September 8, 1981.

Mount Vernon, South Dakota.

Thirty-year-old John Mathis contacts police to inform them he has been shot in the arm

after a struggle with a massed attacker on his farm.

When police arrive, they discover that John's wife, Ladonna Mathis and their two children,

four-year-old Brian and two-year-old Patrick, have been shot to death.

While John claims the massed attacker was responsible, investigators find a number of discrepancies

in his story and he is eventually charged with murdering his wife and two sons.

However, John is acquitted of the crimes at trial, so the Mathis family murders officially

remain unsolved.

After that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the

Trail went cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder and today we will be covering a particularly horrific crime,

the 1981 murders of Ladonna Mathis and her two sons, Brian and Patrick.

This is actually the first episode we've done about the unsolved murder of a family and

it's a pretty unique story.

The patriarch of this family, John Mathis, claimed that he got into a struggle with an unidentified

a sale into killed his wife and children, but the authorities did not buy his story and

charged him with the murders.

This story is reminiscent of a number of infamous cases in which parents have murdered

their families and blamed the crime on an outside attacker such as the Jeffrey McDonald

...