Delayed Justice

Our friend Karolee Gillman of the Grand Rapids History and Special Collections Department at the Main (formerly Ryerson) Branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library has been at it again.  This time she’s been assembling and scanning stories relating to the murder of Joel Battaglia.  She took the time to digitize some 20 files that represent accounts over the years from The Grand Rapids Press.  The intellectual property resides with that newspaper and we use the stories here with permission (Thank you very much!).  The stories, though, relate a familiar theme: An unsolved homicide may seem to fade from view, but the grief and loss are very much with us still.  Just because you haven’t read about the case in the last couple of years doesn’t mean that it’s been magically solved or that it doesn’t matter any more.  It does.

Karolee understands this and does what she can to help the families of those who have been murdered.  Her talent is research: KNOWING a whole lot of stuff, where to find that stuff and a ton more, and then how to share it.  We are profoundly grateful.

The organization of that stuff on our website is still a little bit of the dog’s breakfast…kind of all over the place.  I’ll try to put it in better order in the near future.  Still, you’ll be ale to attend to the media coverage that’s surrounded this case.  It was a high profile investigation for quite some time.  And somebody still knows something that he or she is not bringing forward.  It’s way past time.

April 26, 1998, the body of Deborah Boothby was found on Blue Star Highway. Her death was classified as a hit and run. Nope. She had been beaten to death. That mistaken assessment didn’t sit well in the community at large or in the law enforcement community. And, in the last two years police have undertaken an effort to bring those who murdered her to justice.

You can read about the case here:

Herald Palladium

Channel 3

MLive

And here

The Michigan News.

It’s a grisly crime by all accounts and it hangs on the work by a dedicated collaborative team. The Michigan State Police, the Covert Township Police, and the Michigan Attorney General’s office. We’ve seen this kind of work before, certainly in the Janet Chandler case. …And there is a figure who has played a prominent role in both cases: Detective Sergeant Diane Oppenheim. It was she who went through the Chandler file and spoke for the Michigan State Police about the case when we made the film in the fall of 2003 and early 2004. At the time she said she wanted to work the case and hoped that it would be solved before she retired. Her duties at the South Haven State Police post kept her from working that case. Instead, it fell to David Van Lopick and Michael Jaffrey and Geoffrey Flohr from the State Police (teamed up with Roger Van Lier and Rob Borowski from the Holland Police Department). Ah, but she got in on this one. …She and Officer Jay Allen from the Covert Township Police Department, Trooper Kyle Gorham from South Haven State Police Post and Dennis Pheney from the Attorney General’s Office.

Detective Sgt. Oppenheim and I spoke in January of 2008 about the Boothby case and several others. I was poking about area cold cases and this was one that stuck out a mile…misidentified as a hit and run, the initial investigation less rigorous than it should have been. I know it bothered the Detective Sergeant a lot and she said at the time that the case was under active investigation. I backed off that one immediately; she didn’t need a film maker thrashing about in a case that’s being worked. She said she thought the investigation would be wrapped within the year. It took just a little longer, but here we are: one person has pled to second-degree murder and four others have been or will be arraigned in the case. The charges are premeditated murder and first-degree felony murder. That’s life if they are convicted. It’s possible they may be offered lesser sentences for a plea.

The work on the case kicks into high gear; investigators and prosecutors have to be ready to prove what they charge in court. There are no guarantees that any of the four will plead, although that would certainly be nice and would save a lot of time and money. This kind of work is both time consuming and generally very expensive.

The team members who took on this case certainly didn’t have a lot of resources at their back; budgets are slim and getting slimmer. They DID have determination, intelligence, and luck. And it paid off.

And when this is done…do investigators get a chance to kick back a little and reflect? Well, maybe for a few minutes, but there are other area cases calling:

Maurice Walker of Covert. Murdered 1993.

Wilda Wilkinson of Bangor. Murdered Dec. 27, 1986.

Linda and Harry Holzer of Fennville. Murdered 1975.

Crystal Rainey, 8, and Robert Wayne Rainey, 4 of Bangor. Murdered in 1992.

Know something about these cases? I’m thinking Diane would LOVE to hear from you: 269.637.2125. Nope, she’s not done. Nor are those who work with her.

It’s true that at present there is no ONE system that’s used to track missing adults…or to attempt to identify the remains of the unknown. But there might be if several lawmakers have their way. Representatives Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Ted Poe (R-TX) have introduced HR 3695, the Help Find The Missing Act (Billy’s Law). Billy Smolinski of Waterbury, Connecticut, was 31 when he went missing. The proposed law in his name is intended to provide the framework for a nationwide alerting and identification system.

When we made our film Finding Diane, the crux of the matter was just this: Michigan and Wisconsin made use of different reporting systems for missing adults. Perhaps because of that, it took the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department and the Michigan State Police 18 months to identify Diane as Barbara Biehn of Racine.

Here’s the stated intention of the law:

To authorize funding for, and increase accessibility to, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, to facilitate data sharing between such system and the National Crime Information Center database of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to provide incentive grants to help facilitate reporting to such systems, and for other purposes.

If you want to read more about the law, sign and forward the petition, you can click here.

If you want to read the entire text of the proposal, you might click here.

This kind of proposal makes a lot of sense. One of the questions that surrounds it, though, is cost. Okay, so it’s a great idea and we need this to further the cause of justice for missing adults and for the 40,000 or so unidentified whose bodies have been found, in short people who need to be brought back home alive or dead. So, I called Rep. Murphy’s Washington, D.C. office and posed the question. The estimated cost for the first year is $500 million, about $10 million per state. That’s exclusive of any additional funds that states might want to add in for refinements. And, say, the population of the entire country is 308 million. That would mean each and every one of us would pony up $1.62 a year. Well, yeah, I would be willing to pay the $8.12 a year to be able to better track the members of our immediate family. Still, it’s going to be a hard sell in this state at this time. Jobs are scarce and people are still losing homes, are homeless, are struggling mightily.

One other question I have remains: how long would we need to keep supporting this? Once its up and running with the infrastructure in place, might it not just become our new way of doing things–requiring the same amount of effort as the old way but just more electrons holding hands? Devising the system, upgrading hardware and software is not necessarily a money pit. Does there need to be another bureau and a resulting bureaucracy? I tend to think it might become a built-in practice that we might wonder how we did without. …Especially if it works–which would remain to be seen. We know that what we have in place now doesn’t.

Well, these money and policy matters must be decided at a much broader level than this forum, although addressing it here is appropriate. At least you’ll have some idea of what might be coming down the pike. I know there are a lot of families whose loved ones are listed here who would think this a VERY good idea.

I’ve ever mixed up All Saints’ and All Souls’ days. Not this year. Commemoratio omnium Fidelium Defunctorum…if my study is aright that means the commemoration of all the faithful departed.

And so we ask your commendation for all those listed here, victims of murder. Pray, too, for those who have transgressed and deprived the murdered ones of their lives. This is a terrible burden for them to bear if they have any shred of humanity left them. Their lives are marked forever. We believe that those who have gotten away with it really haven’t. We believe there is an accounting, a tenet of all faiths based on the Book: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The invitation for atonement is always there and begins with admission of what we’ve done.

So prayers for those who have been deprived of their lives and those who have deprived them are in order.

This day is also two years and one day following the guilty verdicts in the murder trial of Janet Chandler. That was on All Saints’ Day, 2006. Mmmm. November 1.