Brian Dugan

Brian James Dugan (born September 23, 1956) is a convicted rapist and serial killer active between 1983 and 1985 in Chicago's western suburbs.

Brian Dugan was born in 1956 in Nashua, New Hampshire, the second child of James and Genevieve Dugan.

He has one sister and three brothers.

According to his siblings, their parents were both alcoholics.

In 1967, the Dugan family moved to Lisle, Illinois.

According to Dugan's family, the boy's birth had been traumatic.

He began to emerge before the attending physician had arrived.

The family claims that, in an effort to delay the infant's birth, a nurse and an intern pushed Brian's head back inside his mother and strapped her legs together.

Relatives later questioned if this caused Brian to have brain damage; as a youth he suffered severe headaches followed by vomiting, for which he took medication until his teens.

Brian was also a chronic bed wetter, a condition his adult father also suffered from.

Brian showed classic symptoms of psychopathy from an early age.

Although he was seen by child specialists, they did not understand the symptoms.

At age 8, Brian and a younger brother burned down the family garage.

According to his brother, Steven, at age 13 Brian poured gasoline on a cat and lit it on fire.

In 1972, Brian ran away to Iowa, and later that year he was arrested on a burglary charge.

It was his first arrest.

He was later convicted for other crimes including arson, battery, and other burglaries.

According to his younger brother Steven Dugan, Brian attempted to molest him in 1972 after a stay in a youth home; Steven suspected Brian May have been sexually assaulted there.

In 1974, Dugan attempted to abduct a 10-year-old girl from a train station in Lisle.

Charges were brought against him but later dropped.

In 1975, he threatened to kill his older sister, Hilary, and to "chop up" her son, and he vandalized her car.

His brother Steven said that Dugan complained of being sexually abused while serving time in the Menard Correctional Center from 1979 until 1982.

On February 25, 1983, 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico (born July 7, 1972) was abducted in broad daylight from her home in Naperville, Illinois.

Suffering from the flu, Jeanine had been home alone while her parents were at work and her sisters were at school.

Her body was found two days later, six miles from her home.

She was found to have been raped and beaten to death.

Rolando Cruz, a 20-year-old gang member from Aurora, became a suspect after offering police false information about the murder in an attempt to claim the $10,000 reward being offered.

Soon, police charged Cruz, Alejandro Hernandez (who had accused two others) and Stephen Buckley, with the girl's rape and murder despite limited evidence.

The three were tried together by prosecutors.

He was already in custody for two other rapes and murders, one of a woman in July 1984 and the other an 8-year-old girl in May 1985.

He was sentenced to life after pleading guilty to the latter two crimes.

He was known for having informally confessed in 1985 to the February 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville, Illinois, which was a highly publicized case.

Rolando Cruz and Anthony Hernandez, both from Aurora, Illinois, had earlier been indicted in the Nicarico case and were convicted of Nicarico's murder in 1987 and sentenced to death.

After appeals and new trials, Hernandez was convicted a third time and sentenced to life in prison.

Cruz and Hernandez were convicted in 1987 and sentenced to death; the jury deadlocked on Buckley, and he was not retried.

Cruz was acquitted in 1995 after a witness recanted testimony, and new DNA evidence was introduced excluding him from that found at the crime scene.

State charges against Hernandez were also dismissed that year and he was freed.

In 2000 these two and Stephen Buckley received a settlement for wrongful prosecution from DuPage County.

In 2005 Dugan was indicted for Nicarico's murder based on DNA evidence; he pleaded guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to death.

After Illinois governor Patrick Quinn signed a new bill to abolish capital punishment in 2011, Dugan's sentence was commuted to life in prison.