‘When Lisa can come back and have her freedom, SO CAN HE’
Mother of 9-year-old Lisa Ann French hopes her petition will keep convicted ‘Halloween Killer’ behind bars
“If you ask Jesus to take over, you will begin a new life.”
— Among handwritten notes found in Lisa Ann French’s Bible
FOND DU LAC – Lisa Ann French wanted to wear a butterfly costume to go trick-or-treating. Her mother nixed that idea, thinking it would prove too flimsy on such a cold night. Lisa chose a hobo outfit instead.
In 1973, everyone’s kids trick-or-treated after dark on Halloween, and 9-year-old Lisa was eager to get started after finishing dinner.
She kissed her parents goodbye and ran out of the house at 192 Amory St. just before 6 p.m. in jeans covered in masking tape, a floppy felt hat and a green parka. She had dotted her face with freckles.
It was the last time her mother and step-father would see her alive.
A fourth-grader at Chegwin Elementary School, Lisa had deep brown eyes, a trendy shag haircut her beautician mother had given her, and a grin that revealed new teeth growing in, as seen in her class photo from that year.
The working-class Fond du Lac neighborhood in northeast Wisconsin was tree-lined, with sidewalks scattered in autumn leaves. Porch lights had been turned on and candy dishes were waiting by doorways.
The plan was for Lisa to meet a friend and head to Pumpkin Place, a block on East Bank Street where parents were hosting an outdoor party. There had been reports around the country of poisoned Halloween candy and razor blades left in apples, so the community wanted to provide a safe place where children could celebrate.
Ann Parker said she still lives with guilt and wonders how things might have turned out differently if she had joined Lisa for a night of trick-or-treating fun as they’d planned. Instead, she misbehaved and at the last minute, was forbidden to accompany her best friend.
“We were inseparable back then,” said Parker, who retired to Florida. “I loved being with Lisa because she was so funny, and bubbly and outgoing.”
The man who killed Lisa Ann French, Gerald Miles Turner Jr., was a neighbor. He was someone she knew. His brutal sexual assault and murder of the young trick-or-treater on Oct. 31, 1973 is still remembered as one of the most heinous crimes in the city’s history. Turner would be called the “Halloween Killer.”
The murder tore apart Lisa’s family, changed Halloween forever in Fond du Lac and started a series of events that led Wisconsin to create a sexual predator law.
More than four decades later, Turner is scheduled for release on Feb. 7 from Racine Correctional Institution. Lisa Ann French’s family is trying to stop it.
A confession, then a denial
Lisa made three stops that night at homes in the neighborhood. One was at teacher Karen Bauknecht’s house. Another was at the home of a classmate, who lived across the street.
The third doorstep Lisa landed on was Turner’s place at 152 Rose Ave., about half a block from home. He was familiar — a friendly man who had once rented the other side of the family’s duplex on Amory Street.
“She used to play with Gerald’s baby,” said Susan De Pauw, Lisa’s younger sister. “He lived with his girlfriend then and Lisa used to push the baby in a stroller down the street.”
Turner’s girlfriend, Arlene Penn, testified at his trial that during the time they lived next to Lisa’s family, the little girl would often visit to show Turner new things she had gotten or just sit and talk with him.
Penn told the jury she and her own daughter returned home on that Halloween night about 7:15 p.m. after attending the party at Pumpkin Place, and found Turner in a bathrobe on the couch, claiming he was sick. Penn left the house again later that night to visit her mother, but said that while she was home, Turner went into the bedroom several times to lay down.
She did not go in to check on him, or she would have discovered Lisa’s body in the adjacent bathroom, where Turner had hidden her, he told detectives in a confession he would later deny.
Those who loved Lisa — the little girl with trusting eyes and a winning smile — say Turner should die in prison, where he belongs. The child’s naked body was found inside a plastic garbage bag, tossed in a farm field about four miles outside the city. Another bag nearby contained her clothing.
“He threw her away like garbage,” said her mother, Maryann Gehring, now of Stuart, Florida. The nightmare of her daughter’s horrific death has lingered, haunting the family for more than four decades.
The grieving mother has created an online petition to keep the 68-year-old Turner behind bars. By early December, the petition at www.thepetitionsite.com had gained nearly 20,000 signatures.
The petition site makes no claim that it can change laws or extend Turner’s punishment. Gehring herself says she doesn’t know if it will make a difference. But she feels compelled to try to spread the word about Turner’s pending release however she can.
Turner was originally sentenced to 38 years and six months behind bars. He has since been set free twice: once on a release date technicality and another time for good behavior in prison. He was returned to prison in 2003 for 15 more years after hundreds of pornographic images were found on a computer in the bedroom of his Madison halfway house.
“Halloween marked the 44th anniversary of Lisa’s death, and to this day, I feel in my heart he will commit another violent sex crime if he is released,” Gehring wrote in the petition. “Turner’s current and prior actions indicate that he is still a dangerous person and should not be released.”
A gruesome discovery
Lisa was told to be home by 7 p.m., and her mother, caring for a newborn son, Michael, was beginning to worry at a half-hour past curfew.
By 10 p.m. the neighborhood had heard one of their own was missing. Betty Wohfiel, head of the block parents, a PTA-sponsored group, made calls to 50 other block parents, telling them to turn on their lights and put signboards in their windows.
Police began an all-night search, and as word spread the next day, upward of 5,000 people joined in a massive, community-wide hunt for the missing 9year-old.
National Guard helicopters and private planes circled overhead, volunteers on horses rode through fields, land rover vehicles scoured marshlands and police dragged rivers and creeks.
Mercury Marine’s photo lab printed 6,000 copies of Lisa’s school photo. Gas stations offered 25 gallons of gas free to anyone using a vehicle to search for the little girl.
Wayne Geis, now retired from the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Department, recalled arriving at the scene where Lisa’s body was found, about two and half days into the search.
Farmer Gerald Braun was on his tractor, returning home about 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday, when he stumbled upon the two trash bags in the brush along McCabe Road, just off Highway 49, in the town of Taycheedah.
“It was ... the worst possible thing that could have happened,” Geis said in a phone interview. “I saw that little girl, and I don’t know how any man could do that. Turner should never, ever be released.”
When word spread that Lisa’s body
“Halloween marked the 44th anniversary of Lisa’s death, and to this day, I feel in my heart he will commit another violent sex crime if he is released.”
Maryann Gehring, Lisa’s mother, in online petition
had been found, people wept openly. The Rev. Clarence Nickolai, pastor at St. Peter’s Church in Malone, was reported to have climbed a barbed wire fence and cut his hand to reach the dead girl. He said the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” over the small, lifeless body.
Nickolai served as a parish priest for 48 years in the Milwaukee Archdiocese, including many years at St. Peter’s.
He died in 1994 at University Hospital in Madison following a lingering illness.
The death of Lisa Ann French wasn’t just one family’s tragedy. On Nov. 6, 1973 a grieving community packed ImmanuelTrinity Lutheran Church in Fond du Lac to pay their respects to the little girl they had prayed so hard was alive.
They filed past the white casket and viewed Lisa, wearing the purple and white dress she had first worn for picture day at school. Classmates and fellow Girl Scouts from Troop 16 took up nine rows inside the church.
Lisa’s mother styled her daughter’s hair for the funeral, said Lisa’s sister Susan De Pauw.
City manager Myron Medin Jr. spoke to the mourners: “We are here ... the entire city in spirit is here ... to share your sorrow.”
Turner was finally arrested nine months after Lisa was reported missing. Fond du Lac Police Chief Harold Rautenberg told the press they had been questioning Turner since the day after Lisa’s body was found.
“My mom was pregnant with me when they were trying to figure out who did this,” De Pauw said. “I was born in August 1974 and Gerald Turner was arrested that same month. My mom spent that entire first year of my life going to court and testifying.”
‘No feeling of repentance’
Turner confessed to killing Lisa on Aug. 8, 1974, but later, during the trial, told jurors that they were not his words, and denied killing the 9-yearold he had befriended.
“I got sick and tired of being harassed by police calling on me,” he said of why he signed the statement.
A machinist for the Soo Line Railroad, Turner was 25 years old at the time and divorced, with two small children. He told detectives he was “highly sexually motivated” when Lisa Ann French entered his home on Halloween night, and he took her to his bedroom.
At one point, Turner said, he noticed the child wasn’t breathing, and attempted to revive her, but that was when his girlfriend, Arlene Penn, arrived home. He placed socks on his hands to move the body to the bathroom.
An autopsy conducted by the Fond du Lac County Medical Examiner ruled asphyxiation as the cause of death. A pathologist testified that the little girl died from shock during the assault.
Turner was found guilty of second-degree murder, enticing a child for immoral purposes and acts of sexual perversion. He began serving his prison sentence on Feb. 4, 1975.
“He has a cold disregard for people, mainly females,” testified Robert Owens, then chief psychologist at Taycheedah Correctional Institution, a nearby women’s prison. “He does not have conscience control to inhibit his impulses for pleasure and to conform to society’s laws.”
“He impressed me as showing no remorse ... no feeling of repentance,” presiding Circuit Court Judge Milton Meister said during sentencing.
In 1992, Turner was paroled for good behavior from Waupun Correctional Institution after serving 17 years and eight months. From there, he went to live at the Bridge Halfway House on Milwaukee’s north side.
City, county and state officials, along with people from the Milwaukee neighborhood, picketed against Turner’s living at the halfway house. For a while, he found work at a Milwaukee recycling plant, but was fired after picketers turned up at the plant as well.
In November 1993, Turner was ordered back to prison when a civil lawsuit filed by angry citizens led to an appeals court decision that the state erred in the way it calculated his mandatory release date.
Turner was scheduled for release once again on July 15, 1994, but it was blocked when the state sought to have him committed to a secure mental institution under Wisconsin’s new sexual predator law.
The law was prompted by public outcry over Turner’s brief freedom. It allows for violent sex offenders to be committed to a secured treatment center when they come up for parole, if they are determined to pose a threat to society. Legislators and advocates for victims of sexual assault refer to it as “Turner’s Law.”
In 1998, Turner went on trial to determine if he deserved to be held as a sexual predator, and a jury decided he did not fit the description.
Turner could not be contained under the law named after him, despite testimony from a 15-yearold babysitter, a former girlfriend and two former wives that Turner beat them when they declined to have sex with them, and then raped them, according to the Milwaukee Journal.
“I don’t think he’ll do so much as jaywalk on parole,” Turner’s attorney, Edmund Carns, told the court.
In July 1998, a judge refused a request to revoke Turner’s parole after he waved a knife and shouted at a caseworker in a Madison group home while he worked as a cook.
In 1999, Turner reached an undisclosed settlement with Waste Management of Madison for refusing to hire him because he had a criminal record. Wisconsin is one of several states that bars employers from considering convictions when hiring.
In 2003, a judge ordered Gerald Turner back to prison to serve another 15 years for violating his parole after authorities found pornographic images on a computer drive, as well as sexually explicit videos and magazines at the Foster Community Correctional House, the Madison halfway house where he was staying.
Life in the shadow of death
In a 1993 interview Allen French, Lisa’s father, said he supported the death penalty for Turner. At the time of his daughter’s death, he was divorced from her mother and had not seen Lisa for more than a month because of working long hours at Rockwell International in Oshkosh.
“I hope God took her away before violence happened to her so she didn’t know, didn’t have time to be frightened,” he said. “Maybe shock took her. Maybe she passed out and (then) died. I hope so.”
French now lives in Red Granite; he could not be reached for comment.
Ann Parker, Lisa’s childhood friend, has clear feelings about Turner.
“That son of a bitch should burn in hell,” she said. “A day doesn’t go by that I am not thinking about my lost friend, missing her, even after all this time.”
De Pauw said Turner robbed her of her own childhood. She was forced to grow up in the shadow of her older sister, with a mother who had a difficult time bonding with her remaining children.
“I think I was 35 years old before I finally understood what my mother went through and was able to forgive her,” De Pauw said. “Halloween was horrible, and there was always so much guilt and pain and anger over what happened.”
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney said that because of Turner’s age, the likelihood of reversing a mandatory release is slim. The prisoner is now being evaluated to determine if he could be classified and held under a civil commitment as a sexually violent person.
“His potential release is something I am not comfortable with, for the protection of the community,” Toney said.
The sexual predator law is a civil commitment process to a secure mental health facility and Toney said his office could file a petition to hold Turner in the system beyond his prison release date. He is awaiting additional information and documents from the DOC before he makes a decision regarding the petition.
Fond du Lac County Sheriff Mick Fink was 17 years old and a dishwasher at the Stretch Truck Stop — the place where all the cops hung out — when Lisa Ann French was murdered.
From that time on, he recalls, communities reset their trick-or-treat hours to coincide with daylight. No one felt safe letting their kids out alone.
“Do I want him out of prison? The simple answer is no. What he did was a horrible thing that shocked the conscience of this community, left a scar forever,” Fink said.
Messages in a Bible
“My mom was pregnant with me when they were trying to figure out who did this. I was born in August 1974 and Gerald Turner was arrested that same month. My mom spent that entire first year of my life going to court and testifying.”
Susan De Pauw, Lisa’s sister
“Do I want him out of prison? The simple answer is no. What he did was a horrible thing that shocked the conscience of this community, left a scar forever.”
Fond du Lac County Sheriff Mick Fink
A sapling maple has grown over the years into an immense tree at the foot of Lisa’s grave at Estabrooks Cemetery in Fond du Lac. Gehring says she used to have dreams of what her daughter would have looked like, all grown up, but they have faded over time.
Both Gehring and De Pauw say they are thrilled, even hopeful, from the response the petition is getting.
“My mother is doing this because she couldn’t live with herself if something happened to another child,” De Pauw said. “With all the wonderful responses, I feel like my family just got bigger.”
In 1985, she wrote to Turner in prison and sent him copies of notes she discovered, tucked inside Lisa’s Bible.
On the day after Lisa’s funeral, her mother found the notes in her room, folded in half, stapled shut and labeled “A gift from God.”
One reads: “If you ask Jesus to take over — you will begin a new life.”
Another says: “Smile, God loves you.”
Turner never wrote back, but Gehring says she does recall the moment her daughter’s killer turned to her in the courtroom during sentencing.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he said.
“He should not be released,” Gehring said. “When Lisa can come back and have her freedom, so can he.”