By Jeff Kenney Editor
MONTEREY — After more than 30 years, the murders of two Culver area women appear to have been solved. Lela Donnelly Hildebrandt, 26, was found dead in her car Oct. 7, 1975, the victim of a shotgun blast that had been fired, Culver town marshall Richard Woodward said at the time, from very close range. Hildebrandt was traveling south on S.R. 17, just south of S.R. 110, when she was killed in her vehicle. Her father, Alfred Donnelly, was a retired math teacher at Culver Academy, from which Donnelly — a lifelong Culver resident — had graduated.

Also murdered was Nellie Mikesell, 72, who was shot in the head with a small-caliber rifle while sitting inside her rural Fulton County home. According to police, the bullet was fired from outside into her living room window. Mikesell’s death took place in September, 1974, and there was no apparent connection at the time between the two deaths.
Now, according to the Associated Press, confessed killer Danny R. Rouse has made a plea agreement in Cass County in which he admitted the killings of Mikesell and Hildebrandt.
The murder of 16-year-old Stephanie Wagner, whose body was found stabbed and strangled in a field in Cass County on Nov. 1, 2006, shocked area residents. Rouse, 52, on parole at the time from Kansas for the murder of a 5-year-old boy in 1979 (Rouse had served 26 years of a life sentence there), pleaded guilty last week to Wagner’s murder. Rouse also confessed to the Mikesell and Hildebrandt murders around the same time, according to authorities.
Fulton County prosecutor Rick Brown said that the Mikesell and Hildebrandt murders were spur-of-the-moment killings of victims that Rouse did not know, and that the killer offered no motive for his actions. Brown added that he had no doubt that Rouse was the murderer, due to a number of details of the killings that he offered authorities in his confession, which only the murderer would have known.
Rouse, who is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 14 for the Wagner murder, made a plea agreement to serve life in prison without possibility of parole for the Stephanie Wagner murder, with prosecutors agreeing not to press charges against him for the Mikesell and Hildebrandt deaths. Brown said authorities made the deal because Rouse’s confession enabled them to solve the cases, which probably would never have been solved otherwise.