED: DNA SPEAKS: Horror in the Dark

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

When teens Llianna Adank and Eric Goldstrand are found shot to death at an Oregon park in 1977, their parent’s worst nightmare had come true. Detectives pursue leads for 40 years until a single piece of evidence leads them to a suspect 3 states away.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, Cold Case listeners. I'm Marissa Pinson. And before we get into this week's episode, I just wanted to remind you that episodes of Cold Case Files, as well as the A&E Classic Podcasts, I Survived, American Justice, and City Confidential, are all available ad-free on the new A&E Crime and Investigation Channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple Plus for just $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. And now on to the show. This episode contains disturbing accounts of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's June 9, 1977 in Eugene, Oregon. The sun is warm, and teenagers Leanna Adank and Eric Goldstrand

are hoping to meet up with their friends at the Willamette National Forest to picnic and swim. Todd Proudfit is Eric's friend. We were at school early that day. He came up to me. Eric did, came up to me, and asked, hey, you know, we're going to go up to Broken Bowl and skip school and go out and play around. It's right on the river.

They're just little day parks is what they are up there. He had an old Ford truck that he was really proud of. He was one of the only one of us that had a vehicle, so he became our driver and always willing to take us guys out to play. it broke down quite often. I had already skipped every class I could skip. I just told them I couldn't go. I think they were hoping that a bunch of us could go have fun and make some magic.

Leanna and Eric had to broken bull by themselves in Eric's old Ford truck. When the couple's curfew comes and goes and there's no sign of them, Eric's mother, Donna Burbach, and stepfather Ted, start to worry. My husband Ted and I went up about 10.30, looking at. for the kids, and probably at that point I wasn't real thrilled that he hadn't called or notified me. I kind of thought probably his truck was broke down, so we just started driving looking for it. Kurt West is a former detective with the Lane County Sheriff's Office. Broken Bowl campground is, it's heavily wooded, thick underbrush. There were picnic areas that were

divided by trees and underbrush, was close to the Fall Creek. We found his truck, the Broken Bull. It was the only truck in the parking lot, parked right up next to the sidewalk in front of the picnic tables with no lights anywhere except one light. It was pitch black. All their stuff was in the pickup, except their swimsuits and their fishing poles. And so they had to be somewhere either hurt or whatever, we started calling their names and looking for him, hoping that it wasn't anything horrible.

It was terrifying out there at night. It was cold black. You couldn't see anything. You couldn't see in front of your face. And when we couldn't find them, it's when we went down below and called the sheriff's department. They just asked us to wait. And then we parked by his truck. Chad Rogers is a sergeant with the Lane County Sheriff's Office.

Sheriff's Office received a phone call from Eric Goldstrand's parents that Eric and Leanna are missing up in the Broken Bowl recreational area. A deputy and a trainee head up that way. Ted and I just sat in the truck and held each other waiting for the police to get there. What the police really thought was that he was lost. He wasn't lost. Eric knew the woods very well. He'd been in the woods all his life. He wasn't lost. What if the very, I couldn't say what a very extent. I said, what if the very ultimate has happened? The deputy and his recruit arrived at approximately 2.30. They examined Eric's truck. This particular campground had no artificial light at all, so all they had were their flashlights. Approximately 100 feet from the truck, the deputy discovered a body on the ground,

and it was that of a young woman. She was a... was lying on the picnic area on her back. She was nude, had her arms to her sides up by her head. The deputy goes and tells Eric's stepdad what he had found and has him take the mom away. I wondered if they had found one of them or if they had just given up that they shouldn't be in there until it was daylight. I wasn't real sure. Eric's stepdad waits until he and Donna are home. Then he breaks the news. When we got in the house, he told me that they found me Anna. She didn't have any clothes on.

Had to be horrible. Fear. I felt terrified because I thought, you know, Eric has to be someplace there. You could never get away from Eric's smile. He had a beautiful, beautiful smile. He's gorgeous. He liked to play football.

He loved to play football. his friends. To a real sweet girl who I like a lot, your friend, Eric, real sweet girl. It sounded like we were 12. We had an area in high school that was a lounge where they have fireplace and places to sit. That's kind of where everybody would hang out when you weren't in class. He was just always coming in and he'd sit down next to you and how you doing, Tadala, la, let's go take off and do whatever. You just was a funny guy. Eric in his very short time here and the two years we got to hang out and be friends.

I can never remember him being down. I can never remember him being angry. I can never remember him being mean. I just always remember him smiling and bouncing around high school. Eric was a kind of person that you could also just spend time with and not have to talk. Didn't I mean? You could just be in a little.

room he's reading a book and be happy. Leanna was family. My aunt married her dad. She was like a year and eight months younger than me, so we were close in age. Just a sweet person that I liked having time with. Not enough. Not enough time.

Leanna's personality was a lot like mine, and we were both outgoing in sports and athletics and music. We both loved riding horses, and we just had fun together. It was, she was easy to talk to and laugh with. Bonnie Van Nuys is Leanna's friend. She was a true friend. She was a friend that had you back and told your secrets to. We were kind of sisterly. We'd take off on a Saturday morning, ride horses all day long. She would challenge you, she was real spunky, full of life, bubbly. She was probably the best friend I ever had in my life. Eric and Leanna met in junior high. By the time she's 16 and he's almost 17, they're a

couple. I think Eric was probably her first big love, yeah. She loved Eric to pieces. As girlfriends, you know, we talked and she was head over heels and loved Eric. He was very good. He was very, crazy about her too. I just loved him together. They always looked happy together in Eric's old truck and just having a good time. One hour after Leanna's body is found, at the campground, police secure the area and decide not to move the body in the pitch dark and disrupt the crime scene. At the time, I was working patrol graveyard quite a few miles away from the scene. I specifically remember when the call came in.

It was an unusual one where a young person had been discovered. It starts getting closer to first light. Detectives start showing up, and their crime scene unit shows up, and they make the decision to wait until the sun comes up again because they don't want to stumble around in the dark in the woods

and either alter or potentially destroy evidence. They were concerned for a situation that Eric was not seen in the area. More often than not, in a homicide, the suspect is someone who knows the victim. Certainly one of the things they would have thought or worried about was maybe Eric's the suspect. You don't know if there's still a suspect in the area.

You have a deceased young lady, and we have a missing young man. All we can do is speculate as to what happened. I had the feeling that they thought Eric had something to do with it, that he had or possibly had done it. As the sun rises, the crime unit begins to process the scene. They look at Leanna's body. Her two-piece swimsuit is off of her, laying on the ground next to her on the other side. There's a towel in near her shoulder, a watered-up towel on the picnic bench.

Immediately, you would assume that there's been a sexual assault in addition to the homicide. Investigators search the area when they find that this tragedy is much worse than they initially thought. At approximately 6.20 in the morning, evidence tech found Eric's body approximately 25 feet from Leanna's body. and he was in the bushes next to it fallen tree, and he had also been shot. You take things like this personally when it's this horrendous. It really motivates you to try to find out who did it. We had deputies and search and rescue people search the entire area,

and also we had roadblocks up. We had a helicopter up there that surveilled the area also. There was nothing that was obvious as far as potential suspects. Unaware that detectives had found their son, Eric's family anxiously waits for news. We just had to wait. They did come that morning when I saw the police I knew. One of the policemen that was there was a personal friend. And when he walked over, he put his arms around me.

And I knew. We were at school. One of my buddies, Scott, just came blasting in the door, in the middle of class. And he says, Todd, we have to go. Our friends were waiting at the street. Scott and I jumped in the car. We ended up being the only four civilians that got to Broken Bowl. And right then is when reality hit.

The first hearse pulled out and drove by. The second hearse drove out and drove by. And I'll be honest with you, from there forward, I don't remember a whole lot. We just stood there and, I think, cried, hugged. We knew our buddy was gone. The bodies of Eric and Leanna are taken to the medical examiner, who conducts the autopsies. The autopsy was done at a Sacred Heart Hospital,

and initially they determined that Leanna had three gunshot wounds, one to the chest and one to the forehead, and then one to the left temple, with a 22-caliber revolver. There had been some seminal fluid found on her body. She had been sexually assaulted. Eric had a gunshot wound at the chest. He gets shot from a dimplever.

distance away. As he comes up the trail into the camp, that shot didn't kill him right away. And then the shot that starts the top of his head from back to front, the second shot that maybe causes him to stumble or fall or trip over this log that he was found lying behind. Five days later, family and friends say goodbye to Leanna and Eric. Among them is Kathy Aaron Kloster, Leanna's cousin. It was a double funeral, and there's probably five, six hundred people there. I remember the two caskets sitting at the front of the church and the two ministers and all the kids. They had open casket funeral.

A lot of people had a real tough time with that. There was people drop into the ground. I happened to be one of them. There was a very horrible scene to see these young people. They tried to do good. They tried to make them look good, but you can't. They asked me to sing at her funeral. which was the single most challenging and tough thing I've ever done in my whole life.

And I've been through some tough things in my life too. I ended up singing in kind of a foyer area. I pointed my music stand at a brick wall. So I didn't have to look at anyone's face or see a flower or a casket or anything. Pluto phone. If you knew the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV. where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman, the legend of Ron Burgundy.

Fantastic. The Matrix trilogy. Welcome to the real world. Mean girls. Shut up. Titanic. I'm the key in the world. And so much more.

For showtimes, press nothing. They're free 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Two and a half months after Eric and Leanna are murdered, the search for the killer stalls until the sheriff's office receives a tip.

Some information came in about two months after the homicide that an individual had been up there with his friend looking for fishing holes around the time of the homicide. And he had a reputation of being kind of a bully and a braggart. While they were up there, they observed a young couple that were skinny dipping, and this individual made comments about how he would sexually abused the young girl.

This particular individual was very aggressive. This was a good lead because of the attitude of the individual and his sexual comments about the young woman who's known to have quite a few firearms. He could have committed the crime. A couple of detectives contacted this individual. This particular individual disliked police officers. He had had some minor brushes with the law,

but nothing serious. He eventually provided his story to the detectives. The only description was that it was a young couple. They had bicycles with them and that they were skinny dipping. Leanna and Eric did not have bicycles at the time. They determined that he was potentially a suspect, but detectives were unable to provide any evidence that he was directly involved. Just as leads begin to grow scarce,

A promising suspect emerges as part of the continuing sweep on ex-offenders and parolees. He was a subject named Dwayne Little. Dwayne Little had been arrested as a teenager in 1964. He was convicted in 1966 of murder and rape of a young woman. And he was paroled in 1974 and arrested again shortly after that for felon in possession of a firearm. and he was again paroled in 1977 just prior to our homicide. He was, I believe, living in Portland at the time. Given his history and his proximity to the area,

he was considered a prime suspect. Dwayne Little was interviewed, and he said that he was working swing shift on June 9th at the time of the homicide. Detectives confirmed that he was working in Portland at that particular time. that's an hour and a half, two hours away. And there's basically no way he could have committed the crime.

You get a lead that looks promising. You do get excited. And it's a disappointment when it turns out to be not quite what you're expected. After months of interviews and polygraphs, police have no suspects, and the case of the carefree teens goes cold. This was random, unprovoked. which is probably one of the biggest reasons the case went cold. Within the year after it happened, your investigators, your detectives run out of,

leads to follow-up on it. It kind of gets put on a shelf, and then it kind of goes cold. In the beginning, I thought, nobody could get away with this, but I soon learned that you can. The first Mother's Day was, yeah, that was hard. Those kind of days turned into sad days. They're part of your life. Losing him and her leaves a hole in my heart.

It took a long time to get past the pain. As years, then decades go by, forensic science begins to transform the work of the police. So in the mid-90s, the detective who was managing the case learned about DNA. It was kind of a new tool for law enforcement then. She looked at what had been collected back in 1977. She had two towels that had seminal fluid on him.

The state police crime lab tested it and extracted a male DNA profile. If we could match the DNA, we could identify the individual that had killed Leon and Eric. We ended up submitting the profile to CODIS, which is a national database run by the FBI, and received no matches on that. It's disheartening when you don't get a CODIS match. Your donor, your suspect,

He's never been convicted of a felony or a violent crime, so the government has not taken his DNA. It's now 2005, 28 years after Leanna Adank and Eric Golds-Transm murders. Tell me about when you became a detective and then when you became involved in this case. Yeah, I became a detective with the sheriff's office in 1983 and really had no direct involvement with the case. until approximately 1986. I do believe I followed up a couple instances of new information, but nothing dramatic. When I retired in 2002,

I talked to the sheriff about potentially starting a cold case unit. Because when you're an investigator for years and years, it's part of your life. It's just who you are. It took us a few years to get one together finally. And it was myself and two other retired detectives. We volunteered our time. This case was always on the forefront as far as cold cases goes. It was a horrific case that as far as we know this person's still out there.

You can't help after all those years of losing some amount of hope. So at some point you just have to accept the way things are. It was just cold. And there wasn't, you couldn't really have to accept. was that you couldn't really have a lot of hope for it because you move through your life, you have to move on. It's now summer 2014, 37 years after Leanna and Eric's murders. We're volunteers, but each one of our cold cases is assigned to a full-time detective. I was assigned the case in 2014. It was already 37 years cold. Kurt and I frequently talked about the serial killers that were running around in the North

in the mid and late 70s. Maybe our double murders down here at Broken Bowl was someone who'd done this before. It was such a cold-blooded killing that this was probably not the person's first time. So shortly after this case was assigned to me, Kurt got a tip from another cold case detective in Northern California in Santa Barbara County

about a guy named Thor Christensen, a serial killer in the late 70s. Thor Christensen is a method of operation was to pick up hijacking young women and drive them to a rural area and shoot them in the temple with a 22 caliber revolver. And then he would sexually assault them post-mortem, leave the bodies there.

And he did this on at least three occasions. There were a lot of similarities there to our case, and we discovered that Thor Christensen had actually been in Eugene in June of 1977, which is the month of our homicide. Christensen is a strong suspect, but not a perfect one. Eric Goldshend was also murdered, and our thought was Liana was attacked in the campsite or the picnic area first, while Eric was away down at the creek.

The killer didn't realize Eric Goldstrom was there, and then he gets surprised. Now this witness shows up that he can't let get away. It was too many coincidences for us to overlook. It was consistent enough that it got our attention. There was another situation in Los Angeles where he had picked up a prostitute. He was going into the Hollywood Hills,

and she was able to escape. Approximately three months later, she was in a bar in Los Angeles, and she saw Thor Christensen walk in, at which time she called the police, he was taken into custody, charged with attempted murder. 41 years after the murders, detectives focus on Christensen. They send the DNA found at the crime scene in Eugene to a genetic analysis company called Parabon for features.

a technique that uses DNA to make a sketch of the suspect. The results of the phenotyping were incredible. It was almost like a drawing of Thor's face. We were certain Thor was our killer. We just had to now prove it. But there's a problem. Christensen is dead. Getting his DNA presents a challenge.

In June of 1980, Thor Christensen was convicted of murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. He was murdered in Folsom Prison about six months later. He was stabbed to death. What we had hoped for was that the makeshift knife that was used to stab him would still be in evidence and it would have Thor's DNA on it still. That makeshift knife was misplaced, lost, thrown away. Detectives changed tactics and ask Christensen's relatives for a familial DNA

sample to compare to the sample found at the crime scene. Every kind of family member that we get in touch with doesn't want to participate, and so it's super frustrating, just maddening, frustrating. It looks like yet another dead end. But then, detectives got a lucky break. We got some assistance from Santa Barbara Sheriff's Office again. Thor's brother had passed away, and we were able to get a blizzard.

blood sample from the medical examiner. So we were able to get a copy of the DNA that way. We were very excited, hoping that we would get a match, a familial match. Once we submitted that, thinking that this was going to be it. We're excited, we're just waiting, watching the clock tick by waiting to hear back from the crime lab that it's a match. For sure, it has to be him. Thor Christensen was the best lead that we'd ever had. It had to be him.

When we initially got the results, I thought somebody must have made a mistake. Curtt calls me and tells me it isn't Thor. I didn't believe him. Like, legitimately did not believe him. I'm like, no, you're wrong. They're wrong. And he's like, no, there's like no familial match. It was upsetting, but we weren't done.

In the years since the murders, a new technology has emerged, called genetic genealogy. It's the use of public ancestry databases to trace a family line from the DNA left at the crime scene. News media was talking about the Golden State Killer crime having been solved with DNA and genetic genealogy. So it ended up contacting Parabon Nanolabs,

and we ended up submitting our DNA sample to them. Initially, Parabon's investigation was not productive. The first run on a genealogy, we had relatives so distanced that there was no way we could put together a suspect. However, we hooked into another family tree website, and they ended up coming up with three people that were closely related. They narrowed down the likely source. of our DNA was one of three brothers. The Troy brothers, all three of whom were born, grew up in the area in Lane County,

up near Brokeable up in the town of Oak Ridge. We determine one of the three brothers still lives in Lang County, in the Eugene area. And then the other two live down in Mesa, Arizona. First thing we set out to do was, through physical evidence, eliminate the middle brother, because he's the one that lives here in town.

lives here in town. We just tailed him, just set up surveillance on him and followed him around. He was a smoker. When the middle brother flipped a cigarette butt out his window, partner fell in behind him, snatched up the cigarette butt, and submits the evidence to the lab to be tested. The results indicated that it was not the middle brother,

however, it was someone directly related to it. So that left the two brothers that lived in Mesa. Police compare their phenotype sketch to the two other Shroy brothers. The sketch matches the younger brother Daniel's face and oldest brother Ronald's hair and eye color. We determined that the younger brother was actually in the Navy at the time of our homicide,

which left the older brother. Ronald Shroy had been in Eugene in 1976. We were able to identify some prior arrests, one of which was a sexual assault in Colorado. He had also been arrested for assault on his brother a couple of years prior. We contacted Mesa PD and we had asked them to do some surveillance and see if they could also obtain discarded DNA from one of the subjects. Unfortunately the situation there was that they were living in a gated community and they've

rarely left their home. In February 24th of 2021, I was headed out the door for a totally unrelated shooting investigation. And my cell phone rings, and it's from the Mesa PD detective. So I answered, I'm carrying my bags out to my truck. And she says, you're not going to believe this. There's been a shooting at the Shroy house. My gut just sinks. Mesa PD get there.

The house is pretty tore up. It was a pretty vigorous physical. dispute the two brothers were having. Younger brother's nose is bloody, his face is swollen and cut, he's bleeding. And then in Ronald's bedroom, lying back on his bed with a gunshot wound to his head. So initially, Mesa PD, not knowing for sure what happened, treated it like a homicide. Then the medical examiner did the autopsy, and they determined it was self-inflicted gunshot wound. I was not expecting that.

Lead suspect Ronald Troy's suicide doesn't prove his guilt, but it does give investigation. a key piece of evidence. The Mesa PD detective got DNA from Ronald because he was deceased. We submitted that DNA to Oregon crime lab and it was a perfect match for Ronald Schroi. It's him. 100% it's him.

I 100% believe that Ronald Schroy killed Leanna and Eric. So Kurt and I go down to Mesa and we meet up with the detective and she takes us to the younger brother's house. And when we pull up, He's sitting out on the front patio area of this trailer house.

We recorded our interview with him, and he was a little surprised that Kurt and I were there. And then when we introduced ourselves, he really didn't understand why we were there. Come on, if I sit down? Yeah, girl. My name's Chad. I'm a detective with the Lane County Sheriff's Office, and this is my partner, Kurt. We're investigating a cold case. We got some information that maybe Ron was associated with some violent crime.

You know anything about anything that he may have been? No, I don't. Okay. And so we talked to him for about an hour and a half, hour, and 45 minutes. He was very forthcoming. He was emotional on and off through our interview. Ron always wanted to be dominant. There was talk about some other type of abuse, historical abuse with him.

Ron was a very abusive person. Okay. He enjoyed it. He had some sexual appetites that were. really out of all right okay we have found his DNA on some old evidence that was preserved from way back in the 70s and it was up at broken bowl campground it was a double homicide you knew the wrong was suspect yeah we just hadn't we weren't ready to be down here yet at that point um so it's just too bad i never heard it i i i i i never heard i i i i i

I was gone at the time, I guess 7 and 7. Yeah, I was in the Navy a couple of years already. Mm-hmm. There was just two high school kids. They were up there fishing, basically. And, uh... Well, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I feel embarrassed. Yeah, we feel bad about having to come up here. He didn't really know about the murders up at Broken Bowl. He didn't know about Leanna and Eric. We learned that it didn't work. They just sat at home, watched TV most of the time. And both he and his brother watched true crime shows quite a bit. Every week, there was an old case that was being solved with DNA.

We were sitting in there and watching the TV, and they had one of these ancestry DNA commercial TV. And I mentioned a run. I thought I might like to do that. Well, he'd hopped out of the seat. Blue is top. So I didn't do it. Right.

And I think both Kurt and I at the same time in our heads are thinking, because he says that kind of contemporaneous to the conversation about them watching true crime documentaries. And Kurt and I kind of look at each other. And so there's no way for us to know for sure. But it's my belief that Ronald was worried that DNA was going to catch up to him.

On September 13th, I got a phone call and I looked down and I saw it was Kurt's name. They had solved the case. And just tears streaming down my face. And that was 44 years, three months and four days after they were murdered, that we finally got the call. When I first found out that it got solved, I felt relieved.

I felt shocked. I felt sad. I felt angry. This person chose to end his life and not have to be held accountable. That makes me angry. I would kind of like to know why. What was maybe wrong with him

or if nothing was wrong with him? Did he ever do this to anybody else? Those are kind of questions that you can't help but wonder about. We should have at least got the chance, you know, to find out. to find out why did you do this? What would make you do this? What would make you kill our friends? The world missed out on a lot of laughter,

because Leanna was funny and happy and smiling and laughing all the time. She had fire, so I'm sure she would have gone on to done great things. They had a lot to give to the world. I have spent my time since I lost Eric, thinking about the good time. we had. I miss his sense of humor. I miss his hugs. I miss just our chats. I love them so much. You've got to wonder, what would his life would have been like? Maybe they'd have gotten married and had a wonderful family. We missed a lot. Cold Case Files is hosted by Marissa Pinson, produced by Jeff DeRay,

and distributed by podcast one. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at A&TV.com. Hello, and welcome to Plutofo. If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV, where all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch Anchorman, the legend of Ron Burgundy.

Fantastic. The Matrix Trilogy. Welcome to the real world. Mean girls. Shut up. Titanic. I'm the king of the world. And so much more.

For showtimes, press nothing. They're free 24-7. That is so fetch. On Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.