Fascinating expose of little-known 1980's serial strangler/sodomizer of young gals,Michael Ronning,part #1
Joe1orbit
Starting to run out of posting time for today, already. Lemme try to get in
three final items today. This one is three days old, but VERY interesting and
really does not deserve to be ignored. Just a BEAUTIFUL demonstration of how
DESPERATE your society is to PRETEND that it can solve crimes and capture
serial killers, and how TOTALLY immoral your judicial system is, HAPPY to
DEMONIZE any luckless, unempowered citizen-slave who happens to be easily
prosecutable and unable to properly defend himself in court, which is something
that even the RICHEST and most CUNNING defendent finds nearly impossible to do,
since a PRESUMPTION of GUILT, not of innocence, is bestowed upon every
defendent, prior to their trial even beginning.
Over in Michigan in 1983, a 17 year old gal was kidnapped and harvested, as
she walked to school. Of course the media focused on this case, and after
awhile, with NO arrest made, POLITICAL PRESSURE was brought to bear on the top
level pigs: "Make an arrest, or you'll be fired, demoted, etc..." So, the pigs
needed a patsy, and about a YEAR after the murder, they found a POOR,
unemployed, mentally RETARDED, 26 year old petty thief, who was the PERFECT
patsy, so EASY to frame because his MIND was like that of a 9 year old child,
meaning the prosecution could SHOW the jury how "ABNORMAL and terrifyingly
DIFFERENT" from THEM, 26 year old Thomas was.
Absolutely NO physical or concrete evidence could be found, to link Thomas to
this murder. but HEY, you creatures don't NEED that, not in an ultra-diseased
society where ALL defendents are PRESUMED GUILTY. Thomas was CONVICTED,
sentenced to LIFE in prison, and thrown into a 'special" prison for mentally
retarded societal torture victims, where he has been tortured for the past 15
years.
Now, 15 YEARS too late, two FORMER PIGS are coming forward to reveal the
TRUTH. Please note how BOTH pigs SUCKED MONEY out of their society for as long
as they felt like it, by ACTING as GOONS and enforcers of evil societal
doctrine, and only AFTER RETIRING, are they coming forward with the Truth. In a
sane society, they would BOTH be sunjected to CRIMINAL prosecution of the
HIGHEST order, for PARTICIPATING in this MOST evil of schemes, the RAILROADING
of an innocent, mentally retarded victim, for the crime of murder.
Even more fascinatingly, the below investigative report shows that a SERIAL
KILLER, targeting young gals, NEVER caught or even officially IDENTIFIED as a
serial killer, may have been at work in the Battle Creek area of MI, for YEARS,
patiently plucking off gal victims, probably LAUGHINg his head off over the
impotence of the pigs, and how they were framing & railroading innocent
parties, like Thomas.
That ALLEGED serial killer, fellow named
Michael Ronning, IS now in custody and has confessed to the 1983 harvesting of
Patricia. We have THREE different gals murdered in the early-mid 1980's, and
Michael may well have committed all three. The victims were strangled and
sodomized, classic signs of MAJOR rage on the killer's part. He LIVED directly
UNDERNEATH the apartment of one of the three gals, and FLED right after she
turned up strangled & sodomized.
Michael later moved to Arkansas, and a VERY similar murder of a young gal
occured there, in 1986. Michael WAS captured after that murder, put on trial &
convicted. He is SUSPECTEd of even MORE harvestings, and yet his name is VERY
unfamiliar to us in the serial killing scene. How VERY unjust, and what a
FASCINATING serial killer he appears to be.
Stay Strong, Michael!
Take care, JOE
The following appears courtesy of the 6/14/00 online edition of The Detroit
Free Press newspaper:
Two ex-cops say wrong man is jailed for murder; admitted serial killer claims
he did it
Proof of the truth was destroyed
June 14, 2000
BY DAVID ZEMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
BATTLE CREEK -- One snowy February morning in 1983, Patricia Rosansky, a
17-year-old junior at Battle Creek Central High, was abducted as she walked
alone to school.
Two months passed before her corpse was found, and another year before police
made an arrest.
The suspect was Thomas Cress, 26, an illiterate, two-bit thief who functioned
at the level of a third-grader. No physical evidence tied Cress to the murder
-- no prints, no blood. Strands of hair were found clutched in the teen's hand.
But they didn't match Cress. There also was evidence of rape, but in 1983 DNA
science could not link it to a suspect.
Cress nevertheless was convicted in 1985 after witnesses said he admitted to
the slaying in casual conversations. He was sentenced to life in prison and now
resides in a unit for mentally ill inmates at the Riverside Correctional
Facility in Ionia.
He insists that he is innocent. "The prosecutor just refuses to let me go," he
says.
This is a story about the imprecise science of finding a killer. It involves
the jailing of a possibly innocent man, the broken careers of two detectives
who came to believe Cress -- and the possibility that a serial killer who
drifted through Battle Creek has gone unpunished.
A two-month Free Press review of Cress' case shows:
There is compelling evidence his chief accusers lied at his trial to collect
reward money.
Michael Ronning, the admitted serial killer, has confessed to Rosansky's murder
-- and passed a lie-detector test.
Cress, too, passed a polygraph in which he denied killing Rosansky.
Finally, the state destroyed crucial evidence that might have cleared Cress.
Detectives say when they told a prosecutor another man was likely responsible
for Rosansky's murder, he ordered the destruction of semen and hair found on
Rosansky -- evidence that, through advances in DNA science, could have
confirmed the killer's identity.
Prosecutors admit the evidence was destroyed, but deny acting maliciously.
Cress' saga is now at the center of bipartisan legislation in Congress that
would require states to preserve DNA evidence while criminal defendants are in
prison. U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a cosponsor of the bill, called the
evidence destruction in Cress's case "an egregious violation of fundamental
fairness" in a statement provided at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
Tuesday.
The case also has renewed a chilling debate in Battle Creek: Was a serial
killer responsible for the murders of Rosansky and two other young women --
Maggie Hume and Karry Evans -- a generation ago?
Battle Creek was never so big that the killing of a young woman passed
unnoticed.
Especially with Maggie Hume.
Her father was Mike Hume, a popular football coach at St. Philip Catholic
Central High.
Maggie was a four-year cheerleader at St. Philip, an honor student who wore her
blond hair in a bouncy pony tail. Maggie stayed close to home after high
school. She attended community college and, in the summer of 1982, found a job
as a doctor's secretary.
Smart and reliable, Hume, 20, typically arrived for work at 8:30 a.m. -- an
hour early. So coworkers grew concerned when she failed to show Aug. 18, 1982.
Police were called. When officers entered Hume's second-story unit at the River
Apartment complex that afternoon, they discovered her body under a bundle of
clothes in her closet. She had been strangled and sodomized. A billfold was
stolen from her dresser.
As police interviewed tenants, they somehow failed to notice a young man
packing his car. He lived in apartment 13, below Hume. None of the officers saw
him slip into his rusted old Cutlass, and quietly out of town.
Six months passed, with no break in the Hume case, when Patty Rosansky left her
home in Battle Creek around 8 a.m. to walk to school.
Patty lived with her brother several blocks from Battle Creek Central High. She
was a B student, active in Junior Achievement and, like Hume, attended St.
Philip Catholic Church.
Crunching through the snow on her way to school that day -- Feb. 3, 1983 --
Patty and a girlfriend spied some classmates. Her friend stopped to sneak a
cigarette. Patty walked on.
Within a block or so, she was abducted and driven to a wooded area used as a
dumping ground outside town. She was marched to a ravine near the Kalamazoo
River where she was raped, sodomized, perhaps strangled and, finally,
bludgeoned. She was then covered with branches and debris. When scrap
collectors discovered her partially nude body two months later, one of her
mittens still gripped the cold ground, a testament to her final struggle.
As Battle Creek worried about Hume's slaying and Rosansky's disappearance, a
third girl mysteriously vanished.
She was Karry Evans of Bellevue, a town of 1,282 residents a few miles north of
Battle Creek. She, too, was 17 and was last seen alive one March afternoon
walking down Main Street.
Evans was a junior at Bellevue High, where she played clarinet in the band. She
lived with her grandparents.
Two months later, mushroom hunters discovered her body in a wooded clearing
between Bellevue and Battle Creek. She, too, had been strangled.
Seven months. Three murders.
All women ages 17 to 20.
Detectives chased what few leads there were. But for months, there were no firm
suspects.
Then, in January 1984, a Crime Solvers program on a local TV station posted a
$5,000 reward for information leading to Rosansky's murderer. The reward was
double what the show had offered in the past.
Within days, several residents reported to police disturbing comments made by a
man they all knew: Thomas Cress.
Among them were Walter Moore, a jailed felon, his brother Terry Moore, their
sister-in-law Candy Moore and Candy's sister, Cindy Lesley.
The accounts of these witnesses, taken together, accused Cress of admitting
that he gave Rosansky a ride that February morning, provided her with
marijuana, then raped and killed her after she refused sex.
Lesley -- who spoke to police before the TV program aired, but did not mention
a confession until afterward -- collected the $5,000 reward.
At Cress' 1985 trial, two other witnesses impressed jurors. Shirley House
testified she was standing outside one day when she overheard Cress say he "had
to kill the bitch" for sex. At a bar, Cress told Emery DeBruine essentially the
same story, DeBruine later testified.
When prosecutors finished, Cress took the stand.
He was a divorced father of three and, at age 28, had spent his entire life in
Battle Creek.
Cress had disabilities that kept him from reading or writing. Before his
arrest, Cress worked odd jobs as a custodian, a carpenter and a newspaper
deliveryman. He sometimes earned extra cash by collecting defective boxes of
cereal from the Kellogg's plant and selling them door to door.
He drank too much and smoked pot. He had two petty theft convictions. He
admitted to "nervous problems" when his marriage foundered.
Sitting before jurors, Cress acknowledged that he knew Rosansky, who lived a
few houses away. But he claimed that on the morning Rosansky disappeared, he
was delivering papers, not cruising schoolyards. His account was corroborated
by his partner on the paper route.
But the prosecution witnesses proved overwhelming. In closing arguments,
Calhoun County Prosecutor Conrad Sindt told jurors that the only thing Cress
could not explain was why all these witnesses would take the stand and lie.
The defense had no real answer. Cress was convicted of first-degree murder and
ordered to spend his life behind bars.
New path of death
Although the Rosansky case was closed, detectives were no nearer to solving the
deaths of Hume and Evans.
But early in 1986, four years after Hume's death, Battle Creek police detective
Dennis Mullen caught his first break in that case.
Mullen, a former combat medic in Vietnam, received a phone call from Arkansas
police about a man held there for the slaying of a 19-year-old woman. His name
was Michael Ronning, a drug dealer and thief from Battle Creek.
He was a suspect in the death of Diana Hanley, who had been abducted from her
home in Jonesboro, Ark., and driven 40 miles to the town of Pocahontas. She was
found bound and apparently strangled, with stab wounds through the throat, in
the woods near town. Her body had been covered with branches.
When Arkansas police questioned Ronning's wife, Vicky Ronning, she hardly
seemed surprised.
She suggested police might want to probe the murder of another woman, in her
hometown of Battle Creek.
She said the woman had been found in the apartment above theirs in 1982. Vicky
and Michael had left that day for Texas.
She was describing Hume.
As he mined Ronning's past, detective Mullen discovered that Ronning had indeed
lived in apartment 13, below Hume, when she was killed -- and left for Texas
that day in August 1982.
Mullen called Ronning's cousin in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, where Ronning
often bunked on his travels.
The cousin didn't disappoint. He remembered Ronning's surprise visit that
summer. In fact, the cousin said, he believed Ronning was behind the murder of
a woman who lived with the cousin at the time.
In September 1982, one month after Hume's death, 20-year-old Annette Melia left
the cousin's Arlington home one evening to walk to a convenience store for a
soda. She never returned.
Squirrel hunters found her skeleton three years later in a wooded area used as
a dumping ground in nearby Bedford. She was covered by roofing shingles.
The more Mullen probed, the uglier Mike Ronning became.
Ronning had run wild as a teenager in Battle Creek, drinking, smoking pot,
brawling. There were reports Ronning liked to torture animals. He once went
after a female relative with a hammer.
He soon graduated from stolen cars and burglary to arrests, in the late 1970s,
for attempted rape in California, indecent exposure in Oregon and armed
robbery, again in California. Five months before Hume's rape and murder,
Ronning was arrested, but not charged, on suspicion of raping a drugged
prostitute in San Diego.
Galvanized by his first break in the Hume case, Mullen flew to Arkansas in 1987
to interview Ronning in prison.
Ronning refused to talk.
Mullen had more luck with Vicky Ronning. He found her back in Michigan, serving
time for drunken driving.
Day after day, Mullen visited Vicky Ronning, prodding her for details to
connect her husband to Hume.
Vicky recalled Michael was out the evening Hume was killed. He often vanished
for hours, even days, and never told anyone where he had been. She also
remembered he was wearing a new pair of moccasin-type shoes with a distinctive
herringbone pattern in the soles. Vicky later identified the shoe in a Sears
catalog.
The pattern matched prints detectives lifted from the air-conditioning unit
below Hume's second-story apartment. Police say the killer used the unit to
hoist himself onto Hume's balcony.
Vicky talked of her cross-country excursions with her husband. He hustled jobs
in construction as they hopscotched through Battle Creek, Texas, Arkansas,
Louisiana and California.
At times, Vicky said, they would settle into a routine in Sacramento, say, or
New Orleans, only to have Michael barrel through the door one afternoon and
announce they were leaving. Immediately.
Vicky's story sounded scattered, but Mullen documented much of it through phone
records. The couple, who were cousins, shared a grandmother in Pocahontas, Ark.
They also shared grandma's phone card.
Mullen called the grandmother, who cheerfully supplied the detective with years
of billing invoices. The records placed Michael Ronning in neighborhoods where
women and teenage girls seemed to turn up dead. The records showed he was in
Battle Creek when Hume was killed; in Texas when Melia died; in Arkansas at the
time of Hanley's death. And, the detective learned, Ronning appeared to be
linked to the 1985 death of Sandra Williams, 38, of Sacramento, Calif.
She was last seen checking into the Berry Hotel there on July 6, 1985, with a
white male. She was raped, bound and strangled with a telephone cord.
Phone records placed Ronning at several Sacramento hotels that summer,
including the Berry. He worked as a handyman there.
He had a key to every room.
In late 1991, Mullen received more grim news from Texas.
Police in Bedford, where Annette Melia's body was found, had identified the
skeleton of a second female. She was 16-year-old Melissa Jackson. Her remains
were discovered in a wooded field just 800 yards from where Melia's body had
been found. Jackson had been covered in plywood.
Mullen checked the phone records. Sure enough, Michael Ronning was near her
home in Grand Prairie when she vanished in 1983.
She was the fifth dead female linked to Ronning.
By now, Mullen was sure Ronning had not only killed Hume, but also Patricia
Rosansky and Karry Evans, the other Battle Creek-area women.
Again, phone records were crucial. They placed Ronning around Battle Creek at
the time of each murder. Other evidence also pointed his way.
Rosansky was found only 1 1/2 miles from the River Apartments, where Ronning
lived, and where Hume had died.
After Rosansky disappeared in February 1983, Mike and Vicky Ronning moved to a
ranch home north of Battle Creek, about five miles from Bellevue. On March 1,
1983, Michael Ronning enrolled his younger sister in the Bellevue School
District and began driving her to school each day.
Twelve days later, Bellevue schoolgirl Evans disappeared while walking down
Main Street. Her body was dumped in the woods near a shooting range, a mile
from Ronning's home.
As evidence mounted against Ronning, detective Mullen became convinced Cress
did not kill Rosansky.
The detective mentioned his concerns one day to Calhoun County Prosecutor
Conrad Sindt, who convicted Cress in 1985.
In Mullen's version, Sindt suggested that he keep his views to himself, unless
he had some evidence to back it up. They never discussed Cress again. Sindt
declined to talk for this story.
Mullen realized his investigation had taken a sensitive turn.
In chasing Hume's killer, he had become entangled in murders involving other
police agencies: Karry Evans, the sheriff's case, and Rosansky, which State
Police had closed with Cress' conviction.
Yet he couldn't help himself.
"A criminal investigation is like riding a bucking bronco," Mullen said. "You
don't take it anywhere; you cannot control it; you just ride it where it takes
you."
In late 1991, Mullen decided to pay another visit to Ronning in Arkansas.
He contacted the new Calhoun County prosecutor, Jon Sahli. Sahli had been
appointed to succeed Sindt, who had become a judge in Battle Creek.
As Mullen and his commander, Joe Newman, recall the conversation, they informed
Sahli of the evidence linking Ronning to Hume's murder. They say they also told
Sahli that Ronning may have killed Rosansky as well.
Sahli, who now works for the Saginaw County prosecutor's office, remembers the
talks differently. In his recollection, the detectives said they suspected
Ronning in the Hume case and "other murders."
"There had been no mention of Michael Ronning's being even remotely connected
to the Thomas Cress case," Sahli said.
In any event, Sahli agreed that the detectives should re-interview Ronning. In
return for confessing to any murders in Battle Creek, Ronning would be offered
the chance to serve out his life term in Michigan, closer to family.
There was another reason they believed Ronning would accept the offer. By
locking into a plea deal with Michigan, he would be shielded from potential
murder convictions in Texas or California, states with the death penalty.
This time, Ronning talked.
In a report dated Jan. 13, 1992, one week after interviewing Ronning, Mullen
wrote that Ronning "insinuated" he was responsible for as many as six murders
and "could clear the man that was in prison on the Rosansky murder."
Ronning also "indicated" that he killed Karry Evans. And he offered to take a
polygraph exam to back his claims.
In the same report, Mullen wrote that Ronning's connection to "the murder of
Patricia Rosansky ...was passed to Prosecutor Jon Sahli."
In the months that followed, Battle Creek police called Sahli's office
repeatedly to push for a plea agreement that would allow Ronning to confess to
the Battle Creek murders, police reports show.
By April, Mullen's frustration showed. "The prosecutor's office," he wrote,
"reminded me of an organization that doesn't do anything."
On May 4, 1992, Sahli received a routine, two-page form from the Michigan State
Police asking permission to destroy all the evidence in Rosansky's death. State
Police noted that Cress' appeals had been exhausted. They said they needed to
destroy the evidence to make room in storage.
On May 14, Sahli signed the order, as he had signed so-called purge orders in
other aging criminal cases.
In the months that followed, which included more meetings with Battle Creek
police regarding Ronning -- meetings in which police say Ronning's connection
to Rosansky's murder was again made clear -- Sahli never mentioned signing the
evidence-destruction order.
One such meeting took place in Battle Creek on Aug. 22, 1992. It was attended
by Sahli, Mullen, an assistant prosecutor, Matt Glaser, and Keith Hall, an
Arkansas attorney who represented Ronning.
In an affidavit, Hall, now a prosecutor in Arkansas, said there was "a detailed
discussion" of Ronning's confessions to murders in Michigan, "including
Patricia Rosansky."
If true, that would have given Sahli a chance to cancel his order to have the
Rosansky evidence destroyed. That did not happen.
State Police burned the evidence that October. Lost forever were the hairs
found clutched in Rosansky's hand and traces of DNA-bearing semen on a sanitary
napkin under her body.
Sahli insists he did nothing improper, that he never learned of Ronning's
alleged link to Rosansky until years later.
"If I thought there was a remote chance of any connection," he said, "I
probably would have said, 'Don't destroy that evidence. Hang on to it for now.'
"
Ronning's hoped-for plea deal did not take shape until 1996, when the governors
of Michigan and Arkansas agreed to it if Ronning could prove he committed the
Battle Creek murders.
Ronning passed a polygraph arranged by police in which he answered yes to the
question, "Is three the true number of people you killed in Michigan?"
In March 1997, Ronning sat before a video camera in the Kalamazoo County Jail
and confessed in a sometimes-rambling narrative to the murders of Hume, Evans
and Rosansky.
His description of Maggie Hume's death was clearly the most impressive. He drew
a detailed map of her bedroom and recalled how her dresser was angled in a
corner. He described the grassy area near the apartment complex where he tossed
Hume's billfold after the murder, a detail that had never been made public.
Ronning was less impressive in describing Evans' abduction from Bellevue. He
said he snatched her using the same ploy as with Rosansky: by driving beside
her as she walked to school, pretending to ask directions, then raising a
starter's pistol to her face and ordering her in the car.
But he said Evans was abducted in the morning; Bellevue police say she vanished
in the afternoon.
Ronning also recalled that Evans' body was dumped closer to a road than it was,
and he was unable, 14 years later, to locate the death scene when driven
through the area by police.
His confession to Rosansky's murder also presented problems. He had the right
time of morning in which she was abducted, and he compellingly described the
girl's journey to the woods outside town, near an abandoned water-pumping
station. After forcing Rosansky into the woods, Ronning said, he offered her
marijuana, forced her to remove all her clothes and strangled her with his left
arm after trying to have sex.
He said he then smashed her once in the back of the head with a large rock.
Just to be sure.
But Prosecutor Susan Mladenoff, who had defeated Sahli the previous November,
and assistant prosecutor Nancy Mullett, were skeptical. To them, Ronning's
confession was vague in some respects, plain wrong in others, and could have
come from reading news stories.
Rosansky was not nude when she was found, only partially nude. And Ronning
failed to note that she was found in a ravine, near the Kalamazoo River. There
also was conflicting evidence about Rosansky's head injuries. Ronning said he
hit her once with a large rock, while experts disagreed on how many times she
was struck, and some suggested a club was a more likely weapon.
Finally, Ronning could not find the path where he said he turned off Custer
Road to kill Rosansky.
To Mullen, this last failure was understandable. The area where Rosansky died
had changed dramatically over the years. What was once a desolate stretch of
country road was now dotted with offices and auto shops. The dirt path Ronning
described in his confession had been covered by a church parking lot.
But to prosecutors, these descriptive failures confirmed their theory: Ronning
was falsely confessing to the Battle Creek murders to move back to Michigan.
They declared the deal dead.
But for Cress, the confessions signaled a new beginning. His lawyer requested a
new trial. Cress took a lie-detector test and was found to be truthful in
denying any role in Rosansky's death.
Mullen also located one of Cress' chief accusers at his 1985 trial, Candy
Moore, whose last name had since changed to Cross. In a videotaped interview,
Cross said she did not recall her earlier testimony implicating Cress.
She now said, "He never talked to me about killing nobody."
Cross also said her sister, Cindy Lesley, falsely accused Cress to collect the
$5,000 reward. "I think it is a setup deal," Cross told Mullen. "Cindy is
money-hungry."
Cross later claimed that Mullen coerced her to recant.
Also coming forward was Thomas Clark, who testified that Walter Moore -- who
had committed suicide in jail -- had once confided he falsely accused Cress for
the reward money.
In December 1997, Calhoun County Circuit Judge Allen Garbrecht ordered a new
trial for Cress, citing the lack of physical evidence linking Cress to
Rosansky's murder, the recanted witness testimony and Ronning's confession.
Garbrecht expressed doubts about that confession, but noted "specific details
may be sketchy," given the lapse of time.
Prosecutors appealed. And in an abrupt turnabout, Garbrecht reversed his
decision in March of last year. Among the reasons he cited was new expert
testimony that indicated Rosansky had been struck multiple times in the head,
not just once, though the judge conceded the evidence was "contradictory."
Garbrecht also cited shortcomings in Ronning's confessions -- discrepancies
that the judge viewed as understandable in his earlier order. The judge did not
address the polygraph exams taken by Ronning and Cress, nor the destruction of
DNA evidence.
He denied Cress' motion for a new trial in Rosansky's death.
"The jury heard Mr. Cress testify, and they didn't buy it," Assistant
Prosecutor Nancy Mullett said of Cress' conviction. "Absent something credible,
believable and compelling, there's no reason to second-guess that jury."
Mullett says she takes Sahli, her former boss, at his word when he says he
never heard Ronning's name linked to Rosansky's murder before he signed the
order destroying evidence. She concedes, however, that she hasn't directly
asked him what he knew.
"Without asking Sahli the question or hearing the answer, I know what it is,"
she said. "I don't need to ask him specifically."
Karry Evans' case remains unsolved and has not been actively investigated for
years. Battle Creek police accuse the Calhoun County Sheriff's Department of
doing little to locate Evans' killer.
"I've written afternoon memos that are more extensive than their investigative
report," said Police Chief Jeffrey Kruithoff.
Newman, the police commander, was also scathing. "With Karry Evans, it was like
nobody cared," he said. "It was a woefully inadequate investigation."
Sheriff's Lt. Bill Burgess calls the criticism an "exaggeration." His office
declined to release a copy of their investigation to the Free Press, after
consulting with prosecutors.
The death of Maggie Hume, however, may soon be in the news again. Mullett, the
assistant prosecutor, said she believes she can resolve the case by year's end.
She will say little beyond that. And she declined to say whether Ronning is a
suspect, though Battle Creek police have sought for years to charge him in
Hume's death.
As for detectives Mullen and Newman, they are on the outside looking in.
Newman retired in February to run a building firm. He said he left the force
convinced that Ronning killed the Battle Creek women, and that Cress is
innocent.
"We were just a couple of cops swimming upstream, trying to show these people
that they made a mistake," Newman said.
Newman said his frustrations pale in comparison to what Mullen endured. "There
was nothing in it for Denny Mullen," he said. "It's just a hell of a way for
him to end his career."
Mullen, who keeps in touch with Cress, retired in December, 16 years after
being assigned Maggie Hume's murder. Weeks before he left, Chief Kruithoff
removed him from the case after deciding it was more important to repair
relations with prosecutors than continue to fight with them over who killed
Patricia Rosansky.
"I'd really had it with this investigation," Mullen said. "I don't have any
credibility with the prosecutor's office anymore. I knew they were looking at
me as some kind of rogue cop."
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And here is the CONCLUSION of the article from the 6/14/00 online edition of
The DEtroit Free Press, on Michael Ronning. NICE to know that he is alive and
well, and still thinking TACTICALLY, valuing his life, despite having NO chance
of ever regaining his freedom.
Take care, JOE
The following appears courtesy of the 6/14/00 online edition of The Detroit
Free Press newspaper:
"I'd really had it with this investigation," Mullen said. "I don't have any
credibility with the prosecutor's office anymore. I knew they were looking at
me as some kind of rogue cop."
In his heart, Mullen said, he knew it was time to retire. He had dealt with
killers his whole career, but his pursuit of Ronning finally overwhelmed him.
"There came a time when all of a sudden it bothered me -- the extreme
inhumanity that one person can do to another," he said, "how vicious and cruel
a person is who takes the life of another."
There were times when Mullen could not sleep, when cynicism and bitterness
overtook him. "You wake up fitfully and you imagine what's happening to the
victims, and how they must have suffered," he said.
Meanwhile, David Moran, an appellate lawyer from Detroit, has asked the state
Court of Appeals to grant Cress a new trial.
As he awaits the ruling, Cress said in a phone interview from prison: "I have
no bitterness in my system."
Now 44, Cress takes medication for schizophrenia and depression. He attends
classes in personal growth and anger management.
"I've been through it three times now," Cress says of the anger class. "Every
time, they give me a certificate saying I have no anger at all."
He has taken up cabinetry and would like to restore old houses if he is
released. Asked whether he has other dreams, Cress thinks for a moment, then
says no. Restoring houses would be enough.
Michael Ronning continues to serve a life term at a maximum security prison in
the Arkansas delta -- unable to get convicted in Michigan, unwilling to confess
to murders elsewhere.
In an interview, Ronning doesn't shy from the tag serial killer. "I guess by
definition I would be," he says.
He then leans across a conference table and confides: "I have to be very
careful what I say."
He is talking about girls such as Annette Melia and Melissa Jackson, girls who
died in states with busy execution chambers.
And he may have been referring to victims such as Sandra Williams in
Sacramento, a case long closed that may soon be reopened. After the Free Press
asked Sacramento police why they never attempted to match semen found in
Williams to DNA samples taken from Ronning, they conceded that might not be a
bad idea. They promised to look into it.
They won't get any help from Ronning.
"That might be paranoia, or whatever," Ronning says of his silence. "But I want
to live a little longer if I can."