Solved cold cases in Michigan
5 documented cases.
Cindy Zarzycki
Cindy Zarzycki, 13, walked to the Dairy Queen on Nine Mile Road in East Detroit, Michigan, now Eastpointe, on the morning of Sunday, April 20, 1986, and was never seen again. She had told two friends she was meeting her boyfriend's father, Arthur Ream, who had promised to drive her to a surprise party for his son; the boy's birthday had been in January, and Ream had paid an employee to take him to Texas that weekend. Police treated her as a runaway for eight years. In 1994 the case was reclassified as a possible homicide and one of Ream's ex-wives pointed police to him; in 1995 Eastpointe Detective Derek McLaughlin was handed the file. In 2007 McLaughlin re-interviewed Cindy's friends, who told identical stories, and found a missing-child coupon with her picture in a watch box in Ream's locked-up warehouse. With Ream weeks from parole, prosecutors charged him in January 2008. In June 2008, with no body and no physical evidence beyond the coupon, a Macomb County jury took two hours to convict him of first-degree murder. In the courthouse lockup he told McLaughlin he had panicked and killed her, and weeks later drew a map marking a grave by a river in Macomb Township. On July 9, 2008, searchers found her remains, her purse and her mix tapes. He was sentenced to mandatory life and died of cancer in prison on August 15, 2024, aged 75, a suspect in the disappearances of other girls.
Helen Mae Dutcher
Helen Mae Dutcher, 36, was stabbed to death in Ferndale, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, in 1979; Wikipedia gives the date as December 1, and the Associated Press reported that her body was found in an alley. Police suspected Coral Eugene Watts for years but never charged him, because, the AP reported, they assumed he would be in his 80s if he ever left a Texas prison. Watts had pleaded guilty in Texas in 1982 to burglary with intent to murder, in exchange for immunity on killings he confessed to, and received 60 years; an appeals ruling and mandatory release laws cut that term so that he was due out in 2006. In January 2004 Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox discussed the case on national cable television. The Attorney General's office said an eyewitness to the Dutcher killing called the next morning. The man said he had watched from his porch. There was no physical evidence, and Watts had never confessed to this killing. Over a defense challenge to the witness's memory after 25 years, a jury in Pontiac heard him, and heard about Watts's Texas confessions, which the judge admitted as evidence of a pattern. On November 17, 2004 it found Watts guilty. He was sentenced to life without parole on December 7, 2004, and died in prison in 2007.
Rick and Gail Brink
Rick Brink, 28, and his wife Gail, 22, newlyweds of 18 months, were shot to death at their home in Park Township, near Holland, Michigan, with their bodies discovered on November 23, 1987. Rick was found in his Chevy Blazer in the driveway and Gail in bed inside the house. Gail's older brother, Ryan Wyngarden, was interviewed within days but was not treated as a suspect, and his then-girlfriend confirmed his alibi. The case went cold. In 2009 the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office formed a cold case team, and in 2011 two detectives were assigned the Brink murders. They read the old files, conducted more than 200 interviews and noticed a discrepancy in the alibi. On January 18, 2013 they brought in Wyngarden's wife, who said her husband had admitted to her years earlier that he killed his sister and brother-in-law. He was arrested within hours. A fellow inmate later testified that Wyngarden confessed to him in jail. At trial in March 2014, prosecutors said Wyngarden acted out of jealousy and to keep secret sexual contact with his sister when they were younger. The defense said his wife's testimony could not be trusted. A jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree premeditated murder on March 28, 2014, and he was sentenced to life without parole. Appeals failed. He maintains his innocence.
Roxanne Wood
Roxanne Leigh Wood, a 30-year-old woman, was found murdered in the kitchen of her home in Niles Township, Berrien County, Michigan, in February 1987, after a night out bowling. She had been sexually assaulted and her throat had been cut, and the killer left a small amount of his DNA at the scene. The case went cold for 35 years, with Roxanne's husband Terry Wood remaining the primary suspect despite no evidence against him. In 2020 the Michigan State Police, partnering with Western Michigan University's Cold Case Program, sent the badly degraded evidence to Identifinders International, where forensic scientists built a usable DNA profile from what was called a record-low amount of genetic material. Investigative genetic genealogist Gabriella Vargas traced that profile through public genealogy databases and, in a matter of days, narrowed the suspects to three brothers, pointing to Patrick Wayne Gilham of South Bend, Indiana. Undercover troopers covertly collected Gilham's DNA from a discarded cigarette, confirming the match. Gilham, who had a prior conviction for a 1979 sexual assault in Indiana, was arrested in February 2022, pleaded no contest to second-degree murder, and was sentenced to 23 to 50 years in prison.
Stella Lintemuth
Stella Lintemuth, an 89-year-old widow living alone in Big Rapids, Michigan, was found murdered in her bedroom on April 23, 1980, just days before her 90th birthday. She had been attacked in her home, and an electrical cord from a porcelain lamp was wrapped around her neck and face. Michigan State Police latent examiner Jerry Disler recovered two fingerprints from the base of the lamp, but in 1980 the only way to identify a print was to compare it by hand against a known suspect, and there was no suspect. The case went cold for more than a quarter century, with local theories pointing to a transient who might have come and gone on the rail line that ran behind the house. In December 2006, Michigan State Police forensic scientist Greg Michaud realized the old latent prints had never been run through the FBI's national fingerprint database, which had not existed in 1980. He entered the print into the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System and got a hit: Scott Elwood Graham, a man who by then was confined in a psychiatric hospital in California. With Graham identified, examiners matched several additional latent prints from the scene to him. The Mecosta County prosecutor charged Graham in 2007, and in 2009 a jury convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder after a six-day trial; he was sentenced to life in prison. The work earned the FBI's 2007 Latent Hit of the Year recognition.