An Update on John Lotter and Thomas Nissen
This week, we’ll take a little sabbatical from Forensic Files to observe the 25th anniversary of Brandon Teena’s murder — a true-crime case little known outside of Nebraska until Hollywood came knocking.
Brandon died at the hands of two lowlifes named John Lotter and Marvin “Thomas” Nissen just before New Year’s Day of 1994.
Dissolute youths. The underachieving trio met while they were couch-surfing and partying in the town of Falls City and other spots in Richardson County.
Lotter and Nissen, both 22, were ex-convicts with insurmountable pasts. As writer John Gregory Dunne described them in The New Yorker:
“Their sociopathic curricula vitae were so similar as to be almost interchangeable. Psychiatric instability, tumultuous family lives, absentee parents, trigger tempers, suicidal tendencies, foster homes, a fascination with lethal objects, juvenile detention, sexual promiscuity, substance abuse, crime (theft and attempted burglary for Lotter, arson for Nissen), prison.”
Although Brandon was born to a teenaged widowed mother, he grew up in a relatively stable home.
Name switch. His main problem was having a gender identity crisis in an era when people didn’t talk about that kind of thing openly. He was born a girl but cut his hair short and styled himself as a boy.
While friends would later describe him as sweet, clean cut, and respectable, Brandon did acquire some legal troubles of his own. He used stolen checks and credit cards to pay for flowers and stuffed animals for the women he dated; he was a romantic.
At traffic stops, he tried to skirt the law by giving the pseudonym “Charles Brayman” to police.
Turned to savages. When Lotter and Nissen found out that their recently acquired drinking buddy — who was dating Lotter’s former flame Lana Tisdel — was actually a woman whose real name was Teena Brandon, they became enraged.
They beat up and raped Brandon one night in December 1993.
After Brandon, 21, filed sexual assault charges, Lotter and Nissen decided to kill him in a case that became the subject of the 1998 documentary The Brandon Teena Story and the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry starring Hilary Swank.
Dramatization on big screen. The latter film, a surprise hit, helped raise awareness of the intolerance faced by people in the LGBT community.
Lotter and Nissen, portrayed by actors Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III, were already in prison for murder by the time the movies came out.
In addition to stabbing and shooting Brandon, whom they found hiding beneath a blanket in a farmhouse in Humboldt, the duo murdered witnesses Lisa Lambert, 24, and Phillip Devine, 22.
The killers spared the life of Lambert’s baby son, Tanner. They deposited him in his crib before they fled.
Nissen later admitted that their original plan was to dismember Brandon, but they didn’t have a chance to go through with it, according to court papers.
Ice going, guys. The murderers attempted some precautions. They took a circuitous trip back to Falls City, so no one would see them returning from Humboldt’s direction.
Lotter and Nissen disposed of the murder weapons, a stolen .380-caliber handgun and a knife with “Lotter” written on its case, by throwing them into the Nemaha River. But the water was frozen, and police found the items the next day.
So where are Lotter and Nissen today?
Lotter, whose criminal record traces back to a 1987 theft and escape conviction at age 16, occupies a cell on death row in the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution.
He has kept busy with appeals, all rejected, over the years and recently came up with a new defense tack — that the state can’t execute him because he’s intellectually disabled.
Point person. As a boy, Lotter scored 76 on a school IQ test, but he got only 67 on the one he took while incarcerated.
The latter would land him below Nebraska’s cutoff of 70 points for death chamber eligibility.
But it’s hard to imagine that the justice system would give more credence to an intelligence test taken in prison than one given during childhood — when the taker had no reason to deliberately appear compromised.
Judges unsympathetic. Plus, it’s possible that Lotter is just bad at taking written tests. He’s no Neil deGrasse Tyson, but he speaks distinctly, enunciating “evidentiary hearing” perfectly well, for example.
Whatever the case, in 2018, Nebraska Supreme Court, turned down Lotter’s appeal. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take Lotter’s death penalty appeal.
His ex-pal Thomas Nissen is serving his sentence of life without parole plus 24 years at Lincoln Correctional Center.
Interestingly, although Nissen reportedly has an IQ score in the 80s, Dunne, who corresponded with him in prison, said that Nissen read and understood books written by Dunne’s wife, the literary journalist Joan Didion.
New development. In 2007, Nissen made a surprise announcement that he, and not Lotter, actually fired the bullets that killed Brandon Teena, Phillip Devine, and Lisa Lambert.
Lotter demanded a new trial on that basis, but he never got one. Regardless of who pulled the trigger, Lotter helped plan the murders, which makes him legally accountable just the same.
Brandon’s mother, JoAnn, won $80,000 in a civil suit against the county for failing to arrest Lotter and Nissen immediately after the rape charges were filed.
No visible means of support. But a court later reduced Richardson County’s liability. JoAnn received only $17,000, according to an account from writer Charles Laurence that ran in the (Ottawa) Citizen’s Weekly on April 2, 2000.
The killers, who reportedly had a total of $5 between them at the time of their arrests, would have to pay the balance, the court decided.
It’s unclear whether Lotter and Nissen were ever employed or what they did otherwise to obtain beer and gas money before their arrests for murder.
Their reduced circumstances, however, haven’t stopped the pair from snagging love interests while behind bars.
Not in the social register. Nissen became engaged to a pen pal from Chicago in 2006, according to the Omaha World Herald.
Lotter applied for a license to marry Jeanne Bissonnette, 50, of Lakewood, Washington, in 2013, according to the Omaha World Herald.
The newspaper story mentioned that Nebraska state prisons don’t keep records of inmate weddings, so there’s no way to find out whether the men followed through and actually got married.
But Lotter and Nissan don’t have a whole lot at stake in that regard. Nebraska isn’t one of the six states that allow conjugal visits.
You can watch the documentary about the case on YouTube.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
P.S. Read an update on Lana Tisdel and her mother.
