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Frozen Silence: What Happened To Baby Nicole? · Dead Serious

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Dead Serious, a true crime podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, James Murray.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast contains mature themes.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your discretion is advised.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, and welcome back to Dead Serious.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, how is everyone doing today?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I went to the movies actually this weekend.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a huge horror movie person.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: I saw the new insidious, and it wasn't too bad.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Personally, I feel like there's a lot of lack of like really good horror movies going on right now.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: I really hope they make a comeback.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: One thing I finally realized is where I knew the actress Lynn Shay from.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: She is in the OG, a nightmare on Elm Street.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: She played the teacher whose class Nancy fell asleep in.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Finally put that together.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I knew I knew her from somewhere and I just could not figure it out.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I hate when that happens.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I have got to figure this out.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, all in all, you know, wasn't too bad.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was alright.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: So today's case is going to take us to Chippewa County, Wisconsin, specifically the town of Lake Holcomb, which, if you have never been to northern Wisconsin in winter, my thoughts would be it's just freezing cold all the time.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of all that I would think of.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Just extraordinarily punitively cold.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been, but that's, you know, kind of is what you think.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Wisconsin, winter, like ice, snow, locked in your house forever.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Lake Holcomb sits about 45 minutes north of Chippewa Falls.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: It is a flowage town, a lake made by a dam, ringed with cabins and year-round homes.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: The population is like somewhere in the low thousands.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: It is the kind of place where the volunteer fire department from the next town over shows up when you need help because there is literally nobody else to call.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was the evening of December 26th, 1989, when 16-year-old Tina put her 10-month-old baby, Nicole Lee Hadamer, in her crib with a bottle and a teething ring.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Tina was at her grandparents' Lou Ann and Lee Hadamer's home, along with her younger sister and brother.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: So there are several minors from this case.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: The names, some of them have been released.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So Tina, for instance, you can find out more information on her.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: I just figured I would leave it at that.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Since the case, I guess, you know, it's it's not it's not closed.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it was snowing that evening.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's December, Wisconsin.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Around 1024 that night, the Chippewa County Sheriff's Department received a call.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: It came from the grandmother.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: She reported that the infant was missing from her crypto.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: There are six people in the house.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: One of them was 10 months old.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: She's the only one who cannot walk out the door on her own.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Sheriff Al Dachi's deputies were dispatched.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: They did the sensible thing first.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: They searched the inside of the house.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: A 10-month old who has somehow gotten out of a crib is statistically still in the house, under a bed, in a closet, behind a couch.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: She was not in the house.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So they moved outside into the snowfall.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's the dark, and they are looking for a child dressed in nightclothes.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: They called in an investigator and they also searched a second home in the area.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, when the sheriff was asked at the time why deputy searched another house that night, his answer on the record was that he could not say.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, to me, there is I cannot say that means like I have legit no idea.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a different flavor that means I know exactly why.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I am not going to tell a newspaper on day one of a homicide investigation.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you look a little further into the case, come to find out the father of baby Nicole lived right next door.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: He was 50-year-old.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, 50 years old, Tino was 16, William D.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Larson.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not even sure what to say about this.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously, that's why they would probably look at a second house, but what the hell is going on there?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: The search went on.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: More people came.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: The volunteer fire department from Cornell was called in to help sometime around five o'clock in the morning, which times are not like they're kind of a little bit all over the place with this case.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a little after midnight, we have four o'clock, we have five o'clock.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen some more who say five.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to go with five when the firefighters show up out in the backyard of the home, starting to shout for the deputies to come over.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: There was baby Nicole face down in the snow.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: She was grasping onto one single blade of grass.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Doug Ellis was the lead investigator on the case.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: He would later become the sheriff of Chippewa County himself.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he is retired now, and he has given interviews about that night.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: He has described what he saw in the plainest possible terms: an infant face down in the snow.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And as he said publicly decades later, that it is an image he has never gotten out of his head that you keep a professional face on at work, and then you take a thing like that home with you.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Nicole was about 75 feet from the house.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Investigators concluded, and this is not a leaf, this is the entire foundation of the case, basically, that there's no possible way a chemical child got 75 feet from that house on her own, under her, you know, her own power, her own will, through snow in the dark, in the freezing cold of Wisconsin in December.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody had to have put her there.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: The autopsy did not produce a clean answer.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: What the record supports is this the cause of death was described as exposure or as a breathing difficulty arising from a chest injury, and in later characterizations by authorities as exposure and asphyxiation, possibly resulting from a blow to the chest.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Ellis' working theory, which he has described publicly, was that she was thrown, that she was thrown some distance and landed on the hard packed snow, chest first, and that the impact caused internal bleeding.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: But then we've got the blade of grass.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: She was found with a blade of grass in her hand.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Investigators read that the only way it can be reasonably read that she was alive when she was placed out there.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: If she had been dead before she went out the door, this would be a case about someone disposing of a body.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Terrible, but different.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: She was not dead before she went out the door.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Which means this is a case about a 10-month-old who was put outside alive into a Wisconsin snowfall, 75 feet from a house with the lights on and five adults and near adults inside it, and left there.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: Left there for roughly six and a half hours before anyone found her.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason anyone found her at all is that volunteers from another town drove out in the middle of the night to look.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: On April 20th, 1990, a little under four months after Nicole died, district attorney Tom Starr convened a John Doe hearing.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you are not familiar with the John Doe hearing in Wisconsin, which I am not either, it is an investigative proceeding.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a device prosecutors use when they need testimony and cannot otherwise get it.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: It is closed.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: In the room, you have a judge, a prosecutor, a court reporter, the witness, and the witness's attorney.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the part that's kind of crazy about that.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: The witness attorney is not permitted to address the court or assist their client during the proceeding.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: They are their functionally furniture, basically, which then why do they even have them?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: It is a powerful tool and it is designed for exactly this situation: a room full of people who know something and are not saying it.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: At that hearing, Nicole's grandparents, Lee and Luann Hadamer, invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions about the case.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: So the Fifth Amendment, when that pops up in a murder case, a lot of people automatically, you know, grow suspicions naturally, right?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it exists for good reasons.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Innocent people invoke it on the advice of competent counsel all the time.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: And a court is not permitted to infer guilt from it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: I, however, am permitted to notice it, and I noticed that it happened here in a closed room four months after a 10-month-old was found frozen in a backyard when the question on the table was how she got there.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Following that 1990 hearing, authorities said something on the record that has hung over this case ever since, that the circumstances pointed toward a particular individual and that they did not have enough evidence to charge that person.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: They have never publicly named that individual.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: In 1992, the FBI came in.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Around that time, Ellis put out a public statement, noting that Nikola would have been turning three and making the point that somebody knows what happened and that a person cannot keep a thing like this inside forever.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: In December of 1998, nine years later, the John Doe hearing was reopened.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Across both hearings, dozens of people testified.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And in February of 1999, district attorney Tim Scobie announced that no charges would be filed.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: He said the office still considered it an unsolved homicide and would pursue every legal means available.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got two John Toe hearings, dozens of witnesses, the FBI, three decades of sheriffs, a cause of death that authorities have consistently described as homicide, a suspect that prosecutors said out loud the circumstances pointing to, but zero charges ever.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: How does that happen?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Ellis worked this case for the better part of his career, and clearly he never put it down.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: I say it because the machinery of a county justice system got fully switched on for this child twice and produced nothing.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a fact or sitting on side rather than skipping past.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: There are two silences in this case, and I find both of them extraordinary.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: The first is the family.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Doug Ellis has said publicly that in all the years he worked the case, the Hadimer family never once contacted the sheriff's department not to ask about progress, not to push, not to check in.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: That is very, very strange to me.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm also just gonna say it's strange about the Fifth Amendment.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's got to be another way.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, fam what do families normally do in these types of cases?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: They call, right?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: They call constantly.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: They call so often that detectives learn their voices.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: They fundraise, they put up billboards, they show up at the county board.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: They become, and rightfully so, a genuine and unrelenting nuisance to law enforcement for decades because their person is dead and nobody has answered for it.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: I just find it crazy that personally the family just kind of like never really did anything.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you just have to wonder why.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: That is the baseline.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: That is what grief does when it has nowhere to go.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: The record here per the lead investigator, nobody called.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second silence belongs to the town.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: When a Wisconsin television station went back to Lake Holcomb years later to do an anniversary piece, they could not get anyone to go on camera, not one person.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Reporters were told that people in town simply do not talk about what happened to Nicole.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: The grandparents declined to be interviewed.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously, they fled the fifth.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: The reporters were unable to reach the mother.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Small towns can be tricky, though.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's not always, you know, the reflex not to talk, I don't think, is always a sinister one.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think sometimes it is exhaustion.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it is a neighbor who does not want to make a hard life harder.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's that everyone is related to everyone, and there is no version of speaking up that does not cost you thanksgiving for the rest of your life.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: But a town that will not talk is still a town that is not talking.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Sheriff Jim Kowalsk has said in the plainest terms, a sheriff can use that his department has been through the physical evidence, that there have not been active leads in years, and that what this case needs now is a person, testimony, a confession, somebody who decides that 36 years is long enough.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: That is the entire remaining path.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Not DNA, not a lab, a person deciding to talk.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Nicole Lee Hadamer was born January 29th, 1989, and died December 27th, 1989.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: She was just 10 months old.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: She lived for 332 days.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: She has a grave in Chippewa County.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: A reporter who went out there for one of the anniversary pieces made the observation that she never had a birthday, never got one.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: The Chippewa County Sheriff's Office still does consider this case an open homicide investigation.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have any information, you can call 715-726-7701.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Somebody in that county knows what happened to that baby.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Ellis said that in 1992.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: He was right then, and it's only gotten worse since because the people who know, they're in their 50s, their 60s, and their 70s now.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the part where I let you know that the dead are patient, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: But witnesses are not immortal.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: People are getting older, people are forgetting, people are going to die.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: 36 years is a long time to hold on to something.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can't quite put it down.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: That is the show today.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Please follow me at dead underscore serious pod.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and please share along the way.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate it.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, stay sharp, stay safe, and definitely stay serious.