Dugan was born in 1956 and had a record of burglary and assault. In 1983 he abducted Jeanine Nicarico, ten, from her home in Naperville, raped her and killed her. In 1984 he raped and drowned Donna Schnorr, twenty-seven, in a quarry. In 1985 he abducted and killed Melissa Ackerman, seven.
He was arrested on June 3, 1985 after the Ackerman killing and pleaded guilty to the Schnorr and Ackerman murders, receiving two life sentences plus 215 years on November 19, 1985. At the same time he offered a detailed confession to the Nicarico murder, which he was prepared to give in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
By then Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez had been convicted of that murder and sentenced to death. The DuPage County prosecutors did not accept Dugan's confession and continued to defend those convictions through years of appeals and retrials. Cruz's conviction was overturned three times. In 1995, at a third trial, a police lieutenant admitted that a crucial piece of testimony against Cruz, a supposed dream statement, had never happened, and the judge directed an acquittal. Cruz and Hernandez were freed after more than a decade on death row. Seven law enforcement officers and prosecutors were subsequently indicted over the handling of the case, and all were acquitted.
DNA testing eventually matched Dugan to the Nicarico murder. He pleaded guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to death on December 16, 2009. In 2011 Illinois abolished capital punishment and commuted every remaining death sentence, so he is serving life.
The Nicarico case is one of the most consequential wrongful-conviction cases in American history: it drove the Illinois death penalty moratorium of 2000 and, in the end, abolition. Dugan's entry cannot be written without it. Two men came close to being executed for a murder the man in the next prison had confessed to.