The Halloween Killer

In 1973, many American families believed it was safe for their young children to wander the streets alone. Neighborhoods were considered to be a safe place, full of trustworthy people who looked out for one another. It was a year before Ted Bundy and BTK started killing, giving the 70s the reputation of being the start of “the golden age” of serial killers, and several years before parents would truly begin teaching their kids about “stranger danger.”

All of this meant that, during Halloween of 1973, 9-year-old Lisa Ann French’s parents didn’t have any reservations about allowing their daughter to go trick-or-treating on her own. The fourth grader had initially planned to spend the night with her friend, Ann Parker, but Ann got grounded by her parents, leaving Lisa to make her way to the neighborhood Halloween party on her own, trick-or-treating as she went along.

Just before 6pm, Lisa left her house. She was proud of her costume - she’d dressed up like a hobo, wearing a green jacket and black hat, and had painted “freckles” on her face. She stopped by several houses, before she decided to knock on the door of another neighbor - a man named Gerald Miles Turner Jr. 

Lisa wasn’t visiting the houses of complete strangers. She’d knocked on the doors of one of her classmates and a teacher from her school, and had stopped to chat with both people before collecting her candy and going on her way. Gerald Turner also wasn’t a stranger to Lisa. He and his girlfriend, Arlene, had recently had a child together, and Lisa loved to say hello to the baby whenever she saw him. That night, she rang Gerald’s doorbell, and after he opened the door, she walked into the doorway to collect her candy. Nobody else was at home with Gearld that night. He began talking to Lisa, and managed to convince her to come inside the house, and into his bedroom.

At about 7pm, Gerald’s girlfriend Arlene arrived at the house. She noticed that he was acting weird; he was only dressed in a bathrobe and kept repeatedly visiting the bedroom, saying that he needed to lie down because he was feeling sick. Arlene spent about an hour at home before leaving again to visit her mother.

Lisa French didn’t return home that night. Her curfew was at 7pm, and when there was still no sign of her, her mother alerted the neighborhood. Over the next few hours, a group of concerned neighbors were out searching the streets for any sign of Lisa. The search grew quickly over the next few days as the authorities became more and more concerned for Lisa’s wellbeing, and eventually, the entire county was searching. There were more than 5000 volunteers involved in the search, as well as the police and the US National Guard.

On the 3rd of November, 1973, at 11:30 am, a local farmer was driving his tractor when he saw two plastic bags that had been left in a field. He looked closer, and saw that the naked body of a young girl had been stuffed into one of the bags, while the other bag contained her Halloween costume. The body was identified as Lisa Ann French.

Lisa’s autopsy revealed that she had two potential causes of death: asphyxiation, and shock due to the brutal sexual assault she had experienced shortly before she died. Her funeral was held three days after her body was found - and two days later, a $10,000 reward was announced for the arrest of her killer.

Early in the investigation, police already had a key suspect: Gerald Turner. But despite repeated questioning, he continued to insist that he was innocent. Almost a year after Lisa’s death, Gerald performed a polygraph test, which came back as having “inconclusive results.” He refused to repeat the test, but finally, he confessed to everything. 

Shortly after luring Lisa into the house, Gerald said had attacked her, removed her clothing, and assaulted her. Either during the assault or immediately afterwards, Lisa died. After he noticed that she was no longer breathing, Gerald listened to her chest, and believed that she still had a heartbeat. During the process of trying to resuscitate Lisa, Arlene arrived home, and Gerald panicked, knowing that he had to hide Lisa’s body as soon as possible. While Gerald had been pretending that he needed to lie down in the bedroom, he had actually been in the bathroom, where he left Lisa’s body. 

Immediately after Arlene left the house that night, Gerald had rushed to dispose of Lisa. He had placed her remains and clothing into bags and drove into a field, where he then dumped the bags. Throughout the disposal process, he wore socks on his hands, hoping that he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints behind.

Shortly after Lisa’s death, Gerald wrote her a letter, which was found by investigators. In the letter, he wrote, “I doubt that I could ever fully realize the terror you experienced at my hands. I can still see you standing [in] the doorway, with that felt hat, beaming at having recognized me. Then I see the delight in your eyes turn to fear, as I close the door behind you.

After his confession, Gerald was convicted of second-degree murder, “acts of sexual perversion” and “enticing a child for immoral purposes” in February 1975. He received a sentence of 38 and a half years behind bars - but after only 17 years, in 1992, he was paroled “for good behavior”. His release caused an uproar in the Milwaukee community, where he was set to live during parole. In November 1993, Gerald’s parole ended, after the Department of Corrections stated that his release for good behavior had been “miscalculated”.

The protests and outrage about his release led to the creation of “Turner’s Law” - a law that meant criminals who had been released from prison could be legally detained in mental health facilities if they were believed to be likely to continue criminal activity. But despite the law being nicknamed after the case, the jury at Gerald’s 1998 parole hearing found that he wasn’t eligible for being detained at a mental health facility. In fact, despite Gerald’s conviction for being a violent sexual predator, the jury concluded that he was not a “violent sexual offender” after all, so there was no reason for him to be detained. The ruling meant that Gerald’s second parole could begin later that year.

During July that year, the state tried to revoke Gerald’s parole after an incident in his halfway house, when he brandished a butcher’s knife while yelling at his caseworker. Despite a psychiatrist assessing Gerald and ruling that he was still a danger to others, the judge ruled that Gerald’s parole should go ahead. On parole, Gerald still struggled to get a job due to his crimes - and when a Waste Management company refused to hire him after finding out about Lisa’s murder, Gerald filed a complaint where he accused the company of discriminating against him. In the settlement, the company was forced to hire Gerald after all, because of a law in Wisconsin at the time meaning that businesses should only take criminal convictions into account if the crime was “substantially related” to the job they were hiring for. Because Gerald wouldn’t be working with children at the company, there was legally no reason that they could refuse to hire him.

The law was eventually repealed, allowing employers to refuse to hire felons at their own discretion - but it didn’t matter to Gerald for long. In 2003, he violated his parole by possessing what was described as “an abundance” of pornography, and he spent another 15 years in prison. He was set to be released from his sentence in February 2018 - but as the date grew closer, Lisa’s mother created a petition against his release, which gathered more than 30,000 signatures. On the 23rd of February, 2022, a judge decided that Gerald’s release should be denied, and the decision was made to detain him at a high-security psychiatric facility instead.

From the early days of the case, Gerald was nicknamed “The Halloween Killer” because of the night when the crime had coincidentally taken place. A holiday where creepy things were used in a fun way had become genuinely scary for Wisconsin residents, leaving a lingering shadow that made people look at their own neighbors in a different light. Gerald Turner himself always believed that Lisa’s murder only attracted public attention because it had taken place on Halloween night. “If it had happened on some other day, like Valentine’s Day”, he said “nobody would have gave a damn.”