Word of the arrest via a friend's text message hit Wayne Sankey like a thunderbolt.
"I said, 'You gotta be kidding me,'" Sankey recalled.
"And then I told the wife and she couldn't believe it. 'There's no way,' she said. 'Ray down the road?'" Ray Vannieuwenhoven was his next-door neighbour a helpful, 82-year-old handyman with a gravelly voice and a loud, distinctive laugh, the kind of guy who always waved from his car.
The widower and father of five grown children had lived quietly for two decades among the 800 residents of Lakewood, a northern Wisconsin town surrounded by forests and small lakes.
Now authorities were saying this man was a cold-blooded killer.
They had used genetic genealogy to crack a cold case that stretched back well into the 20th century a double murder 25 miles southwest of Lakewood.
For nearly 43 years, Vannieuwenoven had lived in plain sight, yet outside detectives' radar.
It was just too much to be believed. Was the guy next door really a monster? ___
Kurt Schuldes, 68, a cousin of David Schuldes in Green Bay, welcomed the news of an arrest, but lamented the time it took: "He just got away with it for way too long, unfortunately."
"It's just something that always hangs over your head, knowing that there's someone out there who did this heinous crime." Prosecutors and Lakewood residents, meanwhile, were left with the question: Who is Raymand Lawrence Vannieuwenhoven?