Into thin air: What happened to Ellabeth Lodermeier?

On March 6, 1974, Sioux Falls police arrived at 305 North Indiana Avenue to find a puzzling scene. On the kitchen floor lay a pizza with one slice missing, along with a spattering of spilled flour. A loaf of bread sat rising on a counter.

The house was locked and a car sat in the driveway.

The woman who lived there was Ellabeth Lodermeier, a 25-year-old Aberdeen native and Augustana College grad who had recently ended a relationship that friends and family described as abusive.

She did not show up to work that day or any day after. A coworker offered a $1,200 reward for information about her whereabouts, but no one stepped forward.

Seven months later, a possible breakthrough emerged when three of Lodermeier's credit cards were found at a railway station in Manitoba, Canada. That lead soon stalled.

Eighteen years after that, in 1992, a farmer found her purse and pocketbook along the Big Sioux River east of Sioux Falls. But no arrests were made and no body discovered, adding to the frustration of friends and family.

“It’s disappointing,” said Ellabeth’s niece, Elizabeth Crow, who lives in Sioux Falls. “Somebody has to know something, I feel, but it’s just getting them to come forward and say something.”

The mystery is equally unsettling to Jerry Thomas, who met Ellabeth the night she filed for divorce and grew close enough that they planned a future together.

It has been nearly 45 years since her disappearance, with many twists and turns in the investigation. But until more answers come forth or her body is found, those who knew her will be haunted by the most maddening question of all: Where is Ellabeth Lodermeier?

To those who knew Ellabeth Mae Keller in Aberdeen, where she grew up, it was not surprising that she ended up helping others for a living.

The youngest of four children born to Leslie and Mildred Keller, Ellabeth was a patient person whose empathy stood out to those around her.

“I knew Ellie as always just caring for other people, and she helped Mom out with us kids,” said Kris Jacobsen, of Pierre, one of Ellabeth's nieces.

After graduating from high school, Ellabeth first attended Northern State University in her hometown before transferring to Augustana, where she graduated in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in social work.

At the time of her disappearance, she worked at the Community Services Office in Sioux Falls as a social worker, a job that Jerry Thomas says fit her well.

"She had a personality like you can't believe," said Thomas, 71, a retired businessman who lives in Bismarck, N.D. "And (she was) easy to talk to. I can see where she would have been great at her job."

It was in Aberdeen that Ellabeth met her future husband, Gene Lodermeier, a Washington High School grad who was attending Northern State at the time. Their relationship evolved quickly and led to a wedding in January 1970 at Faith United Methodist Church in Aberdeen.

A newspaper wedding announcement portrayed a smiling Ellabeth, wearing a pearl-trimmed crown and veil, her signature dark bangs visible beneath. She carried two long-stemmed red roses and one white rose on a Bible, symbols of a future that seemed destined to be bright.

Timeline:The disappearance of Ellabeth Lodermeier

But the happy scene depicted in the newspaper did not tell the whole story. Ellabeth’s family did not approve of Gene, despite his involvement in church and Boy Scouts.

Ellabeth, described by relatives as a fun, carefree person, was not as relaxed when Gene was around.

“She seemed not herself,” said Jacobsen, who was in seventh grade when her aunt disappeared. “When he was there, she was just a different person.”

Jacobsen recalled going to the beach and the movies with Gene and Ellabeth, including one outing when Gene's anger flashed on the way home.

“He was very upset about a particular person,” Jacobsen said. “He was screaming and hollering and banging on the steering wheel.”

By 1973, Ellabeth had had enough: She filed for divorce. According to a deposition she gave in connection with the divorce proceedings, she said under oath that Gene abused her, a charge he denied in court years later.

To this day, though, Jacobsen said the signs were there. She remembers her mother, Ellabeth’s sister Sandra Herman, telling her that Gene would sometimes disable Ellabeth's car to prevent her from going to school at Augustana.

“He was a master manipulator,” Jacobsen said. “It was unfortunate that Ellie, being a kind soul, got sucked into that. … She always thought maybe she could change him.”

Three weeks before the divorce was set to go to trial, Ellabeth vanished.

Jerry Thomas met Ellabeth Lodermeier the day she filed for divorce, while both were meeting friends at the Pomp Room, an iconic downtown Sioux Falls bar.

Thomas found Ellabeth easy to talk to, as well as kind and beautiful. They agreed to meet up again a few days later.

“We hit it off, I mean, we just flat hit it off,” Thomas said. “We liked each other immediately.”

Originally from Redfield, Thomas was working in Sioux Falls when he met Ellabeth. Over the next year, as the two became more serious, he moved to Sioux Falls full-time.

“We had planned a future together,” Thomas said.

The night Ellabeth vanished, he had agreed to call her at home between 9 and 9:30 p.m., as he had gone back up to Redfield to do some work. He called the house three times, and each time, the upstairs tenant answered.

The next morning, one of Ellabeth’s friends called Thomas to let him know she was missing. His first reaction was fear.

“I got in the car and headed straight for Sioux Falls,” he said. “To me, it was (obvious) that she did not leave. There’s no way, it wouldn’t happen.”

Unsolved:5 South Dakota murder and missing person mysteries to remember

When Jerry arrived in Sioux Falls, he headed to the police department, where he was given a polygraph and cleared almost immediately.

“When I walked out of the polygraph test, the guy that administered it … said, ‘This guy didn’t have a damn thing to do with this,’” Jerry said.

From the beginning, the case seemed suspicious. Eight days after Ellabeth’s disappearance, the Argus Leader ran a story in which police asked citizens to check abandoned farm buildings and other areas that might conceal a body. 

Henry Luebke was one of the police officers assigned to investigate. He had moved to the detective bureau from the patrol division in 1969, about five years before Ellabeth went missing.

“It appeared that she didn’t disappear of her own volition,” said Luebke, who is now retired and lives near Canton.

He interviewed family, friends, coworkers and ex-boyfriends, but nothing came of it.  Search warrants were issued for areas in Sioux Falls and other parts of South Dakota, but Ellabeth was not found.

“It was a big blank,” Luebke said. “No useful information came up.”

That trend appeared ready to change when three of Ellabeth's credit cards were found at a railway station in Dauphin, Manitoba. But Detective Pat Mertes, who is the current investigator assigned to Ellabeth’s case, said it is unlikely she ever traveled there.

“It appears it was probably a red herring to throw investigators off,” he said.

The last notable break in the case came in 1992, 18 years after the initial disappearance. A farmer found a woman’s purse and pocketbook along the Big Sioux River east of Sioux Falls. They were determined to be Ellabeth’s.

Despite the lack of evidence suggesting Ellabeth was dead, her family was certain something terrible had happened.

“I think everybody from the beginning assumed Gene did something to her,” Jacobsen said. “I don’t recall anybody thinking that she just picked up and left on her own.”

Mertes confirms that Gene was a person of interest in the case, adding that his death in 2013 prevented any further inquiry into his involvement.

“He was never able to be 100 percent cleared,” Mertes said, adding that other people were investigated but quickly eliminated as suspects.

While Ellabeth’s family suspected Gene and he was interviewed by police, he was never charged in her murder. But the unsolved disappearance of his wife would cast a long shadow over the rest of his numerous brushes with the law.

In February 1978, Gene filed a lawsuit against the city of Sioux Falls, saying he had been harassed and followed by police officers during their investigation of Ellabeth’s disappearance. 

In his complaint, he said they “falsely and maliciously stated directly and by innuendo” that Lodermeier killed his wife, although he was never charged with any crime related to her disappearance.

Lodermeier said that in March 1974, he was questioned by police for 21 hours without being allowed to eat, sleep or use a phone. He said he was then held in the Minnehaha County Jail for nine days. 

More than two years later, six Sioux Falls police officers, including Luebke, testified that they had only been doing their job while investigating the case. Luebke testified that he spoke with Lodermeier daily in the early weeks of the investigation.

“We had many different leads we were checking out,” Luebke said in court.

When Lodermeier’s lawyer, Jon N. Gridley III, asked if the police had a plan to follow Lodermeier, Luebke said, “Absolutely not.”

Lodermeier testified that officer Don Skadsen told him, “Gene, we can’t let a murder die. This will haunt you until it’s solved.”

In the end, the six officers were found not guilty of harassment. 

Gene would go on to be convicted of both misdemeanor and felony crimes, several of them involving retaliation for other matters.

“In 1975, he was convicted of shoplifting at Lewis Drug here,” the Argus Leader reported in 1988. “A year later, he went on a window-breaking rampage at the local chain store’s city locations. The police officer who caught Lodermeier breaking the windows, Al Fields, had a homemade pipe bomb explode inside his car a year later.”

Lodermeier was never charged in the pipe bomb explosion.

In 1989, he was given three 15-year penitentiary sentences for grand theft, a total of 45 years in prison. When he was arrested, he was held on a $1 million cash bond, after Judge Robert Heege deemed him a danger to two detectives who had investigated previous grand theft charges against Gene.

He was accused of talking about having two Sioux Falls police officers, a former employee and Judge R.D. Hurd killed, although those charges never made it to court.

“This defendant has no remorse,” Hurd said at Gene’s sentencing. “The only remorse he has is that he got caught again.”

Although Lodermeier and his parents filed lawsuits and appeals, he was denied a new trial and spent 13 years in prison before being paroled in 2002. He died at home of an aortic aneurysm on April 18, 2013.

Anything he may have known about Ellabeth’s disappearance died with him.

It has been nearly 45 years since Ellabeth Lodermeier was last seen, and authorities are no closer to discovering what happened to her.

In 2016, Detective Mertes inherited the case. A press conference he gave to reignite interest in the unsolved mystery generated 17 new tips, but none of them gave police what they needed to find Ellabeth.

To this day, Mertes says police are not done investigating.

“There are still people we’re trying to track down,” he said. “As people get older … they may feel more comfortable saying something.”

The case still bothers Luebke, one of the original detectives. He wonders whether DNA evidence could have helped find an answer to the mystery, had such technology been available at the time.

“If this happened today, would it have turned out differently?” he asked.

While samples were taken at Ellabeth’s home back in 1974, Mertes said they would not be able to point to a culprit. However, DNA could still play a part in her case.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, is a national clearinghouse for missing persons cases. Sioux Falls police submitted Ellabeth’s information, including DNA samples, to the database so that if remains were ever found, they could be matched to her.

At this point, Ellabeth’s loved ones are not looking for a conviction: They say that hope died with Gene Lodermeier five years ago. But they are hopeful that they will one day find Ellabeth.

Ellabeth’s sister, Sandra, died in 2016. Gone, too, are her parents. Most of the original detectives who worked the case with Luebke have passed on as well. But the next generation has taken up the cause, if only to find closure for those who died before justice could be done.

“Why we push it still is because of Mom,” Elizabeth Crow said of Sandra, who worked hard to find information in the case. “She was the one who held on to all this. I know it’s been a very long time, but it would be nice to just have closure.”

While he eventually went on to marry after Ellabeth disappeared, Jerry Thomas has never gotten over the woman he first met at a Sioux Falls bar nearly half a century ago.

“(Her disappearance) is something that I never forget,” he said. “I think about it constantly.”

Jerry is hopeful that Ellabeth can still come home. A $20,000 reward is being offered to anyone who can provide verifiable proof of Ellabeth’s remains. Jerry's goal is to bury her near her parents in Aberdeen, where he visits each Memorial Day to say prayers and leave flowers.

“There’s no place for Ellabeth, it’s like she didn’t exist,” Jerry said. “But she did exist, and she was a beautiful person.”

If he is unable to find Ellabeth’s remains, Jerry plans to erect a stone for her with her name, birth date and her status as a missing person. He wants to make sure that long after he is gone, Ellabeth won’t be forgotten.

“Someday, one of those family members of Ellabeth’s, they’re going to go back and find Grandma and Grandpa’s resting place,” he said. “I want them to know there was an Ellabeth.”

The $20,000 reward is available to anyone who can provide DNA-provable information regarding Ellabeth Lodermeier’s whereabouts.

Any information should be directed to Detective Pat Mertes of the Sioux Falls Police Department or ellabethcoldcase@gmail.com.

The reward will be available until May 27, 2019.