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 offences started shortly after he was dishonourably 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.
In 1992, after his release, he took ten-year-old Ronelle Eichstedt of Ripon from her bicycle on a rural road, molested her and left her body in a remote place.
In July 1994 he broke into a house in Appleton believing it to be empty. Trudi Jeschke, twenty-one, was in a bedroom; she was house-sitting. He shot her.
Days before that, an Illinois woman had fought off an attempt to abduct her while she was cycling near Hartman Creek State Park in Waupaca County.
On Labor Day 1994 twelve-year-old Cora Jones of Waupaca was taken the same way as Eichstedt. Her bicycle was found lying in the middle of Sanders Road in the town of Dayton. The Eichstedt inquiry had gone cold by then. A search began the next day with hundreds of volunteers covering a ten-mile radius, the FBI joined it, a rural church was turned into a search centre, and the case drew national attention. Her body was found five days later.
He was arrested on November 14, 1994, pleaded guilty and avoided a trial, and was sentenced the following month for offences in five counties.
An earlier version of this entry had the killings in the wrong years, giving Jeschke as 1992 and both girls as 1994. Eichstedt was killed in 1992; Jeschke and Jones were both killed in 1994.
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.
The case was still being cited in Wisconsin a decade later. In 2006 Zoesch spoke publicly about it while the Steven Avery prosecution was under way, and said he was glad not to be involved in that one.