The Deck - Lisa Staes (Jack of Diamonds, Wisconsin)
Episode Date: April 30, 2025Our card this week is Lisa Staes, the Jack of Diamonds from Wisconsin. In the winter of 1976, Lisa Staes was trying to figure out what exactly she wanted to do with her life. Like so many 20-year-old...s, she’d just moved out of her parents’ house and started classes at a community college. She was embracing her independence as a young adult. 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. But in the 49 years since, they’re still trying to uncover why, and, most importantly… who. And now more than ever, it’s a race against time. If you have any information about the murder of Lisa Staes or her whereabouts between Chicago and Wisconsin in January of 1976, please call the Sauk County sheriff’s office at 608-355-4495 and ask for Detective Bulin. Or, if you’d rather remain anonymous, you can call the Sauk County crime stoppers tip line at 1-800-847-7285. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/lisa-staes Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
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Our card this 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.
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,
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,
but in the 49 years since,
they're 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. Music On the afternoon of January 14, 1976, Michelle Laudman 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.
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.
She said that she'd hit it off with this guy
that she met inside,
and she was thinking about going home with him.
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.
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.
So just after 10 p.m. that night,
Michelle called the Oak Park Police Department
to file a missing persons report. the Oak Park Police Department to file a missing
persons report.
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.
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.
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.
He hoped giving officers some more information
about Lisa might get things moving, but it really didn't.
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.
Grant, the older brother, remembers that time just being a blur.
Well, I don't know exactly what went on during
16 months. I don't even know if I knew it was affecting me, you know. It just kind of,
it's one of those things when you're 17, 18 that kind of molds you, you know.
You know, don't really know that it's molding you at the time. But 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, because it's the unknown that
really, really wears on you.
To find out what happened is hard, but to not find out what happened is hard.
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.
You know, I remember acquaintances of her saying, oh, she's dead.
You know, I thought that was rather harsh.
But we'd had no reason to believe that she would disappear without telling any of us or her cousins.
I mean, she was real close with her cousin, Michelle. without telling any of us or her cousins.
I mean, she was real close with her cousin, Michelle.
There was no reason to believe
that she disappeared on her own.
As far as I could tell, it wasn't gonna be good.
After about a year of worrying
and radio silence from Oak Park police, Lisa's parents reached out to their local police.
Even though Lisa had vanished from a different state, her family hoped that another police department might be able to make some progress.
I know my parents were very frustrated after the fact that they had just relied on the Illinois authorities and it wasn't until they,
my parents talked to a local law enforcement person that they actually got any connection made.
People in Chicago really did let them down. At least, you know, that's how they feel.
And I can't disagree with that.
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 the department had been
doing in relation to the case.
Of course, there wasn't much to share.
So Captain Sellers started an investigation of his own.
And thank God he did.
Because just a few months later, in April of 1977, he came across a teletype bulletin
from Wisconsin that caught his attention.
The Sauk County Sheriff's Office had sent out a notification about an unidentified
body that had been discovered.
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.
They made note of a tattoo on the upper left thigh,
and that was the kicker.
Lisa had a tattoo in that exact location.
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 of 1976.
That is just 10 days after Lisa was reported missing. She was under a bridge at
a local creek, completely nude, in a fetal position and frozen solid when they found
her. 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,
and her fingerprints weren't on file anywhere.
So they had given her a temporary name, Frigid Frida.
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.
So they would refer to the case as Frigid Frieda,
and that kind of transferred down
because even talking to older employees here,
that's what they knew the case as.
That was Detective Drew Bullen
with the Sauk County Sheriff's Office.
He said that in the early days of the investigation,
Sauk County detectives sent out hundreds of flyers
with Frieda's description to law enforcement agencies
across the country.
And they released a composite sketch of the woman's face
and upper thigh tattoo to the media.
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.
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.
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.
Now initially, the cause of death was undetermined, though at a later inquest it was ruled a homicide.
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.
I think just based on her position where she was found, obviously being nude, they assumed
that there was probably a sexual component.
And so they, as part of the autopsy back then, in 76, they did take swabs, which are important
today 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 swabs that they would typically do in a sexual assault kit,
and then they would have taken cuttings of pubic hair.
According to Detective Bullen, hair analysis was a popular forensic technique at the time.
It involved placing samples under a microscope and looking at things like color, size, and
composition for comparison.
So the form pubic hair was an important discovery.
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.
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. At least that's all they could
do until the day they could identify her. And with this call from Lee Wood, that day was now. 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.
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.
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.
One would have to have been in our position to appreciate the sense of helplessness we
experienced in our quest for Lisa's whereabouts.
It had seemed to us a logical move to report her disappearance to the Illinois
authorities since that was where she was staying at the time. We put all our faith in them
to do their best and unfortunately that faith was misplaced.
Susan went on to express her gratitude for the work of Sauk County law enforcement.
When we learned the whole story and found that our girl had been given a
beautiful funeral at the Gantt funeral home in Regenburg, we were overwhelmed
with gratitude and relief and joy. We viewed that service on videotape right in the courthouse, openly weeping. 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. 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 and your lovely Wisconsin.
And Susan was right. With this ID, the investigation was only beginning, this time with Sauk County at the helm.
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.
If she was murdered in Sauk County,
it would have been the area's first homicide
in almost seven years.
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.
And they began with Michelle, Lisa's cousin that had been hosting her.
According to Michelle, the day before she was last seen, Lisa ended up meeting and hitting
it off with a singer
named David McKenzie.
Lisa had spent the night at David's place
before returning to Michelle's safe and sound
on Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday night is when Lisa disappeared.
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.
And so Michelle suspects that Lisa, you know, was maybe using some marijuana and
then possibly cocaine and then potentially heroin as well as part of the party that night.
It doesn't sound like Michelle observed any actual use.
That was just kind of her suspicion when she talked with investigators." 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.
I mean, it was the 70s and Lisa was a free-spirited girl.
She was very 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.
She was very bold.
Curious.
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.
And that's when she just sort of, you know, lost track of what I'd call her childhood.
I sometimes worry that maybe we were too hands off.
But there's a balance between riding her on your kid
and letting them learn for themselves.
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.
But they did go and talk to David.
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, 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.
David is very cooperative with investigators
and gives any standards that they requested,
which included
hair samples and had hair samples, I believe, in pubic hair samples.
I'm not sure if they took fingerprints.
I would assume that they did.
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.
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.
I think they were fairly confident,
or I infer from the reports that they were fairly confident,
that he was not involved just because of the potential alibi
and then also his level of cooperation.
Investigators also talked to Kurt, Lisa's other cousin. was not involved just because of the potential alibi and then also his level of cooperation.
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.
According to Detective Boland,
there isn't much more information on Kurt in the case file.
It's not clear if Sauk County investigators
at the time ever considered him a suspect,
and if not, why he was ruled out.
Next up was Lisa's boyfriend, Mark Hanstead.
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.
The two lived together,
and Lisa needed some time away to decompress.
Now today, Susan doesn't remember it that way.
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.
Either way, Detective Bullen says the case file shows that he was never a serious suspect.
It's pretty clear from reports that investigators discovered him pretty early on and there's
not really much, if any, follow-up that I can see that was done in the case.
So the boyfriend was never considered a person of interest?
No.
There's so much that the investigators maybe knew back then or suspected back then and
it isn't documented.
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.
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.
That's when investigators got a letter
from a man in prison alleging that one
of his fellow inmates might've had something to do
with Lisa's murder, a convicted serial killer
named William Zamastow.
At the time, William was serving a life sentence
in Wisconsin for the 1978 murder of a different woman.
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.
And after that time, the late 90s, early 2000s, he was convicted of a double homicide
of some hitchhikers in the Los Angeles area.
And then again, in the early 2000s,
he was convicted of a homicide in Tucson, Arizona.
He had killed an FBI agent's daughter, adult daughter,
sexual assault, and dumped her in the desert.
If you've never heard of William Zamastill before,
it's probably because his name got
lost in the shuffle of prolific serial killers active in the 1970s, ones like John Wayne
Gacy, Ed Kemper, or David Berkowitz.
Plus, William Zamasdill killed all over the U.S. He wasn't known for terrorizing a specific
city or state like those other men, at least as far as anyone knew.
When Williams' fellow inmate wrote to investigators, he said that he believed William
had committed more murders that he hadn't been convicted of. And the letter specifically
mentioned a victim found underneath a bridge in Sauk County. 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.
They started trying to determine Williams' whereabouts in January of 1976, 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.
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.
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.
And when they talked with or attempted to talk with Zamisill, 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.
And that's about all he gave them, by the way.
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.
And so part of his demands were
he wanted to serve his sentence in a certain prison
and he wanted some guarantees. 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.
And they basically said, well, we need to know some details,
and he was not willing to provide them.
So he was never ruled in or out.
It seemed that detectives didn't want to negotiate.
So with that, the investigation stalled again.
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.
The not finding her killer while it's hard is not unexpected.
You would hope somebody would have been found out somehow.
You know, it's always just kind of been something I got a hope that they meet their judgment someday or already have.
You know, there's been every once in a while something comes up that's like,
oh, this person sounds like they could have been a suspect.
And nothing really ever comes of it.
and nothing really ever comes of it.
The only person I know of right now that I never really got any closure
on whether he's involved is William Zamastil.
In the late 2000s, the inmate who wrote to investigators
about William Zamastil was released from prison
and then passed away.
And investigators made no further attempts
to contact William.
Being a convicted offender, his DNA was on file,
but DNA testing wasn't really on detective's minds yet.
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.
But over the years, forensic testing evolved, far beyond the hair analysis of the 70s.
And as Sauk County got access to new technology, investigators sent off some of the physical
evidence that they had collected during Lisa's autopsy.
The first attempt was in 2001, 25 years after Lisa's murder.
They did identify some sperm cells on the swabs, but at the time they were not,
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.
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.
So fast forward to 2009.
That's when investigators sent the foreign pubic hairs and rectal swabs off for testing.
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.
They attempted to analyze the rectal swabs as well and and there's a lack of male DNA detected,
so no further analysis was performed.
And that was the last submission
before Detective Bullen was assigned to the case
in the fall of 2022,
which is a bizarre story in and of itself.
So one of the reasons that this case came back around is we had someone call in and say that they had noticed that someone was placing flowers on the victim's grave.
And so that kind of spurred our interest in my supervisors,
interested me, like, hey, let's have somebody
take a look at this again.
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 Sauk County.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 some of the swabs that we still had.
And then I also resubmitted DNA packets.
They had been hopeful that they would get a full profile
this time around, but no such luck.
The evidence tech said that the sample was
just too degraded. Detective Bullen did resubmit additional material in 2023, essentially everything
they had left, but he is still waiting on those results.
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, right? Based on the advances in genetic genealogy,
a lot of times, if you have a DNA profile,
you're going to identify it.
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.
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.
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.
So Mark, if you are out there,
and if you're listening to this,
please reach out to Sauk County.
Detective Bullen 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.
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.
That's certainly possible and that solves a lot of cold cases too.
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.
In 2023, someone did come forward with a familiar name in a familiar fashion.
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.
The author, Justin Welch, wrote that he and William Zammastil, who he calls Wild Bill,
are very close friends.
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.
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 sh- he did.
And then there was a catch.
Quote,
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.
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.
Bill will not talk until it's in writing
we'll get the transfer, just so you all know."
End quote.
Unfortunately, this ultimatum put detectives in the same place they were in in the late
2000s.
The place of negotiating with a serial killer.
Now, our reporter Nicole talked with the founder of PrisonRiders.com, Lohan Kelly, who published
Welch's article.
She acknowledged that the site doesn't fact check stories, so she can't be certain that
any claims made are 100% true.
But she doesn't dismiss them either.
After publishing that story, Kelly actually reached out to William Zamastill herself to
learn more about him.
And she has been talking with him regularly ever since then.
She calls him Bill.
He would tell me about these murders he did,
but he didn't remember the details of who the victim was,
what they were wearing, what their names were,
what they were dressed in.
Because he wasn't that kind of a serial killer.
He is a very unusual serial killer,
actually, because he doesn't have any ammo. He doesn't have a sort of a standard plan. It's
very impulsive. Sometimes he would use a rock. Sometimes he would strangle them, sometimes he used a knife, shot someone with
a gun once, and a belt, a wire hanger. So in other words, serial killers usually have
a regular pattern and he really didn't. 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.
I'd be always like, well, why did you kill?
And he'd be like, well, sometimes it was just to spice up the day."
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.
I would say things to him like, look, Bill, I know you don't give a sh— about solving this case.
You know, you don't have any remorse. We've talked about this.
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 there is something to this closure business. Closure was so important to people.
You know, I'd think like 10 years ago, your sibling died and, you know, it's going to feel
that much better to know who did it. And the answer is yes, by a huge amount. That why the hell not just,
you know, even though it's not gonna change your life,
you're not gonna feel any differently,
why don't you just try it?
So he did.
As it turned out, the day our reporter Nicole
reached out to Lowen,
William Zamastill had a meeting with the FBI
to come forward about a murder
he was claiming responsibility for in California.
She said the DA seemed interested,
but wanted to do some more investigation
before moving forward.
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.
Hello, you have a call from...
Justin.
An inmate at Wisconsin's secure program facility.
To accept this call, press 5.
To refuse this call, hang up now.
Hello? Hi. Hi, Nicole. This is Justin Welch. Press 5. To refuse this call, hang up now.
Hello? Hi.
Hi, Nicole.
This is Justin Welch from the Wisconsin DOT.
Oh, hi.
Well, I'm gonna let you know something right now,
right off the kick-go.
I'm under investigation by the FBI
because I'm Bill Corren.
They've been, yeah, they have the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigations, like
recording all my phone calls and sending everything to the DA's and all that stuff.
So I have the transcripts.
I just got them last month.
I didn't know they were doing this until just last month.
Anyway, so what do you want to know?
Yeah, before I ask you some questions,
do you mind if I record the call?
I don't care.
Okay, awesome.
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 Baraboo, Wisconsin.
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 and Bill out of the 15, he picked eight of them.
He remembered eight of them.
So 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, yeah, he would tell me,
because he doesn't give a shit.
Like he doesn't care about that.
That was 50 years ago.
You know, he's just an old man now.
He would have told me.
He'd be like, yeah, I did it, Justin.
Yeah, no, I know he didn't do it.
He would have told me.
So at least from Welch's perspective,
investigators would be wasting their time looking at William.
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?
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.
No tip is gonna be disregarded.
We're happy to talk to anyone who might have information because you truly don't know,
and we truly don't know what information is key.
There might be something out there that we have no knowledge of that someone brings to us and it solves the case.
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
They're you know up there in years, you know, dad's 95 and mom's 91
So the fact that they've just the fact that they've had to live life with the rest of our children,
grandchildren, beautiful babies. Some that Lisa just had nothing. I mean she had no life. I mean there was nothing, she was just a baby in our arms.
And there were so many things that she's just missed out on this life. Of course we've lived
a long time. 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 it's just a shame that she missed all that.
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 Bulling.
Or if you'd rather remain anonymous, you can call the Sauk County Crime Stoppers Tip line at 1-800-TIPSAUK.
That's 1-800-TIPSAUK.
And just a reminder, Detective Bullen is still looking for Mark Handstedt and David McKenzie.
So if either of you are out there or someone listening knows these men, please have them reach out.
please have them reach out.
The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work,
visit thedeckpodcast.com.
So what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?