1883
Established in 1883; the Chicago Northwestern Railroad chose the site.
about 0:10:00The story
Canistota sits in McCook County in the south-east corner of South Dakota, a town of 638 people in a little over half a square mile, about forty minutes from Sioux Falls. James opens with the town's history: the Chicago Northwestern Railroad chose the site in 1883, the town was incorporated in 1900, and a railroad man named Major Free named it after his home town of Canistota, New York. A clerical error on the post office application, C ANI stoda instead of C ANA stoda, left the town and its post office with different spellings until 1919. The town's economy, as a 1987 Chicago Tribune article told it, rested on the Ortman chiropractic clinic, a family dynasty of chiropractors going back to Amon Ortman, who began cracking backs around 1915. Amish patients travelled long distances for treatment. By the 1990s the population was ageing, overwhelmingly white, about 56% religious, and the median home cost $79,500.
Piper Streely was from Texas. She met Vance Streely at a Bible college in Oregon, they married in 1988 and in 1991 moved to a trailer on a forty-acre lot at Canistota, where they ran the Prairie View Bible camp for children in their yard. Vance worked as a plumber and Piper at the Southeastern Children's Center in Sioux Falls. They had two children, Shaina, three, and Nathan, two.
On July 29, 1996, Nathan's second birthday, Vance left for work at 6.30am. Piper called the babysitter, Mrs Jordanson, at 9.20 to say they were running late. She never arrived. At noon Vance rang home and left a message. At three o'clock Piper's colleague Patty Sinclair called and Shaina answered, saying she did not want her mummy to die, that she did not want her daddy to die, and that they were probably killed. Patty kept the child on the phone for forty-five minutes and sent for the McCook County sheriff. Sheriff Gene Taylor reached the trailer at five o'clock. The door was open, the living room was wrecked and Piper's purse was strewn across the floor. Shaina and Nathan were in the bedroom, physically unharmed, and the blond labrador, Chase, was safe. Shaina told the sheriff a mean man in a black vehicle with black wheels had come in, grabbed her mother, shouted, fired a gun and took Nathan's new blue tent.
Late that evening Vance remembered a visitor from three days earlier: a chubby, balding man in his twenties who had asked about the Bible camp, left the name Robin Anderson and a telephone number, and seemed startled to find Vance at home. Witnesses placed a black Ford Bronco near the trailer three times that morning. A neighbour saw Shaina and Nathan alone by the roadside at 11.45 and, at 12.10, the Bronco blocking the drive with a man in a baseball cap and jeans walking away.
On July 30 Anderson was interviewed voluntarily for hours. He admitted visiting four days earlier but said he had only asked permission to use their archery range and knew nothing of Piper. While he talked, officers obtained warrants for his home and his Bronco. They found receipts for duct tape, black water-based tempera paint, brushes and a bucket, all bought shortly before the disappearance. The Bronco had been painted with the same washable black paint and a witness had seen him cleaning it twice that day. Inside were a wooden platform drilled with holes and fitted with metal hoops, sized to the truck bed, hairs matching Piper's genetic type, dog hairs like Chase's, a dirty shovel, moving straps, a toolbox, a walkie-talkie, handcuff keys on his key ring and a folding knife with fibres matching Piper's shirt. In his laundry basket were jeans stained with degraded blood, possibly Piper's. A first photo lineup used an outdated licence picture and neither Shaina nor Vance identified anyone; two days later, with a current photograph and in separate rooms, both picked Anderson out.
A botanist identified honewort and black snakeroot from his toolbox, plants growing only in wooded stretches of the Big Sioux River north of Sioux Falls near Baltic. There a motorist had found half of Piper's Code Zero T-shirt on the day she vanished; searchers found the other half under a small tree, along with a vibrator, a partly used candle, a clump of duct tape carrying light-brown hairs and unidentified blood, and the torn end matched Anderson's roll.
Shaina, then four and a half, was to testify by closed circuit television from the town library. She panicked when she saw the room full of adults, was calmed with a puzzle, then pulled a blanket over her head and would not speak. The judge stopped the proceedings. Jamie Hammer, Anderson's friend since school, testified that they had long discussed torturing and killing women, had put wheel poppers on roads, had practised with walkie-talkies near the Big Sioux River and Ditch Road, and had discussed digging graves in advance and throwing evidence from car windows. He described following a girl in Egan and a woman in Sherman. The defence called it trash talk; the court let it in.
On August 26, 1997 a cellmate, Jeremy Brunner, came forward. Brunner, who claimed a Detroit gang past under the nickname Kilo, had shared a cell with Anderson for eight days in August 1996. Police found Piper's wedding ring, a necklace of Larissa's and a hidden gun exactly where Brunner said, between the ceiling and the wall of the basement.
Larissa Dumansky was twenty-nine, a Ukrainian immigrant who came to South Dakota with her husband Bill for a new life. Both worked at the meat plant; Bill moved on to a better job while Larissa stayed on the night shift. She befriended the night maintenance man, Anderson. On August 27, 1994 she vanished from the plant car park. Anderson had stalked her for months. She was six weeks pregnant. When police eventually recovered the grave they found fifty-seven items but no head, and no sign of animal disturbance.
Chief Deputy Attorney General Larry Long argued successfully that Larissa's pregnancy should be admitted as evidence of torture. Brunner testified on March 23. Both families applauded until the judge stopped them. Bill Dumansky called his marriage a honeymoon that did not end; Vance said Anderson had stolen the love of his life but could not hide what he did.
He had been placed in segregation after a razor blade was found under the lip of a table.
The prosecution and defence cost more than a million dollars, the most expensive case in South Dakota's history, and the county legal expense relief programme paid $1.02 million of it. He received thirty consecutive years. Because his crimes predated the July 1996 change in the law, he earned early release and walked out on December 22, 2015 after about fifteen years, with no supervision and a stated plan to leave the state.
She described the wheel poppers, the tyres blowing out, Anderson approaching silently with his hands in his pockets as she opened the boot, and her escape after a struggle when a passing car approached. She said not a day goes by without her thinking of it. Larissa Dumansky is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Sioux Falls, in the West Lawn section. Piper Streely's body has never been found.