Brian Dugan pleaded guilty in November 1985 to two murders in northern Illinois: Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old nurse from Geneva, killed in July 1984, and Melissa Ackerman, a 7-year-old girl from Somonauk, killed in June 1985. He received two life sentences. During the plea talks he told prosecutors that he had also killed Jeanine Nicarico, a 10-year-old girl taken from her home near Naperville in February 1983, and that he had acted alone. He would confess formally, he said, only if he was promised that he would not be executed.
No promise was made. By then three young men from Aurora had already been charged with the Nicarico murder, and two of them, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, had been sentenced to death. Their cases went on for another ten years, through reversals and retrials, before Cruz was acquitted in November 1995 and the charges against Hernandez were dropped weeks later. In November 2005 a DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for the murder, citing DNA evidence. He pleaded guilty on July 28, 2009, with no deal, and a jury sentenced him to death that November. In March 2011 Illinois abolished the death penalty and his sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Dugan was born on September 23, 1956, in Nashua, New Hampshire, the second of five children, according to FBI files described by the Daily Herald in 2007. The family moved to Lisle, Illinois, in 1967, and later lived in Aurora and Batavia. His father, a salesman who drank heavily, died in 1975 of cirrhosis of the liver. His mother was the disciplinarian of the household and later cut him off financially.
In recorded interviews in 1986 Dugan described a normal and happy childhood in New Hampshire that went wrong after the move to Illinois, where, he said, both his parents abused alcohol. His defense team in 2009 told the jury that his birth had been difficult, that as an infant he banged his head against his crib, and that as a boy he wet the bed and suffered headaches followed by severe vomiting, for which he took medication until his early teens. The FBI files recorded that he was cruel to animals and drawn to fire, and that at age 8 he and a brother burned down the family garage with matches. A brother told the FBI that Brian had been cruel to the family's pets.
He left Aurora East High School at 16 and later earned a high school equivalency diploma in prison. His defense said he was physically and sexually abused in a youth home and in prisons. By 2009 his siblings wanted nothing to do with him, and his sister supported his execution. He was in custody when each of his parents was buried.
Dugan was first arrested in 1972, at 15, for burglary. Prosecutors told the 2009 jury that his record over the next 13 years included arson, batteries, criminal damage to property, break-ins, thefts and drug offenses, with convictions in DuPage and Kane counties. They said that between 1972 and 1985 he was free for only about four years and nine months, moving in and out of youth homes, jails and prisons and repeatedly winning early release. He tried to escape twice while in custody.
On April 21, 1974, when he was 17, he was accused of trying to grab a 10-year-old girl near the train station in Lisle. She got away, and the charge was dropped on a legal technicality, the Daily Herald reported.
Prosecutors in 2009 also tied him to attacks that never reached a courtroom at the time. On January 18, 1977, a woman was abducted and assaulted in the western suburbs and escaped; after his 1985 capture, her husband told the court by stipulation, she recognized Dugan on television. She died in 2006. Another woman testified in 2009 that a masked man had tried to abduct her in Aurora in 1979; Dugan said he did not remember that encounter. In August 1982 a woman said he had attacked her in Aurora, and one of his brothers later admitted that he had given Brian a false alibi in that case. None of these three incidents was reported among his convictions.
Jeanine Nicarico was 10 years old, a fifth-grader in Naperville. Her family described her as bubbly, and she loved horses. She had two sisters. On February 25, 1983, she stayed home from school with the flu.
That day she was taken from the house. One of her sisters came home to the empty house. Jeanine was found dead two days later. She had been beaten to death.
In 2009 Dugan pleaded guilty to her murder. Prosecutors argued that the killing qualified for the death penalty because it was committed in the course of other felonies, among them home invasion and aggravated kidnapping, and because he had killed more than one person.
The investigation went on for a year. A $10,000 reward was offered, and Rolando Cruz, then a young man from Aurora, came to the police with a story about the crime that, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, he made up in the hope of collecting it. His story drew in two other Aurora men, Alejandro Hernandez, who was 19 at the time of the crime, and Stephen Buckley. Investigators linked Buckley to a boot print on the Nicarico family's door. On March 8, 1984, the three were arrested, and on March 9 DuPage County State's Attorney J. Michael Fitzsimmons obtained indictments against them for the murder.
The lead detective on the case, John Sam, resigned because he believed the men were innocent, the registry records. The prosecution's case at the first trial rested on informants, police testimony that Cruz had shown knowledge of the crime, statements attributed to Hernandez, two eyewitness identifications and forensic testimony about the boot print. On February 22, 1985, the jury convicted Cruz and Hernandez and deadlocked on Buckley. Cruz and Hernandez were sentenced to death. Prosecutors later dropped the case against Buckley.
Donna Kay Schnorr was 27, a nurse who lived in Geneva, in Kane County. She had a younger brother and two sisters. On July 15, 1984, Dugan sideswiped her car and ran it off the road, by his own later account. Her car was found abandoned. He killed her; she drowned. She died in Kane County.
The case gave investigators little to work with. Kane County State's Attorney John Barsanti told the Kane County Chronicle in 2009 that paint left on her car did not point to any particular vehicle and that the body yielded little evidence.
In May 1985 a series of attacks on women and girls took place in Kane County and nearby, which the Daily Herald, drawing on FBI files and the 2009 court record, attributed to Dugan. In May 1985 one woman was abducted and assaulted, a second escaped an attempted abduction, and a teenage girl was abducted and attacked. In November 1985, the Daily Herald reported, Dugan pleaded guilty to other crimes besides the two murders and received 155 years for the sex attacks. Several of the women he attacked testified at his 2009 hearing.
Melissa Ackerman, known as Missy, was 7 and lived in Somonauk, about 25 miles southwest of Aurora. On June 2, 1985, she was riding her pink bicycle with a friend in LaSalle County when Dugan tried to take both girls. Her friend got away. Melissa did not.
He drowned her. Her body was found on June 17, 1985, in LaSalle County, 15 days after she was taken. Dugan later said he killed her because he feared he had left physical evidence that would identify him.
Melissa's friend escaped and reported the attack. A Mendota police officer had made notes about Dugan's car, and those notes helped lead investigators to him, Barsanti said. On June 3, 1985, the day after Melissa disappeared, police from Geneva, Kane and DeKalb counties and the FBI arrested him in connection with the earlier attacks; he was being held on Kane County warrants for the North Aurora assault and the attempted abduction in Geneva. Physical evidence linked him to Melissa's murder, and on June 25 he was charged with it. He was also named as a suspect in Donna Schnorr's death.
When Dugan's face appeared on television after his capture, the woman attacked in 1977 told her husband that he was the man.
In 1985 Dugan's lawyers negotiated with prosecutors in LaSalle and Kane counties. Investigators in LaSalle County told Kane County prosecutors that he might be responsible for the Schnorr murder, the North Aurora assault and the Geneva attempted abduction, and John Barsanti, who was Kane County state's attorney by 2009, met him in LaSalle County that year. "We heard he was willing to confess and clear all cases we had against him if we took death off the table," Barsanti recalled in 2009. He got that deal for the Schnorr and Ackerman cases. Dugan admitted all three Kane County cases, and Barsanti said he described the Schnorr murder in a flat voice, "without any kind of remorse." Barsanti later likened the tone to someone swatting a fly.
On November 1, 1985, Dugan wrote and signed a confession to the Nicarico murder. George Mueller, a LaSalle County assistant public defender who represented him, testified in 2009 that the statement said Dugan was confessing "to ensure that innocent people are not murdered by the state for a crime they had no part of." On November 8 his public defender told LaSalle County prosecutors that Dugan might be connected to the Schnorr and Nicarico murders and would confess to Jeanine's killing only if his life was spared. Prosecutors, doubting parts of what he said, refused to bargain. Because no deal was struck, he never gave a formal statement that could be used against him.
On November 19, 1985, Dugan pleaded guilty to the murders of Melissa Ackerman and Donna Schnorr and received two life sentences. The Schnorr plea was entered in Kane County. Her brother told the 2009 jury that the family had to learn of the Ackerman link and watch the Kane County plea without being consulted.
Dugan did talk about the Nicarico case, though his admission was framed in hypothetical terms, Illinois Issues reported in 1994. In November 1985, at the LaSalle County jail, he gave an interview to state police in which he drew his movements along the Illinois Prairie Path on the day Jeanine was taken, and a DuPage County prosecutor took notes at an interview on November 13, 1985. Ed Cisowski, an Illinois State Police lieutenant, interviewed him about six times in late 1985 and 1986, including a lie-detector test and hypnosis. Cisowski testified in 2009 that Dugan got some details wrong but recalled facts that only the killer would know, and that he came to believe Dugan acted alone. In March 1986 the authorities exhumed Jeanine's body to check parts of Dugan's account; her parents objected that it was done on Good Friday.
In October 1986 Dugan sat for three recorded interviews with Robert Thorud, a state police mental health expert who studied sexual predators. The ground rules barred talk of the Nicarico case, but Dugan made a couple of veiled admissions, the Daily Herald reported, and Thorud later contacted prosecutors. In those recordings Dugan said, "I don't deserve life," and added, "I'm selfish." In the same recordings he said, "It was crazy. It was stupid. There was no reason for it."
DuPage prosecutors did not accept his account. At Cruz's second trial, the state argued that Dugan might have been involved with Cruz and Hernandez but that Cruz was the attacker, according to the Center on Wrongful Convictions. A police dog trainer testified that a bloodhound had shown that more than one person was involved, which the prosecution used to suggest that Dugan was lying about acting alone.
Dugan was sent to state prison. On July 30, 1987, another inmate at Pontiac Correctional Center stabbed him with a homemade knife in a prison corridor. The inmate said Dugan had been bragging about the Ackerman murder. Dugan survived. A former prison nurse testified in 2009 that he was a troublemaker who showed no remorse and that he "would lay back in his cell at night and brag very loudly." His defense said other inmates had stabbed and beaten him repeatedly over the years.
On January 19, 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Cruz and Hernandez, ruling that they should have been tried separately, according to the Daily Herald's timeline; the National Registry of Exonerations gives the date of the reversal as January 19, 1989. Each man was tried again. At the retrials, much of the evidence pointing to Dugan was kept from the juries, the registry says, and the bloodhound testimony was used against his account.
Cruz was convicted a second time on February 1, 1990, and again sentenced to death. Hernandez's second trial, held in Bloomington three months later, ended with a hung jury. He was convicted at a third trial on May 17, 1991, and sentenced to 80 years in prison.
In 1992 DNA testing excluded Hernandez and Buckley as the source of biological evidence recovered from Jeanine. Prosecutors went on opposing the men's appeals. Mary Brigid Kenney, an assistant attorney general assigned to the Cruz appeal, wrote a memo raising concerns about the case and resigned in protest, the registry records.
On December 4, 1992, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Cruz's second conviction and death sentence by a vote of 4 to 3. The majority opinion, by Justice James D. Heiple, found that Dugan's other crimes were not similar enough to the Nicarico case to be admitted and that Cruz had received a fair trial. Weeks later three justices retired, and on May 28, 1993, the reconstituted court granted a rehearing.
On July 14, 1994, the court reversed Cruz's conviction and ordered a third trial. The justices were deeply split; Justice Freeman wrote the lead opinion, one justice concurred separately and three dissented, and the opinions ran to 107 pages, Illinois Issues reported. The decision held that the trial judge had abused his discretion by excluding evidence of five of Dugan's other crimes, which were similar enough to show his way of operating and to back up his statements about Jeanine, and that the bloodhound testimony should not have been admitted. On January 30, 1995, an appellate court overturned Hernandez's conviction as well.
The registry records that a sheriff's lieutenant had testified about a telephone call supposedly showing that Cruz had made admissions, but that the lieutenant was on vacation in Florida at the time of the supposed call. On November 3, 1995, at Cruz's third trial and after two weeks of prosecution testimony, Judge Ronald Mehling acquitted Cruz, and he walked free. On December 8, 1995, the charges against Hernandez were dropped, and he too was released.
A 1995 DNA test matched biological evidence from the crime to Brian Dugan, according to a case summary by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school.
A sheriff's internal investigation found no wrongdoing by police or prosecutors, but a grand jury began examining the prosecution of Cruz. On December 12, 1996, it indicted seven law enforcement officials, three former prosecutors and four sheriff's officers, who became known as the DuPage Seven, on charges that included official misconduct, obstruction of justice and perjury. A judge freed two of them on May 13, 1999, for lack of evidence, and the remaining defendants were found not guilty on June 4, 1999.
On September 26, 2000, the DuPage County Board voted 14 to 9 to settle the civil rights lawsuits brought by Cruz, Hernandez and Buckley for $3.5 million. Before the end of 2002, DuPage State's Attorney Joseph Birkett released new DNA results that, in the Daily Herald's words, showed Dugan, not Cruz, as Jeanine's attacker. On December 19, 2002, Governor George Ryan granted Cruz a full pardon based on innocence, weeks before he cleared Illinois's death row. Hernandez later received $170,000 in state compensation and Cruz $120,300, the registry records.
On November 29, 2005, a DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for Jeanine Nicarico's murder. Prosecutors cited DNA evidence and improved DNA technology. On January 18, 2006, at his first court appearance, he pleaded not guilty. He was held without bond in the DuPage County jail, where he spent almost four years.
In March 2008 a judge ruled on which parts of the 1986 Thorud recordings prosecutors could use, and a preliminary trial date of January 20 was set. Birkett said he would seek the death penalty. Dugan had long offered to plead guilty if his life was spared; prosecutors would not agree. The defense team investigated Dugan's past, including a claim he had made since the mid-1980s about an encounter with John Wayne Gacy.
Jail officials later testified that while he was held in the DuPage County jail Dugan converted to Orthodox Judaism after a hunger strike over jail food, and that he was a demanding inmate who complained about his meals, his blanket and the paper he was given.
On July 28, 2009, Dugan, then 52, stood before DuPage Circuit Judge George Bakalis and pleaded guilty to the murder of Jeanine Nicarico. He had no promise that he would not be executed; Birkett had said there would be "no deals." "No one aided, abetted or helped me," Dugan told the court. Birkett read a statement of nearly an hour setting out the state's evidence, including finger marks found by the front door. His lawyer Steven Greenberg said, "It has been his desire to admit to this crime for 25 years." In a written note, Dugan said he hoped to give Jeanine's parents and the community "a small measure of resolution in their search for the truth," and in a letter he wrote, "I deeply regret all the pain and suffering I caused."
Jeanine's parents had attended every trial in the case. Her father said Dugan deserved to die, and that whether Dugan had acted alone was, for the family, still unknown.
Jury selection began in Wheaton in September 2009. Before the hearing Bakalis allowed the defense to question the former Kane and LaSalle County prosecutors about the 1985 plea talks. "The jury can't be totally in the dark," the judge said. The hearing began on October 6, before seven women and five men. In its first phase the jury found Dugan eligible for a death sentence.
Birkett, who led the prosecution with Romas Mockaitis and Michael Wolfe, called Dugan "a remorseless psychopath who takes what he wants, when he wants it and cares for no one but himself." Nearly a dozen surviving victims were expected to testify. Melissa Ackerman's friend, who had escaped him in 1985, was among those who testified. Jeanine's sister also testified. Donna Schnorr's brother and sister heard the details of her killing described in court for the first time in 25 years; both supported his execution.
The jury heard about three and a half hours of the 1986 Thorud recordings. "I'm not going to let myself get emotional," Dugan said in one. "What's done is done." In a recorded interview he described himself as having attacked his victims on impulse while high on drugs and alcohol.
The defense, led by Greenberg, Matthew McQuaid and Allan Sincox, argued that his plea showed he accepted responsibility, that he had tried in 1985 to save the men wrongly accused and that he had suffered a damaged upbringing and abuse. The forensic psychologist Kent Kiehl testified about scans of Dugan's brain taken with a mobile MRI, and Dr. James Cavanaugh testified that Dugan came from a dysfunctional family, had a history of head injuries and showed by age 8 traits seen in psychopaths. The defense also claimed a genetic defect.
Late in the hearing, Cisowski and Mueller testified about 1985. Both said Dugan's main aim had been to save himself, because a formal confession without a promise against the death penalty could be used to execute him. Cisowski also confirmed that Dugan did not want the two other men to be executed. One of the officials acquitted in the DuPage Seven case testified that Dugan's errors of detail had worried investigators.
The state of Illinois paid for the defense, at an estimated cost of $750,000 to $1 million, from a fund for poor defendants in capital cases that the Nicarico case had helped to bring about, the Daily Herald reported.
The jury deliberated for nearly 11 hours over two days. On the night of Tuesday, November 10, 2009, the jurors announced that they had a verdict, then asked for more time. They had signed a form for natural life in prison, because two jurors would not agree to death, and a death sentence in Illinois had to be unanimous. Within about half an hour, before the court could be assembled, the two holdouts said they needed more time. Bakalis sequestered the jury overnight in a hotel in Lisle. On Wednesday, November 11, at 2:35 p.m., the jury returned a unanimous sentence of death. Each juror confirmed the verdict in court.
Dugan showed no visible reaction. "This decision is definitely a relief for us," Jeanine's mother said. Birkett called it a "true and just verdict." Wolfe said Dugan had "tried to play so many cards," adding, "Truth always wins." "No one was bullying anybody," one juror told the Daily Herald, and another told ABC7 Chicago that the photographs of the crimes against girls and young women had weighed heavily. Melissa Ackerman's friend said, "He is nothing." Donna Schnorr's sister said death row would be less comfortable for him.
Dugan was 53. He was moved to a state prison the day after the verdict.
The defense asked that the first, discarded verdict form be preserved, arguing that the life verdict was final and that replacing it amounted to double jeopardy. Bakalis kept both forms but did not make the first one part of the official record. On December 16, 2009, he formally sentenced Dugan to death by lethal injection and set February 25 as a nominal execution date, which was expected to pass while the automatic appeal went to the Illinois Supreme Court. Dugan was placed on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center. Birkett said he hoped the appeals would take five years or less.
They never ran their course. On March 9, 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed a law abolishing the death penalty in Illinois, effective July 1, and commuted the sentences of the 15 men on the state's death row to life in prison. Dugan was one of them. The National Registry of Exonerations describes the commuted sentences as life without parole.
As of August 2020, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, Dugan was serving life in prison in Illinois for the murders of Jeanine Nicarico, Donna Schnorr and Melissa Ackerman, plus the sentences imposed in 1985 for the other attacks.
In June 2008 the Daily Herald reported that Dugan had told at least three people, starting in the mid-1980s, about an encounter he said he had at about age 15, around 1972. He said a man in a dark car offered him a ride and a job while he was walking to a grocery store in Lisle, drove him to a secluded place and abused him, then paid him and drove him back. He said he realized the man was John Wayne Gacy when Gacy's face appeared in news coverage in December 1978.
The story is unproven. Dugan never reported it to police, and the FBI's 1985 report on his background does not mention it. Thorud believed it was untrue, saying Dugan's memory was vague and lacked salient details; Cisowski thought him truthful. The writer Clifford Linedecker said Dugan's age fit Gacy's victim profile. Dugan was not sure of his age or the date. His defense team investigated the claim for the sentencing hearing, and the jury heard it in October 2009.
Whether Dugan acted alone. Dugan has said since 1985 that he killed Jeanine Nicarico alone, and he repeated it in court in 2009. Cisowski believed him. At Cruz's second trial prosecutors argued that he might have had accomplices. Jeanine's father said in 2009 that the family still did not know. No one else stands convicted of the crime; Cruz was acquitted and pardoned, and the charges against Hernandez and Buckley were dropped.
Why he offered to confess. Dugan's lawyers said he wanted to save innocent men; his 1985 statement says so. The prosecutors in 2009, and Cisowski and Mueller in their testimony, said his first aim was to save his own life.
Other attacks. The 1977 Elmhurst attack, the 1979 Aurora attempted abduction and the 1982 gas station attack were presented at the 2009 hearing as his, but no convictions for them were reported. They are his attributed or admitted acts, not proven crimes.
Dates and ages. The National Registry of Exonerations gives the day Jeanine disappeared as February 23, 1983, and Melissa Ackerman's age as 8; the Daily Herald, the 2009 court record as reported and other sources give February 25 and 7.
September 23, 1956: born in Nashua, New Hampshire.
1967: family moves to Lisle, Illinois.
1972: first arrest, for burglary, at 15.
April 21, 1974: accused of trying to grab a 10-year-old girl in Lisle; charge later dropped.
January 18, 1977: a woman is abducted and assaulted; she later identified Dugan.
August 1982: woman says he attacked her at an Aurora gas station.
February 25, 1983: Jeanine Nicarico, 10, taken from her home near Naperville; found dead two days later.
March 8 and 9, 1984: Rolando Cruz, Alejandro Hernandez and Stephen Buckley arrested and indicted.
July 15, 1984: Donna Schnorr, 27, killed in Kane County.
February 22, 1985: Cruz and Hernandez convicted; jury deadlocks on Buckley.
May 1985: attacks on women and girls in North Aurora, Geneva and Aurora.
June 2, 1985: Melissa Ackerman, 7, abducted in LaSalle County; found June 17.
June 3, 1985: Dugan arrested; charged with the Ackerman murder June 25.
November 1, 1985: writes a confession to the Nicarico murder.
November 19, 1985: pleads guilty to the Ackerman and Schnorr murders; two life sentences.
March 1986: Jeanine's body exhumed to check his account.
October 1986: recorded interviews with Robert Thorud.
July 30, 1987: stabbed by another inmate at Pontiac.
January 19, 1988 (1989 in the registry): Cruz and Hernandez convictions reversed.
February 1, 1990: Cruz convicted again and sentenced to death.
May 17, 1991: Hernandez convicted at a third trial; 80 years.
December 4, 1992: Illinois Supreme Court affirms Cruz's conviction, 4 to 3.
July 14, 1994: on rehearing, the court reverses Cruz's conviction.
November 3, 1995: Cruz acquitted; December 8, charges against Hernandez dropped.
December 12, 1996: DuPage Seven indicted; acquitted by June 4, 1999.
September 26, 2000: $3.5 million settlement approved.
December 19, 2002: Cruz pardoned.
November 29, 2005: Dugan indicted for the Nicarico murder.
July 28, 2009: pleads guilty to the Nicarico murder.
November 11, 2009: jury returns a death sentence.
December 16, 2009: formally sentenced to death; sent to Pontiac death row.
March 9, 2011: death penalty abolished; sentence commuted to life.