In March of 1988, an 18-year-old drove into the Wyoming night in a little Honda with two words on the plate, little miss.
More than a hundred people swore they saw that car in different states and even in Canada.
For 14 years, police couldn’t find it anywhere.
When they finally did, it was the last place anyone thought to look.
That night, on a dark stretch of Wyoming highway, a police officer pulled her over.
He let her go.
After that, she was gone.
8 days later, she was found in a river.
The worst part was still to come.
[music] She hadn’t died the night she disappeared.
For days, she had been alive, [music] and nobody knows where.
Some witnesses even claimed they saw her behind the wheel days after she vanished.
[music] Then, someone left a message on her grave.
For 14 years, this case refused to break.
This is the true crime story of Lisa Kimmel and this is Grave Docks.
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Lisa Kimmel was born on July 18th, [music] 1969 in Covington, a small town in western Tennessee.
Two younger sisters followed and in 1972 the family packed up and moved more than a thousand miles west to Billings, Montana, a place of wide skies, long winters, and neighbors who knew each other by name.
From early on, Lisa stood out.
She was independent and determined, and she grew up faster than most kids her age.
[music] She helped her parents look after her little sisters.
And while other teenagers were spending their weekends with nothing to do, she was working part-time at a local restaurant.
She saved every paycheck she could.
And before she even graduated from high school, she bought herself something most 18-year-olds only dream about.
It was a brand new Honda CRX.
She made it her own.
On the license plate, she put the nickname her parents and sisters had always called her, little miss.
It was a small, sweet detail, [music] the kind of thing a family smiles about.
No one could have known that those two words would one day matter more than almost anything else in this story.
Lisa graduated in 1987, and that’s when the first real disagreement in the Kimmel household began.
Her parents wanted her to go to college.
Lisa wanted to keep working and build a career on her own terms.
After plenty of back and forth, they reached a compromise.
She would work for one year and then think seriously about college.
The job she chose was one her family knew well.
Lisa worked at Arby’s, the national restaurant chain, alongside her mother, who was a regional manager for the company.
Lisa was good at it.
So good that shortly after graduation, she was offered a management position of her own.
There was one catch.
The job wasn’t in Billings.
It was in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, [music] roughly 550 mi from home.
For an 18-year-old fresh out of high school, it was a huge leap.
Lisa said yes without hesitating.
The distance didn’t feel as big as it looked on a map.
Her mother traveled to Denver for work so often that the two of them saw each other almost every week.
And when Lisa missed home, she simply got in her car and drove the long highway north to Billings.
She knew that road well, and she had made the trip many times.
Her new restaurant was in Aurora, just east of Denver.
She rented her own apartment, made new friends, and threw herself into the work.
By every account, [music] she loved her new life.
A few months later, she started dating a young man named Ed.
He didn’t live in Colorado.
He lived hundreds of miles to the north, [music] but he made the trip to Aurora often, and the relationship quickly grew serious.
Serious enough that Lisa decided it was time for him to meet her family.
She picked the weekend of Friday, March 25th, 1988.
The plan was simple.
Ed lived in Cody, Wyoming, which sat right along her route home.
Lisa would drive up from Aurora, pick him up in Cody, and the two of them would continue on to Billings together.
For the first time, the people she loved most [music] would all be in the same room.
She was excited about it, and everyone around her [music] could tell.
At about 4:00 that afternoon, Lisa pulled out of Aurora in her little Honda with the little mist plates on the back and pointed [music] it north.
Ahead of her were about 7 hours of highway, most of it across the empty plains of Wyoming with the sun going down and the towns getting farther and farther apart.
Ed would be waiting up for her.
But a few hours into that drive, somewhere in the Wyoming dark, Lisa’s night was about to take a turn she never [music] planned for.
And it started with flashing lights in her rear view mirror.
By around 9:00 that night, Lisa had covered roughly 250 mi.
She had crossed into Wyoming and reached the town of Douglas, a quiet stop on the interstate where the lights of town give way fast to miles of open darkness.
She was clearly in a hurry.
Ed was waiting and she still had a long way to go.
That’s when the flashing lights appeared behind her.
A Wyoming patrol officer pulled her [music] over.
His radar had clocked her at about 87 m an hour.
He wrote her a ticket for $120 and under state law at the time, she had to pay it right there on the spot.
Lisa didn’t have that kind of cash on her.
So, the officer offered a solution.
They would go to the nearest ATM just off the road and she could withdraw the money there.
They drove over together and Lisa tried her card.
The machine wouldn’t take it.
By the rules, the officer was supposed to take a driver who couldn’t pay into custody, but he didn’t.
He looked at this young woman alone and far from home on a Friday night, and he made a judgment call.
He let her go as long as she promised to mail a check to the local police department.
Lisa agreed.
She got back into her Honda and pulled out onto the highway again.
From Douglas to Ed’s house in Cody was about a 4-hour drive.
If everything went smoothly, she would be knocking on his door well after midnight.
In Cody, Ed waited.
Midnight came and went and then 1:00 and 2:00.
Sometime before dawn, worn out from watching the road, he fell asleep.
When he woke up at about 7:00 in the morning, Lisa still wasn’t there.
This was 1988.
There were no cell phones and no way to text and ask where she was.
Lisa was out there somewhere on hundreds of miles of highway and there was no way to reach her.
So Ed did the only thing he could think of.
He started calling police departments in Wyoming and in Colorado.
He gave them Lisa’s name and described her car.
And he asked if there had been an accident or anything at all.
The police wrote down the information, but they wouldn’t open a missing person case.
Lisa was 18, which made her a legal adult, and she had only been gone a few hours.
[music] In their eyes, that wasn’t a missing person.
It was a young woman running late.
Ed waited a few more hours.
Then he started calling everyone he could [music] think of, including their friends and Lisa’s boss.
Nobody had heard from her.
He tried her parents and Billings, but no one answered.
[music] When the Kimmels finally got home hours later, their phone was ringing off the hook.
One call after another came from people asking the same question.
Had they heard from Lisa?
At first, her parents weren’t alarmed.
Lisa had driven that road so many times.
Maybe she had car trouble or maybe she had stopped somewhere for the night.
It was hard to imagine anything had happened to her.
But the hours kept passing and Lisa didn’t call.
Eventually, her parents reached Ed and asked him to come to their house.
The meeting Lisa had planned for so long.
The moment she had been looking forward to all week finally happened, but Lisa wasn’t there for it, and nobody in the room knew where she was.
2 days went by without a word.
The police still refused to search.
Under the rules back then, the family had to wait 72 hours before a missing person report could even be filed.
[music] The Kimmels weren’t going to wait.
Lisa’s father hired a pilot with a small plane to fly low along her route, hoping to spot the Honda from the air in a ditch, at the bottom of a ravine or anywhere along the shoulder.
They found nothing.
He then got in his own car and drove part of the route himself, scanning every mile and every pulloff.
Still, [music] there was no sign of her.
So, the family called a private investigator they knew, a former police officer with connections inside the department.
He pulled every string he had, and it worked.
The police agreed to take the missing person report early.
Once they did, investigators quickly confirmed one thing.
A Wyoming patrol officer had stopped Lisa and Douglas the night she vanished.
As far as anyone could tell, [music] he was the last person known to have seen her.
That narrowed the search to the stretch of road between Douglas and Cody.
But that stretch covered hundreds of miles of open fields, forests, and mountains.
Searching it properly would have taken months and thousands of people.
Search crews went out anyway, but they found nothing.
A week went by, then 8 days.
Then on the morning of April 2nd, the phone rang at the police department.
On the other end was a man who had gone out fishing that morning [music] and he had seen something in the water.
The fisherman had been working a stretch of river outside Casper, Wyoming.
At one point, he noticed something in the water.
[music] It was a person lying face down and not moving.
Just days earlier, he had heard on the radio that police were looking for a missing young woman.
He made the connection immediately and called it in.
Detectives arrived and recovered her from the river.
Before long, they confirmed what everyone had feared.
It was Lisa [music] Kimmel.
The search for Lisa was over, and the hunt for whoever did this [music] was beginning.
At first, investigators believed Lisa had died about 5 hours after she disappeared, sometime in the early hours of that Saturday morning, not long after the traffic stop in Douglas.
That first estimate would cause confusion for a long time.
When medical examiners studied the evidence more closely, they came to a very different conclusion, and it [music] was devastating.
Lisa hadn’t died that first night.
She had died about 6 days after she vanished, only 2 days before the fisherman found her.
That meant that while her father was flying over the highway in a small plane, while he was driving the route mile after mile and while her family sat by the phone in Billings waiting for it to ring, Lisa was still alive.
She was out there somewhere for almost a week and nobody knew where.
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The medical examiners found that Lisa had been attacked while she was still alive.
She had several wounds and significant bruising.
The evidence pointed to her being thrown from a bridge into the river while she was unconscious.
Investigators later confirmed it when they found blood on a bridge over the water.
There was one more discovery, and it may have been the most important of all.
Examiners recovered biological evidence from Lisa’s body that appeared to have come from her attacker.
If they could analyze it, it might identify the man who did this.
[music] But this was 1988, and DNA testing was still in its early days.
The tools to build a genetic profile were rare, and the local crime lab didn’t have the resources to do it.
The evidence was carefully preserved, but for now, it couldn’t tell them anything.
So, detectives turned to what they could see, starting [music] with the bridge.
It wasn’t on a major road.
It sat in a remote stretch of wilderness and hadn’t been used in years.
To reach it, you had to turn off the main highway onto a country road and then keep driving.
Nobody stumbled across a place like that by accident.
To investigators, that said a lot.
Whoever took Lisa to that bridge knew the area well.
Most likely it was someone local who lived somewhere near that river.
Then there was the car.
The Honda CRX with the little miss plates hadn’t been found anywhere.
Not on the highway, not near [music] the river, and not in any parking lot or ditch between Douglas and Cody.
Detectives believe the killer had taken it and hidden it somewhere.
And if they could find it, it might hold [music] the clues they needed.
But it was like the car had disappeared into the earth.
So investigators went public.
They shared details of the case with the media [music] and Lisa’s story spread across television screens throughout the region.
Her photo was everywhere and so were those two words on her license plate.
The calls started coming in and that’s when this [music] case took a turn nobody expected.
People weren’t only reporting that they had seen Lisa’s car.
Some of them said they had seen Lisa herself alive and behind the wheel days after she was supposed to have vanished.
In total, police received more than a hundred calls.
People said they had seen the Honda CRX with the little miss plates, and some said they had seen Lisa herself.
But the sightings didn’t come from one place.
They came from different states, and a few came from as far away as Canada.
Most of them were easy to set aside.
A handful weren’t.
Five separate witnesses told police the same thing.
They had seen that exact car with little miss on the plates being driven by a young woman who looked a lot like Lisa.
It happened around Casper on March 26th and 27th, the weekend after she vanished.
That raised a question nobody could answer.
If Lisa was alive and driving her own car around the Casper area that weekend, [music] why didn’t she call anyone?
She was close to her family and talked to her mother almost every week.
[music] Her boyfriend was waiting and her parents were frantic.
She was also due back at work on Monday morning, and everyone who knew her said she would never have missed a shift without a word.
None of it made sense.
One witness added a detail that made it even more unsettling.
He said Lisa wasn’t alone in the car.
A man was sitting beside her.
Police tried to confirm it, but they couldn’t.
As more tips came in, detectives put together sketches [music] based on what witnesses described.
They ended up with seven of them.
Seven different men who had supposedly been seen near Lisa.
Instead of narrowing the search, the sketches made it worse.
The descriptions were so different from each other that it was impossible to pick out any single person.
In the end, investigators looked hard at every one of those accounts.
They accepted that the killer may well have been driving Lisa’s car that weekend.
But the idea that Lisa herself had spent the weekend driving around Casper without picking up a pay phone to call her family didn’t add up.
Their best theory was simpler.
Perhaps one of those witnesses really had seen the killer behind the wheel, moving Lisa’s car to a place where it would never be found.
The rest were probably honest mistakes, or in some [music] cases, they weren’t true at all.
Police later found that several cars of the same model were registered in the area, so plenty of people could have seen one of those and believed it was hers.
Detectives did identify several suspects.
One by one, every one of them was cleared.
Months went by without a breakthrough.
Then 6 months after Lisa was found, someone visited her grave and left something behind.
It was an envelope pinned to the grave site.
Inside was a note written as if from a man.
He wrote that he missed Lisa and he called her death a painful loss.
At first, it read like something a grieving friend might leave, but it was signed with the name Stringfellow Hawk, a character from a popular television series at the time.
That wasn’t a real person.
Investigators asked Lisa’s family about it and then her friends and co-workers.
Every one of them said the same thing.
[music] They had nothing to do with it.
So, who would visit the grave of a young woman they didn’t know?
Leave a personal message about missing her and sign it with a fake name.
Detectives began to consider a possibility that chilled everyone who heard it.
The note may have been left by the person who killed her.
In March of 1989, exactly one year after Lisa disappeared, her case was featured on a popular national television program about unsolved crimes.
Millions of viewers across the country watched it and the phones lit up again.
The tips came in faster than the local department could handle.
It took months and extra officers just to work through them.
To the Kimmels, it was becoming painfully clear that the case was bigger than one local department could manage.
They wanted the FBI involved.
But the man in charge of the case, Sheriff Ron Ketchum, was firmly against it.
He made it clear he had no intention of handing the investigation over to anyone.
Lisa’s parents didn’t back down.
About a year later, with support from higher authorities, they finally got federal investigators on the [music] case.
The FBI came in ready to work alongside the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff wouldn’t cooperate.
He wouldn’t even return their calls.
Why would the man leading the search for Lisa’s killer refuse help from the FBI?
Nobody had an answer yet.
But federal involvement brought something this case had been missing since that morning by the river.
It meant access to a lab that could finally test the evidence Lisa’s attacker had left behind.
With the FBI involved, the biological evidence from Lisa’s case could finally go to a federal lab, [music] one with the technology the local lab never had.
For the first time, [music] investigators had a genetic profile of the man who attacked her.
Now, they needed someone to compare it to.
They started with the people closest to the case.
First was Ed, Lisa’s boyfriend.
[music] He had never been considered a suspect since he had been waiting for her hundreds of miles away and had been the first to raise the alarm.
But investigators wanted to be completely certain.
His DNA didn’t match.
Next, they turned to someone whose name had been in the file from the very first day.
It was the Wyoming patrol officer who pulled Lisa over in Douglas.
On paper, everything about that stop checked out.
There was a recording of his conversation with Lisa.
And on it, [music] you could hear him saying goodbye before she drove away.
But detectives knew a recording only captures what happens while it’s running.
In theory, he could have followed her after she left and caught up [music] with her somewhere down that dark highway.
The officer didn’t hesitate.
He agreed right away to give a DNA sample.
It didn’t [music] match.
The case could have stalled there.
Then a local radio station aired a program about Lisa’s murder.
[music] And afterward, a new witness came forward with a claim that changed the direction of the investigation.
This witness said that on the day Lisa disappeared, [music] he had seen her pulled over on the road.
He said the man who stopped her wasn’t the patrol officer from Douglas.
He said it was Sheriff Ron Ketchum.
[music] Suddenly, a lot of things looked different.
In all that time, the sheriff had never once mentioned stopping Lisa that night.
He was the same man who had fought so hard to keep the FBI off the case [music] and who wouldn’t return federal investigators calls.
Then there was what happened next.
Almost exactly 2 years after Lisa’s murder, Ron Ketchum abruptly left the department.
Soon after, [music] he went through a serious personal crisis.
He was hospitalized [music] and was still in psychological treatment when investigators came to talk to him.
When they asked him about Lisa, he denied having anything to do with her death.
[music] When they asked for a DNA sample, he refused.
Now the man who had led the investigation was being looked at as a possible suspect himself.
Detectives started preparing to go to court to force a sample.
A few months later, just as they were ready to file, Ketchum changed his mind and gave them one voluntarily.
His DNA didn’t match either.
Why he behaved the way he did remains unclear to this day.
People who worked with him described a complicated, closed off man who had served in Vietnam, and they said he had acted that way long before Lisa ever disappeared.
Whatever his reasons, the evidence said he wasn’t the man investigators were looking for.
And with that, they were out of serious leads.
In 1992, police released more details [music] about the case, hoping someone new would come forward.
They also revealed their main theory of what happened on that highway.
Investigators believed more than one person might have been involved.
Most likely, one man abducted Lisa and took her life and someone else may have helped him get rid of her car.
They believed she was taken during a stop somewhere along her route at a gas station or another place where she pulled over.
One idea they ruled out was that Lisa had picked up a hitchhiker.
She was far too careful for that.
Not long before she disappeared, her car had broken down on the side of the road.
When another driver stopped to help, Lisa stayed inside with the doors locked and only lowered her window an inch or two to talk to him.
She understood the risks of being a young woman alone on the road.
So, how did someone get to her?
Nobody could say.
No new leads came in, and Lisa Kimmel’s case went cold.
It stayed that way for 10 more years.
Her parents grew older and her sisters grew up without her.
The sample from the federal lab sat in storage holding the killer’s identity with no one to compare it to.
Then came July of 2002.
[music] The local police department reopened the case and their very first move would accomplish in a single day what 14 years of searching never had.
Investigators took the DNA profile from Lisa’s [music] case and entered it into the FBI’s national DNA database.
When Lisa disappeared in 1988, that database didn’t [music] exist.
It took years to build and even more years before law enforcement across the country was using it widely.
By 2002, [music] it held the genetic profiles of thousands of convicted offenders.
The result came back almost immediately.
There was a match.
The DNA belonged to a 59-year-old man named Dale Wayne Eaton.
And he wasn’t hard to find.
[music] He was already sitting in prison.
He had been arrested in 1997 for something that looking back sounds frighteningly familiar.
A young family was driving through the Wyoming wilderness when their car broke down on the side of the road.
A man in a van pulled over to help.
He looked under the hood and told them there was no way to fix it out there, but he had a solution.
He offered to drive them to the nearest service station, which he said belonged to his brother.
They were stranded in the middle of nowhere, and a stranger was offering help.
So, they accepted and climbed into his van.
A few miles down the road, the man said he was tired and needed to rest.
He asked the woman to take the wheel and moved into the back of the van.
Once the van was moving again, he pulled out a rifle and ordered her to turn off onto a country road.
She didn’t.
She yanked the steering wheel so hard that he lost his balance and dropped the gun.
The family scrambled out of the van and the man came after them with a knife.
In that moment, the father grabbed the rifle and struck him with it.
The family jumped into the van and [music] drove straight to the nearest police station.
Officers went back to the scene, found the man nearby, and arrested [music] him.
That man was Dale Wayne Eaton.
At trial, the court found [music] that Eaton had a number of mental disabilities.
Instead of prison, he was sent to a secure treatment facility.
The plan was that he would spend a few years there, get help, learn a trade, and eventually rebuild his life.
He escaped a few months later.
When he was caught, he was sent to prison for 5 years.
Before he went in, authorities took a sample of his DNA and entered it into the national database.
That routine step years after Lisa’s murder and for a completely different crime finally connected him to her.
When Lisa disappeared in March of 1988, Dale Eaton was 43 years old and he lived in the same part of Wyoming where she was found.
Now, investigators started digging into his past, and what they found was disturbing.
His history of violence went back to when he was 16.
He had sold a woman some watermelons and offered to carry them into her home for her.
Once inside, she saw that they were rotten and refused to pay.
They argued and eaten attacked her with a knife and ran.
He was arrested the next day.
The court ordered him into mandatory treatment where he was diagnosed with several moderate mental disorders.
[music] After that, he drifted from job to job and never stayed anywhere long.
Later, he married and had three children.
The marriage was troubled from the start.
The couple fought constantly and after 15 years they divorced.
After the divorce, Eaton settled in the small community of Monita, Wyoming, about an hour from Casper.
His in-laws owned a piece of land there with a few unfinished buildings and [music] an old bus that had been converted into living space.
That bus is where he lived.
It had no running water or real comforts, only a small bed.
When he needed a shower, he walked over to a neighbor’s house.
On paper, investigators now had a lifelong repeat offender [music] whose DNA had been found on Lisa.
That was powerful evidence, but they wanted more before they charged him.
They wanted to be sure the case was airtight.
So, detectives drove out to Manita.
A few neighbors lived not far from Eaton’s property, and one of them told investigators something they wouldn’t forget.
Around the time Lisa disappeared, he said Dale Eaton had dug an enormous hole on his land.
When people asked what it was for, Eaton said he was putting in a septic tank.
That septic tank was never installed.
[music] Investigators brought in equipment and started to dig.
Under the dirt, [music] exactly where that hole had been, they found a small Honda CRX.
On the back, the plate [music] still read Little Miss.
Lisa’s car, the one more than a hundred people claimed to have seen across several states and even in Canada, had never left Wyoming.
For 14 years, it had been buried right there on Dale Eaton’s property.
Investigators finally had the DNA and the car, but as [music] they kept looking into the man behind bars, they discovered that even prison hadn’t stopped him.
While serving his sentence, Dale Eaton had taken the life of [music] his cellmate.
Whatever else happened, he wasn’t getting out anytime soon.
That gave investigators what they needed most, which was time.
They could build their case carefully, piece by piece, until there was no way around it.
In April of 2003, 15 years after Lisa drove out of Aurora for the last time, Dale Wayne Eaton was formally charged with her murder.
He refused to plead guilty, so the case went to trial.
As often happens in the American justice system, it took a long time to get there.
The trial didn’t begin until about a year later.
When it did, prosecutors called a surprise witness.
He was another man who had shared a cell with Eaton and he told the court that Eaton had confessed to him.
According to this witness, Eaton had laid out the whole story.
He claimed Lisa had seen Eaton standing on the side of the road and stopped to give him a ride.
At some point in the car, Eaton made advances toward her and she pushed him away.
He then pulled out a gun and forced her to drive to his property where he held her for several days before he killed her.
It was a full account, but almost nobody believed it.
Lisa’s parents rejected it outright.
Their daughter, who had once refused to step out of her own broken down car and only lowered her window an inch to talk to a stranger, would never have pulled over in the middle of the night to pick up a man on an empty Wyoming highway.
[music] There were also serious doubts about the witness himself.
Either Eaton had lied to him [music] or he had made the story up to get a lighter sentence.
In exchange for testifying.
Either way, he had every reason to tell the court something it wanted to hear.
Investigators had their own theory built on the evidence.
They believed Lisa stopped at a gas station somewhere along her route.
They even pointed to a specific one [music] between Casper and Eaton’s property that Lisa would have passed on her way to Cody.
It was a place Eaton went often.
He had no running water out at the bus, so he regularly drove there to use the public restroom.
Investigators believe that’s where their paths crossed.
Eaton got into Lisa’s car, pulled a gun, and forced her to drive somewhere remote.
Then he took her back to his property and held her in that old bus.
That was where Lisa spent the last days of her life while the search planes flew overhead [music] and her family waited by the phone.
A few days later, he took her to that isolated bridge over the river, the one you could only reach if you knew those back roads.
Well, that’s where he ended her life.
There was one more piece of the puzzle.
Experts compared Eaton’s handwriting to the note left on Lisa’s grave, the one signed Stringfellow Hawk.
They found a strong similarity, but it wasn’t enough to present in court as proof.
As it turned out, they didn’t need it.
The DNA and the car buried on his land told the jury everything.
Even Eaton’s defense team seemed to understand that they weren’t really fighting for an acquitt.
They were fighting to keep him from facing the death penalty.
And they pointed to his mental disabilities, arguing he couldn’t be held fully responsible for what he had done.
It didn’t work.
The jury found Dale Wayne Eaton guilty of murdering Lisa Kimmel, and he was sentenced to death.
But the Kimmels weren’t finished.
They filed a civil lawsuit against Eaton, and the court ruled in their favor.
The land in Monita with the unfinished buildings and the bus where their daughter had been held was taken from him and handed over to Lisa’s parents.
They knew exactly what they wanted to do with it.
Working with the local fire department, [music] the Kimmels burned every structure on that property to the ground.
They chose the date carefully.
It was July [music] 18th, Lisa’s birthday.
For her family, it was the closest thing to closure the courts could give them.
For Dale Eaton, though, the case was far from finished.
His lawyers were just getting started.
In the years after his conviction, Dale Eaton’s attorneys filed one appeal after another to overturn his death sentence.
Each time the courts rejected them.
That changed in 2010 when a court agreed to hear one of those appeals and scheduled a new hearing.
The defense argued that when Eden was sentenced, the court never properly considered his severe childhood mental disabilities and developmental delays.
They also went after the testimony of his former cellmate.
The jury had never been told that this man had been promised a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying, which meant his story could easily have been invented.
Even so, there was never any real chance the conviction itself would be thrown out.
The DNA was eatens and the car had been buried on his land.
Nothing in any appeal could change that.
Dale Wayne Eaton remains in prison today.
He is now an elderly man and it is unlikely the death sentence will ever be carried out.
There is one more part of this story that still hangs over that stretch of Wyoming.
In the area where Eaton lived, there have been other murders and unexplained disappearances of young women, and many of those cases remain unsolved.
Police have no evidence tying him to any of them, but investigators have acknowledged that they can’t rule him out.
When you look at the path his life took, from the teenager with the knife to the stranger who offered a stranded family a ride, it’s hard not to wonder.
Lisa Kimmel may not have been the only one.
For 14 years, her family lived without answers.
They saw more than a hundred sightings that led nowhere.
Seven sketches of seven different men and a note on her grave from someone who used a fake name.
Through all of it, the answer was buried just an hour from the river where she was found.
Lisa was 18.
She had worked hard, bought her own car, and moved to a new city on her own.
She was proud of the life she was building.
And on the last night anyone saw her, she was simply driving home to introduce the people she loved to each other.
She never got to have that moment.
But her family made sure the place where her life was taken [music] no longer stands.
And they made sure the world remembers her name.
In true crime, it’s easy for a case like this to become just another file in a cabinet.
Lisa was never just a case file.
She was a daughter, a big sister, and the girl her family called little miss.
If you stayed with me to the end, leave the words justice for Lisa.
It tells me who was here for the whole story, and it helps make sure this isn’t just another case file.
If stories like this matter to you, subscribe to Gravedoc because some truths don’t stay buried forever.
