A 26-year-old Wyoming man was sentenced to 25 years in prison Thursday for his role in the 2021 kidnapping and murder of a 29-year-old woman in Douglas County.

Leo Vanbuskirk pleaded guilty in May to second-degree kidnapping and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder in the death of Rachel Holeman, according to the previous reporting.

Vanbuskirk was one of three people charged in connection with Holeman’s death.

Holeman was first reported missing in Fort Collins in November 2021, and police tracked her last known location to Aurora.

Investigators later found Holeman was in Colorado with two other people, Casey Childers and Shantel Edlund, to distribute drugs when Childers, Edlund and Vanbuskirk kidnapped her in Aurora on Nov. 6, 2021, according to the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.

Edlund’s vehicle was spotted by a Douglas County sheriff’s deputy responding to an unrelated call near South Parker and Russelville roads on Nov. 7, 2021, and the three were arrested more than a month later in Sheridan, Wyo., in an unrelated traffic stop.

Search and rescue crews found Holeman’s body in Douglas County on Dec. 31, 2021, near the area where Edlund’s vehicle was seen the month before. She died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Vanbuskirk is the last of the group to be sentenced.

Edlund, 46, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit second-degree murder in August 2022 and was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Childers, 41, was convicted of first-degree murder, second-degree kidnapping and conspiracy to commit second-degree kidnapping by a Douglas County jury on July 25 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

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Originally Published: August 9, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.