Rock Falls woman appealing her 45-year murder sentence

MORRISON – A Rock Falls woman sentenced to 45 years for stabbing her best friend to death with a kitchen knife is appealing the term in the Appellate Court.

A jury took two hours on Aug. 5 to find Nichole R. Elsesser guilty of first-degree murder in the death of boxer Tracy Russell, 53.

Russell was killed Dec. 15, 2019, at a home along the river in rural Rock Falls, where the two got into an argument that turned physical.

Judge Trish Senneff sentenced Elsesser on Feb. 1, and gave her credit for 1,144 days served.

Elsesser’s attorney, Michael Jarard of the Jarard Law Group in Chicago, filed a motion to reconsider the sentence during the hearing; it was denied.

He also filed an motion to appeal her sentence; an attorney from the State Appellate Defender’s office will represent her in the appeal, which will be heard in the Fourth District Court in Springfield.

Elsesser stabbed the well-known area boxer after he punched her several times in the back of the head. The 5-foot-5, 135-pound Elsesser then stabbed Russell four times with a steak knife, first in his back shoulder, then, as he swung at her, in his abdomen below his rib cage, in his right upper arm and his left thigh, investigators said.

The wound to his thigh cut an artery, which caused his death. Russell bled to death on the porch at the home in the 22000 block of Brooks Road as other people at the house that day, including Elsesser, drove away.

When they returned an hour later, Russell was dead.

Elsesser told investigators that she and Russell were “best friends,” and that she thought she had stabbed him with a pencil.

Elsesser, 48, was in Whiteside County Jail on $1 million bond since her arrest.

She now is housed in the state’s Logan Correctional Center for women, about 30 miles north of Springfield.

Except for a 2006 misdemeanor conviction in Whiteside County for resisting arrest, she appears to have no felony criminal history in Whiteside, Lee or Ogle counties.

Jarard also filed a motion seeking to set aside the guilty verdict or in the alternative, get a new trial.

In it, Jarard claimed Whiteside County State’s Attorney Terry Costello failed to prove Elsesser guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; the verdict is against the weight of the evidence; she was denied due process and equal protection; the trial was not fair and impartial; the trial was based on evidentiary facts that do not exclude every reasonable hypothesis consistent with her innocence; the court erred in overruling her motion for a directed verdict at the end of the state’s case; and the assistant state’s attorney made prejudicial, inflammatory and erroneous statements in closing arguments that prejudiced her right to a fair trial.

Senneff also denied that motion.

Russell was a former professional boxer and a member of the legendary Jon Russell boxing family of Rock Falls.

He was the father of Jamie Russell, then-coach of the Sauk Valley Community College women’s basketball team and a former youth boxing champion. Jon Russell, who died in 1988, was his brother.