By 1996, Dave Hamm spent four decades hunting some of the suburbs’ most notorious thugs, thieves and murderers.
But, instead of retiring, the veteran cop made a promise to stick around and help solve one final mystery – the infamous 1983 slaying of Jeanine Nicarico.
Fourteen years later, months after a jury sentenced the 10-year-old Naperville girl’s murderer to death row, Hamm grudgingly retires today.
“I don’t want to,” said Hamm, at 73. “In my mind, I’d like to go on forever but, it’s time for me to go.”
Hamm was enjoying semiretirement in the mid-1990s, keeping peace in a DuPage County courtroom as a deputy sheriff, when then-State’s Attorney Anthony Peccarelli came to him with that final assignment.
Hamm accepted the job offer to become a state’s attorney investigator and, for years, as Jeanine’s photo hung on his office wall for inspiration, he hunted leads in a dozen states in his quest to answer Peccarelli’s question.
His doggedness helped lead to Brian Dugan’s death sentence a few months ago.
Two other men, including Rolando Cruz, spent years on death row for Jeanine’s murder before 1995 exonerations. Coincidentally, Hamm served as the courtroom deputy during Cruz’s third trial. Hamm’s instincts told him Cruz was probably innocent.
Later, after Peccarelli hired him, Hamm said he became convinced Dugan acted alone after interviewing witness upon witness who reported seeing only one man in a green car near the Nicarico home that day.
Hamm continued the investigation after Joe Birkett took over the office’s helm.
“There are thousands of people who are impacted by his great service,” Birkett said at Hamm’s recent retirement party. “You can’t count them all.”
Hamm, known for his unfaltering recall of dates and names, as well as a saucy sense of humor, is widely regarded as the foremost authority on the sad saga. He uncovered many truths in a law enforcement career that dates back to late 1958.
He stood nearly alone in the 1960s in welcoming DuPage County’s first black police officer to serve as his partner on the sheriff’s force, at a time when others refused. Decades later, Hamm was reunited with that partner, Bill Simmons – when Birkett named him the county’s first black chief of his investigations unit.
Simmons, who shares Hamm’s deep faith, said he had a large influence on his life.
“He’s got a lot of insight and wisdom,” Simmons said. “Dave’s a very humble man, but his mind is like a steel trap.”
Hamm also served as a longtime Illinois State Police detective lieutenant. There, he pursued notorious horseman Silas Jayne, who was convicted of conspiracy in his brother’s 1970 fatal shooting in Inverness.
It was while investigating Jayne that Hamm encountered Kenneth Hanson, a horse trader who Hamm became convinced was behind the unsolved Oct. 16, 1955 Peterson-Schuessler murders in which the three slain teen boys’ bodies were found near a Jayne stable.
Hanson wasn’t an original suspect, but Hamm gave federal authorities his files when he retired from the state police in the early 1990s. They soon closed in on Hanson, who died in 2007 at 74 while serving a 200-year prison term for the slayings.
Hamm also chased leads in the 1982 Tylenol killings in the suburbs in which seven people died of cyanide poisoning.
He and his wife, Mary, married for 50 years, have two sons and four grandchildren.
“The Lord has protected me in a lot of situations,” said Hamm, who recalled a Westmont police call in which he was “one-trigger-squeeze away from eternity.”
He said: “It’s been a great ride.”
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