Crime Immemorial

On the evening of August 17th, 1992, eleven-year-old Holly Staker was babysitting for Dawn Engelbrecht’s two young children at an apartment in Waukegan, a city north of Chicago in Lake County, Illinois. Engelbrecht had left the children in Holly’s care while she ran an errand.

When Engelbrecht returned, she found the back door kicked in and Holly missing. Police were called, and a search quickly located Holly’s partially clothed body on the floor of one of the children’s bedrooms. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed twenty-seven times, and strangled. The violent nature of the attack and the young age of the victim horrified local residents and drew significant media attention.

The two children Holly had been watching were unharmed, but they were too young to provide detailed accounts of what happened. No immediate eyewitnesses or clear suspects emerged, leaving investigators under pressure to solve the case.

The investigation initially stalled, but about ten weeks later, police focused on Juan A. Rivera Jr., a nineteen-year-old local man with a prior burglary conviction who was on electronic home monitoring at the time. An informant’s tip led to intense questioning over several days.

Rivera, who had attended special education classes and had a history of mental health issues, at first denied any involvement. After nearly four days of interrogation (including extended sessions), he reportedly broke down, nodded in affirmation when asked if he committed the crime, and later signed confessions. The confessions contained inconsistencies; one was so implausible that prosecutors had investigators obtain a second, revised version.

No physical evidence—fingerprints, blood, hair, or other traces—linked Rivera to the scene. Electronic monitoring records placed him more than two miles away during the likely time of the crime. Nonetheless, Rivera was indicted in November 1992.

He was convicted in 1993 and sentenced to life without parole, though that conviction was overturned on appeal. He was retried and reconvicted in 1997, but that too was vacated after post-conviction developments.

In 2005, DNA testing on semen recovered from Holly’s body definitively excluded Rivera as the source. Despite this exculpatory evidence, prosecutors retried him a third time in 2009, suggesting implausible explanations for the DNA (such as sample contamination or that the semen was unrelated to the assault, implying an eleven-year-old had a consensual sexual partner). Rivera was convicted again.

In December 2011, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed the conviction outright in a strongly worded opinion, barring retrial. The court found the evidence insufficient beyond a reasonable doubt, criticizing the reliance on a questionable confession without corroboration and highlighting the DNA exclusion. Rivera was released in January 2012 after serving over nineteen years.

In 2015, Lake County and Waukegan settled Rivera’s federal wrongful conviction lawsuit for $20 million, one of the largest such settlements in U.S. history at the time. Allegations in related litigation included claims that police may have planted evidence (such as blood on sneakers not commercially available until after the murder).

The semen DNA profile from Holly’s body identified an unknown male perpetrator. As of 2026, no arrest has been made in connection with this profile.

In a notable twist, around 2014, DNA testing in an unrelated Lake County murder case (the 2000 beating death of Delwin Foxworth) produced a match: DNA on a weapon in that case matched the unidentified profile from Holly Staker’s rape kit. This suggested a possible serial offender, but it has not led to charges in either case. Some discussions in true crime communities and podcasts continue to highlight the need for further investigation into this genetic link.

More than three decades later, Holly’s killer has not been brought to justice.