Female victim Elisabeth Miles “Lisa” Curtis Ehlers, age 25, a white resident of Jackson Hole, was found shot to death on June 21, 1984 at a highway turnout near the Hoback River on U.S. 191 just north of Bondurant, Wyoming.
She had at least two fatal gunshot wounds—one to the chest and one to the head—and also a wound to her right hand.
Reports noted her car was left in park with the engine running, personal items and money still inside, and that Elizabeth had been preparing to travel to Florida to join her husband.
The homicide of Elizabeth Ehlers, age 25, went cold for decades. In 1988, Idaho serial killer Paul Ezra Rhoades was publicly floated as a possible suspect in the killing near Bondurant, but despite investigators placing him in the broader region, no corroborating evidence emerged and he was never charged in connection with the death of Elizabeth Ehlers.
An arrest came nearly 25 years later. On March 1, 2009, authorities arrested 45-year-old Troy Dean Willoughby in Helena, Montana, and charged him with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Elizabeth Miles Curtis Ehlers, age 25, at the Bondurant turnout; he was extradited to Sublette County and held on $1 million bond. Sublette County officials described the apprehension as the first arrest in the long-standing cold case of Elizabeth Miles Curtis Ehlers.
In January 2010, a Sublette County jury convicted Willoughby of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison; the Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in June 2011. Later in 2011, however, prosecutors disclosed previously undisclosed reports from 1984, and a district judge granted Willoughby a new trial based on evidence issues; the case of the murder of Elizabeth Ehlers returned to court for retrial.
At the second trial in February 2012, a Fremont County jury in Lander acquitted Willoughby of the murder of Elizabeth Ehlers.
In 2013, state entities paid a combined $1.25 million to settle Willoughby's subsequent civil claims related to the investigation and prosecution tied to the death of Elizabeth Miles Curtis Ehlers, whose killing near Bondurant remains officially unsolved after the acquittal.
