Brian James Dugan (born September 23, 1956) is a convicted rapist and serial killer active between 1983 and 1985 in Chicago's western suburbs. He was known for having informally confessed in 1985 to the 1983 abduction, rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville, Illinois, which was a highly publicized case. He was already in custody for two other rape/murders, one of an adult woman in 1984 and the other a female child in 1985. He was sentenced to life after pleading guilty to the latter two crimes. Rolando Cruz and Anthony Hernandez, both from Aurora, Illinois, had earlier been indicted in the Nicarico case and were convicted of Nicarico's murder in 1987 and sentenced to death. After appeals and new trials, Hernandez was convicted a third time and sentenced to life in prison. Cruz was acquitted in 1995 after a witness recanted testimony, and new DNA evidence was introduced excluding him from that found at the crime scene. State charges against Hernandez were also dismissed that year and he was freed. In 2000 these two and Stephen Buckley received a settlement for wrongful prosecution from DuPage County. In 2005 Dugan was indicted for Nicarico's murder based on DNA evidence; he pleaded guilty in 2009 and was sentenced to death. After Illinois governor Patrick Quinn signed a new bill to abolish capital punishment in 2011, Dugan's sentence was commuted to life in prison. Early life and crimes Brian Dugan was born in 1956 in Nashua, New Hampshire, the second child of James and Genevieve "Jenny" Dugan. He has one sister and three brothers. According to his siblings, both parents James and Jenny Dugan were alcoholics. In 1967, the Dugan family moved to Lisle, Illinois. According to Dugan's family, the boy's birth had been traumatic. He began to emerge before the attending physician had arrived. The family claims that, in an effort to delay the infant's birth, a nurse and an intern pushed Brian's head back inside his mother and strapped her legs together. Relatives would later question if this caused Brian to have brain damage; as a youth Brian suffered severe headaches followed by vomiting, for which he took medication until his teens. Brian was also a chronic bed wetter, a condition his adult father also suffered from. Brian showed classic symptoms of psychopathy from an early age. Although he was seen by child specialists, they did not understand