Jessica Dishon

Case background and investigation

Jessica Dishon was a 17-year-old high school senior living with her family in Bullitt County, Kentucky, near Shepherdsville. On the morning of September 10, 1999, she disappeared from the driveway of her home as she was preparing to leave for school. Police have said she was dragged from her car, according to Louisville station WDRB.

Her body was found 17 days later, about seven miles from her home, in an area known as the Salt River bottoms. WAVE 3 News and WDRB reported that she had been beaten and strangled. WDRB has described the original investigation as badly flawed.

A neighbor of the family was arrested and charged with her killing in 2001. His trial ended in a mistrial in 2003, and the charges were dismissed, the Associated Press reported. WAVE later described him as a man wrongly accused. The case then went unresolved for a decade.

In 2013 the Bullitt County Sheriff's Office reopened the matter after two jail inmates separately told investigators that Jessica's uncle, Stanley Dishon, had said he killed her. According to WAVE and WDRB, the informants said he feared she would disclose that he had sexually abused her. He was arrested on October 2, 2013, and charged with murder. WDRB reported that the evidence was circumstantial and rested largely on the informants' accounts, together with relatives' descriptions of his behaviour at the time.

In January 2015, at a hearing in Bardstown, Stanley Dishon entered Alford pleas to first-degree manslaughter in Jessica's death and to sexual assault counts in separate cases. Under an Alford plea a defendant does not admit guilt but accepts that the evidence could lead to conviction. On March 26, 2015, a Bullitt Circuit Court judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison, followed by five years of probation, and ordered him to register as a sex offender.

Dishon has continued to deny killing his niece. In a 2019 interview from the Kentucky State Penitentiary he told WDRB that he was at work that morning and had pleaded guilty on his lawyers' advice. His attorneys had said at the time of the plea that they believed he was not the killer but that he faced a possible life sentence in the abuse cases. The Kentucky Innocence Project told WDRB it had declined his 2017 request for help. His conviction stands.