Lakewood, Wis. • 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 neighbor — a helpful, 82-year-old handyman with a gravelly voice and a loud, distinctive laugh.
The widower and father of five grown children had lived quietly for two decades among the 800 residents of Lakewood, a northern Wisconsin town.
Now authorities were saying he was a killer.