David Spanbauer was born in 1941 and came from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He was a lifelong burglar and thief and spent most of his adult life in prison. His offending began as a juvenile, and the serious offenses started shortly after he was dishonorably discharged from the Navy in 1959; they included the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl and the shooting of her uncle. He had served twenty years for rape and attempted murder.
On August 23, 1992, ten-year-old Ronelle Eichstedt was riding her bicycle near her home outside Ripon when he took her. Her body was found on September 30 in a farm field in Iowa County, in the southwest of the state, about a hundred miles away.
On July 3, 1994 he knocked a twenty-four-year-old Illinois woman off her bicycle on Golke Road near Hartman Creek State Park in Waupaca County and threatened her with a gun. She got away. The same day he burglarized a house in Appleton. Six days later, on July 9, he broke into another house on the north side of Appleton believing it to be empty. Trudi Jeschke, twenty-one, was house-sitting there and was in a bedroom. He shot her dead.
On Labor Day, September 5, 1994, twelve-year-old Cora Jones was taken the same way as Ronelle Eichstedt, while riding her bicycle near her grandmother's home in the town of Dayton; her bicycle was found lying in the middle of Sanders Road. The Eichstedt inquiry had gone cold. Hundreds of volunteers searched a ten-mile radius, the FBI joined the search, and a rural church became the search center. On September 10 two hunters found her body northwest of Antigo, in Langlade County.
In November 1994 Gerald Argall of Combined Locks caught a man trying to break into his house and tackled him as he ran. It was Spanbauer, and he was arrested on November 14. The next day he admitted the attempted abduction near Hartman Creek, and on November 18 he confessed to the three killings and to sexual assaults in Appleton. On December 8, 1994, which would have been Cora's thirteenth birthday, he pleaded guilty or no contest in Outagamie County Circuit Court to eighteen felonies from five counties, including the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of both girls, Trudi Jeschke's murder, the attempted abduction, two rapes and several burglaries. On December 20 Judge James Bayorgeon imposed the maximum, three life terms plus 403 years, and called him pure evil. A Langlade County sheriff's deputy, Larry Shadick, who spoke with him, recalled what he said: those girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he just did what he did.
His counsel, Thomas Zoesch of Appleton, who remained his unofficial lawyer for years afterwards, said he had kept his professional composure until the case ended and then gone home and wept. Detective Dan Woodkey of the Appleton police described him as a manipulator who always wanted something from his interrogators. Woodkey recalled transporting him from a prison in Minnesota when a news item came on the radio about a break-in in which a girl had been killed: Spanbauer talked from the back seat about how terrible it was, and had never expressed any remorse for the three he had killed himself.
In his last months he was negotiating to sell an interview to the Appleton Post-Crescent. His conditions were a cash payment and that it be conducted outside the prison. The paper does not pay for interviews. Zoesch thought he wanted to bare his soul and that there was a financial motive as well. His last letter, dated July 19, asked whether the paper was going to do it, said things were getting tight, and noted that he was down to a hundred dollars in his canteen fund.
He had been in failing health for two years, with heart and liver disease, and had left instructions with the infirmary staff not to resuscitate him. Those instructions were followed. He left no letter of confession or contrition, and Zoesch believed he had accounted for all his crimes, saying there would have been no reason for him to withhold one.
Cora Jones's father said that at least his taxes would no longer keep the man alive, that he had always known from his pay slip that he was paying for the health care of his daughter's killer, and that there would be a party that night. The district attorney said it would be hard to find anyone in Wisconsin shedding a tear.