Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder
Fred Rosen
For my loving uncle, Irving Alper
“Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.”
—Voltaire
Prologue
November 14, 1997
The sun rose slowly. It was 6:45 A.M. In two cities in Michigan, the players were ready.
In West Bloomfield Township, just blocks from police headquarters, the beautiful housewife was getting her kids ready for school. Her boyfriend lounged in the living room, a loaded revolver in his waistband.
Down the block at the police station, one of the cops reported in for work. Another, who was on the night shift, was still sleeping.
A third cop reported to work thirty miles north in Flint. He was unaware at that moment of the body in the park.
The body was not a bullet-riddled corpse. Nothing so dramatic. She was merely a middle-aged woman long past caring about her appearance, her family, and her life—because it was over.
She lay huddled in a blanket in the snow that drifted over her. It would be hours before she would be discovered, but when she was, all the players would be brought together in a murder case that would become one of the most twisted and sordid in Michigan history.
PART ONE
One
November 14, 1997
At approximately 1:48 P.M., Deputy Darrin Zudel of the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department (GCSD), while working district E-2 in the town of Genesee, Michigan, was dispatched to Fisherman’s Park at the northeast corner of Bray and Carpenter Roads. The dispatcher said it was a possible DOA (dead on arrival).
When Zudel got to the park, he found three men and one woman, all in their early twenties. They were the ones who had called in the “911”. It seemed that they had gone fishing in the park. On their way to the river, they had discovered a body.
“Stay back,” Zudel told them.
Along with two EMTs who had just arrived on the scene, Zudel set out along the path the fishermen had been on only moments before when they made their discovery.
It didn’t really look like much, sort of like a package all bundled up in a blanket. Zudel pulled the blanket down from the face and noted that the subject was a woman with blood around the head and also bruising to the face and eyes. He reached down, pulled the blanket aside from her right arm, and put his hand on her right wrist. The body was very, very cold. He was not surprised when he didn’t feel any pulse.
Leaving the body with the two EMTs, Zudel went back to his car. By that time, Lieutenant Michael Becker of the Genessee County Sheriff’s Department had arrived. Becker had been on uniformed duty when he heard Zudel being summoned and had raced to the scene as fast as he could.
Zudel took Becker back along the trail; Zudel showed him the body. From Becker’s preliminary examination, it was clear the woman had been murdered. It was time to bring in a specialist.
Kevin Shanlian was in his office at the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department when he, too, heard Central Communication dispatch Zudel’s unit to the fishing site located at Bray and Carpenter Roads.
While the park was technically in the township of Genesee, it was located right next to Flint. Flint, Michigan, has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country. Murders, though, didn’t just stop at the city line. They leached over. Unfortunately, homicides were anything but rare in Genesee. Commonplace was a more apt description.
Immediately a question of jurisdiction came up. While the park was in Genesee Township, the township was within the county of the same name. Therefore, who had jurisdiction? Actually, the answer was both, but the township’s police force had two detectives on leave and was understaffed. As a result, they made the practical decision to shift responsibility to the sheriff.
The next call Shanlian heard was from his lieutenant, Michael Becker, summoning him to the scene. The body dump job would be his case. Shanlian reached into his desk.
When he had first started as a rookie, he probably had eight guns on him and a knife in his boot. But the more experience he got, the more he realized how much you used your head on the job. He got to putting the gun in a drawer or in a glove compartment, having to remind himself to take it out when he went into the field.
Now he reached into his desk and took out his 45mm Sig Sauer automatic and snapped it in place in the shoulder holster under his jacket. It was a lot of firepower, but Flint was a high crime area and cops were always one step behind the bad guys when it came to firepower.
He drove quickly to the scene. By the time he got there, the temperature had risen to all of thirty-three degrees, a veritable heat wave in the late Michigan fall.
“She’s along that path there,” Lieutenant Becker told Shanlian, pointing behind him.
Becker was busy answering half a dozen questions from support personnel. Alone, Shanlian walked along the path and into the park.
The warmer air had mixed with the colder ground producing a fog that hung low to the earth, swirling around the body of the woman, who looked so warm and comfy wrapped in the flowered blanket that had become her death shroud.
Who was she? How had she gotten there?
Shanlian, a veteran detective at thirty-five, spotted Deputy Zudel, the cop who had first called the homicide in.
“Have the fishermen who discovered the body transported to headquarters, where we’ll take their statements. Then go check the trash containers around here and the roadway west of here,” Shanlian requested. “Let’s see if we can find any evidence that might help us.”