WYOMING 1988 Cold Case Solved After 14 Years — Justice for Lisa Marie Kimmell
On the afternoon of March 25th, 1988, Lisa Marie Kimmel drove her black Honda CRX out of Denver, Colorado, heading north through Wyoming.
She was 18 years old, on her way back to Montana to visit her family for Easter.
She planned to stop in Cody to pick up her boyfriend and then head together to Billings.
For the first time, she would introduce her boyfriend to her parents.
The Montana license plate on the car read Lil Miss, the nickname her grandmother had given her since she was little.
Lisa never made it to Cody.
She never made it home to Billings.
The last time anyone saw her alive was at 9:06 pm near Douglas, Wyoming, when a highway patrol officer pulled her over for speeding.
That brief exchange was recorded.
It was the last recorded voice of Lisa Marie Kimmel.
Eight days later, two fishermen found her body floating face down in the North Platte River near Casper.
She had been abducted, held captive for six days, raped, then beaten and stabbed to death before being thrown from the old government bridge into the river.
The Honda CRX with the Lil Miss license plate vanished without a trace.
300 people reported seeing that distinctive car, but no one ever found it.
For 14 years, the case went cold.
No suspects, no car, no answers.
Then, in the summer of 2002, an old DNA sample was retested with new technology and the CODIS system returned a name.
The car was later dug up from 2 m underground on a remote piece of land 75 mi from Casper.
The Lil Miss license plate was still intact after 14 years buried.
This is the story of how Wyoming’s most shocking cold case was finally solved.
About a family that never stopped demanding justice, and about a DNA sample that did what 14 years of investigation could not.
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To understand why the death of Lisa Marie Kimmel became one of the most famous cold cases in Wyoming history, you have to understand who she was before the black Honda CRX disappeared on the highway.
Lisa Marie Kimmel was born on July 18th, 1969 in Covington, Tennessee.
Her father, Ronald Kimmel, was a United States Marine stationed at a base in Tennessee when she was born.
Her mother was Sheila Kimmel.
Lisa was the oldest child in the family with two younger sisters, Sherry and Stacy, and a younger brother named Ricky, who died in a tragic accident at the age of three.
The name Lisa Marie was her grandmother’s wish, who had always dreamed of having a granddaughter by that name.
And it was her grandmother who also gave her the nickname that would follow her even after death, Lil Miss, short for the affectionate phrase, “My Lil Miss Lisa Marie”.
In 1972, the Kimmel family moved to Billings Heights, Montana, where Lisa grew up.
Those who knew her remembered a sweet, outgoing, hardworking girl who loved collecting stuffed animals.
In 1984, at just 15 years old, Lisa started working part-time at an Arby’s restaurant.
She advanced quickly, becoming a manager before graduating from high school.
After graduating from Billings Senior High School in 1987, Lisa moved to the Denver area of Colorado, working as a manager at an Arby’s in Aurora.
Her mother, Sheila, was also living in Denver at the time, in the same apartment complex as Lisa.
Mother and daughter often drove together back to Billings to visit her father and younger sisters.
Lisa was 18, independent, had a steady job, and was in love.
Her boyfriend, Ed Gerick, lived in Cody, Wyoming.
The car Lisa drove was a brand new 1988 black Honda CRX SI with a sunroof.
It carried a personalized Montana license plate that read “Lil Miss”.
In a vast and sparsely populated state like Wyoming, that compact black car with the distinctive plate stood out on every road.
Anyone who saw it once remembered it, and that detail would become the center of the entire investigation.
March 25th, 1988, was a Friday, 3 days before Easter.
Lisa left Denver sometime after 4:30 pm driving north on Interstate 25 through Wyoming.
Her plan was simple.
Stop in Cody to pick up Ed Gerick.
Then the two of them would continue to Billings so she could introduce her boyfriend to the family for the holiday.
It was a long trip, more than 800 km from Denver to Billings.
But Lisa was used to Interstate drives like that.
She often drove alone, often at night, on the empty highways of Wyoming, where you could drive hundreds of miles without seeing another person.
Around 9:06 pm near the town of Douglas, Wyoming, a Wyoming Highway Patrol officer pulled Lisa over for speeding.
The exchange was routine.
The officer wrote a ticket.
Lisa was polite and cooperative.
The entire stop was recorded on the audio equipment mounted in the patrol car, according to standard procedure.
No one knew at the time that this recording would become the last recorded voice of Lisa Marie Kimmel, and 16 years later, it would be played in a courtroom in Casper in front of her parents.
The Highway Patrol officer was the last person confirmed to have seen Lisa alive.
After that traffic stop, Lisa disappeared.
She never arrived in Cody.
Ed Gerick waited, then grew worried, then called.
She never arrived in Billings.
Her parents waited, then panicked.
On March 26th, Lisa was reported missing to the authorities.
A search began immediately, spanning three states: Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado.
Family, friends, and police searched along the route Lisa should have taken.
At the same time, a troubling detail emerged.
On an old, little-used suspension bridge outside Casper, Wyoming, local residents reported seeing unusual lights in the early morning hours of March 26th.
No one knew what those lights meant.
Not yet.
Eight days after Lisa disappeared, on the afternoon of April 2nd, 1988, two men fishing on the North Platte River, about 2 miles downstream from Casper, discovered a body floating face down in a patch of weeds along the bank.
The victim was identified as Lisa Marie Kimmel, 18, from Billings, Montana.
The autopsy showed she had been sexually assaulted.
She had been beaten and stabbed multiple times before she died.
Her body had been thrown into the river from the old government bridge.
The old bridge where residents had reported seeing the strange lights on the night of March 26th.
But the detail that made investigators blood run cold was in the timeline.
Although the body was found eight days after Lisa disappeared, forensic evidence showed she had been killed only a few hours before she was found.
The cold river water of late March in Wyoming had preserved the body from decomposition, allowing forensic pathologists to determine the time of death accurately.
That meant Lisa had been held captive by someone for six full days from the moment she vanished on the highway on the night of March 25th.
Six days.
Think about that.
An 18-year-old girl held somewhere in Wyoming for nearly a week, raped, then killed and thrown into the river from an old bridge that someone had illuminated with lights in the dark of night.
A semen sample was collected from the body and preserved in a rape kit.
It was the only biological evidence the investigation had from the scene, and it would sit untouched in storage for 14 years before changing everything.
But in April 1988, the investigators did not know that.
What they knew was that the black Honda CRX with the Lil’ Miss license plate had disappeared along with the killer.
And they believed that if they found the car, they would find the person who killed Lisa.
The hunt for the black Honda CRX became the focus of the entire investigation.
In Wyoming crime history, few vehicles had ever been so easily recognizable.
A shiny black 1988 Honda CRX Si with a sunroof and a clear personalized Montana license plate reading Lil’ Miss.
Anyone who saw it on the road would remember it.
And indeed, people remembered.
Or at least they thought they did.
In the weeks and months after Lisa disappeared, as many as about 300 people across Wyoming, Montana, and neighboring states reported to police that they had seen that car.
300 calls.
300 potential leads.
And not a single one led to the real car.
It had vanished from the face of the earth as if it had never existed.
Investigators quickly cleared the highway patrol officer who had stopped Lisa on the night of March 25th.
His work records and schedule were thoroughly checked, the recording of the traffic stop showed nothing unusual, and he was confirmed to have no connection to the disappearance.
But that only deepened the mystery.
Because if the officer was the last person to see Lisa alive at 9:06 pm in Douglas, then what had happened to her in the time between then and when her body was found 8 days later? Douglas is about 50 mi east of Casper.
Lisa was driving north on Interstate 25, the road that would take her through Casper before continuing on toward Billings.
She could have reached Casper within 45 minutes to an hour after being stopped.
And this is where the story grows strange.
Multiple witnesses reported seeing Lisa or her car throughout the week that police believed she was being held captive, even after the time that forensic evidence indicated she was already dead.
One witness said he had seen the black Honda CRX with two people inside, Lisa and an unidentified man.
If that was accurate, it meant someone had been driving Lisa’s car with her sitting beside him, possibly under duress, possibly not.
Another witness reported seeing Lisa more than a day after the time police believed she had been killed.
And this sighting was in Casper, Wyoming, more than 100 miles from the town of Buffalo, where some other witnesses claimed to have seen her earlier.
If Lisa was still alive, why didn’t she contact her boyfriend or her parents? Why didn’t she go to Cody or Billings? These sightings contradicted one another, contradicted the forensic evidence, and were never satisfactorily explained.
They haunted investigators for years.
Had someone been driving Lisa’s car after she was dead, using it for a while before hiding it? Or had the witnesses been mistaken, seeing a different car and having their memories influenced by the flood of news coverage on television? No one knew.
Lisa’s case was featured on national television within weeks of her body being found.
The program Unsolved Mysteries, one of the true crime shows with the largest audience in America at the time, aired the case on March 15th, 1989.
Every broadcast focused on the car.
Images of a black Honda CRX with the Lil Miss license plate were shown over and over with the hope that someone, somewhere, would recognize it and call.
Hundreds of calls poured in after each airing, but none of them solved the case.
In the years that followed, A&E’s Cold Case Files also aired the case.
Then, On the Case with Paula Zahn.
Then, Nightmare Next Door.
Each program retold the story, showed the car, and appealed for witnesses.
The investigation even expanded beyond US borders, reaching as far as Canada because of reports of the car being seen in the north.
And through all that media attention, not a single lead pointed to the killer.
Then, a chilling detail emerged.
About 1 year and 4 days after Lisa disappeared, a letter was found placed on her grave at Sunset Memorial Gardens Cemetery in Billings, Montana.
The letter was signed Stringfellow Hawk, the name of the main character in the action television series Airwolf, which aired on CBS from 1984 to 1987, >> >> about a combat helicopter pilot.
The contents of the letter haunted the Kimmel family for years.
Someone had gone to Lisa’s grave, left the letter, and signed it with the name of a fictional television character.
Was it the act of a stranger or of the killer himself? >> [snorts] >> Police could not determine.
But the handwriting sample from the letter was collected and preserved.
Years later, it would become an important piece of the puzzle.
But by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the case was dying.
No suspects, no car, no murder weapon, no DNA match because DNA profiling technology at the time was not yet advanced enough to analyze the semen sample from Lisa’s rape kit.
A reward fund for information leading to the killer was established and gradually increased.
But money could not replace evidence.
The original investigators retired one by one or moved on to other cases.
The case file was put away in a drawer.
Lisa Marie Kimmel became a name on the cold case list of Natrona County, Wyoming.
And the black Honda CRX with the Lil Miss license plate became a ghost.
The car everyone remembered, but no one could find.
14 years.
That was how long the Lisa Marie Kimmel case lay in the dark.
From 1988 to 2002, there were no suspects, no turning points, no breakthroughs.
In the world of criminal investigation, >> >> a case that is not solved in the first 48 hours is often considered very difficult to crack.
A case that goes unsolved for 14 years is considered all but dead.
But there was one person who refused to accept that.
Sheila Kimmel, Lisa’s mother, never let the case be forgotten.
Throughout those years, she continually contacted the Natrona County authorities, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, anyone with the power to reopen the case.
She asked the same question over and over, “When are you going to reopen my daughter’s case?” And she received the same answer year after year, “There is no new evidence.
There are no new witnesses.
There is no reason to reopen it”.
But Sheila did not back down.
She understood something that many victims’ families have learned the hard way.
In the criminal justice system, if family stops asking, the system stops searching.
A cold case only truly dies when no one is left demanding answers.
Sheila refused to let that happen.
The pain of the Kimmel family was not only the loss of Lisa.
This family had already suffered tragedy before.
Lisa’s younger brother, Ricky, had died at the age of three.
Now, their oldest daughter had been murdered, and the killer was still free out there, possibly living a normal life, possibly driving the same roads Lisa once drove.
Ron Kimmel, Lisa’s father, carried the pain more quietly, but no less heavily.
Sherry and Stacy, Lisa’s two younger sisters, grew up in the shadow of the unsolved case.
In a family where their older sister’s birthday, Easter, and every spring were reminders of what had happened on the Wyoming highway in March 1988.
Sheila carried a private belief about her daughter’s death.
She described an experience she called very sacred, a moment on the night of March 31st, 1988 that made her certain Lisa had died that night.
Forensic evidence later confirmed that Lisa was killed only a few hours before her body was found on April 2nd, but the exact timeline of the 6 days of captivity remains one of the most heartbreaking mysteries of the case.
No one knows exactly what Lisa endured during those 6 days in captivity.
While the Kimmel family lived with the pain, the world of forensic science was changing.
In the late 1980s, when Lisa was killed, DNA profiling technology was still in its infancy.
The first DNA analysis method, developed by British geneticist Alec Jeffreys in 1984, required large samples and took many weeks to produce results.
In 1988, the CODIS system, the Combined DNA Index System, the FBI’s national DNA database, did not yet exist.
It only began operating on a pilot basis in 1990, and was officially launched nationwide in 1998.
That meant the semen sample collected from Lisa’s body in April 1988 had been preserved in a rape kit with no system available to compare it against anyone.
It sat there in the evidence locker, waiting for a technology that had not yet been born.
Throughout the 1990s, DNA profiling advanced by leaps and bounds.
New methods, such as PCR or polymerase chain reaction, allowed analysis from much smaller samples than before.
CODIS expanded rapidly, collecting DNA profiles from convicted offenders across all 50 states.
By the early 2000s, the database contained millions of profiles, and more and more cold cases nationwide were being solved by retesting old biological evidence with new DNA technology.
Wyoming also built its own DNA database, requiring the collection of DNA samples from convicted inmates, and that was the key.
In the summer of 2002, investigators from the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation were reviewing cold cases, looking for those with biological evidence that had never been tested with modern technology.
They found Lisa Marie Kimmel’s rape kit, the semen sample collected 14 years earlier, carefully preserved, never entered into any database because when it was collected, that database did not yet exist.
The sample was analyzed, a full DNA profile was created, and it was entered into the CODIS system for comparison.
The result came back almost immediately.
There was a match.
After 14 years of silence, the system had just spit out a name.
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The name that the CODIS system returned was Dale Wayne Eaton, 57 years old from Moneta, Wyoming, a town so small it barely appears on the map, located about 75 miles west of Casper in the desolate expanse of Fremont County.
At the time his DNA matched the sample from Lisa’s body, Eaton was serving a sentence at the federal prison in Englewood in Littleton, Colorado for an unrelated illegal firearms possession charge.
He had been in the justice system for a long time, but no one had ever connected him to the 18-year-old girl who vanished on a Wyoming highway on a March night in 1988.
Dale Wayne Eaton was born on February 10th, 1945, the second of seven children.
His father was a violent man who regularly beat the children.
His mother, though she loved her children, suffered from schizophrenia.
>> >> Eaton grew up in a chaotic, unstable, and violent family environment, details that his defense team would later use in appeals, but which that time of the 2004 trial were almost never presented to the jury.
That omission would come back to haunt the entire case years later.
Eaton spent most of his life as a drifter, working odd jobs and moving through Wyoming and neighboring states.
He lived on a remote piece of land in Moneta, where there were almost no neighbors, no oversight, and no one to notice what he did.
It was the kind of place where a person could hide anything or anyone without anyone knowing.
And Eaton’s criminal history showed he was no stranger to violence.
In 1997, 9 years after Lisa was killed, Eaton was arrested for kidnapping a family at gunpoint in Wyoming.
He was convicted and imprisoned.
While in prison, he was charged with manslaughter for causing the death of fellow inmate Clay Palmer.
Eaton was acquitted in that case, but the incident showed that violence followed him even behind bars.
It was during his incarceration that a blood sample from Eaton was collected under Wyoming state law requiring DNA from convicted inmates, and that sample was entered into the database.
He had no idea that when that blood sample was taken, he was writing his own sentence for a murder he had committed more than a decade earlier.
When the DNA match was confirmed in the summer of 2002, investigators began digging into Eaton’s life, and what they found made the picture grow darker and darker.
They returned to Moneta, to the land where Eaton had once lived.
And there, a detail from the past unexpectedly resurfaced.
Eaton’s former neighbors, people living in the sparsely populated area around Moneta, told investigators that around the time Lisa disappeared in late March 1988, they had seen Eaton digging a large hole on his property.
An unusually large hole, not like digging a well or a storage pit.
At the time, they didn’t think much of it.
This was Wyoming.
People dug holes on their land for all kinds of reasons.
But 14 years later, when investigators asked about it, that memory remained clear.
On July 29th, 2002, an excavation team arrived at Eaton’s property in Moneta.
They knew what they were looking for.
They began digging, and at a depth of about 2 m, roughly 6 ft underground, they found it.
The black 1988 Honda CRX SI.
The car that had been missing for 14 years.
The car that 300 people claimed to have seen, but no one could find.
The car that Unsolved Mysteries and Cold Case Files had shown over and over on national television.
It was right here, underground, on the property of a violent criminal 75 mi from Casper.
And on the car, still attached, was the Montana license plate with the words Lil Miss.
14 years underground, and the plate was still there.
>> >> Think about that.
The killer had dug a hole deep enough to bury an entire car, pushed the car in, covered it with dirt, and lived on that land as if nothing had happened.
He walked on the ground under which the victim’s car lay.
When the car was dug up, investigators noticed it had been partially dismantled.
The wheels had been removed.
The seats had been taken out.
The transmission had been removed.
The stereo was gone.
It was unclear whether those parts had been sold by Eaton, used for something else, or discarded somewhere.
But the body, the frame, and the license plate remained.
Enough to confirm beyond any doubt that this was Lisa Marie Kimmell’s car.
With the DNA match and the car found on Eaton’s land, investigators could now piece together the full picture of what had happened in late March 1988.
Prosecutors believed Eaton had kidnapped Lisa on the night of March 25th, possibly at a rest stop near Casper on Interstate 25.
He took her back to his remote property in Moneta, where he held her for 6 days.
During those 6 days, he raped her multiple times.
Then, he killed her, beating and stabbing her before driving her body to the old government bridge near Casper and throwing her into the North Platte River late at night or in the early morning hours under the lights that residents had seen and reported on the morning of March 26th, but that no one had investigated further at the time.
After disposing of the body, he drove the Honda CRX back to Moneta, dug the hole, and buried it.
A former cellmate of Eaton’s at the federal prison, Joseph Dax, provided another crucial piece of the puzzle.
Dax told police that Eaton had told him about sexually assaulting Lisa.
According to Dax, Eaton described meeting Lisa and offering her a ride.
Court documents do not specify exactly how and where Eaton and Lisa came into contact, but Dax’s account matched the prosecution’s theory that Eaton had taken advantage of the isolation of a Wyoming highway at night to approach a young woman traveling alone.
The evidence was now overwhelming.
DNA from the semen sample matched.
The victim’s car was buried on the suspect’s land.
Neighbors confirmed he had dug a large hole at the exact time Lisa disappeared.
A cellmate said he had confessed the attack.
And there was one more piece of evidence investigators had been waiting for for years, the Stringfellow Hawk letter found on Lisa’s grave.
The handwriting on the letter was compared to Eaton’s handwriting.
The result, a match.
The person who had left the mysterious letter on the victim’s grave signed with the name of a television character was the same person who had killed her.
He had returned to her grave after killing her.
He had stood at her grave and left a message.
That was not an act of remorse.
It was an act of control of someone who treated the victim as a trophy even after she was dead.
In April 2003, Dale Wayne Eaton was formally charged with eight counts related to the Lisa Marie Kimmell case.
First-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated robbery, first-degree sexual assault, second-degree sexual assault, and additional charges.
He was extradited from federal prison to Natrona County, Wyoming, where he was denied bail.
The case would be tried in 7th District Court in Casper, the same city where Lisa’s body had been found in the North Platte River 15 years earlier.
Natrona County Prosecutor Kevin Meenan announced he would seek the death penalty.
This was a case in which the prosecutor believed the severity of the crime, kidnapping, holding her for 6 days, raping her repeatedly, then murdering an 18-year-old girl, deserved the highest punishment Wyoming law allowed.
The trial began in March 2004 before Judge David Park.
The most shocking moment of the trial came on the very first day when the prosecution played a recording from 16 years earlier.
>> >> The recording of the Wyoming Highway Patrol stop on the night of March 25th, 1988, when Lisa was pulled over for speeding near Douglas.
Lisa Marie Kimmel’s voice filled the courtroom.
She was polite, cooperative, the young voice of an 18-year-old girl in a hurry to get home to see her family.
Her parents, Ron and Sheila Kimmel, sat in the row right behind, hearing their daughter’s voice for the first time in 16 years.
Beside them were victim advocates Jamie Tolson and Janice Lynch and son-in-law Todd Hoover.
On the other side of the courtroom, Dale Wayne Eaton, 59 years old, sat at the defense table with his attorney Wyatt Skaggs.
Prosecutor Mike Blonigan, who had taken over from Meenan to lead the trial, presented the case systematically.
First came the DNA evidence.
The semen sample from the 1988 rape kit matched Eaton’s DNA profile in the CODIS system exactly.
The odds of a random match were in the billions to one.
Next came the car, the Honda CRX dug up from Eaton’s land in Moneta, still bearing the Lil Miss plate.
Physical evidence that could not be denied that the car missing for 14 years had been on the defendant’s land.
Then came the neighbors’ testimony, those who confirmed Eaton had dug a large hole at the exact time Lisa disappeared.
Then came the handwriting sample.
The Stringfellow Hawk letter found on Lisa’s grave at Sunset Memorial Gardens in Billings was compared to Eaton’s handwriting and forensic experts confirmed a match.
The man who killed Lisa had returned to her grave, left a letter signed with the name of a television character, and his handwriting had betrayed him.
Then came the key witness.
Joseph Danks, Eaton’s former cellmate at the federal prison, took the stand and recounted the version of events Eaton had told him.
According to Danks, Eaton described approaching Lisa and offering her a ride, then sexually assaulting her.
This testimony gave the jury a view from the defendant’s own mouth, not circumstantial evidence, but a confession recounted by someone who had heard it directly.
Eaton did not admit guilt.
He testified that he knew Kimmel, but denied the most serious charges.
Under the weight of the overwhelming evidence, he was forced to admit that he knew Lisa, but he could not explain why his DNA was on her body, why her car was buried on his land, or why his handwriting appeared on the letter left on her grave.
Each piece of evidence, standing alone, was already highly suspicious.
Together, they formed an unbreakable wall.
Defense attorney Wyatt Skaggs faced a nearly impossible task.
The DNA evidence was irrefutable.
The car was undeniable.
The handwriting was inexplicable.
The defense strategy focused on questioning the exact circumstances of the encounter between Eaton and Lisa and trying to sow reasonable doubt about the specific details of the case.
But against that volume of evidence, reasonable doubt had no place.
On March 17th, 2004, the jury returned to the courtroom.
The verdict, guilty on all counts.
Dale Wayne Eaton was found guilty of kidnapping, raping, and murdering Lisa Marie Kimmell.
16 years after Lisa was thrown into the North Platte River, 14 years after the case became a cold case, and more than a year after DNA first returned his name, the justice system had finally named the killer.
Ron and Sheila Kimmell, along with victim advocate Janice Lynch and prosecutor Mike Blonigan, walked out of the Natrona County courtroom.
Sheila wept.
Ron was silent.
They had waited 16 years for this moment.
Three days after the guilty verdict, on March 20th, 2004, Dale Wayne Eaton, 59 years old, was sentenced to death.
He became the only inmate on Wyoming’s death row.
In a vast state with a population of fewer than half a million people, where the death penalty was rarely applied, a jury’s decision to impose a death sentence showed the severity with which they viewed Eaton’s crime.
Kidnapping an 18-year-old girl on her way home, holding her for 6 days, raping her repeatedly, then killing her and throwing her body into the river in the dark of night.
The Kimmell family finally had answers to the questions that had haunted them for more than a decade and a half.
They knew who had killed Lisa.
They knew where she had been held.
They knew where the car had been for 14 years.
But the verdict and sentence were only the beginning of a new legal battle.
A battle that would stretch on for nearly two more decades and raise questions about the criminal justice system that no one in the courtroom that day could have anticipated.
After the 2004 verdict, the Kimmell family did what many victims’ families dream of, but few ever achieve.
They filed a civil suit against Dale Wayne Eaton for the wrongful death of Lisa.
And they won.
The court awarded them ownership of Eaton’s land in Moneta, the very land where Lisa had been held for 6 days, where she had been raped, and where her Honda CRX had been buried under 2 m of earth.
On July 18th, 2006, on what would have been Lisa’s 37th birthday.
The Kimmel family returned to Moneta and burned every structure on that land.
They burned the house where their daughter had been held.
They burned the walls Lisa had looked at during the final 6 days of her life.
They burned everything until only bare ground remained.
That was not an act of vandalism.
It was an act of cleansing.
A family erasing the place where the worst imaginable thing had happened to their daughter on the very day that marked the anniversary of her birth.
Sheila Kimmel, the mother who had fought for 14 years to find the killer, did not stop at the verdict.
In 2005, she published the book The Murder of Lil’ Miss, telling the story of Lisa’s life and death, of the search that lasted more than a decade, of the sleepless nights and the unanswered calls, of the pain of a mother who lost her eldest daughter in the most brutal way imaginable.
The book was not just a memoir.
It was a call one should never give up, that evidence can wait for decades if properly preserved, that technology will catch up to crime.
In 2009, true crime author Robert Scott published Rivers of Blood, delving into Eaton’s life and crimes, providing a more detailed picture of the man behind Lisa’s murder and the suspicions that she was not his only victim.
But while the family tried to find peace, the legal system pulled them back.
The appeals battle began almost immediately after the death sentence.
Eaton’s new attorneys filed an appeal with the Wyoming Supreme Court, arguing that the trial had been unfair.
The Wyoming Supreme Court rejected the appeal and upheld the sentence.
Eaton continued appealing through the federal court system.
And here, 10 years after the original verdict, everything changed.
On November 20th, 2014, Federal Judge Alan B.
Johnson in Cheyenne, Wyoming, issued a ruling overturning Eaton’s death sentence.
Eaton’s appellate attorneys did not dispute that their client had killed Lisa.
They admitted it.
They did not deny that he had thrown her body from the bridge into the river or buried the car underground.
They did not even contest that he had held her for 6 days and raped her continuously.
What they argued was that the original defense team at the 2004 trial had failed to fulfill its constitutional duty.
According to the United States Supreme Court, a defendant facing the death penalty has the constitutional right to a full investigation of his life circumstances, so the jury has information when deciding the sentence.
The original team had not presented to the jury important mitigating factors.
Eaton’s low IQ, his childhood of abuse by his father, his mother’s schizophrenia, his lifelong mental health problems.
Eaton did not even have two attorneys experienced in death penalty cases on his defense team as recommended by the American Bar Association for capital cases.
Judge Johnson gave the state of Wyoming two choices.
Hold a new sentencing hearing within 120 days or keep Eaton in prison for life without parole.
Prosecutor Mike Blonigen, who had led the 2004 trial, said the Kimmel family had heard the news and were disappointed.
Clearly they’re not happy about this, he said, but they knew this was a possibility.
In January 2015, the Natrona County prosecutor filed a motion to seek the death penalty again.
The Kimmel family prepared themselves for a new battle, but that battle stretched on for another 7 years through twists no one had anticipated.
Psychiatric experts appointed to evaluate Eaton concluded that he was not mentally competent to face a death penalty sentencing hearing, but could participate in a non-capital sentencing.
In September 2021, the Natrona County prosecutor formally withdrew the request for the death penalty.
Eaton was scheduled for resentencing on January 21st, 2022.
The Kimmel family flew in from Colorado and Arizona to be present and read victim impact statements in court.
Then, the unbelievable happened.
Eaton never appeared in court.
Due to a communication failure between the Wyoming Department of Corrections and the court, he was not transferred from the medium-security prison near Torrington to the Natrona County Courthouse in Casper.
The family had flown thousands of miles, prepared themselves for months, ready to face the man who had killed their daughter once more, and he simply was not brought.
The hearing was postponed.
The family had to go home and wait again.
Finally, on March 25th, 2022, exactly 34 years after Lisa Marie Kimmel was last seen on a Wyoming highway, Dale Wayne Eaton stood before the court to receive his new sentence.
Every member of the Kimmel family was present and faced Eaton and his defense attorney directly.
Sheila Kimmel described years, 6,511 days since she had last faced him at the 2004 trial.
“You didn’t just take Lisa’s life,” she said.
“You took a part of ours”.
She said the decision to seek the death penalty had been the hardest the family had ever made, and that they would have been willing to accept a life sentence if Eaton had asked for forgiveness.
He never did.
Sheila spoke directly to Eaton’s defense attorney, rejecting the argument that a difficult childhood or mental health issues justified sparing him the death penalty.
Then she said what she had believed for years.
Lisa was not Eaton’s first victim, and she was not his last.
Dale Wayne Eaton was sentenced to life without parole plus 40 to 50 years for aggravated kidnapping, 20 to 25 years for aggravated robbery running concurrent with the kidnapping, but consecutive to the murder sentence, and 20 to 25 years for first-degree sexual assault running concurrent with the previous sentences, but consecutive to the murder sentence.
He would die in prison.
>> [groaning] >> Sheila’s belief that Eaton might have had more victims was not baseless speculation.
Authorities had long suspected Eaton in connection with the series of murders known as the Great Basin murders, a string of killings of at least nine women from 1983 to 1997 spanning Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.
Most of the victims were young women who were sexually assaulted and murdered, their bodies dumped near Interstate highways running through the Great Basin region.
Initially, investigators believed all the cases were the work of a single serial killer they called the Great Basin killer.
That theory was eventually discarded when some cases were solved and showed different perpetrators, but Eaton remained a suspect in several unsolved ones.
He was also suspected in the disappearance of Amy Roe Bechtel, a 24-year-old woman who vanished near Lander, Wyoming in July 1997.
The Fremont County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Eaton was in the area at the time Bechtel disappeared.
But Eaton was never charged in the Bechtel case or any other case besides Kimmel’s.
Those cases remain open.
Today, Dale Wayne Eaton is 81 years old and is held at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution.
He will never leave prison.
The Lil’ Miss murder case left a legacy that reaches far beyond the courtroom in Casper.
It proved that biological evidence, if properly preserved, can solve a case decades after the crime occurred.
The semen sample from the 1988 rape kit sat in storage for 14 years waiting for a technology that did not yet exist when it was collected.
When that technology arrived, a single DNA comparison did what 14 years of traditional investigation, hundreds of tip line calls, and millions of television viewers could not.
It also raised painful questions about the rape kits across America that have never been tested, about cold cases that could be solved if someone would reopen in evidence vault and look again with new eyes.
On the afternoon of March 25th, 1988, Lisa Marie Kimmell drove her black Honda CRX out of Denver on Interstate 25, the Lil Miss plate reflecting the late day sun.
She was 18 years old, in love, in a hurry to get home for Easter.
She never arrived.
The car vanished with her, buried under Wyoming soil for 14 years until an old DNA sample was retested and the system returned a name.
The Lil Miss plate was still intact when the car was dug up, as if it had been waiting.
A 14-year cold case, a family that never stopped asking, a DNA sample waiting in the evidence vault.
And in the summer of 2002, the CODIS system answered the question that everyone else had stopped asking.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories of forgotten victims and the people who refuse to let them be forgotten.
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The next case is waiting.
