Table of Contents

From the Notorious USA Team

Notorious Michigan

FOREWORD

SENSATIONAL YOOPER MURDERS

SLAUGHTER IN JACKSON

STRANGENESS AS EVIDENCE

MALIGNANT RESENTMENT

BROTHERS IN HARMS

THE COED MURDERS

THE BABYSITTER

LONELY HEARTS

FIRST STEP ON A DARK ROAD

THE TIDE GOES OUT

THE ANN ARBOR HOSPITAL MURDERS

MENTAL TWIST

THREE LEVELS BELOW DELIVERANCE

THE MURDER GAME

VENGEANCE

PUPPY LOVE REJECTED

FATAL ATTRACTION

PHOTO ARCHIVE

From New York Times Bestselling Author

Katherine Ramsland

PRAISE FOR KATHERINE RAMSLAND

"Katherine Ramsland has made many valuable contributions to the fields of forensic psychology, crime analysis and criminal justice as exemplified in her books The Human Predator and The Mind of a Murderer among others. It is rare to find someone with the breadth and depth of knowledge that Dr. Ramsland commands, even more so for such an individual to also be a gifted teacher and a wise and compassionate human being."

—Former FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary

“Ramsland’s books are incisive and thorough, and demonstrate a depth of knowledge not only about criminal behavior, but about human behavior as well. She has the rare ability to explain complex phenomena in simple terms.”

—Dr. Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

“Dr. Ramsland has the ability to comprehend complex issues, analyze them meticulously, and express her opinions and conclusions in a completely objective manner.”

—Cyril Wecht, Past President, American Academy of Forensic Sciences

The Unknown Darkness

“This is a must-read for true crime fans. A beautifully written expert analysis of high profile killers.”

—Ann Rule, New York Times bestselling true crime author

“One of the most immensely readable and gripping accounts of serial murder I have ever read.”

—Colin Wilson, bestselling author of Serial Killers

The Forensic Science of CSI

“With the mind of a true investigator, Ramsland demystifies the world of forensics with authentic and vivid detail.”

—John Douglas, Former FBI profiler and BSU chief

“Fascinating...a must for anyone who wonders how the real crime solvers do it.”

—Michael Palmer, New York Times bestselling medical novelist

Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today

“A riveting read, a model of engaged journalism.”

—Publisher’s Weekly

Inside the Minds of Serial Killers

“In the area of psychological research on serial killers, Dr. Katherine Ramsland has distinguished herself as a unique thinker with a fascinating approach to case analysis. Anyone who takes this subject seriously should read this book.”

—Robert K. Ressler, Former FBI profiler

Inside the Minds of Healthcare Serial Killers

“Timely and riveting…”

—Beatrice Yorker, Dean, College of Healthcare and Human Services, Cal State, LA

Beating the Devil's Game

"Once again Katherine Ramsland has brilliantly captured the insights and drama of some fascinating cases."

—Dr. Henry C. Lee

The Real Life of a Forensic Scientist

“…strongly recommended for every practitioner, student, and devotee of this exciting profession.”

—Dr. Cyril Wecht, past president of American Academy of Forensic Sciences

“A must read for the CSI crowd.”

—Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner, NYC

Ghost: Investigating the Other Side

“The best book of its kind I’ve ever read.”

—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author

“Ramsland is a master of foreboding.”

—Publishers Weekly

Snap! Seizing our Aha! Moments

"Both motivational and informative, Snap is a treat to read! Katherine Ramsland will singlehandedly increase the number of bright ideas to be born in the coming decade!"

—Shelley Carson, author, Your Creative Brain

I've always said intuition is the highest form of knowledge. SNAP shows me why I might be right. This is a fascinating exploration of the mind when it's in hyperdrive, as illuminating as it is fun to read. Ms. Ramsland reveals the science and psychology of the aha! moment in vivid detail, with intriguing examples, while being wise enough to leave room for the consideration of a mystical element to human consciousness. Highly recommended."

—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author

“Of course, someone who had so much insight into the human mind – who had worked as a therapist, who had a graduate degree in clinical psychology – would be able not only to explain the troubled mind, but would also be able to explore what’s best and smartest about the way we think.

—Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Blum, Author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

The Heat Seekers

“Katherine Ramsland is a marvelous novelist, who approaches her subject with chilling, fascinating inner knowledge. The Heat Seekers is a gem.”

—Whitley Strieber, New York Times bestselling novelist

KATHERINE RAMSLAND began her career as a writer with Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. She had a bestseller with The Vampire Companion. Since then, she has published 40 books and over 1,000 articles, reviews and short stories. From ghosts to vampires to serial killers, she has taken on a variety of dark subjects. She holds graduate degrees in forensic psychology, clinical psychology, criminal justice, and philosophy. Currently, she teaches forensic psychology and criminal justice at DeSales University. She speaks internationally about forensic psychology, forensic science, and serial murder, and has appeared on numerous documentaries, as well as such programs as The Today Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, NPR, Coast to Coast, Montel Williams, Larry King Live and E! True Hollywood.

GREGG OLSEN is the New York Times bestselling author of eighteen books, true crime and fiction, including Fear Collector, A Twisted Faith, Starvation Heights, Abandoned Prayers, If Loving You Is Wrong and a dozen others. His book Envy was Washington State’s selection at the National Book Festival in 2012.

THE MURDER GAME

Katherine Ramsland

Copyright 2014 by Katherine Ramsland and Gregg Olsen

All Rights Reserved

Book Cover Design by BEAUTeBOOK

Map by Brad Arnesen

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the authors.

Published by Notorious USA

From the Notorious USA Team

WELCOME TO THE LATEST INSTALLMENT IN THE New York Times bestselling series of stories about America’s most notorious criminals.

That’s right. No matter where you live, you’re in the middle of Notorious USA.

For this edition, Notorious USA, Michigan, Katherine Ramsland takes on the famous and not so famous cases that still haunt the state. Katherine is one of the best in the business and here she takes readers on a journey through darkness with insight and clarity. This is one of my personal favorites in the annals of Notorious USA. I hope you agree!

Don’t miss Bodies of Evidence, Notorious USA’s first box set and New York Times bestselling collection about the criminals from our neck of the woods (the Pacific Northwest). Like all of our collection, Bodies of Evidence is available as an eBook on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.

Your crime scribe,

Gregg Olsen

Notorious

Michigan

FOREWORD

YOU KNOW YOU’RE FROM MICHIGAN if you point to a spot on the palm of your right hand to show where on the “mitten” you live or angle that hand, thumb up, to show it on the “rabbit.” You know the difference between a Yooper and a Loper, and you can drive 80 miles per hour through two feet of snow (passing on the right). You eat rather than wear a pastie, and you acknowledge the mosquito as the state bird.

I’m a Loper, and because I’m from “below the bridge” that connects the two parts of Michigan, people in the Upper Peninsula (Yoopers) call me a troll. I’ve followed crimes in my home state since my youth, with particular attention to our bloodbaths and serial killers. Many people don’t know that Michigan holds the record for victim toll from a schoolyard massacres.

I’ve always wanted to write a crime book about Michigan. I grew up near Ann Arbor (“A2”), and the more I’ve immersed in true crime narratives, the more surprised I am by how many notorious criminals have passed through A2 in some shape or form. “Devil in the White City” H. H. Holmes went to medical school at the University of Michigan, where Unabomber Ted Kaczynski got his Ph.D. in mathematics and the notorious Leopold and Loeb attended classes. John List, who slaughtered his entire family in New Jersey and became a prominent success story for America’s Most Wanted, also attended this university.

Ted Bundy stopped in A2 briefly while on the run from a Colorado jail. He toasted the new year of 1978 and watched a Rose Bowl game before deciding that A2 was too cold and too expensive. He stole a car and headed to Florida. John Norman Collins, convicted of one co-ed murder in the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area, is unofficially linked to several others. Someone still unknown overdosed at least ten patients in the city’s VA hospital, and the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” believed to be Carl “Coral” Eugene Watts, killed three women in Ann Arbor, where Watts had once been evaluated for “dangerousness.”

In fact, Watts made history in serial killer lore. After fatally stabbing two women in Detroit, Watts fled to Texas. He was arrested there for burglary and aggravated assault. But Texas had ten unsolved murders that bore similar circumstances to those in Michigan, so officials cast their eye on Watts. He made a deal to confess, adding two in Michigan, in exchange for immunity. They agreed – to their later regret. In a legal quirk for early release, Watts was set to become the first confessed serial killer to be freed. But then a witness came forward in the murder of Helen Dutcher, so a Michigan jury convicted Watts, keeping him in prison. Whew!

I had my own collection of Michigan true crime, but while out in a boat on one of the Wolverine State’s many lakes, I asked my companions about crimes they recalled. This gave me more tales that I hadn’t heard. We’ll start with three from the U. P.

SENSATIONAL YOOPER MURDERS

IN 1913 IN CALUMET’S ITALIAN HALL, over 500 children attended a Christmas party, and many were on the second floor awaiting Santa’s attention. Then someone yelled “Fire!” People panicked.

Adults and children ran together for the only staircase to the ground floor. It soon got crowded. The first people to reach the exit got out, but a throng pushed against the door and clogged the opening. People still descending the stairs smashed into those below them, suffocating or trampling some underfoot. The shrieks of children filled the air. Within minutes, bodies piled up, extending thirty feet up the staircase.

The place was a madhouse of chaos, as people searched for ways to get out. A few stopped to help others, but there was nothing they could do for those already dead. Some of these Samaritans were injured as well.

Seventy-three people died on that terrible day. Sixty-two were children. No one knows who called out “fire,” but no evidence of fire was found. It seemed nothing short of an evil act. If it was a prank, it was a very poor one. Now the town had to collect the dead.

Suspicion arose that the alarm had been aimed at strikebreakers, who’d recently made it difficult for striking miners to force owners to improve their working conditions. Yet several people claimed that they’d seen a man raise the alarm who was wearing a button for “Citizens Alliance” (local businessmen trying to help settle the strike). This seemed inconsistent with CA’s purpose, so it was assumed that a striker might have used the button to throw false blame on the alliance to discredit them. Or punish them.

Yet there might have been another motive. The owner of the saloon on the first floor had rushed to help people on the staircase. When he returned, he found his till empty and much of the liquor gone. Perhaps an opportunist had seen him leave or perhaps the shout about a fire had been a set-up for robbery.

The festivities, intended to bring a bright spot to a dismal season for the impoverished miners, became one of the greatest tragedies in Michigan’s history. The burials took place right after Christmas. The person responsible was never identified.

AN UNUSUAL INSANITY DEFENSE IN MARQUETTE COUNTY COURT in 1952 became quite famous. Thanks to a Jimmy Stewart movie, people still know about it today.

This tale began when Charlotte Peterson came home one evening with a torn skirt and no panties. She claimed that the local Big Bay tavern owner, Mike Chenoweth, had raped her. Her husband, Coleman, made her swear on a rosary that she was telling the truth. She said that Chenoweth had offered her a ride home from the tavern and had pulled over and forced himself on her. She offered her disheveled clothing and facial bruises as proof.

Already insanely possessive, Peterson armed himself with his handgun and marched directly to the Lumberjack Tavern, about a quarter mile from his home. In front of numerous witnesses, he walked up to Chenoweth, raised his gun, and shot him. He then walked out. Peterson was quickly arrested. He said he didn’t recall the shooting, but since his gun was empty, he believed he must have done it.

John Voelker, a former district attorney who was depressed over having been voted out of office, was eager to defend Peterson. It seemed an impossible case to win, but he was determined to prove himself against the man who’d successfully campaigned for his job, Edmund Thomas. For Voelker, this case was about showing the voters who the best attorney was. They’d see how wrong they were.

Although there was no evidence that Charlotte had actually been raped, and plenty of witnesses had seen her comporting herself in an “unladylike” manner at the tavern for several hours (this apparently just meant that she’d removed her shoes to play pool), the point was whether her husband had believed her. If he had, then blind rage could have driven him to do something about it.

Thomas teamed up with a Lansing-based assistant attorney general, Irving Beattie, which gave Voelker the chance to turn the case into a small town vs. big city competition, as well as a U.P. vs. L.P. conflict. He knew this would give him an edge with the locals on the jury.

In the opulent Marquette County Courthouse, the prosecutors offered their reconstruction of events: Peterson had done it, there was no doubt, and on the walk between his trailer and the tavern, he’d had time to consider what he was doing. Thus, his act could only be construed as first-degree, premeditated murder.

Voelker conceded that Peterson had killed Chenoweth, but insisted that he’d had an “irresistible impulse” resulting from temporary insanity and a memory blackout. In other words, Peterson had not had the presence of mind to be able to stop himself. It had been an act of blind rage.

Let’s take a moment to review this concept. The legal system recognizes that responsibility for committing a crime depends on two things: actus reus, or evidence that the accused was able to engage in the act (and did), and mens rea, the mental state required to have intended to commit an act and foreseen its consequences. The standard for determining criminal responsibility varies by state, but in the context of a trial, insanity is not a diagnostic concept. It is a legal concept related to, but not synonymous with, severe mental illness.

As confusing as it might seem, one can be psychotic but be judged sane because he or she understood that the act was wrong when doing it. One can also be judged temporarily insane while having no mental illness. In some states, defendants can give evidence of reduced mental ability without having to claim insanity. They can say they did not purposely or knowingly commit the crime, or that they could not have meaningfully premeditated it, and this could win a lesser verdict and sentence. People acting under duress might also be excused.

Let’s add one more twist: In homicide cases in some states, extreme emotional disturbance might be claimed for a possible reduced charge to manslaughter. Four things must be proven: 1) that the provocation would cause a reasonable person to violently react, 2) the provocation actually caused the reaction, 3) there was no time for a reasonable person to cool off between the provoking act and the reaction, and 4) the defendant did not cool off. In situations such as the discovery of something suddenly enraging, such as adultery or someone molesting your child, reasonable people might act before thinking.

It all comes down to what a reasonable person might do. In other words, in the Peterson case, an “irresistible impulse” defense was risky, given how much time he’d had to reconsider what he was doing.

Despite the evidence, the jury acquitted Peterson. Two doctors who had no training in psychology or psychiatry pronounced him currently sane and therefore safe. In other words, he’d been in the grip of temporary insanity or irresistible impulse on the night of the murder, but now he was fine. He would not be incarcerated anywhere, not even a mental institution.

Buoyed by his victory, Voelker turned the case into a blockbuster novel, Anatomy of a Murder. It was made into a movie in 1959 starring Jimmy Stewart. Most of the movie was filmed in the Marquette area.

IN JUNE 1991, FAMILY MAN AND CHURCHGOER David Allan Goodreau was the last person anyone would suspect in the murders of two young women in Houghton. Yet, he was what we’d call an “inconspicuous predator.” He lived a double life. People liked this well educated, mild-mannered social worker. He put up a good front. Fortunately he was stopped before he could victimize more women.

On June 26, the body of Kathy Nankervis was found in the Portage Canal, near Lake Superior. It had been submerged for about two weeks. She had two children and was known to be depressed, so officials wondered if she’d committed suicide, especially since it was difficult to determine how she’d died.

Six months later, in January 1992, another victim turned up. Michigan Tech coed Jodi Watts, 19, had been raped and stabbed to death in a parking ramp in Houghton. She’d crawled 150 feet to seek help. Someone found her, but she soon died before she could identify her attacker. There were no leads and no witnesses.

Since this was the second murder in the general area, the FBI sent a profiler to assist local law enforcement. The special agent believed that the two incidents were related, but added little to the investigation. He said the man would be strong and angry, facts that were plain to any homicide detective.

On June 24, 1993, a Hancock resident reported someone trying to break in to her apartment in the middle of the night. The police arrived quickly and saw Goodreau nearby. They took him in to ask him what he was doing there and he quickly confessed to both unsolved murders. He offered details.

Goodreau had seen Nankervis in her home when he peeked through a window, and had abducted her for rape. He bound her and took her to the canal. After raping her, he decided to kill her. He drowned her and submerged the body, but it resurfaced. He repeatedly stabbed it in an effort to release air so it would sink, but he didn’t puncture the stomach. That was his error. The body eventually floated and a fisherman spotted it.

Goodreau had abducted Watts when she was jogging. He’d dragged her into the parking structure to rape her. He didn’t realize he hadn’t killed her on the spot.

At a bench trial, Goodreau insisted that satanic forces had influenced him. No one took him seriously and he was convicted.

SLAUGHTER IN JACKSON

JACKSON WAS A MUCH SMALLER TOWN in lower central Michigan in 1883 than it is today, but by any standards the assault on the Jacob Crouch family was extreme. On the night of November 21, there was a violent storm. The thunder that rolled through buffered gunfire that killed four people in their sleep. Jacob, 74, was a victim, along with his eight-months-pregnant daughter, Eunice White, her husband, and a visitor from Pennsylvania named Moses Polley.

George Bolles, a 16-year-old black farmhand, had been a man outside during the storm holding a lantern. Then he’d heard a terrible scream that sent him scampering for a hiding place. The next day, he’d entered the house and discovered the bodies.

Local law enforcement found that Jacob had been shot in the head, as was Moses Polley, while Eunice had taken four bullets and her husband two. A photographer was asked to get a likeness of Eunice White’s eyes, in the hope of seeing the killer’s image reflected in them (a common notion in those days). Apparently, it wasn’t, as no suspect was identified from this method.

Then in a bizarre aftermath two months later, Jacob’s other daughter, Susan Holcomb, was found dead in her home. She’d been poisoned. Then Crouch’s former hired hand, James Fay, died. Despite the evidence of murder, his death was declared a suicide (perhaps with the idea of closing the case by casting blame on him for all the murders). With six people dead (seven, with the unborn child), the local residents were pretty rattled.

One theory held that Jacob, a wealthy wheat farmer who owned 1,000 acres, had planned to leave his fortune to Eunice’s unborn child and cut out his grown children, Susan, Judd and Byron. Rumors arose that Byron had hired a band of Texas cowboys to kill his father and the others. Yet even with the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency on the case, nothing of merit turned up.

Nevertheless, in March 1884, Judd Crouch and Daniel Holcomb, Susan’s husband, were charged with the murders. Daniel’s trial started on Nov. 8, 1884. Prosecutor Frank Hewlett, who was in poor health, died before it was over. (A witness was also killed during the trial by her ax-wielding husband.) All evidence offered was circumstantial. There were no witnesses to the actual shooting and the lone witness outside had not seen the male figure very closely, so the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Judd was never brought to trial.

In 1886, three bloody shirts were found buried inside the stump of a tree on the Holcomb property. Some believed they were associated with the slaughter, but to whom they belonged remained as much a mystery as the other incidents.

STRANGENESS AS EVIDENCE

ON THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 25, 1913, Mary Nordham went over to her neighbor’s house in Chelsea. Mrs. Elizabeth Stapish, 78, failed to answer her knock. She tried again. Same result.

Thinking she was out, Mary came back later. There was still no response. Then she found the door unlocked. This was uncharacteristic. With growing concern, Mary let herself in. On the kitchen table she saw a package of meat, still wrapped but smelling as if it had been sitting in the open too long. Elizabeth’s purse sat next to it and her walking skirt, hat and cape were hanging up. It appeared as if she’d been interrupted while unpacking purchases.

Elizabeth’s husband was long dead, so she lived alone. She supported herself by selling chickens, eggs, and produce from her garden. Because she had a delusional mental illness for which she’d once been hospitalized for three years, and was probably quite eccentric, she attracted attention. She often wore odd colors and mismatched clothes. She also had mood swings, especially depression, and she was always afraid, even of people she knew. She was also fanatical about religion and money. After her husband’s death, her brother had been appointed her guardian. Yet, she lived on her own.

When Mary determined that Elizabeth was not home, despite all the signs that she should be, she asked other neighbors to help her search. Someone mentioned having seen Elizabeth walking out to the barn earlier that day, where she often husked corn from her garden. Someone else suggested that she might have killed herself.

Deputy sheriff J. Edward McKune arrived and went through the house before going out to the outhouse and barn. Around 5:30 PM, he found the barn door latched on the outside. He had to push it over a stone impediment before getting inside. It was dark in the barn, but he could make out a pile of cornstalks in the center. He brushed at them and found Elizabeth’s mangled body.

She was lying on her back. Her hands were folded over her chest. Her face was discolored and her eyes and tongue were protruding. At first appearance, it looked like a clear case of murder by strangulation. A trunk strap was pulled so tight around her neck it was embedded in her flesh. The belt buckle was at the back. Her legs were bound with a cord typically meant for tying corn. Her bruised head was covered by blood-drenched newspaper. It appeared that silo refuse was used as a gag and there was reason to believe she’d been sexually assaulted.

McKune reported to his superiors. They arrived in Chelsea shortly after an acting coroner removed the body to a funeral parlor on Main Street. The officials prepared for an inquest.

Investigators searched the barn for possible clues, and others went over the ground to look for footprints. Dr. S. G. Bush examined the body. He knew he had to be careful, lest fragile evidence might be inadvertently destroyed in the examination. He wasn’t sure whether the abrasions had occurred before the death, in an unrelated event, or during the death struggle. The physician couldn’t establish whether a sexual assault had preceded the death, but it was clear that she’d been strangled. Still, he couldn’t rule out suicide. The sheriff wanted the doctor to analyze the stomach contents to check for poisoning, but he said it wasn’t possible because the body was oddly saturated in embalming fluid, which had entered the stomach. (This seemed like an odd statement in the narrative I found, and I think the sheriff’s request must have occurred after she’d been prepared for her funeral.)

The death was a mystery. Those who suggested suicide said that Elizabeth could have suspended the strap from a rafter in the barn and placed it around her neck. During the death struggle she’d pulled down the cornstalks that covered her body from an overhead loft. She was just strange enough to have impulsively interrupted her chores in the house, like putting away meat, to spontaneously kill herself.

Yet, against suicide as the manner of death was the fact that she was dressed in many garments, which “one bent on suicide would have shed.” Her legs were tied with twine, which was considered more consistent with homicide. Experienced investigators were certain her legs had been tied to keep her from kicking her killer as she was being strangled. Also, the latch was closed on the outside, and it was necessary to lift the door over a stone door block in order to open it.

Investigators did discover something in the house that surprised them. Not only was the dead woman a hoarder but she also hoarded rather expensive items. The house was one of the oldest in Chelsea, and looked rundown, but they found numerous colorful hats, shoes never worn, new silk underwear, and many fine blankets. The clothing was quite expensive, despite the decedent’s apparently poor financial circumstances. She also had an assortment of baby bibs and a collection of silver coins, found hidden in a salt bag.

With this discovery, Sheriff Stark thought that robbery had been a motive. There was a belief among neighbors that Elizabeth kept money hidden in the house. It was clear that she’d taken many precautions against theft. She had burglar alarms on all windows and doors, and she’d devised a system of securing her trunks on wooden blocks, which would have alerted her if someone had tried to move one. A likely suspect was someone who knew about her paranoia and/or her money.

Investigators reconstructed the crime thus: Elizabeth had returned from the butcher shop, and after changing, checked her hiding places. Someone had followed her and seen her looking, and then hit her in the head. Tying her legs, he’d used his belt to strangle her. He then carried her body to the barn. He hid her under the corn stalks and locked the barn door to delay discovery. (This actually seems like odd behavior in the middle of the day when neighbors could see someone carrying a body to the barn. It also doesn’t explain why Elizabeth wouldn’t have put the meat away before checking her hiding places.)

In terms of suspects, about 150 railroad workers were camped in shacks not far from the Stapish house. The back of her property adjoined the railroad property. They knew of her and often bought her chickens and produce. She was known to haggle over the price, which might have made some enemies. An observant person could have learned her habits, and in fact, some of these workers had exploited a hole in her fence to steal from her garden. The belt around her neck was consistent with that used by the men on the crew.

Numerous workers were questioned, but no suspect was established. The coroner’s jury heard the various notions that people offered and came to the conclusion that the death was a homicide. It was never solved.

MALIGNANT RESENTMENT

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS GOT THE NATION’S ATTENTION during the 1990s, but few people realize that one of the deadliest occurred over half a century earlier in Bath. At the time, this town was a small community of about 300 people. Everyone knew everyone else, and they all knew Andrew P. Kehoe, an irascible man who’d bought a 185-acre farm in 1919. He complained a lot, kept to himself, and was reportedly cruel to his animals.

The Bath Consolidated School opened in 1922, bringing together children from the general area under one roof. This raised the taxes but kept the children safer and standardized their education. Kehoe was unhappy, because he had so much land for taxation assessment, so he took a seat on the school board to try to keep spending under control. When he lost that battle, he made deadlier plans. For him, it was all over.

On May 18, 1927, M. R. Ellsworth was planting melons on property that adjoined Kehoe’s. He was half a mile from the school and could see its chimney over the tree line. Around 9:45 AM, he heard a terrible explosion. Unsure where it came from, he looked around and saw smoke and flames at Kehoe’s property, seemingly from a barn. Just as Ellsworth hollered for help, he saw the other buildings go up in flames. But then he realized that the school had exploded. A plume of smoke erupted in that direction.

Ellsworth and his wife got in the car to race into town to find their son, who was in the second grade. They could hear children screaming. Upon arriving, they learned that their son was safe, but many other children had perished. Ellsworth saw a pile of small bodies under a crumbled wall, with dust, pieces of plaster and blood mixed together. He ran to get rope and saw Kehoe driving into town. Kehoe waved at him with a smile. It made no sense… unless… Kehoe had done this.

Ellsworth’s suspicions were sound. About half an hour later, Kehoe blew up his own truck, killing himself.

Thirteen ambulances arrived to remove the dead and a coroner’s jury was hastily assembled. The charred body of Kehoe’s wife was discovered behind his empty sheep barn, now burned to the ground. His two horses were also dead, hobbled with wire to prevent them escaping the fire. A picture emerged that Kehoe had planned all of this to punish everyone before taking his own life. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise.

When he was younger, Kehoe had been suspected in an “accident” that had fatally burned his stepmother, whom he despised. Apparently, if he didn’t like a situation, he set about to change it, no matter what the cost to others. He was perpetually resentful, holding grudges when people wouldn’t abide by his wishes. He once shot his neighbor’s dog just because the animal annoyed him.

Over a period of months, Kehoe had purchased dynamite and an explosive called Pyrotol, a WWI surplus product. Inside the school, he worked on “repairs,” but officials discovered after the explosion that he’d actually wired charges all over the building – over 1,000 pounds of explosives. At the same time, he’d wired his own home with firebombs. Then he’d bided his time until the target date.

“On Monday evening of May 16, 1927, two days before the tragedy,” Ellsworth wrote in his book, “Mrs. Blanche Harte, fifth grade teacher, called Mr. Kehoe over the telephone and asked him if she could bring her class to his woods on Thursday for a picnic. He told her that would be all right and after asking her a few questions about some school records, they hung up. A short time afterwards Kehoe called her over the telephone and asked her if she couldn't just as well have her picnic on Tuesday, as it might rain Thursday. I suppose he wanted the children to have a little fun before he killed them.”

That same Monday evening, Kehoe bludgeoned his wife to death after bringing her home from an extended hospital stay (which had cost him a lot of money). He also wired his fruit trees and sawed the grapevines, leaving them to stand on their stumps as if still intact. He also bound the legs of his horses.

The next day, as the children arrived for school, Kehoe set his barn on fire and detonated the bombs at his home. Then he went down to town and detonated the school. The entire town was in chaos, not knowing to which incident they should respond.

As the day was reconstructed, it became clear that Kehoe had abandoned his burning property and driven into town in a truck filled with dynamite. For the final part of his mission, he beckoned the superintendent of schools, Emory Huyck, to his truck and then shot into the explosives in the back seat. Flying shrapnel killed Huyck and another man whom Kehoe despised. Kehoe died, too, sliced up and thrown into a woman’s garden.

In the end, Kehoe had largely failed, because a short circuit had prevented his handiwork from bringing down the whole school, which had been his intent. Yet thirty-eight children had died and eight adults, including Kehoe. Sixty-one others were seriously injured.

Kehoe had left behind a sign, posted on his property, to explain his madness: Carefully hand-lettered on a piece of wood were the words, “Criminals are made, not born.” His remains were gathered and he was buried in an unmarked grave.

BROTHERS IN HARMS

IN THE HISTORY OF CRIME, WE’VE SEEN BROTHERS AND COUSINS become killing teams, but familial teams are rare. The only family known thus far in the U.S. (perhaps the world) that produced two serial killers in unrelated incidents with entirely different victim types was the Ranes family in Kalamazoo.

It started on May 30, 1964, with the discovery of a body.

At around 5:00 P.M. on that Saturday afternoon, a patrol officer made a routine inspection of an abandoned Chevy. He saw bloodstains on the bumper and papers scattered in the front seat, so he had the car towed to a police post. Around the same time, Mrs. Gary Smock was in the station to file a missing person report. She heard about the car and said it sounded like her husband’s. He’d gone missing the night before.

When the car’s trunk was popped for inspection, Smock’s body was inside, shot in the head. He’d been a 31-year-old junior high teacher from Plymouth. An autopsy indicated that he’d been shot just below the ear with a .22 caliber weapon. A cord was wrapped around one wrist as if he’d been bound, and his shoes and watch were missing. He’d been dead no more than twelve hours.

The police canvased local lodgings to try to reconstruct Smock’s final hours. That Friday, he’d been on his way to see his in-laws in Allegan, leaving from an appointment in Battle Creek. Smock’s wife had heard from him around 6:00 PM, when he said he was on his way but would be too late for dinner. That night around 11 PM, his car had been spotted at a Kalamazoo service station. A palm print and fingerprint were lifted and were determined to belong to someone other than Smock. Another bullet was recovered from the floor of the car’s trunk, and while Smock’s billfold was empty, a check had been written on Friday evening to “Cash” for $11.

Early the following morning, around 60 miles away in Elkhart, Indiana, service station attendant Charles Snyder had been shot twice in the head, also with a .22, and $100 was missing. Given the half tank of gas in Smock’s car, police estimated that it had gone at least 100 miles after being filled at 11:00 PM.

In less than a week, thanks to a tip from a local resident, they nabbed the perpetrator.

Larry Lee Ranes, 19, had spent three months hitchhiking across the country. On Thursday, June 4, he went to the home of an acquaintance, Arthur Booth, and confessed that he’d killed some people. He was going to go talk to a priest and then commit suicide. Booth alerted the police.

Ranes was arrested at Booth’s home wearing Smock’s stolen watch and shoes. He had just 15 cents on him. He admitted to the murders of both men and handed over his .22 caliber handgun. Ranes said that Smock had offered him a ride and Ranes had forced him to drive to a country road where Ranes robbed him of $3. Then he’d ordered Smock into the trunk of the car and instructed him to be quiet. When Smock had thumped to make himself heard, Ranes had tied him up and shot him. Then he’d shut the body into the trunk. Hungry, he’d bought a hamburger and then drove to Indiana. There he’d killed the gas station attendant, grabbed money, and returned to Kalamazoo. He’d gone through a police roadblock with Smock still in the trunk. He’d returned to the point at which he’d met Smock and abandoned the car, hitchhiking into Kalamazoo.

Ranes was bound over to Circuit Court and a psychiatric examination got underway before Eugene Field, his public defender, arrived.

Even before Ranes was caught, investigators had speculated over whether Smock’s killer had also shot and killed a service station attendant on April 6 in Battle Creek. Vernon LeBenne was shot with a .22 while working at an I-94 Interchange near where Smock had been driving. When asked about it, Ranes confessed to this murder, too. Then he added two more in two other states. One victim had picked him up near Death Valley on May 23 and the other was another gas station attendant in Kentucky.

RANES HAD NO CRIMINAL RECORD, but he’d been a troublemaker throughout his adolescence. He’d grown up in Woodward in an abusive and unstable home, and was a year younger than his brother, Danny. Their father was an alcoholic who got mean when he drank and would hit whoever was close by. Each of the kids took a share of the abuse before the man finally walked out, but by this time the damage was done. He’d modeled the use of violence to get through life, and the boys took out their frustrations on each other.

Ranes had tried the military but ended up in the stockade for the latter part of his stint before he was discharged. Then, feeling that his life would be short, he began to wander.

He was charged in only the Smock murder, with other charges in reserve pending the results of the trial. Mounted posses from the sheriff’s department combed the area west of Kalamazoo where Ranes had killed Smock to locate physical evidence, such as the flashlight that Ranes said he’d tossed from the car. They did not find it.

At the end of September, the trial began in Kalamazoo County Circuit Court. Assistant Prosecutor Donald Burge had prepared slides of Smock’s body. Eugene Field objected to their graphic nature, but the judge admitted twelve.

The courtroom battle centered on the question of Ranes’s sanity. Several psychologists testified that he’d committed murder during periods of temporary insanity from rage against a father who’d beat him mercilessly. Ranes’s father had once been a gas station attendant, which supported this defense, as did the fact that his victims had closely resembled his father.

The jury didn’t buy it. Ranes was convicted of Smock’s murder and given a life sentence. He appealed it, based on the fact that the prosecutor’s psychiatrists had started to examine him before he was properly represented by counsel, and he won a new trial. Yet when it became clear to him that his insanity plea was weak, he pled guilty and received a new life sentence.

BY THIS TIME, OLDER BROTHER DANNY was acting out. He’d served a prison term for assault and was paroled early in 1972 when he was 28. Within a month, he committed another crime. Most of the details came from his accomplice, Brent Koster, who was 15 at the time. Koster said that shortly after he met Danny Ranes in June, Ranes described the incident to him and showed him where it happened.

In March, Patricia Howk, 29, left home with her seventeen-month-old son, Cory, to do some shopping. Ranes accosted her before stabbing her to death, leaving her son to wander aimlessly until an elderly woman found him the next day and called the police. The boy had blood on him, so they searched for his mother and found Howk’s body behind the Independent Elevator Company building. Her billfold was missing, so robbery seemed a possible motive.

Koster said that Danny had seen the woman go into a Topp’s department store, so he’d parked his Corvair van next to her car to wait. She came out with her son and buckled him in. Then she came around to the driver’s side, where Ranes was waiting. He pulled a knife and forced her to get into his van, where he bound and raped her. He left her bound as he forced her into the front. He tried to strangle her but she fought him, scratching his face. They struggled so hard they fell out of the van to the ground.

Danny stabbed her in the back but he said that “it didn’t seem to have much effect,” so he gave the knife a twist. “That did it,” he claimed. Somehow the child had gotten out of the car and was standing near the van, crying. Danny figured that the boy wouldn’t recall anything because he was too young, so he left him alone.

Danny suggested to Koster that they grab a girl, rape her, take her money and valuables, and kill her. Although Koster was just 15, Ranes said that his six-foot-six frame would be intimidating. Koster agreed to try it, so they put together a murder kit. The opportunity arrived quickly.

On July 5, Ranes and Koster were working at the Sprinkle Road service station when Linda Clark and Claudia Bidstrup pulled in around 1:30 A.M. They were on their way from Chicago to Ann Arbor. Koster filled the Opel Kadette’s tank while Ranes popped the hood. Ranes dismantled a wire to the spark plugs, making the car sound as if it had a problem. He directed the girls to drive it into the bay. When they were inside, the two men pulled knives. Ranes told the girls to keep quiet and they wouldn’t be harmed. He then instructed them to get into the backseat. He drove the car to a dark area at the back of the station and bound the girls.

Ranes assaulted both and told Koster to kill Claudia. Koster attempted to strangle her with a rope, but she struggled. Ranes held her down and together they killed her. Koster finished the job with Linda by himself. They put both women into the Opel, covered them with a blanket, and Koster drove the car to a wooded area near Galesburg. He poured gasoline over it and lit a cigarette on the floor of the car. He left before he knew if it had ignited the accelerant. Ranes then showed him money, two rings, a pair of earrings, and some photographs that he’d stolen from the victims. They celebrated together.

Nearly two weeks later, on July 17, motorcycle riders in the woods near Galesburg came across an abandoned blue Opel Kadette that contained the decomposed bodies of two young women in the back seat. The car’s registration was traced to a Chicago-area man, who had reported his daughter missing. Fingerprints identified Linda Clark and Claudia Bidstrup, both 19. One was the daughter of a Chicago police detective. Ropes around their necks indicated that they’d been strangled. The gas tank was full, so investigators surmised that they’d encountered their killer not far from there. Police looked for gas stations close by. The investigation was underway as Ranes and Koster struck again.

On August 5, they kidnapped eighteen-year-old Patricia Fearnow from the Western Michigan University campus. Koster tied her up in the back of the van, covered her with a sleeping bag, and then lay next to her as Danny drove. Over a period of six hours, both of them raped her. Then Koster placed a plastic bag over her head to suffocate her. They dumped her body in the woods.

On September 4, the police closed in. Koster and Ranes were arrested for the July double homicide. Koster was assigned an attorney, James Hills, who told him that if he offered details truthfully he would be allowed to plead to second-degree murder to one homicide, for a reduced sentence. The other charge would be dropped. Koster showed them Fearnow’s body, which had not yet found. He said that Danny Ranes had been the instigator. Shortly after this murder, he’d broken off with Ranes because Ranes wanted him to steal a car and go to Florida. Koster was afraid that Ranes had in mind to kill him, too. He also told detectives about Ranes’s confession of the murder of Patricia Howk. Ranes was subsequently charged with four murders in total.

Since Koster was 15, Hills tried to keep him in juvenile court, but Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Donald Burge petitioned to waive him into adult court. His request was approved, because Koster had a previous criminal record of burglary and car theft. At the time, the Michigan Supreme Court was reviewing its policies about juvenile waivers, because the current law offered no guidelines. The concept under consideration was that the juvenile system could not hold an offender beyond the age of 19.

Danny Ranes ended up in a maximum-security cell in the same county jail where his brother Larry awaited his retrial (having not yet pled guilty). They were placed in cells #1 and #2. But unlike Larry, Danny would not capitulate. He insisted he was innocent.

Danny went to his first trial in February 1973 for the murder of Partricia Howk, with Koster the chief witness against him. Danny’s former wife also testified. She said that a few days after the Howk murder, she’d noticed a scratch on her husband’s face while they were riding in the car. His explanation had been lame. In addition, in January, a guard found a torn-up note in the toilet bowl of Ranes’s jail cell, in his handwriting, that indicated he was trying to find a woman who would lie for him for money and give him an alibi.

Danny Ranes was convicted of second-degree murder. Then he faced a second trial for the murder of Linda Fearnow. Koster was an even stronger witness for this one, since he’d participated. Ranes was convicted of first-degree murder. In August, Ranes pleaded no contest to reduced charges of second-degree murder in the double homicide. He received two more life sentences.

Still uncertain about his appeal, Koster offered the proposed guilty plea for his part in the murders and received life in prison. He could offer no reason why he’d participated in rape and murder. Without Ranes’s instigation, such acts would never have even occurred to him. “There’s a reason for everything, but I can’t pin one on that,” he said.

In 1981, the Michigan Supreme Court set aside Ranes’ conviction in the Howk case.

Several people who knew Danny surmised that his competitiveness with his brother might have triggered his own murder spree. Larry had gotten considerable publicity in 1964, and then with his successful appeal in 1971, he got more. It was right around the time that he was brought back to Kalamazoo that Danny had started his own spate of murders.

THE COED MURDERS

MANY READERS KNOW THAT I’VE PUBLISHED hundreds of cases about serial killers. Few are aware that I got my start with this one in the area of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. It was the first case that I wrote for Court TV’s Crime Library, because people I know had some involvement.

The late 1960s were chaotic years. Timothy Leary urged kids to try LSD and astronauts died violently as humans took their first steps on the moon. Hippies preached free love while Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, the Chicago Seven spat demands at the Democratic Convention, and Ted Kennedy left a girl to drown. Manson led two massacres in California just before thousands of peace-lovers went to Woodstock. Detroit endured race riots, while forty miles to the west, a series of murders shook the Ann Arbor area.

In July 1967, Mary Fleszar turned up missing after going for a walk near Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. On Tuesday, August 8, 1967, the Ann Arbor News described a gruesome discovery: “A body found yesterday afternoon on a Superior Township farm was tentatively identified as that of a 19-year-old Eastern Michigan University coed.” It was Mary Fleszar.

Two guys were plowing a field when they heard a car door slam. Thinking they might witness a pair of lovers, they sneaked closer to look. The car door slammed again and an engine turned over, but by the time they reached the area, the car was gone. They noticed fresh tire tracks in the weeds and a putrid odor. Then they spotted a blackish form with leathery skin. A dead deer, they thought. The carcass appeared to have a head, but it was rotten and shapeless. Then one of them noticed that the ear looked human. They ran to get the police.

The responding officers recognized the body as human. It was nude, lying on its side, facedown. One forearm and hand and the fingers of the other hand were missing. Both feet had been severed at the ankles, and animal bites were evident on the skin. The medical examiner estimated that the victim had been dead approximately a month, and the summer heat had accelerated decomposition. The remains were identified from a pile of clothing nearby as those of the missing coed. She’d been stabbed in the chest approximately thirty times.

Police ran down witnesses and leads, but failed to identify Fleszar’s killer. One odd incident occurred at the funeral home where Fleszar’s body was sent. A young man in a bluish-gray Chevy came in and claimed to be a family friend. He wanted to take a picture. He was told no, so he left. No one could recall much about what he’d looked like. But it seemed strange that he hadn’t produced a camera.

Nearly a year went by before Joan Schell, 20, disappeared while hitchhiking near the university’s student union. A witness saw her get into a car with three men. Her body was found a week later on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, which bordered Ypsilanti. She’d been stabbed five times and sexually molested. Her throat was slashed.

Next was Jane Mixer, whose body was left inside a cemetery near Denton Road. She was a law student at the University of Michigan and had supposedly found a ride home on March 20, 1969, through a ride board. Someone named “David Johnson” was going to pick her up. Mixer had been shot twice in the head with a .22-caliber gun, and a stocking was twisted around her neck. She was fully clothed.

Within four days, a high school dropout, Maralynn Skelton, was killed and dumped just outside Ann Arbor. Her skull was cracked in three places, and she had been whipped with a belt and sexually molested. A garter belt was wrapped around her neck.

Less than three weeks later, thirteen-year-old Dawn Basom disappeared after visiting a friend on the EMU campus. She was found dumped along a roadway. She’d been strangled with a black electrical wire and stabbed in several places. She was killed elsewhere, possibly in a deserted farmhouse where items of her clothing were found.

Another University of Michigan student, Alice Kalom, was murdered in June 1969. Her body was found near North Territorial Road and U.S. 23, near an abandoned barn. She’d been shot once in the head and stabbed twice in the chest, as well as raped. Her clothing was scattered around her body, but her shoes were missing.

That summer, a citizens’ group invited famed Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos to assist, since the police seemed to be getting nowhere. He agreed to come, although he’d been discredited on several prior cases, including the Boston Strangler a few years before.

His method was to hold pictures of the murder scenes in closed envelopes, reciting reconstructions of the murders. Several times Hurkos insisted he could solve the case within the next day or two, only to recant. He said the killer was a genius who was playing with the police. He also called him, variously, a sick homosexual, transvestite, member of a blood cult, daytime salesman, and someone who hung around garbage dumps. He said the killer was about five-feet-seven, blond and baby-faced, 25-26 years old, and about 136-146 pounds. Hurkos added that the killer drove a motorbike and went to school at night. He predicted that the murder count would reach nineteen.

Hurkos went on television and stated that an arrest was imminent. He hoped the killer was listening, because he was going to describe him. Yet now he had an entirely new set of characteristics: the killer was six feet tall and had dark brown hair. (One account holds that a girl came to Hurkos’ hotel, and in the presence of three police officers, said she suspected her boyfriend. His name was John Collins, he had brown hair, was six feet tall, and rode a motorcycle.)

Karen Sue Beineman disappeared on July 23 after leaving a wig shop and getting on a motorcycle with a dark-haired young man she said she didn’t know. This put pressure on Hurkos to deliver. A photo of her gave off no “vibrations,” although he believed that something bad had happened to her. He predicted that her body would be found by a roadway named Riverview or River Drive. It was found several days later in a ditch alongside Huron River Drive.

Just 18, Beineman had sent a letter to her parents to assure them she was being careful. Why she’d accepted a ride from a stranger is anyone’s guess. She knew that girls had been killed. Beineman had been sexually molested and strangled.

Upon hearing of the body’s discovery, Hurkos still could not name the killer. When taken to the site, he didn’t experience his usual “vibrations,” but said the man he “saw” was not an American and that he was associated in some way with a ladder.

Then Hurkos left the city, vowing to return a week later to wrap up the investigation. Before he did, John Norman Collins was arrested.

ULTIMATELY, COLLINS WAS CONVICTED of the murder of Karen Sue Beineman, whom he’d picked up on his motorcycle. Although Collins was convicted of only the Beineman murder, he nevertheless entered crime archives as a serial killer. This was due to Edward Keyes publishing The Michigan Murders, which implicated Collins circumstantially in each of the seven cases, as well as one in California and possibly a few in other states.

Yet Keyes based his book on newspaper reports, police suspicions, and notes kept by a professor at Eastern Michigan University. He did not speak to anyone in Collins’ family, Collins himself, or his attorneys. The book was as much speculative as factual.

Then former state trooper Earl James penned Catching Serial Killers, in which he described the physical, circumstantial, and testimonial evidence that tied Collins to each murder. Yet there were rumors that some evidence had been planted so that if Collins managed to get through the Beineman trial they could prosecute him for others. (I was personally told this by a reporter who said that a state trooper had said it to him while they were drinking together. I don’t know if it was true.)

The investigation relied on an innovative forensic technique (now discredited) called neutron activation analysis, in which a specimen was placed in a nuclear reactor and irradiated with a stream of neutrons. This treatment purportedly allowed scientists to measure and identify the sample’s smallest constituent particles. Hair samples from the victim’s clothing and clippings from the floor of the crime scene (Collins’ uncle’s home, and his uncle was a state trooper) were subjected to this technique, which influenced Collins’s conviction. He received a life sentence. He protested his innocence, and still does to this day. He was never charged in any other case.

Yet there were cold case developments. On November 25, 2004, more than thirty-five years later, Gary Earl Leiterman, 62, was charged with one count of murder in the death of Jane Mixer, the third victim. His DNA was lifted from the stocking found tied around her throat.

Leiterman’s trial began July 11, 2005, in Ann Arbor. The evidence from the cold case was controversial, and many trial watchers believed that there were too many problems for a conviction. Some of the police officers from the Collins investigation testified, and they admitted that three decades ago evidence had been poorly handled: Investigators did not wear gloves and some key items had been lost.

Leiterman's DNA had been included in the FBI's national database after he was convicted in 2002 of prescription fraud. When evidence from the Mixer case was tested, they got a hit. The odds that it had come from a Caucasian man other than Leiterman were calculated at 170 trillion to one. This alone would have been compelling, despite his denial that he knew Mixer, except for one thing: DNA from the body also connected another man to Mixer.

A spot of blood removed from Mixer’s hand had been tested and matched to John Ruelas, who was imprisoned in 2002 for the murder of his mother. However, Ruelas was only four years old at the time of the Mixer murder. It made little sense, aside from contamination in the lab while handling evidence, that he could have had anything to do with her murder. That's what Leiterman's defense team counted on.

The two-week trial ended on July 22 with a quick verdict, focused on the DNA. Five stains had been found on Mixer's pantyhose. They were of biological origin, but Stephen Milligan, who worked in the DNA section of the lab, said he was not able to identify them clearly as semen or blood, due to the way such evidence was stored in the 1960s. The samples from both cases (Leiterman and Ruelas) had been tested on the same day, but several technicians claimed they were analyzed in separate parts of the lab. To the charge that technicians had been careless, Milligan insisted that quality controls had been in place and it was not possible that they had somehow mixed the evidence. But the prosecutor never did explain how DNA evidence found on the victim could be linked to Ruelas.

Still, DNA was not the only issue. A documents expert had said that a phrase, "Muskegon — Mixer," found penned in a phone book in 1969 was most likely Leiterman's handwriting, although another expert contradicted this. It was also confirmed that Leiterman had owned a .22 handgun at the time of Mixer's death, but he reported it stolen in 1987, so it could not be fired for comparison tests. In addition, the bullet fragments were too degraded for a good comparison. Nevertheless, a merchant testified that Leiterman had purchased .22-caliber ammunition in February 1969, just before Mixer's death. How Leiterman came across Mixer was not clarified in media reports, but the assumption was that he’d noticed her ad requesting a ride and had arranged to pick her up.

Closing argument took up the morning on Friday, July 22, and at 4:15, the jury announced that they had a verdict: they found Leiterman guilty of first-degree murder. Leiterman received life in prison. All of his appeals have been denied. (I spoke with the judge involved and he was certain that justice was done.)

This conviction raised issues about the initial investigation and a possible assumption of guilt that might have caused police to overlook other suspects. Those same questions can be raised as well with the investigations of the other victims. In the event that investigators had decided at some point that the coed murders were all linked just because they were students on two closely related campuses, they might have failed to note how dissimilarities among the crimes (and there were some) might link them to different offenders rather than to a single perpetrator.

In fact, another case loosely linked to Collins was solved as well. Keyes had tentatively associated Collins with the murder of Eileen Adams, a high school freshman who was abducted from Toledo on December 19, 1967. Her frozen body was found in a field in Whiteford Township, Michigan, on January 30, 1968. It had been wrapped in a rug and mattress cover, and tied with an electrical cord. The girl had apparently been left alive but bound in such a way that her struggles to get free had tightened a telephone cord looped around her neck and tied to her ankles, which had strangled her. Her shoes and coat were missing, and she had been raped. Police believed that her abductor had held her somewhere for up to two weeks before leaving her in southeastern Michigan.

According to the Toledo Blade, Eileen’s father had dinner one day with an off-duty police officer, Sergeant Mike McGee. Under ordinary circumstances, they’d never have crossed paths, but McGee’s in-laws were in the habit of inviting the elderly from area nursing homes to join them; Eileen’s father was one of them, and he took the opportunity to tell McGee about his daughter’s still-unsolved murder. Shed been on her way by bust to her sister’s house, but never made it.

McGee alerted Lucas County cold case detectives, who’d received a grant to investigate murders and sexual assaults, so they decided to re-open the case. They looked at evidence from the crime scene and managed to isolate DNA from semen found on the girl’s underwear. They were also already aware of a potential suspect against whom to compare it.

In 1981, the former wife of Robert Baxter Bowman had alerted the police about her suspicions that he’d been involved. She’d seen the girl tied up, naked, in their basement. Bowman had also tried to drown their daughter. He was crazy! But she’d stayed quiet because he’d threatened to kill her, their daughter, and the girl. He’d then forced her to accompany him when he dumped the body in the field.

The police spoke with him, but had no evidence against him, so he was released. In the interim, DNA analysis was discovered and utilized in solving cold cases, many of them as old as this one.

In September 2006, cold case investigators found Bowman’s ex-wife and daughter in Florida, and since they had nothing of Bowman’s from which to acquire a DNA sample, they used a reverse paternity test to confirm the identification from the semen. Bowman’s last known residence, they then learned, was Riverside, California.

Charged with kidnap, rape, and aggravated murder, police from Ohio and California searched for him. His last contact with police in that state had been in 2003, when he was investigated for two warrants. A Michigan woman who saw Bowman’s photo in the newspaper told police that he’d tried picking her up when she was a girl, so it’s possible that he committed other crimes against children as well.

In 2008, Bowman was arrested near Palm Springs. He was homeless. Details indicated that Bowman had kidnapped Eileen and held her captive, bound like Christ, for several days in his basement. He had delusions about being Jesus Christ, and he had several dolls with nails in their heads, like Eileen. After a mistrial, Bowman was finally convicted in 2011.

Since John Collins has been convicted of just one murder as of this writing, aside from Mixer the other cases remain officially unsolved.

THE BABYSITTER

MARK STEBBINS LEFT THE AMERICAN LEGION HALL in Ferndale, just after noon on a cold February 15 in 1976. It was a Sunday and the twelve-year-old wanted to go home and watch a movie. But Mark vanished somewhere along the three blocks between the American Legion Hall on Livernois and his house.

By 10 PM that night, Mark’s frantic mother had called the police. Officers asked for a description. When she last saw him, she said, he was dressed in blue jeans, a hooded blue parka, rubber boots, and a red sweatshirt. He had blue eyes and blond hair.

A search was launched. By the time morning arrived, everyone believed that Mark had been kidnapped.

Around 11:45 AM on February 19, a businessman walked to a Southfield mall to visit the drugstore. He crossed through a parking lot and spotted something that looked like a kid lying on the ground in a fetal position. He was dressed in jeans, a red sweatshirt, and blue parka. The hood was pulled up. The man called the police.

It was the missing Mark Stebbins. An autopsy found two lacerations on the boy’s scalp, at the back of his head, but he’d died from being smothered. From bruises on his wrists, it appeared that Mark had been bound in some manner, and this suggested he might have been held captive. The coroner estimated that Mark had been dead about eight hours. Oddly, he appeared to have been bathed and his clothing washed and ironed before he was dumped. Such behavior suggested that the offender might have known Mark and felt badly about the treatment.

The pathologist also found evidence of sexual assault. Mark had been sodomized, possibly with an object. The police believed they were looking for a pedophile.

Spring and summer passed without significant progress in the investigation. Winter settled in. Then on January 2, 1977, Kristine Mihelich went out during the mid-afternoon to visit a 7-Eleven store in Berkley. She did not come home. Her mother called around to Kristine’s friends, but no one had seen her. By 6 PM, the police were notified. Photographs of Kristine were copied and distributed. A clerk at the 7-Eleven on Twelve Mile Road recalled a pixie-like girl who resembled Kristine coming in. He thought she’d purchased a movie magazine, but he hadn’t seen her leave.

Days melted into a week. Leads dead-ended. Then a mailman was delivering mail in Franklin Village on January 21. There in plain view, in a snow-filled ditch, was the body of a young girl, face-up, with her arms folded over her chest. She wore the same clothes as the missing girl described in the papers. He notified the police.

Identified as Kristine, the body was partially frozen and the best determination indicated that she’d been in place for about a day. Cause of death was asphyxiation: like Mark Stebbins, she’d been smothered. There was an indentation from a car’s bumper in the snow bank near her body, but officers failed to take measurements. Someone did take a photograph. Car manufacturers looked at it and said it was the bumper of a Pontiac LeMans or Buick Skylark.

Kristine’s clothing indicated that she’d been undressed and redressed, because several items had been placed on her incorrectly. Kristine’s parents said that she usually tied her blouse in back, but her blouse was now tied in front. Her pants were tucked inside her boots, which her parents said she would never have done. Her clothes were clean, despite apparent captivity for two weeks, which indicated that her captor had washed them. She also seemed to have eaten well.

Police now wondered if there had been a third victim that they hadn’t included. Just two weeks before Kristine’s abduction, on December 22, another girl, also from Oakland County, had been killed.

JILL ROBINSON ARGUED WITH HER MOTHER that evening in their Royal Oak home. Furious, Jill put a blanket, some clothes and some toiletries into a small denim backpack. Retrieving her bicycle, she got on and rode away. Someone saw her, in her bright orange jacket and blue knit cap, on Gardenia Avenue, alone. It seemed absurd for a child to be out on a bike on a winter night in Michigan, but no one asked her what she was doing. She got as far as Main Street, where her bike was found the next day. But Jill had vanished.

On December 26, four days after she’d left, Jill’s body was found on a shoulder along Interstate 75, north of Sixteen Mile Road near Big Beaver Road, in Troy. This was fifteen miles from where her bike was found. There at the scene, someone had aimed a 12-gauge shotgun at her face as she lay on the ground to blow off the top of her head.

Because Jill had been shot instead of smothered, was female, and bore no sign of sexual trauma, detectives had not linked her murder with that of Mark Stebbins. With the murder of Kristine, they had to rethink this, especially because Jill’s clothing had been washed and pressed. It also appeared that she’d been bathed. From the time that had elapsed between her disappearance and murder, it was clear that her killer had held her alive for several days.

Journalists dubbed this killer “the Babysitter,” because of the care he seemed to take with the victims. Homicide detectives from several jurisdictions met with county and state officials to form a plan. The decision was made to organize leads and suspects via a mainframe computer.

Having two of the three murders so close together in time gave the task force a sense of urgency. This perpetrator apparently felt immune, since he’d gotten away with at least three murders and was dumping his victims where they – and he – could easily be seen.

Despite all the media attention that warned parents to watch their children, the Babysitter, or the Oakland County Child Killer (OCCK), found his next opportunity in the middle of March.

Timothy King was 11. Slender, with reddish hair and freckles, he’d borrowed some spare change from his sister before taking off on his skateboard just before 8 PM to buy candy at a drugstore on Maple Road in Birmingham. By one account, he asked his sister to leave the front door ajar so he could get back in, because he knew she was going out. Then he put on his red nylon hockey jacket and left. He arrived at the store, made his purchase, and went out the back door into a parking lot shared with a grocery store.

When Tim’s parents came home at 9 PM, they found the door ajar and the house empty. Tim’s sister was with friends and his older brother was babysitting. Aware of the danger to children Tim’s age, the Kings called around, but no one had seen him. They drove around the neighborhood, looking for him. Tim had vanished about six miles from where the third victim had been abducted.

The police sprang into action. They conducted a house-to-house search and set up roadblocks. A witness who’d been in the drugstore parking lot said that around 8:30, she’d seen a boy in a red nylon jacket with sports emblems. He’d been talking to a man who stood next to a dark blue compact car that looked like an AMC Gremlin with a white racing stripe along the side. The man had mutton-chop sideburns, bushy hair, and looked to be between 25 and 35. He was white, but with a dark complexion.

No other leads turned up and no blue Gremlin surfaced on the roads. The task force began to contact all local owners of this type of car.

Tim’s mother, Marion King, wrote an open letter to the kidnapper and published it in The Detroit News. She begged him to release her son unharmed. She also promised to give Tim his favorite meal: Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Six days after Tim had disappeared, his body was found in a ditch in Livonia. His skateboard had been placed nearby. The body was still warm, so it had not been there long. The autopsy, which determined cause of death to be smothering, turned up the remains of his last meal: fried chicken.

Once again, this pedophile had kept the boy captive for several days, as Tim had been killed about six to eight hours before his body was discovered. He’d been bathed, like the others. In fact, he’d been thoroughly scrubbed, including under his fingernails. It appeared that his wrists had been bound. There was also evidence of sexual assault with an object, like with Mark Stebbins.

Aside from the treatment of the victims, other factors indicated that all four victims were in the same series of murders that could be attributed to a single perpetrator (although there was also talk of a possible “wolf pack” of pedophiles). The victims were around the same age and had all been alone when grabbed. Two had been kidnapped on a Sunday afternoon, and the other two on a Wednesday. All were taken during winter months and all had been kept for some period before they were killed. The boys had been sexually assaulted. Their bodies had been placed in areas where they’d be quickly found rather than left to decompose in a secluded spot. Three had been smothered. A few hair strands were found on the boys, along with white animal hairs, but the state of analysis at the time could do little with this potential evidence without also having a suspect for comparison.

There were no more leads. The task force was disbanded in 1978 without solving the mystery and arresting a perpetrator. However, this case has been revisited whenever new developments or technologies offer a means to look at it again.

SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED as persons of interest.

A key suspect was Chris Busch, the son of Harold Busch, an executive at General Motors who lived in Bloomfield Township. Chris had driven a blue Chevy Vega with a white stripe along the side. Just before Mark Stebbins’ abduction, Busch had been in police custody for possession of child pornography. He was part of a group of men who’d been assaulting boys. Among them was James Gunnels, who inexplicably continued to hang out with Busch.

Gunnels was involved in a number of property crimes and there is some suspicion that Busch might have used him to lure younger boys. Gunnels was 16 at the time of the OCCK murders. On March 19, while Tim King might still have been alive, a woman who knew that Busch was a sex offender called police to report that she'd seen him with several boys near his family's cottage on Ess Lake. Tim King’s body was found shortly thereafter.

Other items circumstantially implicate Busch. White animal hairs had been found on all of the victims, and the Busch family had owned a white welsh terrier. After Busch committed suicide in 1978, ligatures were found in his room, along with a drawing on his wall of the face of a young boy screaming. The boy was wearing a parka hood and resembled Mark Stebbins.

In 2005, nearly three decades after the murders, Detective Sergeants David Robertson and Garry Gray began going through the files once again. They put out a public appeal for tips.

In 2007, the focus was on Ted Lamborgine. A retired autoworker who’d resided in Royal Oak during the 1970s, he’d been involved in a child pornography ring. He pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting young boys in order to avoid a plea deal that required a polygraph. The family of Mark Stebbins filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him. However, at this writing, Lamborgine has not been charged with killing Mark.

In July 2012, news outlets announced a potential DNA link. The FBI DNA Unit at Quantico, VA, had tested some strands of hair picked off the bodies of Mark Stebbins, Kristine Mihelich and Timothy King. Using mitochondrial analysis, which is much less accurate than nuclear DNA analysis, they established a link between the boys, as the hair on them had come from the same person.

DNA tests confirmed that white dog hair found on all four victims was from the same dog, but police did not locate a dog for matching. The lab also tested hair recovered from a Pontiac Bonneville that belonged to Archibald “Ed” Sloan, another person of interest from the 70s. The analysis linked Sloan’s car to the boys. Now over 70, he’s serving prison time for two counts of criminal sexual conduct. However, mtDNA analysis of Sloan’s hair did not match that found on the boys or in the car. Thus, investigators continue to look for information about other people who might have borrowed the car. Sloan often loaned it to his pedophile friends. The analysis cleared him.

There was a match between Gunnels and a hair found on Kristine Mihelich. Gunnels said he did not know how his DNA got on her. The Michigan State Police reports show that Gunnels had told inconsistent stories, and in a recorded conversation between Gunnels and his sister while he was in prison, she’d asked him about the hair found on Kristine. His answer had been enigmatic: “I wasn’t there when it happened,” he said. This indicates that he possibly knows something about her death. When specifically asked using a polygraph, he flunked on those questions. Yet he was not charged. The DNA link was considered weak, the evidence in degraded condition, and the strand of hair had been destroyed during the testing.

Tim King’s father has posted documents on the Internet, apparently with the hope of persuading someone that Busch and Gunnels should be a top priority. Yet it’s difficult to make a case with so little physical and circumstantial evidence. The best evidence (hair) was used up in testing, so something new would have to emerge. As of this writing, the identity of the Babysitter, or the OCCK, remains unknown.

LONELY HEARTS

DURING THE 1940s, HOMICIDE COPS Charles Hildebrandt and Elmer C. Robinson tracked a male con artist, Raymond Fernandez, who was using personals ads to attract and fleece vulnerable women. The officers learned that he’d teamed up with an obese woman, Martha Beck, who was posing as his sister. Robinson’s gut told him these two grifters had turned their con game into a deadly affair and were associated with more than a dozen fatal incidents.

In a cleaned-out rental on Long Island traced to Fernandez, they finally found evidence of murder: Apparently, the killers didn’t realize just how much blood can seep into floorboard cracks. Clearly, a body had been there. The cops suspected that the missing Janet Fay, 66, had been killed. However, Beck and Fernadez had absconded.

Fernandez had corresponded with a forty-one-year-old widow in Grand Rapids, Delphine Downing, the mother of a two-year-old girl, Rainelle. He’d presented himself as Charles Martin, a successful businessman who loved kids. By letter, when Fernandez told Delphine he was traveling to her area on business, she was happy to invite him to her home on Byron Center Road in Wyoming Township. He arrived in January 1949 with his “sister.”

Fernandez knew exactly how to play this single mother. He was courteous to her and deferential to her child. Soon, he’d moved in as Delphine’s lover. Beck wasn’t happy about this development, but she bided her time. When Delphine caught Fernandez without his toupee, she was shocked. She claimed he’d deceived her. Beck stepped in and convinced Delphine to take some sleeping pills to calm herself down.

While Delphine was unconscious, Rainelle began to cry. Beck grabbed the child and choked her. The bruises were obvious on the girl’s neck. The grifters had reached a turning point. They couldn’t let Delphine awaken and see what Beck had done. Fernandez got a handgun and shot the sleeping Delphine in the head. Then they wrapped her body in sheets and carried it to the basement. They dug a hole, placed the body inside, and covered it with cement.

Beck and Fernandez remained in the house to look for valuables. Rainelle cried incessantly, so Beck, a mother herself who’d abandoned her kids, drowned the child in a metal tub. Fernandez buried her in the basement.

Oddly enough, they went to the movies. During this time, suspicious neighbors called the police to go check on Delphine’s welfare. Officers were dispatched just as Beck and Fernandez arrived home to pack up their stuff. Rather than leaving the state as they’d expected, they were placed under arrest. Fernandez confessed in the hope of remaining in Michigan, where there was no death penalty. However, they were both extradited to New York to be tried for the murder of Janet Fay. Their trial, which detailed their various sexual perversities, became a sensational proceeding.

Beck and Fernandez were convicted, largely due to Fernandez’s 73-page confession (which he had tried to recant), and both went to the electric chair on the same day in March 1951. They were suspected in up to 20 murders.

FIRST STEP ON A DARK ROAD

HENRY LEE LUCAS WOULD GAIN FAME DURING THE 1980S FOR HIS CONFESSION to hundreds of murders. When he later recanted, he said he’d been just “funning” with law enforcement. "I set out to break and corrupt any law enforcement officer I could get,” he said. “I think I did a pretty good job."

Officers from 19 states had closed their cases, based on Lucas’s details. He’d partnered with the notorious Ottis Toole, who seems to have been the man who killed Adam Walsh, which launched the popular TV series, America’s Most Wanted. Together from their prison cell in two different states, they made wild and disgusting claims about their life as wanderers. For Lucas, his career in murder had started in Michigan.

Lucas was born in 1936 in the backwoods of Virginia to a woman named Viola, a half-Chippewa prostitute and bootlegger who got mean when she drank. Lucas said that she’d dress him up as a little girl, which humiliated him. When he was five, Viola struck him in the head with a board, knocking him out and producing a series of headaches, dizzy spells, and blackouts. Lucas also took a knife wound to his left eye, and eventually he got a glass eye that left him with a drooping eyelid. Not surprisingly, he became sullen and withdrawn.

On June 12, 1952, Lucas burglarized an appliance store and was sent to a reformatory for two years. Upon release, he committed a felony and got four years at the Virginia State Penitentiary. He escaped, stole a car and made his way to Michigan, where he was arrested and returned to prison. When he was released, he went to live with his half-sister in Tecumseh. Then Viola came for a fateful visit. She was 74 at the time.

On January 11, 1960, after drinking too much, Lucas and Viola got into an argument, supposedly over a woman Lucas wanted to marry. He grabbed a knife and plunged it into Viola’s neck. (He remembered only that he knocked her around and she had a heart attack, but then he saw the knife in his hand and the wound on her body.) Lucas was arrested, convicted of second-degree murder and sent to the state prison in southern Michigan. There he tried to commit suicide and was transferred to a forensic psychiatric hospital.

For his mother’s murder, Lucas served half of a twenty-year sentence. Yet as soon as he was released, he tried to kidnap two girls. Arrested again, he returned to prison for another three and a half years. Once he was out, he moved to Pennsylvania. Soon, the one-eyed killer started to travel. In Florida, he took up with Ottis Toole and they roamed cross-country together.

In Texas in 1983, Lucas was jailed for illegal possession of a weapon. He told a jailer that he'd done some “bad things,” and began to confess … and confess. At first the police believed him, but as his death toll climbed to some 600 victims in nearly every state and in Canada, it began to seem like he was just a compulsive confessor. Nevertheless, he did point to places where police did find victims.

Lucas was convicted of several Texas murders, and for one he received the death penalty. Eventually, when it was proven that he could not have killed this victim, his sentence was commuted to life, and he died in prison.

THE TIDE GOES OUT

IT WAS JUNE IN 1968 WHEN RICHARD ROBISON SET OUT with his family for their log cabin retreat, Summerset, near Lake Michigan’s dunes in the northwest part of the state. I went to that area many times as a kid, walking the beach and picking up the distinct “Petoskey stones” for my grandmother’s collection. I might have even passed by the Robison kids at some point doing the same thing on the same beach, as they’d come to this cottage every summer for twelve years.

I first heard of this case in association with John Norman Collins (see story above), when there was speculation that he might have been involved. Then I read When Evil Came to Good Hart, by Mardi Link. It was such a spooky story that I had to include it in this collection. Nothing about that idyllic place would have suggested the possibility for such cold-blooded brutality.

The Robisons had told friends and relatives that they’d spend the summer months in Good Hart, in their cabin a couple of miles north. Robison worked in advertising and published a cultural arts magazine, Impresario. His wife, Sarah, was a homemaker, and their children ranged in age from 7 to 19. The oldest was a student at Eastern Michigan University, but he’d wanted to join them at the cottage as well. They knew they’d be isolated, but that’s what they wanted: a nice, relaxing summer up north.

They took the narrow drive off M-119 into the woods. A few people saw them on June 24, when they went shopping for supplies, and someone doing work for them saw them on the 25th. No one recalled seeing them after that. Yet no one personally checked on their welfare, either. There were no cellphones or Internet connections. Even long distance calling was used sparingly.

But some residents who lived in the area of their cottage complained of a foul odor, especially when the wind blew a certain way. Many believed that a dead animal had crawled under the Robison cottage, and they couldn’t understand why no one did anything about it.

On the sweaty afternoon of July 22, caretaker Chauncey Bliss and his assistant went to check. They approached the Robison home and knocked. No one answered. He knew that the Robisons had been planning an extended trip, so he didn’t worry about that. Curtains prevented them from seeing inside and the doors were locked. An outside leather latch on the front door had been pulled inside and the lakeside door was padlocked. Two cars covered in pollen were parked there, and flies crawled on the log walls. Something was definitely wrong here.

Bliss pried open the door to get in. Stale air blasted them. Now the smell was overwhelming. So were the flies. The house was full of them. He spotted what looked like a female leg under a rug, then a body in the hall, and backed out.

The police arrived when he called. It was much worse than anyone had anticipated. They had to strap on gas masks to go through the rooms and break a few windows to let in fresh air and drive out the flies. Dead flies littered the floors. Someone, perhaps Robison himself, had slaughtered the entire family. But his body was among the others, so the first thought was a murder-suicide. A note written on a paper towel and stuck to an east-facing window said, “Will be back 7-10. Robison.” Next to it were three bullet holes.

Three bodies blocked the hallway. Robison lay on a hot air register. His son Randall, 12, was on top of him, covered with a rug. Young Susan, 7, lay nearby. Richard, Jr., 19, was sprawled in a doorway, and his younger brother Gary, 17, was in a bedroom. Playing cards were scattered, as if he’d been shot in the midst of a game. A plaid blanket covered Shirley, 40, who lay face down in the living room, with legs spread in a posture that suggested sexual assault. Her dress was pulled up and her underwear, sliced with a knife, was pulled to her ankles. All of the victims had been shot, but Susan had been bludgeoned with a hammer. Casings were found from .22 and .25 caliber weapons. Bloody drag marks showed that some of the bodies had been moved, and there were bloody footprints – good for evidence.

The bullet holes in the windows suggested that someone had shot from outside first and then entered the home to finish the job. Furniture was overturned, but there was no evidence of forced entry. Perhaps the doors had not been locked.

The sheriff was on vacation, and the inexperienced under-sheriff wiped things clean and allowed the crime scene to be trampled by numerous people before the evidence unit arrived. He seemed unaware of the need to preserve evidence. He even wiped the hammer clean that had been used on Susan. (There’s actually a photo of him doing it.)

They called Emmet County Prosecutor W. Richard Smith to the scene. Later to reporters he would say, "I lasted in there maybe two or three minutes. I was just covered with flies, and the stench was unbelievable."

They all knew that if this was some outside killer, he (or they) had a very long head start. These bodies were badly decomposed, thanks to being enclosed for almost four weeks during the summer. But breaking the windows had let in the air. This had helped, but it would also affect the bodies. Officers were posted to watch the scene overnight.

Then something bizarre happened. On-site deputies noticed plumes of smoke coming out the broken windows. Had someone started a fire? They rushed in to extinguish it. But they discovered that the cooler night temperatures had kicked on the gas heater. Robison’s decomposed body, lying on the vent, was breaking apart and falling onto the furnace below.

NEWS OF THE MASSACRE SPREAD FAST. People in the community feared that a deranged killer was loose among them. Who would slaughter an entire family?

The 15 shell casings found in and around the house were from two different guns, a rifle and a handgun. The autopsies found that all had been executed with shots to the head, and Susan had been bludgeoned. Richard was shot three times. Shirley’s diamond ring was missing, but watches and billfolds with money were not taken. Shirley had been raped, and three pubic hairs were collected.

The investigation hit plenty of dead-ends until it appeared that Robison’s business practices were not altogether above-board. In fact, Robison was both secretive and duplicitous. Some associates called him schizophrenic. He seemed to have been the focus of the massacre. A 1970 Detroit Free Press story revealed that Robison's company had overcharged a significant client, Delta Faucet, for ads. The article stated that just prior to the massacre, Impresario's circulation and number of pages increased substantially. Apparently, this was a deception to make companies believe it was a better place for ads than it really was.

Investigators questioned Robison's business associate, Joseph Scolaro III. A former military sharpshooter, he knew how to use a gun. He said he had an alibi for the day the Robisons had disappeared. Yet his story was complicated and could not be corroborated. Officers who questioned him believed he was hiding something, especially when he contradicted himself several times. Scolaro also failed three lie detector tests and he’d argued over the phone with Robison on June 25. In addition, he could not account for eleven hours of that time frame. His shoe fit a clear bloody shoeprint found in the house, although the shoe they tested had never been worn. Still, Scolaro’s habit was to purchase duplicates of everything. He could have thrown the matching pair out.

Worse, he clearly had lied to a couple who’d called him to inquire about the Robisons. At this time they were all dead, but Scolaro said he’d heard from them and they were in Kentucky.

Scolaro also owned a gun like that believed to have been used on the Robison’s, although the one he gave police didn’t match the spent casings. Yet on February 2 that year, he’d purchased two similar .25 caliber Berettas. He claimed he’d given the other one away. Some of the cartridges from the scene were SAKO, a rare 1968 Finnish brand sold in Michigan only in January and February 1968. Scolaro had been one of the few purchasers.

On a hunch, police went to where Scolaro liked to target shoot and used metal detectors to pick up shell casings there. They got a match to the cartridges from the scene. The circumstances were against Scolaro, but the case was not definitive. Scolaro could not be charged.

In 1973, Scolaro wrote a suicide note admitting that he was a liar, thief and fraud but insisting on his innocence in the Robison homicides. Then he fatally shot himself. He’d been embezzling from the business, so he had a motive to want Robison dead. But why would he kill the entire family?

Among other suspects in this case were the caretaker who discovered the bodies, organized crime, and presumed serial killer John Norman Collins, who liked to ski in the area and who had some acquaintance from the university with the eldest son.

Eventually, DNA technology allowed testing of pubic hair strands found on Shirley Robison. However, the samples were too deteriorated to provide conclusive results.

THE ANN ARBOR HOSPITAL MURDERS

THE ANN ARBOR VENTERANS ADMINISTRATON HOSPITAL (VAH) is located on the edge of the north campus of the University of Michigan. During a six-week period in the summer of 1975, there was a sudden spike of patients experiencing Code 7 breathing failures. As the incidents increased, the staff became alarmed. Some of the patients died.

Dr. Anne Hill, Chief of Anesthesiology, suspected foul play. She believed that someone was intentionally putting patients at risk with a muscle relaxant, Pavulon. Within minutes, Pavulon deactivates muscles, rendering patients paralyzed but conscious. It’s a terrifying experience and they suffocate. On August 15, Dr. Hill saw three patients experience this. Since the hospital was federal jurisdiction, the FBI was called in.

Special Agent Gene Ward, from the Ann Arbor office responded. He called Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Delonis. The FBI formed a task force, which undertook a yearlong investigation. Bodies of deceased patients were exhumed and the records of all attending staff were checked.

Immediately obvious was the problem of testing from Pavulon in an embalmed body. There were no such tests. The FBI had to develop one that would be admissible in court. Eventually, they found traces of Pavulon in some of the exhumed bodies. Most had been patients in the Intensive Care Unit. The investigators identified more than 50 suspicious breathing failures. The victim toll was around three-dozen, with some being poisoned several times. Nine had died. None had been prescribed Pavulon. Whoever was doing this had injected full-strength Pavulon into the patients intravenous tubes. This turned the investigative focus on the nursing staff. They had access to the drug, which was generally kept locked up, and they had the three-minute time frame available for the opportunity.

Over 750 people were questioned. A clear picture emerged in a dozen of the incidents. Declaring that a killer was at large among patients, the FBI warned that until they identified this person, any patient was vulnerable.

The investigation continued for months, with suspicion centering on two nurses from the Philippines, Lenora Perez, 31, and Filipina Narciso, 30. They’d been on duty each time the patients in question were stricken. Patient John McCrery recalled seeing a nurse, known to him as “Pia” (Narciso’s nickname), inject something into his IV tube minutes before he went into respiratory arrest. However, he soon had surgery that caused brain damage and he was removed from the witness list. A witness against Perez was hypnotized, but he died prior to trial.

The two nurses were indicted on ten counts of poisoning, five counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

During their trials, several relatives of the deceased were called as witnesses and they recalled seeing these nurses in the vicinity of the patients, and even in their rooms, during the fatal seizures. One man identified Perez as the nurse who’d put something into his father’s IV before he went into cardiac arrest. In addition, both Narciso and Perez made comments that suggested anger over staff shortage. The implication was that they were endangering patients to show the need for more coverage.

However, coincidence and sparse circumstantial evidence made up the prosecutor's case, which was insufficient for convictions. No one could link either nurse to the Pavulon. The judge vacated the murder charge against Perez.

The trial for Narciso took thirteen weeks. Finally, she was acquitted of the murder charge, but both nurses were convicted of conspiracy and poisoning. Yet the convictions were appealed and the appeals court set them aside. At a second trial, the charges were dismissed. (Another version holds that the government declined to undertake a second trial.)

The murders remain unsolved, and many supporters claim that these nurses were scapegoated.

MENTAL TWIST

AS HALLOWEEN APPROACHED IN 1978, a young man grew restless. Billy Hardesty, 20, prepared for a rampage against people who made him mad. As darkness set in on October 18 in Van Buren Township, Hardesty loaded a weapon and took aim at his father, Ronald, and pulled the trigger, shooting him in the back. He then went into the kitchen where his mother was doing the dishes and shot her in the head. But killing them was not enough.

Hardesty then went to Abigail’s Dirty Shame Saloon at 327 E. Michigan Ave in Ypsilanti. He got into a fight with two men, and outside in the parking lot, he shot and killed Troy Curry and Timothy Schofield. Next, Hardesty went to a machine shop in Ypsilanti Township, Stiles-Wood Building. Daniel Wood, the brother of Hardesty’s ex-wife, was there. Hardesty killed him as well. Hardesty left but then returned, just as Tommy Lee Brown emerged to call the police to report the shooting. He was seriously wounded, as was another man, Bobby Joe Baker, who was shot 14 times but survived.

Hardesty returned home, high on Valium. Police arrived shortly thereafter to arrest him. After a two-hour siege in which Hardesty exchanged gunfire with police and was shot twice, officers brought him under control. They found the body of his father, doubled over and frozen stiff, buried beneath some packages of meat in a freezer on the back porch. Altogether, Hardesty had pumped at least fifty rounds into his victims. Those who knew him said he was a troublemaker and a “nutcase” who should have been locked up long ago.

A psychiatric exam was ordered. Two clinicians said Hardesty was not competent to stand trial. He might, however, be rendered competent with treatment. The judge committed Hardesty, with a trial pending his mental recovery. He was given antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers.

In March 1979, Hardesty was found competent. This decision was reversed in June. By November, a psychiatrist found him competent again. In September 1980, the judge agreed, as long as his drug therapy continued.

However, Hardesty’s attorney wanted him off drugs so the jury could see him in the mental state he’d been in on the night of the shooting. This would present a fairer picture of his condition at the time of the crime. The judge denied the motion.

The eleven-day trial began on February 13, 1981. The prosecutor offered 35 witnesses to the defendant’s nine. One of them was Hardesty himself. He said that he’d killed his father because “I was tired of him calling me queer.” He killed his mother because he was “bloodthirsty.” He added that he’d stabbed a man in California 50 times. That man had died.

Strangely, the trial judge would not allow Hardesty’s primary psychiatrist to testify. Still three mental health experts did testify that Hardesty’s mental state at the time of the crime supported a legal finding of insanity. Yet four had supported the prosecutor’s claim of premeditated first-degree murder.

The concept at stake was whether Hardesty had a thought disorder on October 19, 1978 that had significantly impaired his judgment, behavior, capacity to recognize reality, or ability to cope with the ordinary demands of life. In addition, this disorder had to impair his ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or ability to conform his behavior to the law. During this period of time, the burden was on the prosecutor to prove sanity rather than on the defendant to prove insanity.

The jury deliberated for two days. On all counts (four of first-degree, one of second-degree, and two of intent to murder), they found Hardesty guilty but mentally ill. Michigan had instituted this legal standard in 1975 in an attempt to decrease the number of insanity acquittals. Juries are given choices among Guilty, Not Guilty, Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, and Guilty But Mentally Ill. The latter means that the defendant committed the act, did not meet the standard to be declared insane and thereby acquitted, but nevertheless is mentally ill. They receive the same sentence as if they were found guilty, but might be confined and treated in a forensic hospital instead of prison. Hardesty was sentenced to five life terms plus 150-300 years. His only comment was to ask his attorney to write him a $100 check for cigarette money.

Hardesty filed an appeal on numerous grounds.

THREE LEVELS BELOW DELIVERANCE

DAVID TYLL AND BRIAN OGNJAN, best friends since childhood, had waited until the second weekend of Michigan’s two-week deer season in late November of 1985. Supposedly neither twenty-seven-year-old mechanic actually liked hunting, but they enjoyed the time away from St. Clair Shores to drink and hang out. On November 22, they traveled in Tyll’s1980 Ford Bronco to Mio, Michigan in Oscoda County, where the woods of the Huron National Forest were thick and the deer were plentiful. A number of people saw them. They’d asked one resident for directions when they got lost one night. They also showed up in several bars, offending a waitress and several female patrons. They reportedly split up at one point and came back together. Sunday, November 24, was the last time they were seen. They never arrived at their ultimate destination or visited a friend who’d expected them. The Ford Bronco disappeared as well.

Neither contacted his family that weekend. Tyll was married and Ognjan had a steady girlfriend. Neither came to work on Monday, although both were reliable employees. Neither had used his credit cards, bank accounts or health insurance after that weekend. Their relatives were certain that something terrible had happened to them. The parents of both filed missing persons reports.

The idea of looking for two lost hunters in the dense woods of northern Michigan in the Lower Peninsula was daunting, but police took it seriously. As they asked around, they found people in local bars who’d seen the young men. They heard about how drunk the guys had been and wondered if they might have driven off the road and landed in one of the deep ponds in the area. One officer had seen a dark-colored Bronco come up out of a ditch and drive off, but he hadn’t pursued it.

Eventually, rumors emerged about the Duvall brothers, Raymond “J.R.” and Donald “Coco.” They were two of seven brothers, known for their backwoods ways. They raised pigs “parted out” stolen cars, stole electricity, and with their long hair and beards looked like a cross between a ‘60s hippie and a tough biker “They’re three levels below Deliverance,” one police officer reportedly said. People around the area feared them, including wives and ex-girlfriends. Even some of their brothers were afraid. Coco and J.R. drank heavily and got into frequent brawls.

Several officers tracked down leads, most of which went nowhere. Even psychics weighed in, but nothing materialized from their supposed visions except wasted manpower. Weeks passed, then months.

The rumors had it that three of the Duvall brothers had entered the Linker’s Lost Creek Lodge near Mio, where Tyll and Ognjan were drinking. They seemed to recognize the out-of-towners and one woman in particular, Barbara Boudro, believed that trouble was brewing. She was in the bar every day and she knew when the air crackled with male tension. Someone called the police, just in case, but got the one patrol officer who preferred to let bar fights take care of themselves. Thus, no one responded.

Coco reportedly called for reinforcements and more guys showed up. Some rumors placed this gang out in the parking lot with the missing hunters. Detectives learned that numerous people had heard the Duvalls brag that they’d killed the hunters from Detroit, cut them up and fed them to their pigs. The trick would be finding evidence. Supposedly, they’d also either sunk the Bronco into a deep lake (of which there were many possibilities) or had cut it up and sold off the parts. Some rumors had it that they’d buried parts of the car on their property, which might be traced with a metal detector. However, there was no probable cause for a warrant to search.

Detective Sergeant Curtis Schram stayed on the case as it grew colder and colder, and updated the families. But despite chasing down every lead, no matter how fragile, he could not solve this case. The puzzle attracted the attention of producers for Unsolved Mysteries and Missing: Reward. In fact, the reward steadily rose until it was $100,000. Every significant anniversary brought a retelling of the tale in the media and a slew of new tips, none of which amounted to anything.

AFTER A DECADE, SCHRAM WAS TRANSFERRED. The case went through several hands before former State Trooper Robert “Bronco” Lesneski, a triathlete and SWAT member, inherited it. He proved to be just as dogged. To him, the missing men became like his own family members. He brought in a cadaver dog team, used forward-looking infrared from the air, patrolled by helicopter, searched numerous lakes, and knocked endlessly on doors to ask residents what they knew about the night the hunters had disappeared. The years passed. He kept revisiting the case. Somewhere, he believed, was someone who knew something that could be checked out.

One day in 1999, Barbara Boudro opened the door. According to Tom Henderson in his true crime book, Darker than Night, when she saw Lesneski she said, “You’re going to get me killed.”

Lesneski sensed he’d finally struck gold. But Boudro resisted. She offered a few tidbits but minimized her role. It took a lot of coaxing on Lesneski’s part, but finally Boudro admitted that she’d seen what had happened to the missing deer hunters. She was an actual eyewitness. It still gave her nightmares, and the Duvalls had threatened her with becoming pig food if she ever talked with the police. Both of her dogs had been killed: one was shot and the other was run over while in her yard. There were rumors that others who knew the story had ended up dead, either murdered or in “accidents.” Boudro anticipated the day when she would become one of them.

But as an eyewitness, her story allowed Lesneski to get arrest warrants. Once Coco and J.R. were locked up, more people called to say what they knew. All these years, they’d been too scared of the brothers to come forward. It was enough to go to trial.

Donna Pendergast, the tough daughter of a Detroit cop, was the prosecutor. The Duvalls tried to stare her down, to scare her, but she let them know they didn’t fool her. When Tyll’s brother walked in, his resemblance to his murdered kin was so striking the Duvalls glanced at each other as if spooked.

The star witness was Barbara Boudro. Terrified of being in the same room with the Duvalls, she initially tried to flee. Back on the stand, she told the jury about seeing Tyll and Ognjan in the bar on the day they went missing. They’d been quite annoying. She’d watched the build-up of tension and believed that a fight between these out-of-towners and the Duvall brothers was inevitable.

Boudro then went home with a friend. They were watching a movie when they heard men yelling in the clearing not far from her house. Someone parked a truck in her driveway. She also heard a “pinging” sound, like an aluminum bat. Her friend wanted to see the fight, so they went out a back window to avoid anyone in front and took a secluded path down to the clearing. Boudro was stunned by what she saw.

Illuminated with headlights, the Duvalls and a few other men were beating the hunters. Tyll was on the ground. Coco swung a bat or a pipe, splitting open his head. Ognjan managed to break away and flee, but the brothers caught him and kicked him to death. Boudro left, terrified, but the next day she retuned to the clearing. She could see the dark patches of blood on the snow. In addition, the Duvalls had threatened her right away, as if they realized she must have at least heard the altercation.

It was stunning testimony, shored up by a parade of witnesses – including the Duvalls’ relatives – who said that the brothers had often bragged about killing the men and feeding them to the pigs. Coco often liked to say, “His head had split open like a melon.” Sometimes when he was drunk, he blurted things out and then threatened those who’d heard him.

The Duvalls’ defense attorneys emphasized the complete lack of physical evidence, along with the lack of credibility of a woman who drank heavily back then, but the witnesses they used – including Coco and J.R. – were so lame, the prosecution’s witnesses looked good by sheer contrast. The totality of the testimony added up to a region dominated by nasty ruffians who threatened anyone who might stand against them.

The jury didn’t take long to return a verdict. On October 30, 2003, nearly 18 years after Tyll and Ognjan had disappeared, Coco and J. R. Duvall, now 51 and 52, respectively, were found guilty of first-degree murder. Whether they’d intended to kill Tyll and Ojngan or had just acted on drunken bloodlust, it was clear that they’d enjoyed the murders that night and had used them to boost their reputations in the area for being tough. Both received life sentences without the possibility of parole. The residents who’d lived near them breathed easier, and the families of the victims were pleased that at last someone would pay for what they’d done.

“They took my son. It doesn't bring him back, but it's something,” said Tyll's father. “I was glad to see them cuffed, and I can't wait to see them in chains.”

THE MURDER GAME

CATHERINE MAY WOOD WAS A FLIGHTY, HIGHLY SENSITIVE WOMAN, according to her ex-husband, Ken. He thought, she was both needy and insecure. The Woods separated in 1986, just after Ken learned about Cathy’s affair with a coworker at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Walker, where she was a supervisor.

Cathy was in love with an aide, Gwendolyn Gail Graham, a tough-talking Texas girl. Graham often displayed the scars on her arms, sometimes lying about how she got them. She apparently had severe reactions to abandonment, which included the type of self-mutilation common to people with borderline personality disorder.

With over 200 beds, Alpine Manor, averaged about forty deaths annually. Graham noticed this and she suggested a game to Wood. They had practiced sexual asphyxia to achieve greater orgasms, so Wood thought Graham was kidding when she suggested that they kill a patient together. Yet talking about murder excited them both. Finally, with Graham’s goading, in 1987, Wood decided to do it.

The M-U-R-D-E-R Game worked like this: Alpine Manor recorded the names of patients who had died or were discharged in a book. Wood and Graham decided to kill patients in a way to make the first initial of the last names of six patients, when read down the page, spell MURDER. So, for example, Murray, Usher, Rogers, Drake, Elliott, and Ritter would work, as long as they were killed in the right order, and before someone else died or was discharged.

It would be tricky, they thought, but fun. And it was. The first murder was exhilarating. The victim was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Placing a washcloth over the woman's nose and mouth, Graham pressed down until the woman stopped struggling. Then they washed the body down together, reveling in their power.

In the weeks that followed, Graham moved on to several others, leaving a washcloth in the room as her “calling card.” In one version of the story, they had targeted at least twenty different people, including other aides.

However, it proved too complicated to select the right patients in a way that minimized risk and also spelled the word, so they selected those who would be easy to kill without discovery. No longer playing the game, their new motive was to have leverage with each other so they would be bonded “forever.” With each killing, they added one more day to “forever,” so that after the third murder they might sign a love letter, “forever and three days.”

Acting as sentry, Wood watched as Graham attempted to smother elderly women, but some struggled so hard she had to back off. Oddly enough, none complained, and in fact most of the patients liked these two women. In many respects, they were good at this job.

To relive the crimes, Graham took jewelry, personal keepsakes, and socks of the victims. She and Wood placed these souvenirs at home on a special shelf. In a morbid postscript, they sometimes washed down the bodies as part of the postmortem routine, and handling their deceased victims further excited them.

Then they grew bolder. They told colleagues what they were doing, because the confessions added to their heightened sexual drive, but their accounts were dismissed. No one could believe that a person who entered healthcare would actively kill a patient. Wood, in particular, was known to lie and play mind games, so few associates took her seriously.

Graham then pressured Wood to take a more active role: Wood would have to kill one of the patients herself. She balked, which angered Graham. She took up with another woman and returned to Texas. From there, she wrote disturbing letters about wanting to smash the faces of babies in her care at another facility.

Wood told all of this to her ex-husband. It took him a year, but Ken eventually notified the police. After an investigation, both women were arrested. Wood turned state's witness against her former lover for a sentence of 20 to 40 years, with the possibility of parole. Graham, too, testified, but the most telling witness was Graham’s current lover, who admitted that Graham had confessed six murders to her. Former colleagues also described the things these women had said, including seeing their “souvenir shelf.”

On September 20, 1989, the jury convicted Graham of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. She drew six life sentences, with no possibility of parole. In media accounts, Wood’s role was downplayed to “occasional lookout,” and the case remains controversial over whether there were more than five murders. There was speculation, especially after a psychological evaluation of Graham, that even if Graham committed the murders, Wood had been the ultimate mastermind. The entire story is in Lowell Cauffiel’s true crime book, Forever and Five Days.

VENGEANCE

EMPLOYEES IN THE POSTAL FACILITY AT ROYAL OAK thought they heard shots, but it was difficult to tell. Then they heard screams. It was the age of “going postal,” when disgruntled post office workers like Oklahoma’s Patrick Sherill were seeking revenge for being fired or laid off. This time, on a cold November 14, 1991, it was close to home for Michiganders.

Thomas McIlvane, 31, walked into the postal service center with blood on his mind and a sawed-off .22 Ruger semiautomatic carbine. He’d been fired a year earlier and the former Marine and champion kickboxer had threatened to come back and make someone pay if he wasn’t reinstated. He’d said that he’d make Patrick Sherill’s assault, in which 14 people had died and 6 were wounded, look like a picnic.

His threats only ensured that firing him was the right decision. He had a short fuse. In fact, he’d been dishonorably discharged from the service for running over a car with a tank.

More than 160 people worked at the regional service center. Given news stories of half a dozen post office shootings over the past five years, it’s no surprise that some of them started jumping out of second-story windows to escape. They’d expected this from “Tommy.” Several were injured. Others barricaded themselves in their offices and hoped for the best.

In a spree that lasted about six minutes, McIlvane killed four and wounded five before turning the gun on himself. He didn’t die right away, however, so he was transported to an area hospital. He remained in a coma for a day before he expired.

Officials acknowledged that they’d known about his threats but had been helpless to do anything, short of closing the facility. This wasn’t an option. Employees had been warned to keep him from entering should he show up. But he’d arrived with a coat draped over his weapon.

McIlvane’s assault surprised no one who knew him. He’d been fired for fighting with customers on his route and having disputes with his manager. Being a martial arts expert made him more than a little scary. One supervisor had asked for extra security, which was denied. This man was among the dead. The other three fatalities were also supervisors, including a woman.

PUPPY LOVE REJECTED

IN LANSING, ROSE LARNER, 18, HAD BEEN dating John Kehoe, but was also friends with Bill Brown. The three of them became inseparable. Rose was happy, but Kehoe eventually tired of her and told her to get lost. Rose was devastated. Then in December 1993, she vanished.

That evening, she’d told her mother she was going to a friend’s house. When she failed to come home, her mother called the friend. Rose had never shown up. She was considered somewhat wild, so the police believed she might have run away. Her mother was certain that something had happened to her.

After two weeks with no sign of Rose, the police undertook a search for her. Kehoe admitted that he’d spoken to her on the night she disappeared, but he’d been with another girl. He had an alibi. Bill Brown didn’t help them with information, either. Nor did any of Rose’s friends.

The case went cold. More than two years went by. Rose seemed to be gone for good. Rose’s mother kept the case alive, and the Michigan State Police revisited the files. They decided that Kehoe was still a key suspect, since he’d been heard saying nasty things to and about Rose. He’d also been in the drug business with Bill Brown, and they’d been together on the night Rose vanished. Investigators decided to pressure Brown.

He resisted at first. He insisted he knew nothing. But finally, with the threat of problems over his suspected drug deals, he told investigators that Kehoe had killed Rose that night. She’d been bugging Kehoe. He’d wanted to get rid of her.

Together Kehoe and Brown had lured her to the car with the promise that they would all have sex, but then they took her to the home of Kehoe’s grandparents, who were away. They all showered together, but Rose refused to participate in a sexual menáge á trois. So Kehoe strangled her in the shower stall and slit her throat. Once she was dead, he proceeded to cut her body into pieces.

Brown said he’d been horrified and the whole thing made him ill, but Kehoe had forced him to help clean up the scene. They’d worked on it for hours, trying to remove every trace of Rose’s blood. Then they’d taken Rose’s parts to a cabin belonging to Kehoe’s family and burned them in a campfire ring. As they’d driven away they’d spread her ashes along the highway. Brown had feared that Kehoe would murder him if he told anyone about what they’d done, so he’d kept quiet.

Investigators believed Brown was telling the truth, but they needed evidence to confirm it. The murder had taken place more than two years earlier. They went to the grandparents’ and sprayed the rooms with luminol, which picked up blood on a carpet that suggested a ring the size of the bottom of a bucket. However, there was not enough to perform the type of DNA tests they used at that time. Kehoe and Brown had done a thorough cleanup job, and it looked as if the case was going to stall once more. But then an observant officer noticed a small darkish spot on the printed wallpaper that was not part of its intricate pattern. It was the right color for dried blood.

Technicians performed a test on it to determine if it was indeed blood. The test results were positive. So it was blood, but its origin had not yet been determined. They managed to extract enough of the substance for DNA analysis. Again, they stalled, because they needed DNA from Rose herself for comparison. More investigation turned up a report once filed by Rose for a sexual assault. She’d had her blood tested, so a sample was available. Testing indicated that the odds were one in more than 700 million against the blood spatter on the wallpaper being from anyone but Rose Larner.

Investigators also checked the basement sump-pump where the young men had dumped bloody water and went through the ashes in the fire pit where they’d burned Rose’s remains. With ultraviolet light, scientists analyzed fragments from both locations that appeared to be bone. A few small fragments proved to be human, specifically from someone fairly young. Against all odds, they had found evidence to corroborate Brown’s story.

In 1996, police arrested John Kehoe. Although he tried to finger Brown as the killer during his trial, he was convicted of first-degree murder. He received a life sentence.

FATAL ATTRACTION

SCOTT AMADURE FIRST SAW JON SCHMITZ in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. He managed to get onto a popular talk show, The Jenny Jones Show, where people find out the identity of a secret admirer. Schmitz was also invited onto the show and he believed he knew who his admirer might be – a woman who lived in his apartment building. He’d recently broken up a serious relationship and he was ready to start over with someone new. He’d spent a lot of money to dress to impress before flying to the Chicago taping on March 6, 1995.

To Schmitz’s surprise, even though the woman from his building was there, the person revealed to be his admirer was male – Scott Amadure. Schmitz was reportedly mortified, but he kept his cool. “I’m not interested,” he said.

He hadn’t realized that the show was actually “Secret Crushes on People of the Same Sex.” He would later say that a show staff person had assured him that his secret admirer was female. Had he understood the nature of the show, he’d never have agreed to appear. But he rode out the experience.

All three went home on the same flight and Schmitz volunteered to provide rides home. They stopped at a bar and Schmitz left on his own. Apparently, Amadure pulled a prank by stealing a construction light and putting it inside Schmitz’s car. Somehow the light, and a suggestive but unsigned note, set Schmitz off. Now that they were off the show, he wasn’t going to take this humiliation lying down.

He purchased a shotgun and ammunition, calmly telling the clerk that he was going hunting. On the morning of March 9, Schmitz went to Amadure’s trailer and shot him twice in the chest, killing him. He turned himself in and confessed.

The spotlight was on The Jenny Jones Show. Oakland County Prosecutor Richard Thompson insisted that the staff had ambushed Schmitz. "They seem to follow the rule that anything goes in the pursuit of ratings,” he said. “As a result, one man is left dead, and another faces life in prison without parole."

For an interview with People, Jones insisted, “We have no responsibility whatsoever because [Schmitz] was not misled. All the guests knew that it could be a man or a woman—it's very clear that he did know. This was not an ambush show."

In 1996, Schmitz was found guilty of second-degree murder and given a 25-50-year sentence. The conviction was overturned and he received a second trial. The result was the same.

Amadure’s family sued Telepictures, The Jenny Jones Show, and Warner Brothers (who owned the show) in 1999 in civil court. They argued that The Jenny Jones Show producers, in their quest for ratings and advertising money, were negligent. They’d put the unstable Schmitz on the show and humiliated him in front of a national audience. Thus, they’d caused him to kill Scott. The jury gave the family a huge award, but the Michigan Court of Appeals overturned the verdict. The Michigan Supreme Court later declined to hear the case. The looming damper on the talk show industry had been quashed.

AS YOU CAN SEE, MICHIGAN has a wide variety of murders, some of which remain unsolved. Perhaps a Cold Case squad will put an ending to those stories one of these days, like the Rose Larner case or the deer hunter murders. It takes persistent investigators, of which Michigan certainly has its share.

DON’T MISS BODIES OF EVIDENCE, NOTORIOUS USA’S FIRST BOX SET and New York Times bestselling collection about the criminals from our neck of the woods (the Pacific Northwest). Also check out Unnatural Causes, a box set that covers the crimes of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. Like all of our collections, Bodies of Evidence and Unnatural Causes, are available as an e-book on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.

If there’s a notorious case from YOUR town you’d like us to write about, contact:

Gregg@GreggOlsen.com

Photo Archive

Mugshots for Catherine Wood and Gwendolyn Graham

Larry Ranes mugshot

Danny Ranes mugshot

Henry Lee Lucas about the age when he killed his mother.

Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck mugshots

Raymond (J.R.) Duvall mugshot

Donald (Coco) Duvall mugshot