Nicarico investigator: 'Justice has finally triumphed'

After spending decades chasing killers, Dave Hamm was enjoying semiretirement in the mid-1990s, keeping peace in a DuPage County courtroom as a deputy sheriff.

But, two years into the gig, then-State's Attorney Anthony Peccarelli came to the veteran police officer with one last assignment.

"He told me ... to find out who killed the little Nicarico girl," Hamm said. "He wanted to know for sure."

"I thought I was retired. I told him I wanted to pray about it and think about it. I went home, talked to my wife and said, 'I think I want to do this one more time.'"

Hamm accepted the job offer to become a state's attorney investigator in February 1996 and, for the next 13 years, hunted leads in nearly a dozen states and generated 1,000 pages of reports in his quest to answer Peccarelli's question.

The final page of the extended tragedy was written Tuesday when a DuPage County jury sentenced Brian Dugan to death for the 1983 murder of Jeanine. Two other men, including Rolando Cruz, spent years on death row before 1995 exonerations.

Hamm served as the courtroom deputy during Cruz's final trial. Hamm's instincts told him Cruz was probably innocent.

Later, after Peccarelli hired him, Hamm said he became convinced Dugan acted alone after interviewing witness upon witness who reported seeing only one man in a green car near the Nicarico home that day. All of them - two neighbors, two women working at a nearby church where Dugan asked about a job, a passing motorist and two tollway workers near where the child's brutalized body was discovered - all told Hamm the same story.

"This is the kind of crime a guy does alone," Hamm said. "He doesn't do it with two or three other guys. I began to really believe that, and, by then, the DNA (testing) started coming back to Dugan and excluding Cruz."

Peccarelli, a former judge who died of cancer in 2005, ended his two-year state's attorney appointment Oct. 1, 1996, when Joseph Birkett took over the office. Hamm said Birkett gave him similar marching orders to uncover the truth.

He did just that. Hamm tracked down an old Dugan cohort who identified a piece of torn cloth used to blindfold Jeanine; Dugan kept that draped over his bedpost at the Aurora boardinghouse where both lived in the mid-1980s.

Hamm, known for his unfaltering recall of dates and names, is widely regarded as the foremost authority on the sad saga. He doesn't fault the investigators before him who pursued innocent men, including Cruz, who admits he was a young punk who made up lies to cash in on a $10,000 reward. Hamm also said some witnesses, such as the church women, didn't come forward right away.

Hamm uncovered many truths in a law enforcement career that dates back to late 1958.

He stood nearly alone in the 1960s in welcoming DuPage County's first black police officer to serve as his partner on the sheriff's force, at a time when others refused. Decades later, Hamm was reunited with Bill Simmons - when Birkett named him the county's first black chief of his investigations unit.

At Hamm's next post, as a longtime Illinois State Police detective lieutenant, he pursued notorious horseman Silas Jayne, who among his list of crimes was convicted of conspiracy in his brother's 1970 fatal shooting in Inverness.

It was while investigating Jayne that he encountered Kenneth Hanson, a horse trader who Hamm became convinced was behind the unsolved Oct. 16, 1955 Peterson-Schuessler murders in which the three slain teen boys' bodies were found near a Jayne stable.

Hanson wasn't an original suspect, but Hamm gave federal authorities his files when he retired from the state police in the early 1990s. They soon closed in on Hanson, who died in 2007 at 74 while serving a 200-year prison term for the slayings.

Hamm also chased leads in the 1982 Tylenol killings in the suburbs in which seven people died of cyanide poisoning.

At 73, Hamm grudgingly plans to retire Feb. 19. He and his wife, Mary, with whom he is celebrating a 50th anniversary, have two sons and four grandchildren.

A framed photo of another child, Jeanine Nicarico, hangs on his office wall.

"I made a commitment to see it through to the end," Hamm said. "I hope the end is here. There's no doubt in my mind we have the right guy. This case has a sad history, but I think justice has finally triumphed."

<div class="infoBox"> <h1>More Coverage</h1> <div class="infoBoxContent"> <div class="infoArea"> <h2>Stories</h2> <ul class="links"> <li><a href="/story/?id=335585">Dugan gets death sentence for Nicarico murder <span class="date">[11/11/09]</span></a></li> </ul> </div> </div> </div>