The Michigan Murders

320 Pages·2016·3.26 MB·English

by  Keyes

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The Michigan Murders
Edward Keyes
To Della Agnes Murray Walsh,
a grand lady who gave me my beloved Eileen; who in turn honored me with
Steve and Dara and Ed and Terry and Kenan and Jeanine and Lisa and Tom …
all of whom have put up with me for so long, hoping for the best …
Author Preface
What follows is true.
A few years ago, a normally peaceful mid-American community was wracked
by a succession of inexplicable murders. The victims—seven young females—
ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-three, each killed with unspeakable
savagery.
The primary locale was Washtenaw County, Michigan, not far west of Detroit,
seat of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Eastern Michigan
University in adjoining Ypsilanti. All the murders occurred within this twenty-
five-square-mile area. The time span was from July of 1967 through July of
1969. Those two years became a period of maddening frustration and
humiliation for policemen tormented by the case. It was also an unendurable
crisis for those who looked to them for protection. As an inquisitive reporter and
writer, I could not help but wonder how so “average” a community had dealt
with so prolonged a period of anxiety and fear: how individuals were affected,
by what misplacement of circumstances they’d become involved, where these
tragedies had left them. And, of course, who had killed. And why.
It turned into a three-year project. I strove to recreate the situations, the
scenes, the moods as they were when they were happening, as authentically as it
was possible to do after the fact. What follows, then, is factual to the very best of
my ability. But it does not, cannot, represent all the truth. For no matter how
hard one may try, however deep the most enterprising reporter may dig, it is
rarely possible to find out everything one wants to know … and, by the same
token, one often turns up facts that in the end prove extraneous and must be
discarded as irrelevant to the central theme. But everything here described did
happen, and the account is limited only by my own powers of description and
interpretation.
There is one element of “fiction” knowingly presented, nonetheless, and it is
important for the reader to know of it. True names are used only of public
officials and certain private individuals drawn unofficially into these events, and
of police officers involved (with three exceptions, so as to safeguard decent
reputations). Identifications of all other principals have been disguised—of the
victims, their families and friends; of bystanders, witnesses, suspects; even of the
one finally accused and tried. All these persons, not least the family of the
convicted murderer, now that the horror is over (although for some the trauma
may never be), have their own lives to lead, their own circles of peaceful
association to protect and cherish. I have seen no need to expose any of them
further to needless aggravation or harassment from either the unthinking or the
malicious. To those who do not know them, their true names will not be
significant to the drama in any case.
I will burden you here with practically none of the usual formal
acknowledgments. Having spent an aggregate of six full months in Michigan,
having interviewed and talked with many hundreds of helpful individuals,
having been permitted access to countless volumes of records both public and
confidential, I see hardly any way to begin, or end, such a list of all to whom I
owe gratitude.
There are two warranting special mention nonetheless. One is the Michigan
State Police as an organization—tough, uncompromising, one of the proudest
and most capable law-enforcement agencies I have encountered anywhere—
without whose thoughtful forbearance and subtle approval my efforts might have
run into many a dead end.
The other is an erudite, interested, enthusiastic gentleman who had himself
closely followed and noted many of these events before I’d ever entered upon
the scene, and in whose perceptive insights I found much value. To Professor
Paul McGlynn of Eastern Michigan University, my thanks and warm respects.
All others—many of whom deserve no less recognition—will find themselves
in the narrative (appropriately, I trust), even if many will have to accommodate
to their new identities. Each has contributed to what I hope all will find to be an
accurate and sensitive representation of how it was in the time of The Michigan
Murders.
Edward Keyes
New York 1976
CHAPTER 1
Ypsilanti, Michigan. July 10, 1967. Hot, quiet, stagnant.
Marilyn Pindar’s younger sister Sheila received the call. It was Nanette
Langois, Marilyn’s roommate. Had the Pindars heard from Marilyn? She had not
come back to the apartment on Sunday night and had not shown up for work yet
on Monday morning. Probably nothing to worry about, but …
Sheila Pindar, an alert, vivacious eighteen-year-old, was alarmed. She and a
couple of friends had dropped by the apartment a little after 7:30 the previous
evening, to find her sister out, and after waiting for a few minutes, had left,
asking to have Marilyn call home when she got in. Now she learned that Marilyn
had returned to the apartment ten or fifteen minutes later, puttered about for a
few minutes, and then gone out to get some air. Nanette had not seen or heard
from her since. Neither, it now began to appear, had anyone else who might have
been expected to.
Sheila pondered this, then decided to tell her mother. Margaret Pindar got into
her car at once and sped the seven miles north to her daughter’s apartment
building at 413 Washtenaw Avenue, a tree-lined street in the heart of Ypsilanti,
only a few blocks from the campus of Eastern Michigan University, where
Marilyn and her roommate were students.
As Mrs. Pindar drove into the tarmac parking area in front, she noticed that
her daughter’s Comet was not in its usual reserved space, but at the opposite side
of the lot. Using her spare key—she liked to be able to drop in every so often
when the girls were out, to straighten up or bring things they might need—she
went through the apartment with a mother’s practiced eye and noted that her
daughter’s belongings seemed in order. Then she picked up the phone and called
Nanette at the university’s Field Services Office, where she and Marilyn worked
part-time. Marilyn still had not reported in. Mrs. Pindar asked what she was
wearing when she went out last on Sunday evening. Nanette said it was the
orange tent dress with white polka dots and her leather-and-straw sandals. Mrs.
Pindar checked Marilyn’s closet. The dress and sandals were not there. Also,
there was no sign anywhere of either her apartment keys or her car keys. Yet she
had not taken her purse containing her driver’s license.
Margaret Pindar next telephoned her husband at the bronze plant in Flat Rock,
where he was director of engineering.
Charles Pindar listened quietly. He suggested that Margaret telephone the
police first, then go to Ypsilanti headquarters personally. He would leave the
plant at once and join her there.
At police headquarters the Pindars’ concern turned to frustration. Marilyn Pindar
had been missing less than twenty-four hours. Police are not aroused to quick
anxiety over a young person dropping out of sight for a day or two—particularly
in a town like Ypsilanti.
Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, are university towns. Ypsilanti harbors
Eastern Michigan University, which in 1967 had an enrollment of some 13,000
students. Just to the west, comprising a significant part of the city of Ann Arbor,
is the University of Michigan, with almost three times as many students as
E.M.U. Thus together, within a range of barely ten miles, the two communities
swarmed ten months of the year with close to 50,000 young people, mostly
transient, plus additional thousands of high-school age and younger.
In such environments, the typical missing persons case usually turns out to be
some restless student taking off on a lark or to shack up somewhere for a couple
of days. The local police had become so used to this that often they were hard
put not to spell it out in plain language to distraught parents or guardians who
descended to hound them about a son or daughter who had not been heard from
in a day or so.
The desk officer and his sergeant, after dutifully asking routine questions of
the Pindars and jotting a few notes, finally moved to cut the session short by
suggesting with weary candor that, after all, there really might be less to the
situation than met their eyes.
Mr. and Mrs. Pindar caught the inference and protested: Their daughter was
definitely not the type of girl to just go off. Besides, she had left behind the car
her father had just given her—a blue ’63 Comet she prized. If she were off on a
lark, wouldn’t she have taken it? And then there was the matter of her
belongings, which were still at the apartment. Except for the car keys and her
apartment key, Marilyn had left everything behind except the clothes she’d been
wearing. It was unlike Marilyn to take off with just the clothes on her back, even
for a night—and particularly without her handbag.
The officers listened to all this without comment. They had heard stories like
this from distraught parents a hundred times—and the kid usually showed up the
next day. There was little that Margaret and Charles Pindar could do but return
home and wait—and hope for a call that would dispel their foreboding.
The Pindars were a close-knit, deeply religious family of Polish-German stock.