On December 13, 1974, on Interstate 70 near Ogallah in western Kansas, a man in a pickup truck drew alongside a red Toyota carrying two young women from Fort Madison, Iowa, Diane Lynn Lovette, nineteen, and Cheryl Lynn Young, twenty-one, with Cheryl's small son, Guy William Young. According to later accounts they were driving to see relatives in Denver. The man shot out one of their tires with a handgun, and when they stopped he offered help. He took them to an abandoned farmhouse in Graham County, raped Lovette, killed both women with a shotgun and left the boy to freeze. Their car was found that day; the bodies were found on January 13, 1975, trappers coming on the child first. Guy's age is given as three in the court's opinion and most reports, two in some. One later report gives the family's home as Colorado Springs.
The man was Francis Donald Nemechek, known as Don, born on June 29, 1950, in WaKeeney. After a divorce his father helped him get work as a truck driver, and he lived with his father until his arrest. In 1974 he had pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. On January 1, 1976, near Ogallah again, he fired at a car on the interstate carrying a Colorado man and four passengers, who escaped unharmed and reported it. He was arrested two weeks later, identified by witnesses, held on twenty thousand dollars' bond, and fingerprinted; his trial for the sniping was set for September.
He was free in the meantime. On June 30, 1976, he abducted Carla Joan Baker, twenty, a University of Kansas student, as she rode her bicycle on a street in Hays. Her father found the bicycle the next day. Her body was found on September 21 near Cedar Bluff Reservoir. On August 21 he took Paula Sue Fabrizius, sixteen, an Ellis High School student who worked as a rangerette at Cedar Bluff State Park, and killed her near Castle Rock in Gove County; she was found the next day.
He was arrested at work on August 24, 1976. Witnesses had named him as the last person seen with Paula Fabrizius, his fingerprint card was already with the Trego County sheriff from the sniping case, and his prints were matched to evidence in her case. In his camper investigators found a blood-soaked carpet and photographs. In October he was charged with all five murders. He confessed to them but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity; at trial his lawyers conceded he had done it and argued he had not known what he was doing. The jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder, and on March 7, 1977 he was sentenced to five consecutive life terms. The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed on April 1, 1978. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation said he was not responsible for other crimes attributed to him by rumor, among them the murder of Linda Leebrick.
Kansas had no death penalty at the time, and his life sentences carry the possibility of parole. He has been refused every time he has applied. In 2007 the parole board denied him and deferred his next hearing ten years, the longest the law allowed, and the families of the dead have organized petitions and attended public comment sessions against his release at each review. He is held at Lansing, and his next hearing has been deferred to 2027.