On February 25, 1983, ten-year-old Jeanine Nicarico was home sick with the flu in Naperville, Illinois, alone, because her parents were at work and her sisters at school. Someone broke in and took her in broad daylight. Her body was found two days later, six miles from her home. She had been raped and beaten to death. Two years later, in the custody of police investigating another child's murder, Brian James Dugan offered to tell prosecutors that he had killed her. They turned him down, and two other men went to death row for her murder.
By 1985 the Nicarico case already had its defendants. Rolando Cruz, a twenty-year-old gang member from Aurora, had come to the police with false information about the killing in an attempt to collect a $10,000 reward and had become a suspect himself. He, Alejandro Hernandez, who had accused two others, and Stephen Buckley were charged with the rape and murder on limited evidence and tried together. In 1985 Cruz and Hernandez were convicted and sentenced to death. The jury deadlocked on Buckley, and he was not retried.
Dugan was born on September 23, 1956, in Nashua, New Hampshire, the second of five children of James and Genevieve Dugan, both of them alcoholics according to their children. The family moved to Lisle, Illinois, in 1967. His family said his birth had been traumatic and wondered whether it had damaged him; as a boy he suffered severe headaches followed by vomiting. At eight he and a younger brother burned down the family garage. At thirteen, his brother said, he poured gasoline on a cat and set it on fire. He ran away to Iowa in 1972 and was arrested that year for burglary, the first of many arrests that brought convictions for arson, battery and further burglaries. In 1974 he tried to abduct a ten-year-old girl from the train station in Lisle; the charges were dropped. He served time at Menard Correctional Center from 1979 to 1982.
On July 15, 1984, he saw Donna Schnorr, a twenty-seven-year-old nurse from Geneva, Illinois, in her car at a stoplight. He followed her, ran her off the road, pulled her from her car, beat her and raped her, and drowned her in a quarry. In May 1985 he abducted and raped a twenty-one-year-old woman in North Aurora, who survived; on May 28 he tried and failed to abduct a nineteen-year-old walking along a road on the west side of Aurora; and the next day he abducted and raped a sixteen-year-old girl in the same area.
On June 2, 1985, seven-year-old Melissa Ackerman and her eight-year-old friend Opal Horton were riding their bikes in Somonauk when Dugan confronted them. He grabbed Opal first and threw her into his car, but she got away while he was overpowering Melissa. He raped Melissa and drowned her in a creek more than fifteen miles away. Her body was not found for several weeks. Opal gave police a description of his car, and an officer in nearby Mendota remembered stopping Dugan over an out-of-date inspection sticker. He was arrested at work the next day. Physical evidence in his belongings tied him to the crime, and to avoid the risk of a death sentence he pleaded guilty to the murders of Melissa Ackerman and Donna Schnorr and received two life terms. "It might have been for the sex, but I don't understand why," he said. "I wish I knew why I did a lot of things, but I don't." In 1987 he survived being stabbed nine times in prison.
His offer on the Nicarico murder came with a condition: an informal confession in exchange for a guarantee that he would not face execution. The DuPage County prosecutors refused, so he never gave a formal statement, and the case against Cruz and Hernandez went on. After appeals and new trials, Hernandez was convicted a third time and sentenced to life. Cruz was acquitted at his third trial in 1995, after a witness recanted and DNA evidence excluded him, and the state's attorney then dismissed the charges against Hernandez, who was freed. In 1996 three prosecutors and four sheriff's deputies from DuPage County were tried for conspiring to frame the two men and were acquitted. In 2000 Cruz, Hernandez and Buckley received a settlement from the county for wrongful prosecution. Dugan later said he had confessed in order to clear them. Cruz said he believed Dugan's motives were self-serving.
Advances in DNA testing matched Dugan to semen recovered at the Nicarico scene, and in 2005, still in prison, he was indicted for her murder. He pleaded guilty in 2009, and a jury sentenced him to death. In 2011 Governor Pat Quinn signed the law abolishing capital punishment in Illinois, and Dugan's sentence was commuted to life. He is held at Stateville Correctional Center.
In 2008 the Daily Herald reported that Dugan had claimed since the 1980s that in 1972 a man offered him a job at a grocery store in Lisle, drove him to a secluded spot and sexually abused him, and that after John Wayne Gacy's arrest in 1978 he recognized the man as Gacy. Terry Sullivan, who had prosecuted Gacy, publicly doubted the story, noting that Dugan had not reported it at the time and that neither the method nor Lisle matched Gacy's pattern, though he allowed that Dugan fit the profile of Gacy's victims.