Charges filed after missing sisters discovered

The owners of a Minnesota horse ranch, where last month police discovered two sisters who had vanished in 2013, are now facing charges and possible prison time, in the latest turn in a bizarre case involving the missing teenage girls who have said they were hiding from an abusive father.

The prosecuting attorney in Dakota County, Minnesota, charged ranch owners Gina and Douglas Dahlen on December 11 with deprivation of custodial rights for their involvement in the disappearance of teenage sisters Samantha and Gianna Rucki. An acquaintance of the couple, Dede Evavold, is facing the same charges.

“This is a very sad case that just shows how nasty divorce can be,” says Detective Jim Dronen of the Lakeville, Minnesota, police, who has been on the case since 2014. “When you have people that are just working so hard to win, it can just make things really, really nasty and there’s really no winners.”
Samantha and Gianna Rucki, now 17 and 16, respectively, disappeared on April 19, 2013 after their mother lost custody of them and their three siblings following a bitter divorce and a judge ordered them to live with an aunt.

In an unusual television interview that the sisters gave shortly after their disappearance, they said they ran away and that their father was abusive.

Their father, David Rucki, has denied this, and police have said the father never gave up searching for the girls.

Police arrested the girls’ mother Sandra Grazzini-Rucki, who is accused of aiding in the girls’ disappearance, in October, when new information in the case came to light. This new intelligence also led police to White Horse Ranch, a nonprofit owned by the Dahlens that provides horse therapy to “broken children,” according to its website. In November, the police located the missing girls there.
The Dahlens and Evavold now each face two felony counts of deprivation of custodial/parental rights—one count for each of the Rucki girls. Each charge has a maximum sentence of zero to two years in prison and/or fines of $1,200 to $4,000.

“Concealing children and keeping them from a parent for over two and a half years in violation of a court order is unconscionable,” Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said in a statement.

According to the criminal complaints, police seized computers and cellphones from Evavold during a search of her home in St. Cloud, Minnesota, which is a two-hour drive from the ranch, in October. Police say the phones contained voice memos of “audio statements” from the missing girls, dated April 21, 2013—two days after they disappeared. A photo that the police determined was taken that same day showed a street sign at an intersection where Douglas Dahlen owned an auto repair shop, which police say is the only building in the vicinity.

Another cellphone photo apparently showed Samantha Rucki pictured with a donkey in June 2013. Police said aspects of that image appeared to match those in images on the website for the ranch.
Douglas Dahlen told the police that the girls had been there for about two and a half years.
“From these interviews, it was determined that [Samantha] and [Gianna] had been dropped off at the Dahlen residence by Grazzini-Rucki and Evavold on April 21, 2013, and that the girls had been there since that date,” the complaints say.

“There’s no denying it’s on my phone,” Evavold tells Newsweek, referring to the files mentioned in the complaints. But she says the photo of the intersection was from a later date than what the police said. And despite the photo of Samantha, she would not comment on whether she had seen the girls since their disappearance.

“Had I been smart about things, I probably would have removed things,” she says.

Evavold now finds herself in the type of situation she usually writes about on her website, Red Herring Alert, which aims to expose corruption, including in the court system.

“I’ve sat in courtrooms and watched really the illegitimacy of things,” she says. “I’ve been involved in so many cases where I’ve watched people have their rights terminated and be charged with ridiculous [crimes]. It really is going after non-criminals and charging them while there are severe crimes that are out there. It’s just backwards, it’s inverted.”

Evavold reiterated what she previously toldNewsweek—that the girls ran away from home because their father is “a violent man.”

“I’m not a criminal, and the wrong people are being harassed in this,” she says.

Evavold previously told Newsweek that she was acquaintances with both the Dahlens and Grazzini-Rucki, but wouldn’t comment on whether the Dahlens and Grazzini-Rucki knew each other. She now concedes they do know each other; They are “friends through circumstances,” she says.