Alcester Union & Hudsonite Online

ELK POINT – Circuit Court Judge Steven Jensen said he would allow several pieces of evidence in the murder trial of David Lykken at a motions hearing last week in Elk Point. The trial is scheduled to begin March 18.

Lykken, 53, is accused of murdering Sherri Miller and Pamela Jackson of Vermillion in May of 1971. Lykken was 16 at the time and Miller and Jackson were both 17. The girls were last seen in a 1960 Studebaker as they were looking for a party at a gravel pit near Union Grove State Park.

Lykken’s attorney, Mike Butler from Sioux Falls, filed several pre-trial motions asking the court to throw out pieces of evidence, including an alleged tape recorded confession and testimony from Lykken’s sister, Nancy Bell.

Butler argued that the alleged confession from Lykken to fellow penitentiary inmate Aloysius Black Crow in March of 2006 should not be allowed because the State couldn’t prove that it was Lykken’s voice on the tape.

After hearing Black Crow’s testimony last week, Butler withdrew the motion but will likely challenge the credibility of the evidence during the trial.

At the hearing on Thursday, Assistant Attorney General Rod Oswald read parts of the transcript in which Lykken allegedly confessed to the murders. In it Lykken said he wanted to have sex with one of the girls, but she refused so he attacked her.

“To make a long story short, I got what I wanted twice,” Oswald read from the transcript. He went on to read that Lykken raped Jackson and when she tried to escape, he caught her and strangled her and “ended her existence” because he didn’t want to go to jail.

Oswald read other portions of the transcript saying that Lykken intended to kill the other girl in Pipestone, MN, but his brother, who was with him at the time, didn’t want to participate.

Other testimony at the motions hearing came from Lykken’s younger sister, Nancy Bell, who said she recalls seeing a car at the family farm with two girls in it slumped over and not moving. She also said she recalls seeing the two girls later in a wheelbarrow and that a car was buried on the farm.

Butler challenged the testimony, saying that Bell doesn’t know for sure whether her memories are real or imagined because her repressed memories were regained with the help of a police psychiatrist.

Judge Jensen said he would allow the testimony because, by law, Bell is deemed competent to testify and that a jury should determine if her story is believable.

Lykken’s ex-wife and former girlfriends also testified at the hearing, saying that Lykken choked, raped and beat them, and that they were often afraid for their own safety. Another acquaintance said Lykken raped her after she refused to date him.

Other testimony that could prop up the State’s case came from Bonnie Pojunos, who worked in the Union County Sheriff’s Office in 1971. Pojunos testified that she recalled when then-Sheriff Ed Ekren visited the Lykken farm around the time of the girls’ disappearance, he noticed that a portion of the feedlot had been cleared away and that the cattle sunk in the mud farther there than in other parts of the feedlot, indicating that there had likely been some digging going in that area.

Pojunos said that Ekren, now deceased, didn’t get a warrant to search the farm because he wasn’t absolutely certain, and that he was afraid for his family. Pojunos said she recalled Ekren saying “I know that they know what happened to the girls”.

Lykken was convicted in 1983 for attacking a woman in Sioux Falls, and in 1990 was convicted of kidnapping and raping of a former girlfriend in Vermillion. He is currently serving a 227-year sentence at the South Dakota State Penitentiary.

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