Our 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-olds, 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!
Chapter 1: Who is Lisa Staes and why is her story significant?
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.
Chapter 2: What events led to Lisa's disappearance in 1976?
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.
On the afternoon of January 14th, 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.
Chapter 3: How did the investigation into Lisa's case unfold?
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. 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 Leawood, 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 those 16 months. I don't even know if I knew it was affecting me, you know. It just kind of is one of those things when you're 17, 18, that kind of molds you, you know, don't really know that it's molding you at the time. But, uh, 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 harder.
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.
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Chapter 4: What were the challenges faced by law enforcement in Lisa's case?
You know, I remember acquaintances of hers 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. So there was no reason to believe that she disappeared on her own. As far as I could tell, it wasn't going to 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.
It was in February 1977, a year after Lisa's disappearance, when Captain Al Sellers from the Leawood 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 Leawood 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 Frida and that kind of transferred down because even talking to older employees here, that's what they knew the case as.
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Chapter 5: How was Lisa's body ultimately identified?
That was Detective Drew Boland 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 Frida'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 positioning 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 off the 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 foreign 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 Leawood, 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 day's. 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.
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Chapter 6: What new leads emerged in Lisa's case after many years?
Bodacious.
Yeah, 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.
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, you know, there's a balance between, you know, riding herd on your kid and letting them, you know, 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.
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Chapter 7: Who were the key people in Lisa's life and investigation?
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. 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 on the case.
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