Lisa Ann Slusser was born on August 30, 1964, and she was killed six days before her thirteenth birthday, on August 24, 1977. She is buried at Ascension Catholic Cemetery in Libertyville, in Lake County, Illinois. The man who killed her was not named for her death until four years later, and by then he had already been sentenced to life in Wisconsin for another.
Lawrence Dalton, born in 1945, was eventually held responsible for four deaths in Wisconsin and Illinois in 1977 and 1978: Lisa Slusser; Blanche Penna, twenty-three; a woman named Shirley Taylor; and a fourth victim who has never been identified.
The Wisconsin case is the one that went to trial, and the appellate judgment sets it out. Dalton lured Blanche Penna to the house where he was living, handcuffed and gagged her, raped her and killed her, and buried her body near the house. He was arrested on April 23, 1979. In the Circuit Court of Kenosha County he was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping by deceit and first-degree sexual assault, and on October 31, 1979, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Some summaries of the case give the sexual assault count as second degree; the Court of Appeals opinion says first.
He appealed on two grounds and lost both in 1980. The first was that he had not meant to kill her, and that the trial court should have let him call psychiatric evidence that he lacked the specific intent at the time. The Court of Appeals held that the evidence had been properly excluded, following a decision of the Wisconsin Supreme Court that year.
The second ground concerned his wife. Karen Dalton testified that he had told her he killed Blanche Penna and buried her by the house. He argued that this was a privileged communication between husband and wife. The court did not have to decide whether the conversation was private, because he had said it in front of his four children, who were then between about three and five and a half. The judgment records that the children were by three different women, one of whom was named Kathy Penna. Whether she was related to the victim does not appear in the record.
Wisconsin found that he had "mental and physical aberrations as to sexual matters" and committed him to Central State Hospital. There, according to later federal court findings, he repeatedly attempted suicide, refused food for long periods and had to be restrained and force-fed.
While he was still a patient he was charged in Cook County, Illinois, with murder and rape. He arrived in Illinois on August 23, 1981, and two days later tried to kill himself again and was admitted to Cermak Hospital, the jail hospital in Chicago. On November 20, 1981, he pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and one of rape. He was sentenced to seventy years on each murder count and thirty years on the rape count, to run concurrently.
He later challenged the Illinois pleas, arguing that a man in his condition could not have entered them knowingly and voluntarily. The Illinois circuit court refused him an evidentiary hearing, and in November 1995, shortly afterward, the state destroyed what remained of his court record. On federal habeas review the Seventh Circuit held that the facts behind his due process claim had gone undeveloped through no fault of his own, and sent the case back for a hearing. The outcome of that hearing does not appear in any published source.
How Lisa Slusser, Shirley Taylor and the unidentified victim died is not set out in any published record, and the fourth victim's name has never been established. Dalton was later reported held at the Oshkosh Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.