What Happened to Brandon Teena’s Most Famous Ex? (Boys Don’t Cry and The Brandon Teena Story)
The last time Lana Tisdel’s name came up in the press was the year 2000, when she settled a lawsuit with movie distributor Searchlight Pictures for an undisclosed sum.
Brandon Teena and Lana Tisdel
Although she came off as a protagonist in the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, Tisdel didn’t care much for the Hollywood treatment.
Dramatic-license violation: She alleged that the movie used her life story without her permission and unfairly depicted her as a habitual drinker and drug user.
Tisdel (pictured above in her 20s), who had dated Brandon Teena — who was born a girl named Teena Brandon but dressed and lived as a man — also called out Boys Don’t Cry for falsely portraying her as having been present during the shootings that killed Brandon, 22, and witnesses Lisa Lambert, 24, and Phillip Devine, 22, just before New Year’s Day of 1994.
Ex-cons John Lotter and Thomas Nissen had targeted Brandon Teena for murder to quiet a rape case against the two ex-cons.
Maury comes knocking. A year before Boys Don’t Cry, Tisdel herself had appeared in the documentary The Brandon Teena Story, and she seemed like a sympathetic character there, too.
Shortly after the movies came out, Lana and her mother appeared on A Current Affair and TheMaury Povich Show.
So what’s become of the hardscrabble, karaoke-loving Nebraska girl portrayed by actress Chloë Sevigny on the big screen?
Pretty as ever. Today, she maintains a presence on the internet, but she uses her married name, Lana Bachman, and probably isn’t looking to satisfy curiosity seekers.
She has a daughter and two sons and at least one grandchild.
Lana, who in her youth resembled actress Jodie Foster, still has long beautiful strawberry blond hair. She has become more striking with maturity.
It’s not clear what type of work she does or whether she and her husband are still together. (She hitched up with a guy from her hometown of Falls City on Dec. 6, 2001, according to Douglas County records.)
Linda Gutierres was Lana Tisdel’s mother
Struggle to survive. Sadly, her mother, Linda Gutierres, who came off as a flawed but not irredeemable character in the documentary, died in 2003 at the age of 54.
Her obituary didn’t disclose her cause of death.
Linda Gutierres had a rough life. She was wounded in a stabbing attack by an ex-husband and supported her family on a monthly disability check of less than $400, according to an account by writer Eric Konigsberg, who grew up in Omaha.
Including Lana, Linda Gutierres left four children behind.
Unwitting accomplice. Lana’s father, L.L. Tisdel, was not included in either film but inadvertently played a role in springing Brandon Teena from jail.
He gave Lana a blank check for a perm, but she used it to pay Brandon’s $250 in bail instead.
L.L. Tisdel died in 2007 at the age of 71.
In August 2020, Lana suffered a new tragedy when her Ford pickup crossed a center line and fatally injured Chrysler minivan driver Glenn D. Aston in a head-on crash in Fairview, Kansas. Lana herself suffered injuries requiring hospitalization, but she has since recovered. (Thanks to reader Charlene for writing in with the update.)
You can watch the interviews with Lana Tisdel and Linda Gutierres in the documentary on YouTube.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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 Teena, right, dated a number of women but reportedly cared the most about Lana Tisdel
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.
Scene of the triple homicide in Humboldt, Nebraska
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.
A youngish John Lotter and in a recent mug shot
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.
Thomas Nissen in court and in a recent mugshot
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.
