In the spring of 1991, a horrific crime cut short the life of a young woman serving her country. Lisa Ann Nadeau, a 24-year-old female Army Specialist and payroll clerk at Fort Dix, New Jersey, was found brutally murdered in her base residence on or around April 5th. The scene discovered by authorities painted a grim picture of her final moments; she had been bound, beaten with a hammer, stabbed, and ultimately strangled to death. The violence of the act left a lasting scar on the community and her family, who remembered her as a dedicated soldier and a loving single mother to two young children.
For a time, the question of who could have committed such a heinous act remained unanswered. The investigation eventually led to a former Army drill sergeant, Earl J. Richmond Jr., who had been stationed at Fort Dix. Richmond was not immediately considered a suspect in Nadeau's death.
It was his connection to subsequent crimes in North Carolina that ultimately brought his actions in New Jersey to light. After being arrested for the murders of a woman and her two children in North Carolina, DNA evidence linked Richmond to the murder of Lisa Ann Nadeau.
Faced with the irrefutable scientific evidence, Earl J. Richmond Jr. confessed to the murder of the young Army Specialist. He was subsequently tried and convicted for the first-degree murder of Lisa Ann Nadeau and sentenced to life in prison. Following this conviction, he was also found guilty of the murders in North Carolina and received a death sentence for those crimes. Richmond was executed on May 6, 2005, for the slayings of the mother and her two children, having already been held accountable for the violent end he brought to Lisa Ann Nadeau's life.
