Robert Leroy Anderson was convicted in two separate prosecutions for crimes against two women. In May 1997 a Sioux Falls jury found him guilty of kidnapping Piper Streyle, a wife and mother of two young children from rural McCook County, South Dakota, and he received a life sentence. Two years later, after the case against him widened to a second woman, a different jury found him guilty of murdering both Streyle and Larisa Dumansky, with other charges, and sentenced him to death.
The killings took place almost two years apart. Dumansky died in August 1994 and Streyle in July 1996. Anderson was then a young man working the night shift at a meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, married twice, with four children. He maintained that he was innocent. On March 30, 2003, while an appeal of his death sentence was pending, he died by suicide at the South Dakota State Penitentiary. The South Dakota Supreme Court ruled two months later that his death would not erase the convictions.
Little is known of Anderson's early life. A retrospective by Cassie Williams, published by the Echo Press, described him as a high school dropout who worked nights at John Morrell & Co., the meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, and said he had been married twice and had four children. At his 1999 trial his defense attorney told jurors the same, adding that his first wife had remarried and lived out of state. His date of birth, his birthplace and his childhood have not been made public.
The Associated Press gave his age as 29 when he went on trial for murder in 1999. His mother sat behind the defense table through the trial, and at the sentencing phase the defense said it would call her, his sister and other relatives.
One relationship runs through the case. A childhood friend of Anderson, who later lived in Kansas City, Kansas, was charged as an accomplice in the Dumansky case. That man's cooperation is the reason prosecutors could bring the Dumansky charges at all.
Larisa Dumansky was 29 and lived in Sioux Falls. She and her husband had come to the United States in 1990, he told the jury, to leave the former Soviet Union because of religious persecution. They had two young daughters. Dumansky worked nights at John Morrell & Co., where Anderson also worked, and the Associated Press reported that the two had met there.
She died in August 1994. According to the Echo Press retrospective, police first looked at her husband and then at a co-worker whose alibi held up, and nobody was arrested in 1994. The same retrospective says she was several weeks pregnant. Her husband described at the sentencing phase what her death had done to the family: the younger daughter, who was five when her mother died, cried uncontrollably, and the older daughter, six, took on a mothering role in the household. He said he could not fully fill both parents' places.
On November 10, 1994, a young woman was the target of an attempted kidnapping near Tea, a town west of Sioux Falls. She escaped and was driven to Tea by two high school students. Prosecutors said Anderson was the man who tried to take her and that his friend acted as lookout. She identified Anderson in court in 1999. Anderson was not tried separately for that incident. His friend later pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping in connection with it.
Piper Streyle was 28. She lived in a rural home near Canistota, in McCook County, with her husband and their two young children, a daughter who was three in 1996 and a son. Her parents, who lived in Texas, attended the 1997 trial and the 1999 trial. Her cousin moved to Sioux Falls in the fall before the 1999 trial and attended every hearing.
At the sentencing phase her husband said her death had crushed his hopes and those of the children. Their son, then four, still woke up crying, he said, and their daughter, then six, feared losing her father as well.
The Streyle case began on Monday, July 29, 1996, in McCook County. The couple's three-year-old daughter was at home that morning, and what she said that day to her father, to her mother's co-worker and to the sheriff was later at issue on appeal.
Investigators focused on Anderson after he admitted that he had been at the Streyle home on the morning of July 29. According to the Echo Press retrospective, he was identified on July 30 and questioned for about seven hours; he declined a polygraph examination and gave shifting accounts of his visits. Officers seized his vehicle, and on August 1, 1996, they searched his trailer and the Bronco. Hair found in the vehicle was later matched by DNA testing to Piper Streyle, the retrospective reported. At the 1999 trial the chief deputy attorney general told jurors that other testing suggested a bloodstain on Anderson's clothing was likely hers.
On August 2, 1996, Anderson was arrested and charged with two counts of kidnapping. The Echo Press retrospective reported that both of Streyle's children picked him out in a lineup; the Supreme Court wrote that the daughter identified him from a photo lineup.
Jury selection began on April 8, 1997. On May 8, 1997, the jury convicted Anderson of kidnapping Piper Streyle under the state law that covers kidnapping to facilitate a felony. Circuit Judge Boyd McMurchie sentenced him to life imprisonment about two months later, according to the Echo Press retrospective. Anderson called the prosecution vindictive.
The trial raised questions that the South Dakota Supreme Court answered when it decided his appeal. Piper Streyle's daughter, a young child, refused to testify. The court held that the trial judge did not abuse his discretion in refusing to declare a mistrial and that the girl was competent to testify. Anderson argued that the account of what she had said on the day her mother was taken, given through her father, her mother's co-worker and the sheriff, violated his right to confront her. The court held that her statements were excited utterances, a long-recognized exception to the hearsay rule, and that they were reliable.
He also argued that the trial was held too late under South Dakota's 180-day rule, that his request for a lawyer was ignored during police questioning and that his statements were involuntary. The court excluded the time taken by pretrial motions and DNA testing delays and found the trial timely. It found that the part of the interview used at trial was not custodial and that his statements were voluntary. It upheld testimony from a friend of Anderson about earlier conversations in which Anderson had talked about abducting women, finding it relevant to plan, preparation and intent.
In an opinion by Justice Gilbertson, State v. Anderson, 2000 SD 45, 608 N.W.2d 644, decided March 29, 2000, the court affirmed the conviction and the life sentence. Justice Sabers concurred in the result only.
Anderson was in the penitentiary when the case against him widened. According to the Echo Press retrospective, his childhood friend confessed that he had helped plan the Dumansky kidnapping and the attempt near Tea.
An Associated Press report in the Yankton Press & Dakotan says the friend was scheduled for trial on February 7 on seven counts of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy, and that he instead pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap Dumansky, attempted kidnapping of the young woman near Tea, and accessory to kidnapping and first-degree murder. Under the agreement he faced up to 25 years, with two 25-year terms to run concurrently, and he received immunity from prosecution for crimes related to Dumansky, Streyle and the young woman. In exchange he agreed to tell investigators everything he knew. Larry Long, then chief deputy attorney general, said the plea was negotiated over several weeks and that an acquittal was a real risk if the case went to trial. The report said the friend did not testify at either of Anderson's trials.
The Echo Press retrospective, written decades later, gives his sentence as 30 years and says he was released in 2016. The two accounts differ on the term.
A second break came from inside the penitentiary. An inmate who had shared a cell with Anderson contacted the state attorney general's office on August 26, 1997, the Associated Press reported in March 1999. He said Anderson had talked about the crimes. The Echo Press retrospective says he told investigators that Anderson had kept belongings of the women at his mother's house in Sioux Falls, and that investigators recovered belongings of both women there, including jewelry. At the 1999 trial the Associated Press reported that the inmate led investigators to items belonging to both women, among them Piper Streyle's wedding ring and a necklace that had belonged to Dumansky, and to other items that were not described in that report.
The inmate was released in November 1997 in exchange for a deposition against Anderson, having served 14 months of a five-year sentence. About three weeks later he was arrested on drug charges and received a six-year sentence. The Associated Press reported that he had been held in protective custody because other inmates called him an informer, and that he had filed a federal lawsuit claiming the penitentiary failed to protect him. A Minnehaha County judge later suspended the six-year sentence on conditions: no drug-law violations for five years and cooperation with prosecutors in future Anderson hearings and the friend's case. Streyle's family thanked the man for testifying, and her parents corresponded with him. The Associated Press said the family regarded him as a hero.
The defense put his record at the center of its case. At the 1999 trial the attorney general, Mark Barnett, raised the man's criminal history himself in questioning him: forgery, assault and shoplifting as a juvenile, and larceny and robbery as an adult.
The information from the accomplice and the inmate changed what the state could charge. Anderson was charged with the murders of Larisa Dumansky and Piper Streyle, with other charges, and prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty if he was convicted of either murder. Long later said he spent about two and a half years working almost entirely on the case and felt strong pressure to obtain a death sentence, Dakota News Now reported in 2020. Long, who became the state's attorney general, helped write a book about the case with Phil and Sandy Hamman.
In the Streyle case the state had to prove her death from circumstantial evidence.
Jury selection began on January 19, 1999, and testimony started on March 2, the Associated Press reported. Circuit Judge Tim Dallas Tucker presided. Anderson pleaded not guilty to all counts.
In an opening statement of about three hours, Larry Long described the DNA evidence tying Streyle to Anderson's vehicle and clothing and the laboratory evidence in the Dumansky case. He named Anderson's friend, the accomplice and the former cellmate as witnesses to come.
David Palmer, a Sioux Falls attorney for the defense, spoke for about half an hour. He said the state had no eyewitnesses and no scientific evidence showing how the women died or who killed them. He attacked the former cellmate's credibility, calling him a liar and a convicted felon, and he said investigators had not followed proper procedure, pointing to new evidence that turned up after Anderson's Bronco had been stored in an unsecured lot.
The first witnesses were the families. Dumansky's husband described how the couple had come to the United States, and he sat on the side of the courtroom nearest the prosecution with the relatives and friends of both women. Anderson's mother sat behind the defense. A friend testified that Anderson had spoken about ways to abduct women, and a former supervisor at the plant testified about Anderson's absences from work on certain days. The former cellmate testified on March 22, 1999, and the Associated Press reported that he described what Anderson had told him about the Dumansky killing.
Michael Butler, a second defense lawyer, handled the later phase of the trial. The court granted a defense request that Anderson be allowed to submit a written statement, read by a lawyer, before sentencing, and it widened a gag order from the lawyers, investigators and witnesses to family members. Judge Tucker declined to sequester the jury for the remainder of the trial.
The jury of six men and six women deliberated for eight hours over two days and returned its verdicts on a Tuesday. It found Anderson guilty of murdering Piper Streyle and Larisa Dumansky, of the rape of Streyle and of the kidnapping of Dumansky. Anderson showed no emotion. Some members of both victims' families cried quietly, and his mother cried as she left the courtroom. A friend of Dumansky's husband called the verdict a victory for both families.
The same jury then heard evidence on whether Anderson should receive life imprisonment or death by lethal injection. Prosecutors said they would point to earlier statements in which Anderson told the attorney general he was innocent and said "I hope you rot in hell," and a remark to a newspaper that he would not "bow down and accept punishment" for something he said he had not done. They argued that these showed a lack of remorse.
The families testified. Dumansky's husband and Streyle's husband described the effect of the killings on their young children, and the Associated Press said at least three jurors cried during the testimony. Butler asked the jury to stay open-minded and to consider a life sentence.
In April 1999 Anderson was sentenced to death. The Echo Press retrospective gives the date as April 9, 1999.
Anderson appealed to the South Dakota Supreme Court. The appeal concerned the procedure and law behind the death sentence, the court wrote. While it was pending, and at his request, the court delayed its decision to consider new authority he had raised. His father died a few days before Anderson's own death, the Echo Press retrospective said.
On March 30, 2003, Anderson died by suicide at the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Streyle's husband said afterward, as the Echo Press quoted him, "This is what we were after anyway." A prosecutor, Roger Gerlach, said that many women would sleep better.
On May 30, 2003, the court issued an order dismissing the appeal, reported as State v. Anderson, 2003 SD 65, 664 N.W.2d 48. It held, in a unanimous ruling, that a defendant who dies by suicide while an appeal is pending cannot erase his convictions in that way. It did not vacate or abate the judgment of conviction for the kidnapping and murder of Larisa Dumansky and the rape and murder of Piper Streyle. The arguments about the death sentence had become moot, the court said, and it dismissed the appeal in its discretion; it added that it would have affirmed the convictions in any case. The five justices were Chief Justice Gilbertson, Justices Sabers and Konenkamp, Acting Justice Max A. Gors and Retired Justice Robert A. Miller.
Attorney General Larry Long said the decision gave the victims' families closure and preserved the verdict, the attorney general's office stated in a press release. A 2006 notice from the State Historical Society's archives listed Anderson among the inmates who had been on South Dakota's death row and recorded that he died by suicide in 2003.
Streyle's parents attended both trials and said they supported the death penalty. Her mother said there was no real closure and that she wanted people to be more careful and less trusting. Her father said, "I don't want this horror to be forgotten." The Associated Press reported that her cousin planned to move to Los Angeles after the trial and that her parents planned to move to a new city.
Dumansky's husband was left raising two daughters. In January 2020 Dakota News Now reported that Streyle's husband declined to comment on the book that Long and the Hammans had written.
Anderson told the attorney general he was innocent and maintained that position through the 1999 trial. The defense case rested on the absence of eyewitnesses and of forensic evidence showing how either woman died, on the former cellmate's record and motives, and on the way investigators handled Anderson's vehicle. The jury rejected those arguments. The South Dakota Supreme Court wrote in 2003 that it would have affirmed the convictions had he lived, but it did not rule on them, because the appeal was dismissed.
Some accounts differ. The Echo Press retrospective says a jury of eight men and eight women convicted Anderson in 1999, while the Associated Press at the time reported six men and six women. The terms of the accomplice's sentence also differ between the plea report and the later retrospective.
Anderson was not charged with any other killing.
August 1994: Larisa Dumansky, 29, of Sioux Falls, is killed.
November 10, 1994: attempted kidnapping of a young woman near Tea; she escapes.
July 29, 1996: Piper Streyle, 28, is taken from her home near Canistota; deputies find her two children alone.
July 30, 1996: Anderson is questioned for about seven hours.
August 2, 1996: Anderson is arrested on two counts of kidnapping.
April 8, 1997: jury selection begins in the kidnapping trial.
May 8, 1997: the jury convicts Anderson of kidnapping Piper Streyle.
May 1997: his childhood friend confesses to a part in the Dumansky kidnapping.
About July 1997: Anderson is sentenced to life imprisonment for the kidnapping.
August 26, 1997: a fellow inmate contacts the attorney general's office.
January 19, 1999: jury selection begins in the murder trial.
March 2, 1999: testimony begins.
March 22, 1999: the former cellmate testifies.
April 1999: the jury convicts Anderson of both murders and the related counts; he is sentenced to death.
March 29, 2000: the South Dakota Supreme Court affirms the 1997 conviction and life sentence.
March 30, 2003: Anderson dies by suicide at the South Dakota State Penitentiary.
May 30, 2003: the court dismisses the appeal without vacating the convictions.
January 2020: Dakota News Now reports on a new book about the case.