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On Friday, March 25, 1988, 18-year-old Lisa Kimmell was driving her black 1988 Honda CR-X with its distinctive LIL MISS personalized Montana license plates. She was traveling from Denver, Colorado to Billings, Montana, a 554 mile drive that should have taken her right around 8 hours. On her way, she planned to stop off in Cody, Montana to pick her boyfriend up so he could finally meet her family over the Easter weekend, but she sadly never made it.
Her family immediately knew that something terrible must have happened, but for years, both the truth as well as the most important piece of evidence remained hidden. Her killer may have believed he buried the evidence forever, but he was mistaken.
Lisa Marie Kimmell was born on July 18, 1969 in Covington, Tennessee to parents Sheila & Ronald Kimmell. Ronald was in the Marines & was stationed there at the time of her birth. She had two younger sisters, Sherry & Stacy & a younger brother, Ricky. When Lisa was one week from turning ten, her family faced a horrific loss when Ricky died at 3-years-old in a tragic accident on July 11, 1976.
Lisa was named by her paternal grandma, who always dreamt of having a granddaughter named Lisa Marie. This same grandma nicknamed her Lil Miss, which was a shortened version of My Lil Miss Lisa Marie. Lisa was described as a sweet, outgoing girl who was dedicated, hard-working & loved to collect teddy bears.
She was raised in Billings, Montana & after graduating from Billings Senior High School in 1987, she accepted a management position at an Arby’s restaurant in Aurora, Colorado near Denver. Her mom was a regional manager for Arby’s so during the week, she & Lisa lived in the same apartment complex in Denver & on a weekly basis, they would make the long drive back home to see her dad & younger sisters.
On Friday, March 25, 1988, when Lisa left to head north from Denver back to Billings, she was making the drive alone since her mom had flown back the day before in anticipation of a ski trip. She would be alone for the majority of the drive until she picked up her boyfriend, Ed Jaroch, in Cody, about 1 hour & 45 minutes before reaching Billings.
When Ed last spoke with Lisa at about 4:30 pm on Friday, she told him she would be there to pick him up somewhere around midnight, now on Saturday, March 26. When she didn’t arrive as planned, Ed contacted Lisa’s family to let them know. Since their daughter was a highly reliable, responsible girl, they were immediately terrified & reported her missing at 9 am on Saturday morning.
Lisa had been driving her black 1988 hatchback Honda CR-X with the distinctive personalized Montana license plates that were personalized with LIL MISS in honor of her nickname.
The Kimmells began calling authorities in Colorado, Wyoming & Montana, which is how they learned Lisa had been pulled over by the Wyoming Highway Patrol for speeding the night before. She was about 3 ½ hours into her drive when patrolman Alan Lesco clocked her driving 88 mph on his radar. He pulled her over in Douglas, Wyoming at 9:06 pm. Since she had been unable to pay for her ticket, he escorted her to an ATM, but the machine was incompatible with her debit card, so he told her she could mail a check once she reached Billings.
Lisa’s signature was on the ticket & this was the last confirmed sighting of her. There was an unconfirmed sighting of her less than an hour later at 10 pm when someone said they saw her at a grocery store 45 minutes west of Douglas in Casper, Wyoming.
Lisa’s family was desperate to find her so her father chartered a plane to do an aerial search for his daughter’s car, but there was no sign of her. He also drove from Billings to Denver to retrace her last movements & to try to figure out what may have happened to her, but once again, he found nothing.
Missing persons posters were posted everywhere in hopes that someone might come forward with information.
Eight days after Lisa was last seen, Greg Bradford, a mechanic, was out fishing in Casper, Wyoming on the North Platte River on Saturday, April 2, 1988, when he stepped off the side of the bank & saw a female in the water. Since he’d heard reports of Lisa being missing on the radio, he immediately assumed it must be her.
Police searched the area where Lisa’s body was recovered. A quarter mile away on the Old Government Bridge, an old highway bridge, they found blood that was the same type as Lisa’s. Since the bridge is so seldom used, police concluded that her killer likely lived locally.
Investigators initially believed she was murdered early on Saturday morning, about five hours after she was stopped for speeding, based on residents who reported seeing unexplained lights in the early hours of that morning.
According to her autopsy, Lisa had bled to death from multiple stab wounds to her chest that were inflicted shortly after what would have otherwise been a fatal blow to the head before her body was thrown into the river. Her time of death was difficult to accurately estimate since her remains had been in the cold water of the North Platte River.
There was evidence to suggest she had been bound & held captive prior to her murder for a period that could have been two days, but was more likely seven days.
Based on semen found in her vagina & on her underwear, which was the only clothing she wore when her remains were recovered, the medical examiner determined that she had been sexually assaulted.
Although Lisa’s body had been found, her car was still missing, as was her purse, her ID, car keys & other belongings, which were likely with her car.
According to Sheriff Ron Ketchum of the Natrona County Sheriff’s Department, there were over a thousand sightings of Lisa’s car, many from law enforcement officers. The information pointed to the car driving further north to Canada.
One of the most reliable sightings came ten hours after Lisa was believed to have been killed. Donna Kirkpatrick, the wife of a local county sheriff, said she had seen Lisa driving her car in Buffalo, Wyoming, an hour & 40 minutes north of Casper where her body was found.
She was driving behind a black sports car with the personalized Montana license plate of LIL MISS at noon on Saturday. Out of sheer curiosity, Donna wanted to see if the driver fit the plate & she saw that a young girl was behind the wheel.
Another eyewitness reported seeing Lisa more than a day after she was presumed to have been murdered, this time in Casper. As was the case with Donna, Lisa’s license plate caught the eye of Diana Houston on Sunday afternoon. She noticed it right away since she was also from Montana & as she looked closer, she saw that it said LIL MISS. As she drove by, she saw a girl with blond hair wearing a yellow sweater driving the car.
Sadly, years went by & Lisa’s murder went unsolved. Her case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries as well as Cold Case Files & there was also extensive news coverage, but 14 long years would go by before there were answers.
As DNA technology continued to advance, there was finally a match in July 2002 when a team of investigators began looking into cold cases. When the semen from Lisa’s rape kit was used to create a profile, they found a match in the CODIS database to 57-year-old Dale Eaton, a man from Moneta, Wyoming. At the time of the match, he was at Englewood federal prison in Littleton, Colorado.
His DNA was submitted into the database five years earlier after he was arrested for kidnapping a young family in September 1997, 9 ½ years after Lisa’s murder. Shannon & Scott Breeden were driving on I-80 outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming from Michigan to their home in Washington state with their 5-month-old son, Cody, their dog & their cat when their van broke down in an isolated area.
After being stranded for more than twelve hours, the family was desperate when Dale pulled over & offered them a ride to Rock Springs in his van so they could find a mechanic to fix their car. They got into his car at 9 am & Shannon immediately felt uneasy. She later said that he looked like a serial killer, but as a sort of hippie mom, she didn’t want to be judgemental.
At one point, Dale pulled over to relieve himself while Scott sat in the front seat with Cody while Shannon was in the backseat. He asked Shannon if she could drive to allow him to rest in the backseat & as she began to drive, he pointed a rifle at Scott & Cody, instructing them to drive down a narrow dirt road from the highway that led to the Red Desert.
Shannon was sure that the man was going to kill her & her family. She knew she needed to do something before they were even more isolated so she hit the gas & sharply turned the wheel in hopes they could get the rifle away from Dale.
When Dale lunged toward the front seat to grab the car keys, Scott took the opportunity to run from the car with Cody. Although Shannon tried to do the same, he grabbed her & they began to fight. Dale lost control of the rifle, but he grabbed a knife & tried to stab Shannon in the ribs with the dull blade. By this time, Scott had run back to protect his wife & they managed to fight back against him, stabbing Dale in the chest. Scott then beat him with the rifle before they took the van & found help a mile down the road.
The Wyoming Highway Patrol found Dale bleeding in the desert. He quickly confessed to kidnapping the young couple, claiming he was dying & hoped the couple would kill him so he wouldn’t have to commit suicide. After spending only 99 days in prison for the attack, he was released in April 1998 after reaching a plea deal.
He was given a 2-5 year suspended sentence in a halfway house where he had a curfew. He got his van back so he could work while promising to abide by the law, to work full-time, answer questions truthfully, have no possession or consumption of alcohol, undergo counseling & have a mental health evaluation 30 days later.
One month later, he was back in prison for a weapons charge & while he was behind bars, he killed his cellmate, Carl Palmer, in a fit of anger on September 3, 2001. He was charged with manslaughter after the man died from a ruptured vertebral artery, the primary blood vessels in the neck that supply blood to the brain & spinal cord.
Dale Eaton was born on February 10, 1945 as the second of seven children to a physically abusive father & a mother, who, although loving, suffered from schizophrenia. In 1961, when he was 16 & living in Meeker, Colorado, his mom was hospitalized after trying to set their home on fire. During this time, he ran away 4 ½ hours east to Greeley, Colorado.
He rarely went to school & during his first psychiatric evaluation, he was determined to have serious emotional problems & was held back a year in school. After he was caught committing assault with a deadly weapon & stealing, he was sent to Lookout Mountain School for Boys until he was 19.
After he left the reformatory, he was in & out of jail until life calmed down for him for a short time at 25-years-old when he worked & began attending church. The next year, at 26-years-old, he married an 18-year-old in 1971 & on their wedding night, she said she wanted a divorce. Through their rocky relationship, they had two children together before divorcing in 1986.
After he threatened to kill himself, he had a psychiatric evaluation at a hospital where he was diagnosed with depression & a thought disorder, which is a disruption of a person’s normal thinking pattern that affects how they organize & express ideas. It’s not a single diagnosis, but a clinical term for a range of disturbances in the form, flow or content of thought.
One year before Lisa’s murder, at 40-years-old, he moved to his uncle’s property in 1987 & converted a 1950s bus into his sparse living space. It held a propane tank & a small bed, but had no real power or working plumbing. During this time he worked part-time jobs, but because of his lack of accommodations, his hygiene was suffering & work was sporadic.
Now a match to the preserved DNA in Lisa’s case, investigators obtained a search warrant for his Moneta, Wyoming property. When they spoke with his neighbors, they reported seeing Dale digging a large hole on his property near his trailer.
Six feet underground, they found Lisa’s Honda CRX with its LIL MISS license plate while the wheels, the seats, the transmission & the stereo were missing. According to Dale’s son, around mid-1988, he helped his dad install the seats & stereo into his pickup truck while other parts were melted for scrap metal.
With the DNA paired with finding Lisa’s car on Dale’s property, he was charged with her abduction, first-degree murder, premeditated murder, aggravated robbery, first-degree sexual assault, second-degree sexual assault & aggravated kidnapping.
His trial began sixteen years after Lisa’s murder on March 3, 2004. Two weeks later, the jury returned with a guilty verdict for all eight charges against him on March 17, 2004.
Testimony for the penalty phase of the trial began the following day & 36-year-old Shannon Breeden, who had been attacked with her husband & 5-month-son in 1997, took the stand to testify against him. However, she was not allowed to tell the jury what he had done to her, her husband & their infant son seven years previously. She was only able to correctly identify him & say where & when the assault occured.
After the fact, she voiced frustration that his family were given a chance to cry & talk about Dale as a little boy & how much they loved him when she couldn’t tell jurors that he had held the gun to the head of a 5-month-old baby.
Dale claimed that when he came home on the night of March 25, 1988, Lisa’s car was on his property & because he thought there were two people there, he assumed he was being robbed. After Lisa trespassed on his property, he said he pulled her from her car at gunpoint before holding her on his property for several days so that he wouldn’t be alone for Easter.
The prosecution, on the other hand, believed that he kidnapped Lisa while she’d been at a rest stop near Casper, Wyoming on the night of March 25, 1988 in Fremont County, Wyoming. He forced her to drive 20 miles to his property where he held her captive for as long as six days, raping her repeatedly. He then drove 70 miles to the Old Government Bridge in Casper where he struck her in the head with a lead pipe & stabbed her six times before dumping her body in the shallow waters over the bridge where her remains were recovered days later.
Joseph Dax, a fellow inmate of Dale’s from federal prison, testified regarding the version of events Dale had told him. Lisa had stopped to offer him a ride & after he got in, he propositioned her for sex which upset her. She pulled over to let him out which was when he kidnapped, raped & murdered her.
Three days after he was found guilty, 59-year-old Dale Eaton was sentenced to death on March 20, 2004.
During the formal sentencing hearing in May, the judge added an additional life sentence in case the death sentence was overturned in a higher court.
Over 10 ½ years later on November 20, 2014, Eaton’s death sentence was vacated because his lawyers had been ineffective during the sentencing phase in regards to presenting evidence about his mental health, brain damage, background & other factors.
In 2015, Natrona County prosecutors filed its intent to seek the death penalty yet again, but this motion was withdrawn after mental evaluators found that Dale was not competent to withstand a capital sentencing hearing. They were, however, able to proceed with a sentencing hearing that did not include the death penalty.
On March 25, 2022, exactly 34 years after Lisa Kimmell was last seen, Dale Eaton was resentenced to life in prison without parole. He was given an additional 40-50 years for aggravated kidnapping to be served concurrently with his life sentence as well as 20-25 years on counts of aggravated robbery & first-degree sexual assault to be served concurrently with the kidnapping sentence, but consecutive to the murder sentence.
Lisa’s mom & her sisters were given the opportunity to speak during the re-sentencing hearing as her father had died two years earlier. They voiced their frustration at having to re-live this horrible piece of their lives all over again.
After Lisa’s family sued Dale Eaton for her wrongful death, they were awarded his property. On July 18, 2005, on what should have been Lisa’s 36th birthday, they torched the buildings on his property, burning them to the ground.
Lisa’s mom, Sheila Kimmell, published a book about her daughter’s case in June 2005, The Murder of Lil Miss. Four years later in 2009, true crime author Robert Scott published Rivers of Blood about Lisa’s case.
Authorities theorized that Dale Eaton had also been responsible for what came to be known as the Great Basin Murders, a series of murders of at least nine women, including Lisa Kimmell, that were committed between 1983-1997 across Wyoming, Utah, Nevada & Idaho.
Most of these victims had been teenage or young adults who were sexually assaulted & murdered either by strangulation, stabbing or shooting. Although investigators initially believed they were dealing with a single serial killer known as The Great Basin Killer, this idea has been abandoned as the majority of the killings were committed by different perpetrators.
Dale Wayne Eaton is currently 81-years-old & incarcerated at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution.
18-year-old Lisa Kimmell had driven her Honda with its distinctive LIL MISS license plates in March 1988 to spend time with her family & to introduce her boyfriend to them over the Easter weekend. It had been late at night, she’d been alone & vulnerable on an isolated stretch of road when she came upon a monster.
For 14 years, the monster who took her life from this world & from those who loved her dearly, remained nameless & faceless. It wasn’t until 2002 when the DNA in her case was finally a match to Dale Eaton.
One can only imagine the horrors of what Lisa’s final days & moments entailed by a man who only saw her as an object to satisfy his violent sexual desires.
Lisa had been a daughter, a sister & a friend who had her entire life ahead. She should have had a future that stretched far beyond that highway in Wyoming. Today, we remember Lisa Kimmell as a young woman who was deeply loved & taken far too soon.
References:
- Unsolved Mysteries: Lisa Kimmell
- Justia U.S. Law: Dale Wayne Eaton v. the State of Wyoming
- Star Tribune: Judge limits victim’s testimony against Eaton
- United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit: Dale W. Eaton v. Mike Pacheco
- In the Supreme Court of the United States: Dale W. Eaton v. Michael Pacheco
- Oil City News: Convicted murderer Dale Wayne Eaton re-sentenced 30 years after disappearance of Lisa Marie Kimmell
- Sheridan Media: Dale Eaton sentenced to life in prison without parole for murder of Lisa Marie Kimmell
- Wikipedia: Great Basin Murders
- Dale Wayne Eaton “The Lil Miss Killer”
- Medium: The Lil Miss Murder: The tragic case of Lisa Kimmell
- Find a Grave: Lisa Marie “Lil Miss” Kimmell
- Cleveland Clinic: Vertebral artery
- Mosaic Mental Health: What is a thought disorder?
- Wyoming Department of Corrections: Dale Wayne Eaton
