“It was unbelievable,” said Gary Schmies, a Waupaca County Sheriff’s Department detective. “There were cameras everywhere.”
After a 10-minute interview, police knew they had the wrong guy.
But they had a photo, and a sketch artist reworked it to make the subject appear older.
It wasn’t David Spanbauer, but the photo would prove especially useful later on.
Attempted robbery seals Spanbauer’s fate
On Nov. 14, 1994, a man from Combined Locks, a town near the larger city of Appleton, was returning home from an outing when he spotted a guy attempting to break into his house.
He chased the burglar down and tackled him, holding the suspect until police arrived.
The suspect turned out to be David Spanbauer, who was booked into jail on burglary charges.
When police learned Spanbauer was driving a maroon car, he quickly became a suspect in the Hartman Creek incident.
While in custody, the police noticed that the tools found in the suspect’s car matched those used in the two home invasion rapes that happened earlier that fall.
They were pretty sure they got their guy, and Langlade County Sheriff’s Department Detective Ben Baker, casually brought out the aged composite photo of the Madison man who had been mistaken for Spanbauer. It immediately got the man’s attention.
Photo brings ruse crumbling down
“I showed him the picture and knew it hit him hard,” said Baker. “He kept looking at it. I put it away and he tried to find it in my papers. Finally he saw it, pointed to it and said it was him.”
“The Fourth of July thing. That was me,” Spanbauer said.
And although he confessed, he downplayed the event, and said it was nothing more than a misunderstanding.
“I just asked for directions. She had an attitude like I asked for sex or something,” Spanbauer said.
He said that she ignored him and rode on, so he grew angry, and hit the woman with his car, knocking her off the road into the brush alongside.
“I was ticked off and was just trying to teach her a lesson. Tell you the truth, it looked more serious than I intended. I was just trying to scare her. It was no abduction thing,” Spanbauer added.
But only because another car had driven by, scaring Spanbauer into leaving, had Stariha been given the opportunity to hop back on her bike and ride directly to the police station to report the incident.
In time, a confession comes
Based on the items found in the trunk of Spanbauer’s car, along with the carpet fibers that linked him to Cora Jones, the police knew they had taken a dangerous killer off the streets.
But a confession would be like pulling teeth.
The police kept up their interrogations for days, but it wasn’t until Spanbauer had secured an attorney, Tom Zoesch, that he confessed to the kidnapping and killing Ronelle Eichstedt and Cora Jones and to the shooting of Trudi Jeschke.
Confessing reveals truth for families
During three days of interviews with Baker and Appleton Police Detective Dan Woodkey, Spanbauer began with the 1992 abduction and murder of 10-year-old Ronelle Eichstedt near her rural Fond du Lac County home.
In his confession, Spanbauer said he saw Ronelle riding her bike near Ripon and forced her into his vehicle, then drove her some miles away and stopped the car. He told her to take off her clothes and tied her hands together before sexually assaulting her.
He then told her to get dressed – leaving off her shoes, socks and underwear – and they drove to a remote area, where he strangled her with a cord, then placed her in the trunk and drove again until he found a wooded spot where he disposed of her body.
Afterwards, he used a knife to cut up the cord as he drove back to Madison.
“I didn't hate David Spanbauer. But I wish I could feel hatred,” Baker said.
Spanbauer later confessed to killing Cora Jones, who had feared abduction her entire life.
In his confession, Spanbauer said Jones lived only a few hours after her abduction, and after killing her in the very spot where her body was eventually found by hunters, he “left the body in a ditch and drove away.”
During that time Spanbauer would also confess to the murder of 21-year-old Trudi Jeschke during the bungled burglary of her north side Appleton home and two sexual assaults in Appleton.
“His whole reaction to me was, ‘those girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I just do what I do,” recalled Langlade County Sheriff’s Department detective Larry Shadick, who regularly visits the memorial left at the site where Cora Jones’ body was discovered. “He just was hunting. Like when you go hunting, he found himself a victim.”
“I go by the memorial quite often, and it all comes back,” he said.
Authorities wondered if Spanbauer had committed other unsolved crimes, and they attempted to question him, including an incident involving a Joliet, Illinois, girl on her bicycle.
“Spanbauer was asked about it,” said a detective in the case, “and said ‘Where was this? Illinois? Illinois has the death penalty. I don't know anything about it.’”
It brought little comfort to officers, given the severity of his crimes.
“I thought I would feel joy. But this was something you just couldn't get any joy out of,” Baker added. “It wasn’t a relief. It was just a basic emptiness, a lot like being shell shocked.”
Arrest brings back bad memories
Many other people were equally horrified to see Spanbauer’s face on television, including a victim that never made it onto Spanbauer’s lengthy rap sheet.
“When I was 9 or 10 I was snooping in my parents’ bedroom and found a journal and some letters from when my mom was younger,” wrote an anonymous poster on cafemom.com. “In it, I read that my mother had been raped. I was so upset and started crying. I confessed to my mom that I snooped and told her what I read. She said, ‘yes, that did happen’ to her but did not go into any details ... and the subject was dropped.’”
“Just last weekend she was over at my house and she said, ‘Remember when you were younger and you snooped and read that letter from my friend that mentioned how I was raped?’ I was so surprised she brought it up. (It was something I hadn’t thought of in years.) I said, ‘Yes, I remember.’
“She said, ‘Well, in 1994 I saw the man who raped me on the news. I never forgot his face. I was at work when I saw it, and collapsed to the floor. My co-worker helped me up. I told her, ‘that man on the news is the man who raped me when I was 17 years old.’ He was on the news because he was charged with raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl.’”
“I was shocked. She was telling me this in such a distant, calm manner. For some reason, I had always thought she was raped by someone she knew, like a date rape kind of thing. I asked her, ‘You knew him, right?’ She said, ‘No, he was a complete stranger. He grabbed me and held a knife to me and dragged me in the woods and raped me. I was able to just fight back and got away. I remember how my hands were bloody from fighting back.’”
“David Spanbauer. He raped my mother in 1972. She was 17 years old and a virgin. She held guilt about never reporting it (though, she didn't know the first thing to do or how to tell police to find him). She said after it happened she was in such serious shock and she just completely shut down. Now, knowing that some girls didn't survive, she is just thankful she survived. I can't imagine how terrifying and horrific that was and am so sad that happened to my mother.’”
Chapter 5: No final trial for David Spanbauer
On Thursday, December 8th, 1994 – the day Cora Jones would have turned 13 - David Spanbauer pleaded no contest to two charges and guilty to the remaining sixteen charges. He was found guilty for first-degree intentional homicide in the Jones and Eichstedt murders and guilty on all other counts.
“Maybe this was our present to her - to get this guy,” said Cora’s mother, Vicki.
Because he took a plea, there would be no trial.
Still, many attende
d the Dec. 20 sentencing hearing at the Outagamie County Courthouse, where only two posters were hanging, one offering a reward for information in the murder of Trudi Jeschke, the other a missing persons’ poster for Laurie Depies.
The packed courtroom included family members of Cora Jones, Ronelle Eichstedt and Trudi Jeschke, as well as the families of Spanbauer’s previous rape victims, who had expected longer sentences for the man who victimized them.
Authorities did not coddle David Spanbauer this time.
Outagamie County District Attorney Vince Biskupic – who would later be found guilty of trial misconduct for bribing prison informants to offer false testimony and hiding evidence - called Spanbauer a “festering soul” and a coward.
“He’s evil. And at the same time he’s pathetic,” said Biskupic.
And with many of the audience watching outside the courtroom via television monitors – the courtroom could hold no more - Spanbauer was sentenced to three life terms in prison without parole, plus 403 years.
“I don’t know from what cesspool in hell you slithered forth and I can’t send you back,” said Outagamie County Circuit Judge James Bayorgeon, who called Spanbauer “pure evil” and questioned why God would allow “a piece of offal like you walk this earth.”
Bayorgeon calculated the life expectancies of Jones, Eichstedt and Jeschke when he determined how much time Spanbauer should – and this time would – get.
“What you have done, Mr. Spanbauer, is unthinkable. It is something you must live with for the rest of your days,” Bayorgeon said. “The only thing I can hope for is that you never spend one more moment of peace for the rest of your life.”
The earliest possible time Spanbauer could be a free man would be December 20, 2191. He would die in prison.
Tell-all falls through
At the time of his death, he was attempting to negotiate a paid interview with the Appleton Post-Crescent, which declined the opportunity because the paper as policy doesn’t pay for interviews.
“I think he wanted to cleanse his soul,” said his attorney, Thomas Zoesch, who encouraged Spanbauer’s confessions so that he could be jailed out of state. Spanbauer apparently feared being killed in prison, since his case was so high profile.
“He had a dark side - kind of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality,” Zoesch said. “The dark side was monstrous and evil. This evil side really controlled him. It wasn’t the way he wanted to be, but he had no control over what he did.”
Still, Zoesch exchanged letters regularly with Spanbauer, although they stopped for a time when the serial killer developed health problems related to his previous heart attack, and was moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin’s Dodge Correctional Institution, where he could receive better medical care.
“He was always friendly and cordial to me, asking me how I was doing, both personally and professionally. He was an intelligent guy,” Zoesch said.
As for his proposed Post-Crescent interview, “I really think he wanted to bare his soul, but there was a monetary motivation as well.”
In his last letter to Zoesch, dated July 19, 2002, he wrote, “I want to know if they are going to do it or not.
“Things are getting tight,” he added, saying that he was down to the last $100 in his canteen fund.
He died less than two weeks later.
No tears for Spanbauer
“You would be hard-pressed to find someone in the state of Wisconsin who would be shedding a tear over his death,” said Outagamie County District Attorney Vince Biskupic. “It’s just a shame that taxpayer dollars had to be used to house him for the last several years. This is one of the examples where I and many people in the state would have liked to have had the death penalty option available, based on the repeated and horrific conduct of this despicable man.”
As for the families, Spanbauer’s death was something they had long anticipated, all the while wondering just how they would react when the news of his death finally came.
“It is kind of a relief. It is a weight off of our shoulders,” said Vicki Jones, Cora’s mother. “We have been waiting eight years, and we know how bad death is. But after what he did to Cora he didn’t deserve to live.”
“At least my tax money is no longer going to keep him alive,” said Rick Jones, Cora Jones’ father. “I always look at my check stub at my taxes and I always knew that I was paying for health care for the guy who killed my daughter. I think we feel now is when he’s going to meet the true judge. Judgment will be passed on him one way or another. There will be a party tonight.”
There was no funeral for Spanbauer, who was 61 when he died, and no one claimed his body. Instead, a prison chaplain offered a short graveside service.
Chapter 6: The aftermath
In May of 1997, Carol Grady – Spanbauer’s 1960 rape victim - led a charge to change laws so felons would be forced to serve the entirety of their sentences, along with a period of supervision that would be a minimum of a quarter of their prison sentences.
“I am angry that someone who perpetuated such a crime is still out there,” said Grady. “It irritates me that our laws are such that allows it to happen.”
Family members of other Spanbauer victims also supported what would become “two strikes you’re out,” aimed at those who commit crimes against children. If convicted twice of sexual assault, kidnapping and false imprisonment or incest, it would mean a mandatory life sentence.
“It will never be over,” said Debbie Jones, Cora Jones’ aunt. “We need to change the laws because we know there’s more than just him out there.”
A killer confesses
In 2011, Larry DeWayne Hall, 48, a Civil War reenactor from Indiana, confessed to the abduction and murder of 20-year-old Laurie Depies from an Appleton apartment complex.
While Hall, who was serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison at the time of his confession, was not the only person to cop to Depies’ disappearance, his story was more credible than most because it included information that was not known to the public.
Hall had been a suspect since he was convicted in the 1993 kidnapping of an Illinois girl.
“From what Larry told us, out of all the other people we've interviewed over the years, Larry seemed the most credible with his information,” Town of Menasha Police Lt. Mike Krueger said.
Still, there was not enough evidence to file charges against Hall, and the Depies’ case remains unsolved.
Jeffrey Dahmer
Milwaukee cannibal searches for a friend
To hear Jeffrey Dahmer tell it, he was just lonely.
He’d been lonely for quite some time, and for good reason, because around the time when other boys were playing baseball or football, Dahmer was developing an obsession with dead animals. Given that, he and the other kids really didn’t have all that much in common.
“He was the loneliest kid I’d ever met,” said Derf Backderf, who grew up with Dahmer in the Ohio town of Bath (also the hometown of basketball legend LeBron James), and later wrote a comic book called “My Friend Dahmer,” after the serial killer’s twisted story of multiple murders and dismemberment with a hint of cannibalism came out.
In desperate need of lasting companionship, Dahmer decided to take matters into his own hands, and embarked on a mission to turn one of the young men he met while trolling Milwaukee and Chicago gay bars into a submissive sex slave who would never leave him.
Funny how things just never seem to work out as planned.
“I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done,” Dahmer later said.
That’s the problem with those “should haves.” We always think about them when it is much too late.
Chapter 1: Birth of an obsession
Born on May 21, 1960, Jeffrey Dahmer had a fairly normal childhood, until he – like many other serial killers before him – began obsessing over dead animals, a sign that something was amiss for the reclusive young man wh
o by high school had developed a serious drinking problem.
“We found out that he had been collecting at the age of 12 to 14 - you know, when your hormones are ranging, puberty - he was collecting dead animals, road kill, riding around the rural roads and collecting them in bags. His mother didn't know. I didn't know. And apparently, none of his playmates knew,” said Dahmer’s father, Lionel, in an interview with CNN. “He examined them and he cut into them, cut them open to examine the insides of the animals. And by the way, a lot of people have been telling me that they’ve done the same thing, but they didn’t turn out like Jeff.”
Dahmer remembered the first time it started.
“In 9th grade, in biology class we had the usual dissection of fetal pigs,” Dahmer said in an interview with Stone Phillips for MSNBC called “Confessions of a Serial Killer,” talking about the roots of his strange obsessions. “I took the remains of that home, and kept the skeleton. I suppose it could have turned into a normal hobby like taxidermy, but it didn’t.”
Hormones and horror
Around the same time, Dahmer’s hormones kicked in, and thoughts of sex came as quickly and obsessively as his thoughts of dead carcasses.
“He did what most all of us young males do when the hormones kick in tremendously,” said Lionel. “He was doing something sexually with them. And I think the neuronal connections, you know, made contact and sort of hard-wired Jeff, so to speak.”
At age 14 or 15, his thoughts turned to violence intermingled with the sex, and he was out of control, with no reason why.
“It veered off into this. It became a compulsion and it switched from animals to humans,” he said.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 18