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On Friday, February 25, 1983, 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico stayed home from school since she was sick with the flu. Since her parents were at work that day & her two older sisters, Kathy & Chris, were at school, she was home alone. The Nicarico family lived on Clover Court in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb that is 33 miles southwest of Chicago. Jeanine’s father Tom worked in Chicago as an engineer while her mom, Pat, was an elementary school secretary in Naperville where the family lived in DuPage County.
Since she wasn’t feeling well, Jeanine just rested that day & not only had Pat come home to check on her daughter during her lunch break, but she also called her on the phone later that afternoon to check in. Sometime after that phone call, a monster broke into their family home & violently abducted, sexually assaulted & murdered Jeanine.
Illinois is home of the nation’s sixth-highest rate of wrongful convictions & in Jeanine’s horrific rape & murder, two men were wrongfully convicted & sent to death row despite the fact that a repeat sex offender & murderer confessed that he alone had committed the crime. This led to a decadeslong saga that dragged her already grieving & traumatized family through the gruesome details that prolonged their immense pain.
Jeanine was a bright-eyed little girl with a dimpled smile & a caring, sensitive heart. In 1983 she was a fifth grader at Elmwood Elementary School. According to her family, when she was in second or third grade, she struggled with reading up until fourth grade when her teacher was able to motivate her & try new techniques to inspire a love for reading in Jeanine. This blossomed into a true love of not only reading, but also school in general for Jeanine, something she loved nearly as much as horses, puppies, gardening & baking.
Since Pat worked close by, she came home during her lunch break at about noon that Friday so she could check on her daughter & make her lunch. While she prepared a grilled cheese sandwich & milk for Jeanine, she learned that Jeanine had allowed a man from the gas company into their house & Pat reminded her daughter to never let strangers inside.
As Pat left to go back to work at about 12:30 pm, she gave her daughter a kiss & a hug & recalled that it was a really tight squeeze before she walked out the door. Pat continued to hold her daughter as she said, I don’t really want to go, Jean, and don’t let anybody in, even if they ring the bell. Just call me and I’ll be right home.
When Pat called Jeanine sometime at about 1 pm to check on her again, they spoke about what Jeanine had been up to. She told her mom what she was watching on TV & whether she should write a letter to her grandparents. As they said goodbye & hung up the phone, this was sadly the last time Pat heard her youngest daughter’s voice.
Sometime after 2 pm that day, just as Pat had feared, someone had come to the door, but this time, Jeanine heeded her mother’s warnings & hadn’t opened the door. What later came to light was that the man on the other side of the locked door had seen the 10-year-old girl inside the house through a window. He called out that he needed a screwdriver to fix his car, but Jeanine told him that she couldn’t help him. As she turned to go back downstairs to the family room, the killer kicked in the door as Jeanine desperately tried to run to safety. The man later indicated that when he saw Jeanine through a window, she was wearing a pink nightshirt with Sleepy the Dwarf on it with the words, I’m sleepy. He later confessed, When I saw her, I had to have her.
The man grabbed Jeanine from the family room of her split-level house & carried her upstairs to an unmade bed in her 14-year-old sister’s room. He tied her up & wrapped her in a sheet from the bed, leaving her there while he went out to his car in order to move it closer to the house. After he moved his car from the street to the driveway, he also grabbed tape. Once back inside, he folded a towel around Jeanine’s eyes as a makeshift blindfold & secured it in place with tape that had zigzag edges.
He carried the 10-year-old girl, terrified, bound & gagged from the safety of her home to his car & made the 15 minute drive to the Illinois Prairie Path which is situated between Aurora & Naperville, just off of Interstate 88, otherwise known as the East-West Tollway. It was there, in the backseat of his car, that he raped her anally.
The man told Jeanine that he would take her home, but as they got out of the car & walked behind it, he struck her twice on the back of the head with a tire iron. She fell to the ground, striking her head on the bumper as she did. He then struck her on the forehead & face with a tree branch & dragged her body 20 feet off of the path.
As the man fled from the scene, he drove in the wrong direction toward a dead end where his car became stuck in the mud as he attempted to turn his car around. As he tried to free himself from the mud & eventually drove off, two Illinois tow workers watched, completely unaware of what he had just done to Jeanine.
When Kathy Nicarico, one of Jeanine’s older sisters, came home from school at about 3 pm, she found the front door ajar. The metal plate on the door that holds the latch, otherwise known as a strike plate, was laying on the ground & the moulding from inside the door frame had been almost completely torn off. As Kathy entered the house, she saw that the TV was on, but Jeanine was nowhere to be found. She found a partially written letter to their grandparents in front of the TV that her little sister had written.
As Kathy went into her bedroom, she immediately noticed that it wasn’t as she left it earlier that morning. There were clear signs of a struggle with her blanket & top sheet missing from her bed. Nothing seemed to be taken from the house & the TV, video cassette recorder, jewelry box & pieces of silver were all within plain view.
After Jeanine was reported missing, a massive task force was assembled which included the FBI, the Naperville Police & the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office. They gathered evidence from the Nicarico house including fingerprints & shoe prints. There was a boot print on the front door just below & to the left of the latch where Jeanine’s abductor had kicked the door in as well as two shoe prints with two different tread designs outside the living room window. A fourth print was inside a depression on the lawn where a car tire had left an imprint.
When two dogs from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department were brought in, they tracked Jeanine’s scent from the front door, part way down the driveway, across the lawn & to the curb about eight feet from the tire track down the lawn.
On Sunday, February 27, 1983, two days after she vanished, hikers found Jeanine’s body in the heavy underbrush, about 45 feet off of a hiking trail of the Illinois Prairie Path between Eola Road & I-88, less than ten miles from her home. She was lying face down on a slight incline & approximately two feet up & to the left of her head was a small head shaped depression in the mud that contained blood. There were leaves & mud on the back of Jeanine’s head & the left side of her body was muddy. Her eyes were still covered with a towel that was taped to her head & she wore only her pink nightshirt which was torn from the hem to the right armpit & pulled over her shoulders. Pat testified that her daughter had been wearing underwear, but as was the case with the blanket & sheet that had been taken from Kathy’s bed, her underwear has never been found.
A coroner from Hamilton County, Ohio, Dr. Frank Clevland, conducted the autopsy & testified that Jeanine died from at least five extraordinarily powerful blows to the front & backside of her head from a blunt instrument. Each injury to the back of her head was characterized by a large laceration that became V-shaped at one end. All blows were delivered quickly & any one of them would have been fatal. She also suffered a broken nose, a split upper lip & a severely bruised lower lip. There was a small bruise to her left shoulder & abrasions on the upper back sides of her legs that were either inflicted after death or shortly before as blood was redirected in reaction to her head injuries.
It was determined that Jeanine had been raped & anally assaulted before her death, but too little semen was recovered from her body to be of evidentiary value. The contents of her stomach determined that she died two to four hours after eating & were consistent with what Pat had made her daughter for lunch. This indicates that she was abducted, raped & murdered between 1 & 4 pm that day.
There were no witnesses that directly observed Jeanine being abducted or murdered, but two witnesses from the prosecution gave evidence that may have been related. Joan Johanville had lunch with her husband at their upholstery business which was in a garage next door to the Nicarico home. She left at about 1:10 pm to drive home & as she passed the Nicarico home, she had to stop her car to avoid a collision with a car driving down the center of the street in the opposite direction. She described the car as older, light blue or white with a lot of rust on the lower portion. The only person she saw in the car was the driver & she described his eyes as very creepy & scary.
When police initially spoke with Joan, she said that the man had no facial hair & wore wire-rimmed granny glasses.
Another witness, Frank Kochanny, a highway maintenance engineer for the Illinois Tollway Authority, indicated that when he & a co-worker were picking up trash alongside the east-bound lanes of the East-West Tollway between 2:45-3 pm, they saw a car driving at 10 mph. The car did a three-point turn & headed back east at a faster speed. It was a 1978 or 1979 green Ford Granada with a missing hubcap at the front driver’s side wheel. The driver was the only person in the car & he was a white male with dark sunglasses & hair that was midway down his ears or shorter.
A $10,000 reward was offered for any information that could lead to an arrest & anonymous tips came flooding into the sheriff’s office. One caller indicated Alex Hernandez, a young Hispanic man who lived in Aurora, knew about Jeanine’s murder.
On March 4, Detective John Sam from the DuPage County Sheriff’s Department, visited Hernandez who told him that while he was drinking beer in a car one night with friends, a guy named Ricky suddenly began talking about killing Jeanine. Although Detective Sam never found Ricky, he found a man named Stephen Buckley, who Hernandez indicated was also in the car that night.
When Sam questioned Buckley, he showed him a photo of the boot print from the Nicarico’s front door & Buckley told him that he had a pair of boots with a similar tread pattern. Without any hesitation, he allowed Sam to take the boots to the crime lab where it was concluded the pattern wasn’t a match. However, the chief of the identification section who made this conclusion did not write a report about his findings, although he indicated that he had discussed them with a DuPage County sheriff. The boot was then sent to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation where a criminologist said that Buckley’s boot probably made the print. Years later, the FBI crime lab would come to the opposite conclusion.
John Sam became progressively persuaded that Hernandez & Buckley were responsible for Jeanine’s murder. They were questioned relentlessly in an attempt to secure confessions, but neither would admit to their involvement. One detective enlisted the help of a friend of Hernandez who went by the name, Penguin, who was in the DuPage County Jail on a burglary charge.
Hernandez was placed in a room with Penguin as well as a box of money which was supposedly the $10,000 reward for Jeanine’s case. Penguin was assured that with his assistance, his burglary charges would be dropped, he could collect the reward & settle down in Puerto Rico while Hernandez was told that he could get a similar deal if he helped solve the case.
John Sam listened through recording devices as Alex Hernandez told Penguin that he & others had been involved in Jeanine’s murder as he said, I’ll tell you how the girl was killed. I held her down. He said he could show police where the crime took place.
However, as police began driving Hernandez around from farmhouse to farmhouse, he was unable to find the correct house. Of course investigators knew that Jeanine had not been killed inside a house. This was when Sam began to realize that Hernandez had nothing to do with Jeanine’s murder while he continued to believe that Stephen Buckley was involved.
Detective Sam also started questioning a 19-year-old man from Aurora named Rolando Cruz, who Hernandez had also mentioned in relation to the murder. Cruz denied having anything to do with Jeanine’s death, but said that Hernandez told him that she had been raped & then murdered with a baseball bat & kicked down the stairs of an Aurora apartment building.
DuPage County prosecutors, led by Assistant State’s Attorney Tom Knight, theorized that Cruz, Hernandez & Buckley went to the Nicarico home to burglarize it & unexpectedly came upon Jeanine. They raped & killed her so she would be unable to identify them. As prosecutors were convinced this was the correct theory, Detective Sam only became more uncertain. The idea that three burglars were suddenly child molester murderers was a ridiculous idea in his mind.
On March 9, 1984, a little more than a year after Jeanine’s murder, a special grand jury indicted Cruz, Hernandez & Buckley for murder, kidnapping & aggravated criminal sexual assault.
Their trials began in early January 1985. As the details of the case were presented, some of the jurors broke down in tears & became physically ill at the brutality & the randomness of the crime. At one point Jeanine’s father said, It’s the bogeyman come to life. There is a bogeyman. It’s for real.
John Sam, despite his doubts at their guilt, hoped that the indictments & the threat of the death penalty would push one of the men to confess or implicate the others to save their own skin, but they didn’t. Sam knew that these were three petty burglars, not tough, hardened criminals & his doubts only grew.
Sam was so sure of their innocence that after an11 year career, he resigned from the sheriff’s department so that he would be able to testify on their behalf.
The chief evidence against Buckley was the boot print from the front door of the Nicarico home while Penguin testified about his conversations with Hernandez in the county jail. Hernandez’s cousin told the court that he had also confessed to him. However, to those who he allegedly confessed to, each story he provided differed greatly.
The primary witness against Stephen Buckley was a North Carolina professor who claimed he had the ability to determine who made the boot print by examining the impression the foot leaves inside the shoe. She said it was Buckley who had left the print on the Nicarico’s door. However, the jury was unable to reach a verdict about his guilt & charges against him were dismissed.
After seven weeks, the jury found Cruz & Hernandez guilty & on March 15, 1985, Judge Edward Kowal sentenced them to death. The following month they were moved to death row at Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois on the Missouri border along the Mississippi River.
Under Illinois law all capital cases are automatically appealed to the state supreme court & the court appoints a state appellate defender to represent each.
In July 1985, Tim Gabrielsen & John Hanlon were appointed to represent Cruz while Larry Essig was representing Hernandez.
Initially, there was no reason to believe that the men had been wrongfully convicted, but after reviewing the 11,000 pages of trial transcripts, it became very clear how little evidence the state had against them. It was their opinion that there was absolutely no smoking gun, the evidence was extremely weak & there was no doubt that the prosecution failed to prove they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Gabrielsen & Essig zeroed in on the fact that Judge Kowal refused to grant the three defendants separate trials. The prosecution argued that it was one crime, not three, that had been committed while the defense argued that the case against one defendant would jeopardize fair trials for the others, something Kowal rejected.
Witness testimonies were jumbled during the trial as some witnesses indicated that Hernandez told them that he and friends committed the murder while others said that Cruz admitted doing the crime with friends. The references of the defendants were indirect & didn’t directly implicate them & their lawyers couldn’t cross-examine the witnesses on these points.
Backtracking to November 1985, eight months after Cruz & Hernandez were found guilty, Gabrielsen spoke with George Mueller, a LaSalle County Public Defender, who told him that on July 5, 1985, 29-year-old Brian Dugan, who had been arrested for the rape & murder of Melissa Ackerman in LaSalle County in June 1985, had confessed to Jeanine’s murder.
On June 2, 1985, 7-year-old Melissa “Missy” Ackerman & her friend were riding bikes on the outskirts of Somonauk, a village in DeKalb & LaSalle Counties, less than an hour’s drive from Naperville, when 29-year-old Brian Dugan snatched them off her bikes. He had been driving down the road when he came upon the girls & despite the fact that he placed both girls in his car, Missy’s friend managed to escape through the window of his car. Tragically, Missy was sodomized & then drowned. Her body wasn’t found for two weeks.
Brian Dugan was a high school dropout from East Aurora High School who became known as a burglar who would kick in the front door in order to gain access to a home. He served four years in Menard Correctional Facility for arson & burglary & was released on parole in 1982, but arrested again & imprisoned at Joliet Correctional Center. Only six months after his release, Jeanine was murdered.
Brian Dugan was arrested one day after Missy’s murder & days later, not only did he confess to her murder, but he also confessed to the murder of Donna Schnorr, which occurred one year earlier as well as Jeanine Nicarico’s murder, which happened two years prior.
Donna Schnorr, a 27-year-old nurse from Geneva, Illinois, was driving home from a party on a rural road in Kane County at about 3 am on July 15, 1984. As she drove, Dugan sideswiped her car, forcing her off the road. He then tied her up, raped her & murdered her. Donna’s father was so shocked & grief stricken by word of his daughter’s murder that he went into cardiac arrest & died later that same year.
Dugan’s confessions came about four months after Cruz & Hernandez had been found guilty & were sentenced to death for Jeanine’s murder. He indicated that he was not only responsible for these three murders, but he had also raped three other women: Demi Peterson, Sharon Grajeik & Cheryl Weaver.
Mueller reached out to DuPage County prosecutors that his client could be tied to Jeanine’s case, but they were skeptical. They thought he was falsely confessing for a plea deal & maybe he learned the details of the crime due to the extensive media coverage.
Mueller was given a list of questions that only Jeanine’s killer would have the answers to & he was sent to speak with Dugan. An hour later, he had all the answers, he handed the paper over & was told, We’ll get back to you.
In the meantime, Dugan took a plea deal for his life for the murders of Missy Ackerman & Donna Schnorr as well as the three other rapes & on November 19, 1985, he was sentenced to two life sentences plus 215 years.
By November, six months after Mueller handed over Brian Dugan’s answers, no one had gotten back to him & he began to wonder if DuPage County didn’t want to hear anything since it would make them look bad for wrongfully convicting two innocent men.
Regardless of the fact that Dugan had nothing to benefit from with his confession, he maintained that he killed Jeanine. During a conversation with a state police investigator, he recalled each gory detail about what he’d done to Jeanine & it all seemed to check out.
He spoke of the serrated tape he used to secure the towel over her eyes, something that had never been disclosed. Investigators confirmed that the pharmacy where he indicated he’d purchased the tape from did indeed sell it. He said he unsuccessfully tried to penetrate the young girl’s vagina & then raped her anally, another detail confirmed by the pathologist that was never revealed. The pathologist also said that the injuries to Jeanine’s head could have come from a tire iron, also something Dugan confessed.
Although the murder weapon was never found, investigators determined that the tire iron that came with the car that Dugan drove, a green 1980 Plymouth Volare, could have made the marks to her head. One of the witnesses described seeing a dark green car near the Prairie Path with a missing front hubcap, details that were consistent with Dugan’s car. The worker thought he saw a Ford while Dugan drove a Plymouth, but the body styles were similar.
The witness also indicated that the man in the green car was a white male in his late 20s, a description that matched Dugan rather than Cruz or Hernandez who were darker skinned and only 19-years-old at the time. Work records also confirmed that Dugan missed work on the day that Jeanine was murdered.
Dugan not only took investigators to the Nicarico’s home where she was abducted, but also to the location where she was murdered & where her body was found. His lengthy criminal record included abductions that involved concealing his victims by wrapping them in sheets or a blanket or burglaries where he gained entry by kicking the door in, both of which were consistent with Jeanine’s case.
However, there were mistakes in some of the details that Dugan recounted. He told investigators that he moved his car onto the driveway to get closer to the house, but he failed to notice that a sailboat was parked there. He remembered where the stairs were in the house, but reversed the location of the stairs that went to the second floor with those that went to the basement. He said he left Jeanine’s body face up while she had actually been found facedown. He said she had nail polish on her toes, but when her body was exhumed, there was no trace of polish on her toes although polish had been found on her fingernails during the autopsy.
These inconsistencies convinced the Nicaricos that Dugan was lying & in April 1987, they held a press conference to dispute his confession while maintaining that the men who were guilty, Cruz & Hernandez, were behind bars. They cited more than 25 errors in his story, including his original claim that he abducted Jeanine at 11 am as well as incorrect details about the home. They felt that someone had fed him information to make his story more accurate.
In December 1987, Alex Hernandez’s cousin recanted his testimony that Alex had confessed to the crime & indicated that prosecutors had scared him into testifying. In early 1988 scientific analysis of hair samples that were taken from Jeanine’s blindfold strongly implicated Dugan. The analysis revealed two abnormalities, one described as fairly rare in the sample that was consistent with Dugan’s hair, but not with Hernandez & Cruz.
Since the state is legally required to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, defense attorney, Michael Metnick, was bewildered that the state ever pursued the case against them, something he feels is morally dishonest.
This raised questions about the potential danger of imposing the death penalty since two likely innocent people could have come close to execution. The death penalty has since been abolished in Illinois which occurred on March 9, 2011.
On January 19, 1988, nearly three years after they were found guilty, the supreme court ruled that the DuPage County judge should have granted separate trials for Cruz & Hernandez & their convictions were overturned while new trials were ordered. However, the court somehow rejected their contentions that the prosecution failed to prove them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Two years later, Cruz was retried in 1990 & once again convicted & sentenced to death. The following year in 1991, Hernandez was once again convicted, but this time he was sentenced to 80 years in prison rather than to death.
On December 4, 1992, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the conviction & death sentence for Rolando Cruz, indicating that the errors in the trial were harmless in light of what they considered to be the overwhelming physical evidence. This sparked a public outcry as even prosecutors admitted that no physical evidence linked either Hernandez or Cruz to the crime.
On July 14, 1994, three new justices had joined the Illinois Supreme Court & the court reversed the December 1992 ruling against Cruz & overturned his conviction after finding several errors in the trial.
Six months later, in January 1995, Alex Hernandez’s conviction was also reversed & another trial was ordered. New testing of DNA excluded Cruz, Hernandez & Buckley as the rapist while they implicated Dugan. Only three men in 10,000, including Dugan, possess that DNA.
Cruz’s retrial began in October 1995 & focused on a vision statement Cruz supposedly made on May 9, 1983, something neither detectives nor prosecutors had any written record of. In this statement, he allegedly described how the crime occurred that included details only the perpetrator would know. However, detectives admitted that there was much confusion in regards to the true dates of when this supposed statement ever happened as the reported date conflicted with the detective’s schedules & one had been in Florida at the time the statement was said to have been given.
Judge Ronald Mehling found Rolando Cruz not guilty & he was released from prison where he had been for twelve years, initially on unrelated burglary charges & then for the crimes against Jeanine.
In December 1995 prosecutors also dismissed all charges against Alex Hernandez.
The following year, on December 12, 1996, a grand jury returned a 47 count indictment against seven people charging perjury, obstruction of justice, official misconduct & conspiracy. These people became known as the DuPage Seven: Detectives Thomas Vosburg & Dennis Kurzawa, Lt. James Montesano & Lt. Robert Winkler as well as prosecutors Patrick King, Thomas Knight & Robert Kilander.
The trial was held in late spring 1999 & relied heavily on the testimony of Cruz, a known pathological liar who lied about even basic facts including his age & military background. The DuPage Seven were found not guilty.
In September 2000, a civil suit filed by Cruz, Hernandez & Buckley was settled by DuPage County for $3.5 million.
In November 2002, an announcement was made that new DNA testimony established with scientific certainty that Brian Dugan was involved in the murder of Jeanine Nicarico.
When the DuPage County Sheriff’s Office, the Naperville Police & the FBI began investigating Jeanine’s case back in 1983, Alex Hernandez & Rolando Cruz lied to police about their knowledge of the crime which diverted the whole investigation away from the real killer. Alex Hernandez was said to have an IQ between 73-85 which is classified as borderline intellectual functioning while Rolando Cruz admitted to lying & playing with police. During this time, he was put up in a Four Seasons Motel where he hosted glue sniffing parties & test drove Cadiallacs that he planned to purchase after receiving the reward money.
Although many people initially believed that Brian Dugan was fabricating his story of being responsible for Jeanine’s murder, DNA evidence has proved his version of events as true. It’s believed that some of the details he recounted were incorrect because he was stoned on pot at the time he murdered Jeanine. There was also the possibility of collusion since he, Cruz, Hernandez & Buckley were all incarcerated in the DuPage County Jail at the same time after Jeanine’s murder (Dugan for unrelated burglary charges).
There was a lot of animosity that Cruz & Hernandez had inserted themselves in Jeanine’s case which allowed the real killer, Brian Dugan, to remain free & murder two more innocent victims, Missy Ackerman & Donna Schnorr & rape three other women. Yes, they paid for their lies by spending a decade behind bars for a crime they didn’t do, but they also received a seven-figure payment upon their release.
In November 2005, A DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for Jeanine’s murder. In July 2008, he dropped his demand that prosecutors forgo seeking a death sentence & entered a blind plea of guilty. He was sentenced to death in November 2009 & spent nearly 16 months on death row until March 2011 when Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the Illinois death penalty & his sentence was changed to life in prison without parole.
After Jeanine’s horrific murder, her family created the Jeanine Nicarico Memorial Fund for Literacy in 1996 to provide grants to educators, schools & organizations that promote literacy. In 2001, Jeanine’s family & friends as well as the community organized an annual race, the G.L.O.W. (Give Literacy an Opportunity to Win) 5k. For more than 20 years the race was held to honor Jeanine & support literacy, fitness & family with the last event held in 2023.
According to her sisters, Kathy & Chris, in her short 10 years of life, Jeanine was always a person who stepped up to help someone who needed a boost. The idea that they were able to give back to the community for two decades was something they knew their sister would be proud of & would have wanted.
Jeanine was the peacemaker of the family, the type of kid who wanted everyone to get along & brought the positive into everything. She was a kind, giggly & happy child. Her family can only wonder how her life would have turned out or what she would be like now as a woman in her 50s. Chris & Kathy see a lot of their sister in their two respective children. Sadly, Pat Nicarico passed away at 80-years-old in September 2023 after a five-year battle with ovarian cancer.
References:
- Find a Grave: Jeanine Nicarico
- Chicago Tribune: Lawyer tells of Dugan’s 1st mention of Jeanine Nicarico
- Northwestern: Center on wrongful convictions
- ABC 7: Event honors Naperville girl killed 33 years ago
- Jeanine Nicarico Memorial Literacy Fund
- Illinois Policy: Questions of Justice: The Nicarico murder case
- DCBA: When justice hides its face
- Justia U.S. Law: People v. Hernandez
- YouTube: Naperville Community Television NCTV17: G.L.O.W. 5k in honor of Jeanine Nicarico takes its last lap
- Chicago Reader: A capital blunder
- Friedrich-Jones Funeral Homes: Patricia Nicarico
- Chicago Tribune: It’s been 36 years since 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico’s murder: On Saturday, family & friends honor her by lighting up Naperville
