Richard Edward Nickels, a 39-year-old White male from Worland, Wyoming, died on March 16, 1982, and the surviving online trail gives the case a stark, half-finished feel. Modern memorial and cemetery records agree on the date and place of death, and they preserve just enough to show that his killing was part of a violent episode in Washakie County that day.
Even now, the case reads less like a neatly preserved court file and more like a life interrupted in mid-stride, with the public record surviving in fragments rather than a single full narrative.
What can be said with confidence from the available online sources is that the case did not simply vanish without a legal aftermath. Later Wyoming Department of Corrections-related reporting states that Donald L. Souter was convicted of first-degree murder in Washakie County and sentenced to life in prison on April 22, 1982. That later reporting, which resurfaced when Souter died in state custody in 2022, is the clearest online evidence that the shootings led to a conviction rather than remaining an unsolved mystery.
The harder part is the middle of the story. The online sources that are readily accessible today do not lay out, in one clean public account, the full sequence of arrest, charging, trial testimony, or the exact evidentiary path that led from the March 16 killing to the April 22 life sentence. They also do not clearly identify any additional suspects beyond Souter in the material now visible through searchable online sources. So the most careful reading is this: Richard Edward Nickels was killed in Worland on March 16, 1982, the case appears to have produced a first-degree murder conviction in Washakie County within weeks, and the only suspect whose name remains clearly recoverable online is Donald L. Souter.
That leaves the case with a lingering sense of distance. There is proof of death, proof of prosecution, and proof of punishment, but much of the human story in between has thinned with time. What remains is the outline of a man from Worland whose death was serious enough to end in a life sentence for someone in Washakie County, and whose name still surfaces more than four decades later in memorial records and prison-related reporting, like an echo from a Wyoming spring that never fully stopped reverberating.
