Lisa Christine Staes

In the winter of 1976, Lisa Christine Staes was a 20-year-old from Leawood, Kansas, who had recently moved out of her parents' home and begun classes at a community college. That January she was staying with a cousin in Oak Park, Illinois, outside Chicago. According to investigators, she was last seen alive on the night of January 13, 1976, after going out with a cousin; the podcast The Deck, which produced an episode on the case with the cooperation of Sauk County investigators, reported she was last seen in Chicago's Rush Street bar district. A missing persons report was filed the next day, but her family later said the initial response from Illinois authorities was minimal.

On January 24, 1976, a Baraboo-area resident who was trout fishing along Harrison Creek in the Town of Delton, Sauk County, Wisconsin, discovered the body of a young woman under the Mirror Lake Road bridge, off Highway 23 about three miles outside the village of Lake Delton. She was nude, frozen, and curled in a fetal position, with no identification; investigators noted a small red-and-green tattoo and a strand of gold-colored metal that appeared to be from a piece of jewelry. An autopsy could not initially determine a cause of death, and a later inquest ruled the death a homicide. Because the killing occurred roughly 200 miles from where she vanished, investigators believe she may have been murdered elsewhere and her body left at the bridge.

The victim remained unidentified for more than a year and was buried as a Jane Doe at a rural cemetery near North Freedom, Wisconsin. In 1977, an inquiry by a police captain in Leawood, Kansas, connected the missing Kansas woman to the unidentified Sauk County victim. The body was exhumed for dental X-rays, and on May 13, 1977, she was positively identified as Lisa Staes. News accounts have variously given her age as 20 or 21.

The investigation led detectives to the Chicago area, where she was last seen. According to The Deck, a musician Staes had met was interviewed early on, provided hair samples, was excluded as the source of foreign hairs recovered from the body, and had an alibi. A 1999 letter from a prison inmate suggested that William Zamastill, a Wisconsin man serving a life sentence for murder, might have been involved; he has never been charged in connection with Staes' death and has maintained through fellow inmates that he was not responsible. Physical evidence, including sexual assault kit swabs, was submitted for DNA testing in 2001, 2009, and again in 2023, but according to investigators the samples have so far yielded insufficient genetic material for a full profile.

Sauk County authorities have worked with the Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Criminal Investigation on the case for decades. Around 2016, Detective Lt. Chris Zunker said the case was 'strictly limited to physical evidence' and was considering resubmitting items to the state crime lab. In fall 2022, Detective Drew Bullen was assigned to the case, which drew renewed attention after cemetery staff reported anonymous flowers left at Staes' grave. Her case is featured as the Jack of Diamonds in a Wisconsin cold-case playing card deck. Anyone with information is asked to call the Sauk County Sheriff's Office at 608-355-4495.