Lisa Staes (Jack of Diamonds, Wisconsin)

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Speaker 1 Our card this week week is Lisa C. Stays, the Jack of Diamonds from Wisconsin.
In the winter of 1976, Lisa Stays was trying to figure out what exactly she wanted to do with her life.

Speaker 1 Like so many 20-year-olds, she just moved out of her parents' house and started classes at a community college. She was embracing her independence as a young adult.

Speaker 1 But no one ever got to see how Lisa's life would unfold because that same year, she disappeared. It took nearly two years for investigators to figure out that Lisa had been murdered.

Speaker 1 But in the 49 years since, they are still trying to uncover why and most importantly, who murdered her. And now, more than ever, it is a race against time.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 1 On the afternoon of January 14th, 1976, Michelle Wadman and Kurt Rahn were out going from bar to bar on Rush Street in Chicago. But they weren't looking to drink, dance, or party.

Speaker 1 They were looking for their cousin, Lisa, who had been in town visiting on her college break. The night before, around 6 p.m., Kurt last saw Lisa at a bar called Mother's.

Speaker 1 She said that she'd hit it off with this guy that she met inside and she was thinking about going home with him.

Speaker 1 So she asked Kurt to wait around for about 30 minutes and if she didn't come back out by then, he could just head home. So when that half hour passed, he did.

Speaker 1 But when Lisa hadn't returned home by the next day, the cousins began to worry. They couldn't find anyone at the bars on Rush Street who could tell them what might have happened to Lisa.

Speaker 1 So just after 10 p.m. that night, Michelle called the Oak Park Police Department to file a missing persons report.

Speaker 1 From Oak Park's original incident file, it looks like that night officers put Lisa's information into NCIC, a law enforcement database, and they checked for accidents in the area. But that's about it.

Speaker 1 They didn't conduct interviews or do neighborhood canvases or initiate any sort of ground search. They didn't even ask for a picture of Lisa.

Speaker 1 When 10 days went by with no updates, Lisa's dad, Jack Stays, actually traveled up from his home in Leewood, Kansas to see what was going on.

Speaker 1 He hoped giving officers some more information about Lisa might get things moving, but it really didn't.

Speaker 1 The Stays family went on to spend over a year living in a state of dread with no idea what happened to Lisa. Her younger brothers, Grant and Tim, were around 17 and 9 when she disappeared.

Speaker 1 Grant, the older brother, remembers that time just being a blur.

Speaker 4 Well, I don't know exactly what went on during the 16 months. I don't even know if I knew it was affecting me, you know.

Speaker 4 It just kind of

Speaker 4 is one of those things when you're 17, 18, that kind of molds you.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 don't really know that it's molding you at the time.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 yeah, I mean, it was hard on my parents. It was really hard on them for all that time.
I saw them age quite a bit. or rapidly, I should say,

Speaker 4 because it's the unknown that really,

Speaker 4 really wears on you. To find out what happened

Speaker 4 is hard,

Speaker 4 but to not find out what happened is harder.

Speaker 1 And the more time that went by, the more difficult it became for the stays to hold out hope that Lisa was going to come back to them.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 I remember

Speaker 4 acquaintances of hers saying, oh, she's dead, you know, and I thought that was rather harsh. But we had no reason to believe that she would disappear without telling any of us or her cousins.

Speaker 4 I mean, she was real close with her cousin, Michelle. So there was no reason to believe that she disappeared on her own.

Speaker 4 As far as I could tell,

Speaker 4 it wasn't going to be good.

Speaker 1 After about a year of worrying and radio silence from Oak Park Police, Lisa's parents reached out to their local police.

Speaker 1 Even though Lisa had vanished from a different state, her family hoped that another police department might be able to make some progress.

Speaker 4 I know my parents were very frustrated after the fact

Speaker 4 that they had just relied on the Illinois authorities.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it wasn't until

Speaker 4 my parents talked to a local law enforcement person

Speaker 4 that they actually got any connection made. People in Chicago really did let them down.

Speaker 4 At least, you know, that's how they feel.

Speaker 4 And I can't disagree with that.

Speaker 1 It was in February 1977, a year after Lisa's disappearance, when Captain Al Sellers from the Leewood Police Department reached out to Oak Park PD, quote, expressing a desire to know exactly what what the department had been doing in relation to the case.

Speaker 1 Of course, there wasn't much to share. So Captain Sellers started an investigation of his own.
And thank God he did.

Speaker 1 Because just a few months later, in April of 1977, he came across a teletype bulletin from Wisconsin that caught his attention.

Speaker 1 The Salt County Sheriff's Office had sent out a notification about an unidentified body that had been discovered.

Speaker 1 The remains were described as belonging to a white female, 18 to 35 years old, 5'3 and 105 pounds, with long dark hair and blue eyes.

Speaker 1 They made note of a tattoo on the upper left thigh, and that was the kicker. Lisa had a tattoo in that exact location.

Speaker 1 When the Leewood police captain called the Salt County Sheriff's Office, he learned that the woman's body had been found on January 24th, 1976. That is just 10 days after Lisa was reported missing.

Speaker 1 She was under a bridge at a local creek, completely nude in a fetal position and frozen solid when they found her.

Speaker 1 Aside from a red and green tattoo and a very small strand of gold-colored metal, which appeared to have been part of some kind of jewelry, there was nothing else on or near the woman to help detectives figure out who she was when they found her.

Speaker 1 And her fingerprints weren't on file anywhere. So they had given her a temporary name, Frigid Frida.

Speaker 5 I think it was more like slang from investigators back then, because obviously there was a year plus before she was positively identified as who she was.

Speaker 5 So they would refer to the case as Frigid Frida, and that kind of transferred down because even talking to older employees here, that's what they knew the case as.

Speaker 1 That was Detective Drew Bullen with the Salt County Sheriff's Office.

Speaker 1 He said that in the early days of the investigation, Saut County detectives sent out hundreds of flyers with Frida's description to law enforcement agencies across the country.

Speaker 1 And they released a composite sketch of the woman's face and upper thigh tattoo to the media.

Speaker 1 The flyers brought in some potential matches from New York all the way to California, enough to fill several thick file folders, but all of those ended up being dead ends.

Speaker 1 There was nothing at the scene to lead them to believe she'd been killed there. The creek was likely just a dumping ground.
And when they did an autopsy, that hadn't made things much clearer.

Speaker 1 Frida had no defensive wounds. And apparently her brain, which can usually tell a medical examiner a lot, was damaged by exposure to the cold and the subsequent thawing.

Speaker 1 Now, initially, the cause of death was undetermined, though at a later inquest, it was ruled a homicide.

Speaker 1 And the only usable evidence they had at the time were foreign pubic hairs on Frida, which suggested that she had recent sexual contact with someone.

Speaker 5 I think just based on her positioning where she was found, obviously being new, they assumed that there was probably a sexual component.

Speaker 5 And so as part of the autopsy back then in 76, they did take swabs, which are important today,

Speaker 5 because obviously back then they weren't necessarily looking for DNA, but obviously that's what we're looking for today, right? So they did do

Speaker 5 swabs that they would typically do in biosexual assault kit. And then they would have taken cuttings off pubic hair.

Speaker 1 According to Detective Bullen, hair analysis was a popular forensic technique at the time.

Speaker 1 It involved placing samples under a microscope and looking at things like color, size, and composition for comparison. So the foreign pubic hair was an important discovery.

Speaker 1 And at the time, investigators actually rounded up some of their usual suspects to compare their pubic hairs with the ones found on Frida. but there weren't any matches.

Speaker 1 Frigid Frida was ultimately buried in a local cemetery, and all they could put on the headstone was a small bronze plaque inscribed with unidentified female.

Speaker 1 At least that's all they could do until the day they could identify her. And with this call from Leewood, that day was now.

Speaker 1 They had to exhume the body to take x-rays for a dental comparison, but when all was said and done, it was Lisa's days.

Speaker 1 The realization that Lisa's body had been found just 11 days after she was last seen was a tough pill to swallow after 15 months of agony.

Speaker 1 At the time, Lisa's mom Susan wrote a letter to the editor at the Baraboo News Republic. This is her today at 91 years old reading from that letter.

Speaker 4 One would have to have been in our position to appreciate the sense of helplessness we experienced in our quest for Lisa's whereabouts.

Speaker 4 It had seemed to us a logical move to report her disappearance to the Illinois authorities, since that is where she was staying at the time.

Speaker 4 We put all our faith in them to do their best, and unfortunately that faith was misplaced.

Speaker 1 Susan went on to express her gratitude for the work of Sauk County law enforcement.

Speaker 4 When we learned the whole story and found that our girl had been given a beautiful funeral at the Gantt funeral home in Reidsburg. We were overwhelmed with gratitude and relief and joy.

Speaker 4 We viewed that service on videotape right in the courthouse, openly weeping.

Speaker 4 It is over for us now, the long nights of wondering, but we know it is only beginning in earnest. for those involved in the investigation.

Speaker 4 To all of them, we can only say thank you and hope they know that we have very good feelings towards all of them. A part of our hearts will remain with our Lisa forever in your lovely Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 And Susan was right. With this ID, the investigation was only beginning, this time with Sauk County at the helm.

Speaker 1 But they still weren't sure when exactly Lisa was killed in the 11 days between her disappearance and the discovery of her body, or even where she was killed in the nearly 200 miles between Chicago and Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Speaker 1 If she was murdered in Salt County, it would have been the area's first homicide in almost seven years.

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Speaker 1 So Sauk County detectives started where Oak Park PD should have those 15 months ago by learning everything they could about Lisa and what she was doing in the days leading up to her disappearance.

Speaker 1 And they began with Michelle, Lisa's cousin that had been hosting her.

Speaker 1 According to Michelle, the day before she was last seen, Lisa ended up meeting and hitting it off with a singer named David McKenzie.

Speaker 1 Lisa had spent the night at David's place before returning to Michelle safe and sound on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday night is when Lisa disappeared.

Speaker 5 So Michelle says that she thinks that Lisa kind of wanted to just be free and go out to the bar and have a good time. She suspects that she was using some drugs back then too, drinking a little bit.

Speaker 5 And so Michelle suspects that Lisa, you know, was maybe using using some marijuana and then possibly cocaine and then potentially heroin as well as part of the party that night.

Speaker 5 It doesn't sound like Michelle observed any actual use, that was just kind of her suspicion when she talked with investigators.

Speaker 1 Lisa's parents, Susan and Jack, didn't know anything about Lisa's possible drug habits, but they said it wouldn't have totally surprised them if she was experimenting.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was the 70s, and Lisa was a free-spirited girl.

Speaker 4 She was very

Speaker 4 audacious. You know, bold.
She wasn't afraid of things. She was, you know, just go out there and do whatever she wanted within reason.
But, you know, I mean, she wasn't a fearful child.

Speaker 4 She was very bold. Curious.

Speaker 4 Yeah, fearless, yeah. And she was.
In her early years, she was a very good student. She was a smart girl.
As she drifted into her teens, she got distracted with, you know, teenage stuff.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 that's when she just sort of, you know, lost track of what I'd call her childhood.

Speaker 4 I sometimes worry that maybe we were too hands-off.

Speaker 4 But, you know, there's a balance between, you know, riding herd on your kid and letting them, you know,

Speaker 4 learn learn for themselves.

Speaker 1 Investigators were never able to confirm whether or not Lisa had drugs in her system when she died because a talk screen seemingly never made it into Frigid Frida's autopsy report.

Speaker 1 But they did go and talk to David.

Speaker 5 He describes how he got to talking to Lisa and Lisa ended up going back home with him that night to his apartment in Chicago.

Speaker 5 and admits that they had sex consensually and that the last time he saw Lisa was the following morning, early afternoon, where she gets on the L-train in Chicago to go back to her cousins in Oak Park.

Speaker 5 David is very cooperative with investigators and gives any standards that they requested, which included hair samples and had hair samples, I believe, and pubic hair samples.

Speaker 5 I'm not sure if they took fingerprints. I would assume that they did.

Speaker 5 But he was very cooperative and those hairs were later submitted to the lab and they excluded him as being the source of the foreign hairs that were found on Lisa.

Speaker 1 Not only was David forthcoming with investigators, but he also had an alibi. He was performing in another bar the night that Lisa disappeared, which detectives confirmed with bar staff.

Speaker 5 I think they were fairly confident, or I infer from the reports that they are fairly confident that he was not involved just because of the potential alibi and then also his level of cooperation.

Speaker 1 Investigators also talked to Kurt, Lisa's other cousin. By the time Sauk County talked to him, he had moved away from the Chicago area.

Speaker 1 According to Detective Bolin, there isn't much more information on Kurt in the case file.

Speaker 1 It's not clear if Sauk County investigators at the time ever considered him a suspect, and if not, why he was ruled out.

Speaker 1 Next up was Lisa's boyfriend, Mark Hansted.

Speaker 1 Or rather, next up should have been the boyfriend. At the time, Susan told investigators that Lisa actually planned the Chicago trip after a falling out with Mark.

Speaker 1 The two lived together and Lisa needed some time away to decompress. Now today, Susan doesn't remember it that way.

Speaker 1 I mean, she was never a big fan of Mark, she said, but she couldn't recall that trip being anything more than a routine family visit.

Speaker 1 Either way, Detective Bullin says the case file shows that he was never a serious suspect.

Speaker 5 It's pretty clear from reports that investigators discounted him pretty early on, and there's not really much, if any, follow-up that I can see that was done in the case.

Speaker 6 So the boyfriend was never considered a person of interest?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 There's so much that the investigators

Speaker 5 maybe knew back then or suspected back then,

Speaker 5 and it is undocumented.

Speaker 5 So that combined with just simply the length of time. With any cold case, it's tough to look back and say, man, what were the investigators doing back then? And it's hard to know.

Speaker 1 Whatever they did didn't lead to solving Lisa's case. And for the next 20 years, it stayed cold.
All the way up until around 1999.

Speaker 1 That's when investigators got a letter from a man in prison alleging that one of his fellow inmates might have had something to do with Lisa's murder, a convicted serial killer named William Zamisto.

Speaker 1 At the time, William was serving a life sentence in Wisconsin for the 1978 murder of a different woman.

Speaker 5 She had been abducted from a parking lot in Madison and sexually assaulted and killed. And he was convicted of that in the late 70s and sentenced to life here in prison in Wisconsin.

Speaker 5 And after that time, the late 90s, early 2000s, he was convicted of a double homicide of some hitchhikers in the Los Angeles area.

Speaker 5 And then again, in the early 2000s, he was convicted of homicide in Tucson, Arizona. He had killed an FBI agent's daughter, adult daughter, sexual assault, and dumped her in the desert.

Speaker 1 If you've never heard of William Zamostill before, it's probably because his name got lost in the shuffle of prolific serial killers active in the 1970s.

Speaker 1 Ones like John Wayne Gacy, Ed Kemper, or David Berkowitz. Plus, William Zamostille killed all over the U.S.

Speaker 1 He wasn't known for terrorizing a specific city or state like those other men, at least as far as anyone knew.

Speaker 1 When Williams' fellow inmate wrote to investigators, he said that he believed believed William had committed more murders that he hadn't been convicted of.

Speaker 1 And the letter specifically mentioned a victim found underneath a bridge in Sauk County.

Speaker 1 Now, investigators were well aware that the information about Lisa's body being found under a bridge could have been gleaned from the news. But still, they took this lead seriously.

Speaker 1 They started trying to determine Williams' whereabouts in January of 1976.

Speaker 1 And as it turns out, he was in custody in Dane County, which is about an hour from Sauk County. But he was serving time for a lesser crime and was granted work release.

Speaker 5 So he definitely was in the area. And the records from the jail back then that they had were on microfilm and they were difficult to read.

Speaker 5 Investigators believed it was possible that he was in jail at the time of this case, but they're not certain because of the quality of the records.

Speaker 5 And when they talked with or attempted to talk with Zamastil,

Speaker 5 he said, well, no, I wasn't in custody. I was out.
So they were never able to definitively say whether or not he was in custody.

Speaker 1 And that's about all he gave them, by the way.

Speaker 1 When investigators went to question him around 1999, he presented them with a list of demands and refused to give any information about Lisa unless those demands were met.

Speaker 5 And so part of his demands were he wanted to serve his sentence in a certain prison and he wanted some guarantees.

Speaker 5 They were suspicious back then as to whether or not he was claiming this murder to gain something for himself because he's incarcerated for life or if he actually committed it.

Speaker 5 And they basically said, well, we need to know some details and he was not willing to provide them.

Speaker 5 So he was never ruled in or out.

Speaker 1 It seemed that detectives didn't want to negotiate. So with that, the investigation stalled again.

Speaker 1 Almost another full decade passed without any movement. And during that time, Lisa's brother Grant says that the Stays family honestly sort of gave up hope that they would ever get closure.

Speaker 4 The

Speaker 4 not finding her killer, while it's hard, is not unexpected.

Speaker 4 You would hope.

Speaker 4 Somebody would have been found out somehow. You know, it's always just kind of been something I got to hope that they meet their judgment someday or already have.
You know,

Speaker 4 there's been

Speaker 4 every once in a while something comes up that's like, oh, this person sounded like they could have been a suspect.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 nothing really ever comes of it.

Speaker 4 The only person I know of right now that I never really got any closure on whether he's involved is

Speaker 4 Williams Zamostille.

Speaker 1 In the late 2000s, the inmate who wrote to investigators about William Zamostill was released from prison and then passed away. And investigators made no further attempts to contact William.

Speaker 1 Being a convicted offender, his DNA was on file, but DNA testing wasn't really on detectives' minds yet.

Speaker 1 Plus, they would have needed a search warrant to obtain his pubic hairs for comparison to those found on Lisa, which it doesn't seem like they ever requested.

Speaker 1 But over the years, forensic testing evolved far beyond the hair analysis of the 70s.

Speaker 1 And as Salt County got access to new technology, investigators sent off some of the physical evidence that they had collected during Lisa's autopsy.

Speaker 1 The first attempt was in 2001, 25 years after Lisa's murder.

Speaker 5 They did identify some sperm cells on the swabs, but at the time, they were not,

Speaker 5 there wasn't enough genetic material present to develop a full profile for the male, and certainly not a profile that would be suitable for entry into a database like CODIS.

Speaker 1 According to Detective Bullen, the lab was only able to collect six sperm heads from a smear prepared from the swabs. Conventionally, complete profiles require between 20 and 50 at the least.

Speaker 1 So fast forward to 2009, that's when investigators sent the foreign pubic hairs and rectal swabs off for testing.

Speaker 5 They were able to detect a trace level of male DNA from a couple of the hairs, but again, the quantity was not sufficient to develop a profile.

Speaker 5 They attempted to analyze the rectal swabs as well, and there's a lack of male DNA detected, so no further analysis was performed.

Speaker 1 And that was the last submission before Detective Bolin was assigned to the case in the fall of 2022, which is a bizarre story in and of itself.

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Speaker 5 So one of the reasons that this case

Speaker 5 came back around is we had someone

Speaker 5 call in and say that they had noticed that someone was placing flowers on the victim's grave.

Speaker 5 And so that kind of spurred our interest in my supervisors interest in being like, hey, let's have somebody take a look at this again.

Speaker 1 Detective Bullen says the thought at the time was that maybe the person who killed Lisa wasn't dead or in prison, but living somewhere in Salk County.

Speaker 1 And after all these years, he had begun to feel remorseful. So Bullen spoke to the cemetery's caretaker, who assumed that the family had been leaving the flowers.

Speaker 1 But according to Grant, while his parents used to go up to Baraboo once a year to see Lisa's headstone, They hadn't been back since his mom's stroke seven years earlier.

Speaker 1 Detective Detective Bullen never did figure out who it was that was leaving the flowers. The cemetery didn't have surveillance video, and the caretaker never saw anyone in the act.

Speaker 1 Now, it's totally possible it was just a caring local resident. But the whole situation did lead Detective Bullen to start digging back into Lisa's case.

Speaker 1 His initial thought was that If it was ever going to get solved, it was probably going to be because of advances in DNA testing.

Speaker 5 I talked with the analyst and he and I agreed that, you know, certainly 2001, but even 2009 to 2023 is a lifetime in DNA science and that their protocols are much different. And I resubmitted

Speaker 5 some of the swabs that we still had. And then I also resubmitted DNA packets.

Speaker 1 They had been hopeful that they would get a full profile this time around,

Speaker 1 but no such luck. The evidence text said that the sample was just too degraded.

Speaker 1 Detective Boland did resubmit additional material in 2023, essentially everything they had left, but he is still waiting on those results.

Speaker 5 So the hope is that we'll be able to get a full male profile, right? Based on the advances in genetic genealogy, a lot of times if you have a DNA profile, like you're going to identify it.

Speaker 5 It's just a matter of time. And so if we get that full male profile, we're confident that we'll have the resources to identify that person.

Speaker 1 On the chance that the DNA doesn't provide answers, Detective Boland is putting in the legwork too. Currently, he's working on tracking down Mark Hanstead, Lisa's then-boyfriend.

Speaker 1 But here's the problem. Because original reports are lacking identifying information, he's been having some trouble tracking this guy down.
I mean, it's not even totally clear if Mark is still alive.

Speaker 1 So Mark, if you are out there and if you're listening to this, please reach out to Sauk County.

Speaker 1 Detective Bolin is also trying to figure out if David McKenzie is still alive just to cover all his bases. But given David's cooperation in the 70s, he's pretty low down his outreach list.

Speaker 5 There is a possibility that someone's out there who knows what happened to Lisa and they're still alive and for whatever reason, they've never come forward.

Speaker 5 That's certainly possible and that solves a lot of cold cases too.

Speaker 5 So between the physical evidence and somebody potentially coming forward with information, I think that's really what we would need to push this case forward.

Speaker 1 In 2023, someone did come forward with a familiar name in a familiar fashion.

Speaker 1 A convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Wisconsin wrote an article for PrisonWriters.com titled, My Friend, a Serial Killer, is ready to confess.

Speaker 1 The author, Justin Welch, wrote that he and William Zamistil, who he calls Wild Bill, are very close friends.

Speaker 1 He said, quote, I know Bill very well now, and I even know about many of the murders he did, but was never convicted of. And that's why I call him Wild Bill.

Speaker 1 He has killed so many people and nobody has any idea because it's been so long. Bill has killed so many people, he can't even remember half the shit he did.
And then there was a catch. Quote,

Speaker 1 we all know Bill is going to die in prison like me. So I thought maybe if I could get him to come forward on many of his other murders, then the federal government would make a deal with him.

Speaker 1 I told Bill I would talk to the detectives and tell them everything they need to know if we could have it in writing that Bill and I would get transferred to the federal prison system for the rest of our lives.

Speaker 1 Bill will not talk until it's in writing. We'll get the transfer, just so you all know.

Speaker 5 End quote.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, this ultimatum put detectives in the same place they were in in the late 2000s, the place of negotiating with a serial killer.

Speaker 1 Now, our reporter Nicole talked with the founder of PrisonWriters.com, Lowen Kelly, who published Welch's article.

Speaker 1 She acknowledged that the site doesn't fact-check story, so she can't be certain that any claims made are 100% true. But she doesn't dismiss them either.

Speaker 1 After publishing that story, Kelly actually reached out to Williams Amistill herself to learn more about him. And she has been talking with him regularly ever since then.
She calls him Bill.

Speaker 7 He would tell me about these murders he did, but he didn't remember the details of

Speaker 7 who the victim was, what they were wearing, what their names were, what they were dressed,

Speaker 7 because he wasn't that kind of a serial killer. He is

Speaker 7 a very unusual serial killer, actually, because he doesn't have any MO. He doesn't have a sort of a standard plan.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 7 very impulsive.

Speaker 7 Sometimes he would use a rock. Sometimes he would strangle them.
Sometimes he used a knife. Shot someone with a gun once.
And

Speaker 1 a belt, a wire hanger.

Speaker 7 So in other words, serial killers usually have a regular pattern and he really didn't.

Speaker 7 I think with Bill, it would be anger that caused him to do some of them, but I also think, believe it or not, boredom.

Speaker 1 I'd be always like, well, why did you kill?

Speaker 7 And he'd be like, well, sometimes it was just to spice up the day.

Speaker 1 When Kelly first started talking with William, she said he had no interest in confessing any of these crimes to authorities. So she took it upon herself to try and convince him otherwise.

Speaker 7 I would say things to him like, look, Bill, I know you don't give a shit about solving this case. You know, you don't have any remorse.
We've talked about this.

Speaker 7 You know, it's not going to do you any good. But let me just tell you another perspective.
And then I would explain that

Speaker 7 there is something to this closure business. Closure was so important to people.

Speaker 7 You know, I'd think like 10 years ago, your sibling died and, you know, it's going to feel

Speaker 7 that much better to know who did it. And the answer is yes, by a huge amount.

Speaker 7 That why the hell not just, you know, even though it's not going to change your life, you're not going to feel any differently. Why don't you just

Speaker 4 try it?

Speaker 1 So he did.

Speaker 1 As it turned out, the day our reporter Nicole reached out to Lowen, William Zamostille had a meeting with the FBI to come forward about a murder he was claiming responsibility for in California.

Speaker 1 She said the DA seemed interested but wanted to do some more investigation before moving forward.

Speaker 1 Nicole reached out to William in prison to ask him about Lisa's case, but she never heard back. Although she did get a response from his friend, Justin Welch.

Speaker 8 Hello, you have a call from

Speaker 9 Justin, an inmate at Wisconsin Secure Program Facility.

Speaker 8 To accept this call, press 5. To refuse this call, hang up now.

Speaker 4 Hello.

Speaker 4 Hi.

Speaker 4 Hi, Nicole.

Speaker 9 This is Justin Welch from Wisconsin DOC.

Speaker 10 Oh, hi.

Speaker 9 Well, I'm going to let you know something right now, right off the kit, go.

Speaker 9 I'm under investigation by the FBI because I'm Bill Friend.

Speaker 9 They've been, yeah, they have the Wisconsin Division Division of Criminal Investigations, like recording all my phone calls and sending everything to the

Speaker 4 Feds and all that stuff.

Speaker 9 So I have the transcripts. I just got them last month.

Speaker 4 I didn't know they were doing this until just last month.

Speaker 9 Anyway, so what do you want to know?

Speaker 10 Yeah, before I ask you some questions, do you mind if I record the call?

Speaker 9 I don't care.

Speaker 4 Okay, awesome.

Speaker 10 So basically, as I wrote to you in my letter, I'm working on a story about the 1976 murder of this woman named Lisa in Barabou, Wisconsin.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I know what case you're talking about. Bill's adamantly saying he didn't do it.
See, the Fed gave me like 15 people to pick from, and I went and talked to Bill about all of them.

Speaker 9 And Bill, out of the 15, he picked eight of them.

Speaker 9 He remembered eight of them. So

Speaker 9 he's told me about lots of murders and told me about where the bodies were at and everything. And they still haven't even found them.
So it's just

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 9 he would tell me because we're

Speaker 9 he doesn't give a shit like he doesn't care about that

Speaker 9 That was 50 years ago, you know, he he's just an old man now. He would have told me he'd be like, Yeah, I did it Justin

Speaker 9 Yeah, no, I know he didn't do it. He would have told me

Speaker 1 So at least from Welch's perspective, investigators would be wasting their time looking at William.

Speaker 1 He may be a very bad guy, capable of very bad things, but according to him, Lisa's murder doesn't seem to be one of them. But if that's true, it still leaves us asking, who killed Lisa?

Speaker 1 At this point, Detective Bullen is asking anyone who might have any information at all about this case, no matter how small, to please come forward.

Speaker 5 No tip is going to be disregarded. You know, we're happy to talk to anyone who might have information because you truly don't know, and we truly don't know what, you know, what information is key.

Speaker 5 There might be something out there that we have no knowledge of that someone brings to us and it solves the case.

Speaker 1 Now, 49 years since Lisa first went missing, all Grant wants is for answers to come while his parents are still around to hear them.

Speaker 4 They're, you know, up there

Speaker 4 in years. You know, dad's 95 and mom's 91.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 the fact that they've

Speaker 4 just the fact that they've had

Speaker 4 to

Speaker 4 live with us for a long time.

Speaker 4 Well, it is 50 years.

Speaker 4 And then in the meantime, we've had a full life

Speaker 4 with the rest of our children, grandchildren,

Speaker 4 beautiful

Speaker 4 babies.

Speaker 4 Something that Lisa just

Speaker 4 had nothing.

Speaker 4 I mean, she had no life. I mean, there was nothing that she was just a baby in our arms.

Speaker 4 And there were so many things that she's just missed out on this life.

Speaker 4 Of course, we've lived a long time.

Speaker 4 We've been so happy with the way our boys have turned out and their families, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They're all beautiful.
So

Speaker 4 it's just a shame that she missed all that.

Speaker 1 If you have any information about the murder of Lisa Stays or her whereabouts between Illinois and Wisconsin in January of 1976, please call the Sauk County Sheriff's Office at 608-355-4495 and ask for Detective Bullen.

Speaker 1 Or if you'd rather remain anonymous, you can call the Sauk County Crime Stoppers Tip line at 1-800-TIPSOC. That's 1-800-TIPSA-U-K.

Speaker 1 And just a reminder, Detective Bullen is still looking for Mark Hanstedt and David McKenzie. So, if either of you are out there or someone listening knows these men, please have them reach out.

Speaker 1 The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

Speaker 1 So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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