Cary Lynne Elkin, a 42-year-old White woman, was found dead during the early morning hours of April 2, 2021, inside a residence on Hungry Lake Lane in the Town of Sand Lake, near Stone Lake, Wisconsin. Sawyer County sheriff’s deputies were sent to the home at approximately 12:26 a.m. after receiving a report of a deceased woman. When they entered the residence, they discovered that Cary had suffered multiple gunshot wounds.
The Sawyer County Coroner’s Office subsequently confirmed her identity, and authorities began treating her death as a homicide.
The first arrest connected to the investigation involved Cary’s husband, Timothy P. Elkin. He was taken into custody shortly after her body was discovered and accused of hiding or concealing a corpse. Although early reports described his arrest as being connected to the death investigation, he was not identified by authorities as the person who shot Cary and was not charged with her murder. The unusual circumstances surrounding the concealment allegation added another layer to a case in which investigators initially released very little information about what had occurred inside the residence.
The Sawyer County Sheriff’s Office continued working the case with assistance from the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation, the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory and several law-enforcement agencies in Minnesota. Investigators executed search warrants, conducted interviews and submitted evidence for forensic examination. By late 2021, Sheriff Douglas Mrotek stated that authorities had developed a likely suspect and believed there was a reasonable motive for the killing, but officials withheld the suspect’s identity while additional investigative work and laboratory testing remained underway.
In May 2022, authorities publicly identified Manly M. McDermott of Bemidji, Minnesota, as the suspected gunman. Investigators said information gathered through search warrants, interviews and forensic analysis had connected McDermott to Cary’s shooting. The sheriff’s office forwarded the case to the Sawyer County District Attorney’s Office with a request that McDermott be charged with first-degree intentional homicide. At the time, McDermott was already incarcerated at the Moose Lake Correctional Facility in Minnesota, where he was serving a five-year sentence for an unrelated firearms conviction.
Despite the sheriff’s recommendation, formal homicide charges were not filed immediately. Nearly two years after McDermott had been publicly named, Cary’s family expressed frustration with the prolonged delay. The district attorney indicated that strategic considerations had affected the timing and that charges were expected during the summer of 2024. In August 2024, prosecutors filed charges against McDermott for first-degree intentional homicide and possession of a firearm by a felon, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in the Wisconsin case.
McDermott was subsequently transferred into Wisconsin custody and brought before the Sawyer County Circuit Court. Following a preliminary hearing in November 2024, the court found sufficient evidence for the prosecution to proceed and ordered him bound over for trial. A judge imposed a $1 million cash bond while the case moved through the court system. The prosecution’s case reportedly relied in part on DNA and ballistics evidence examined by the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory, together with evidence collected during the multistate investigation.
More recent reporting states that Manly McDermott was ultimately found guilty of murdering Cary Elkin. The available public reports confirm the guilty finding but provide limited information about the precise verdict date, the complete findings on each charged count or the sentence imposed. The conviction nevertheless marked the culmination of an investigation that stretched across several years, involved agencies in both Wisconsin and Minnesota and required extensive forensic work before the man investigators had identified in 2022 was formally prosecuted for Cary’s death.
