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The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast
Each week, The Murder Book will present unsolved cases, missing persons, notorious crimes, controversial cases, and serial killers, exploring details of the crime scenes and the murderer's childhood. Some episodes are translated into Spanish as well. The podcast is produced and hosted by Kiara Coyle.
The Murder Book: A True Crime Podcast
Jeffrey Gorton's Deadly Secret II: Unraveling Margueret Eby's Final Hours
Welcome to the Murder Book. I'm your host, kiara, and this is part two of Jeffrey Gorton's Deadly Secrets. Let's begin in the Homicide Bureau. For a year when he got a call at home at 4.50 pm on Sunday, november 9th his day off it was Sergeant Harry Bukamp, back at the downtown headquarters, there was a body at Mudd Estate and he needed to get their ASAP.
Speaker 1:Flint in the mid-1980s was, as it is today, a city of enormous contrast Swirling estates, sliding forested golf courses, just blocks from some of the toughest urban terrain, dope dealing gangs, murder and mayhem in America. It was even worse in 1986. Flint not Detroit 75 minutes south on I-75, was the epicenter of the Rust Belt. Foreign imports had cut into the Big Three's share of the domestic auto market. Plants were being shuttered and those still open were going from three shifts to two to one. In 1986, unemployment was way up in double digits triple the national average. At unemployment offices. Lines ring the building and in winter they had burned scraps of wood and garbage in garbage cans to keep warm while waiting to get inside for their checks. On a per capita basis, there were more homicides in Flint than there were in Detroit, which was nationally known as the murder city.
Speaker 1:At 4.50 came the call from U-Camp, a gruff desk sergeant who growled at effort to get to the Mott estate. A white female was in an upstairs bedroom and had been murdered. Alfred, surprised, turned to his wife and said I got to go to Mott estate. And she asked who is dead and he said I think it's Mrs Mott. Alfred would soon find out that it was Margaret Ebby. Mrs Mott, the 76 year old matriarch of the estate, was away on vacation. Alfred got lots of calls at home.
Speaker 1:In 1986 there were murders, not counting the justifiable homicides in a city of about 150,000 residents. Elford, who retired from the Flint police force in the year 2000, said that they were out a lot that year. A lot that year and at this moment in time he was captain in charge of detectives of affluent Grand Blanc and suburban Flint. He may have been out a lot, but never to the modest date. The modest date and the half mile long cultural center, it's anchor, just cast off downtown, were an oasis of civility and immune to murder and mayhem, or so it seemed. They were just a few miles and few light years from the troubled north side. A murder at Mott's was nearly incomprehensible to Elford, a Flint native who had graduated from Flint Southwestern High in 1968. And it was Alfred knew going to be a big deal, a very big deal TV, newspapers, relentless attention and publicity. And he thought that he it was going to be huge because it was the Mott estate. Mr Mott was Flint. Everyone in Flint was touched by the Mott Foundation sooner or later.
Speaker 1:Charles Stuart Mott was one of a handful of pioneering industrialists who had helped give birth to General Motors and would become the most important vibrant industry on earth. Born in 1875, in 1906, he moved the family business Weston Mott Company made wire, wheels and axles from Utica, new York, to Flint. In 1913, he sold his company to GM in exchange for stock, which would eventually make him a multimillionaire. He served three stints as Flint's mayor, the first beginning in 1912. In 1926, he established the CS Mott Foundation. He established the CS Mott Foundation which in 2002 had more than $3 billion in assets and made nearly $110 million in grants. Mott died in 1973 at the age of 97. His widow, ruth Rawlings Mott, still lived at Applewood in 1986. The estate's name has a double meaning there is a pretty apple orchard on the property and Mott was from the New York Mott's made famous by their apple jutes.
Speaker 1:Edward got to the scene at 5.20 pm. It was a cloudy day, getting dark, the temperature in the mid-30s. It was a cloudy day, getting dark, the temperature in the mid-30s. The first thing he did was to call the Michigan State Police and request a crime scene team to be sent down from the crime lab in Bridgeport, 30 miles to the north. He said that he didn't have confidence in his own people. The Flint PD was always fighting budget troubles. The state police would be able to send in more and better trained crime scene investigators. Already. There were Flint officers Alan Edwards and Julie Ringling who had secured the scene, and his boss, lieutenant Joseph DeCatch. Most murders. The boss wouldn't have beat him to the scene on a Sunday, but this was in most murders. Decatch's boss. Captain Fay Peake arrived at 5.40 and Dave King, another homicide surgeon, at 5.45. King, another homicide surgeon, at 5.45. Elford served as the scene detective, meaning he would preserve the scene, get things organized, assign duties, direct the taking of photos and drawings and later type up a detailed narrative report for whoever would lead the subsequent investigation. For whoever would lead the subsequent investigation.
Speaker 1:Not wanting to contaminate the scene, the Flint cops waited outside till the state police arrived. Meanwhile they worked the perimeter, checking windows and doors for signs of forced entry or for footprints leading up to or away from the house. The house sat just behind an eight-foot cycling fence that surrounded the estate. It was just off the curving driveway that went from the entrance about 50 feet away to the 18-room mod estate a couple of hundred yards to the east. There was a gate at the driveway entrance, but it was never closed and there was no security guard to check on who came and went. Except for the front door, the doors were secured with deadbolts. The windows were locked, none of them broken. There were no footprints. There was an outdoor cement stairway on the south side of the house which led down to an aluminum door at basement level. It too was deadbolted.
Speaker 1:At 6.25, the medical examiner, dr David Cunnan, arrived. He was allowed to enter the house and make the pronouncement of death. At 7.55, the state police team, which had assembled in Bridgeport before driving down in a large work van, arrived. The team of Jane Silva, mike Thomas, john Wilmer and Michael Wallner would be assisted by Flint's evidence tech at the scene, larry Safford. Elford's six-page single-spaced narrative report is rich with detail. Years later state police investigators would be struck by the difference in quality and quantity of the detail in Elford's report and what would later be added to the file. But others working the case, it would be an irony lost on no one. From his report one learns that the large estate is surrounded by a tall wire mesh fence topped by barbed wire. The gatehouse was just inside the northwest corner of the fencing, south of one of two entrances to the estate in a few yards on the other side of the fence and a barrier of vegetation and trees.
Speaker 1:From a theater parking lot A 1982 door Chevy registered to Ebi set part in a driveway. Two-door Chevy register to Abbey, set part in a driveway. The cops went in through the front door into an entrance hallway. On one side was an archway to a dining room, on the other an archway to the living room. Alfred was struck by how neat the place was. Everything tidy and clean. Place was, everything tidy and clean, no sign of struggle. On the dining room table he found an unzipped gray purse and a key ring with 14 keys. Under the purse was a flyer from a First Presbyterian Church of Flint for a noon luncheon four days earlier there was a flyer for the US Air Force Band for a show on November 21st. There were several photos of Abby and her family and friends. In the top left drawer of the dresser were Abby's driver license and several credit cards.
Speaker 1:There were two windows in the room. Neither had curtains. In the kitchen, an empty bottle of wine Chateau Cantinac 1970, sat on top of a cupboard. Next to the bottle was a cork, an empty plastic cup and a clear glass wine decanter, about a quarter filled with red wine. The windows above the sink had no curtains. A grand piano dominated the living room which faced a brick fireplace. The window on the north wall was curtainless.
Speaker 1:The northwest bedroom upstairs was in sharp contrast to the mayhem across the hall. It had the one curtain window in the house, two twin beds, a small round table with a collection of children's books on top and a TV stand and TV. The room was undisturbed and tidy. Investigators would later find out that Margaret had made it into a room for her grandchild. The bathroom seemed perfectly ordinary, except for two things a small jackknife on the top of a small plastic shelf next to the sink and a small dab of red next to the cold water faucet. There will be nothing small about the dab's eventual impact.
Speaker 1:And then Effort's report gets to the southwest bedroom, where nothing was normal. The nearly two pages devoted to the bedroom speak both to the horror of the scene and to Effort's skilled attention to detail. On first reading, the dry, clinical tone of Effort's report of Margaret Abby's bedroom masks the ghastliness of what he saw. But on second reading the style seems to convey almost a cinematically chilling sweep as the reader pans across the bedroom seeing the things of everyday life Laundry receipts, partially burned candles, gray socks, unopened pantyhose, bubble gum and between them or on them, things of horror Large pools of blood on the carpet, drops of blood on a skirt hanging on a doorknob, a gold chain half buried in a gaping neck wound, a clown figure on top of a dresser that held earrings below it. On the front of the dresser, more blood, the routine and the unimaginable.
Speaker 1:Elford wrote the following the victim's bedroom was located west of the upper hall, in the southwest corner of the upstairs of the house. The bedroom door opened inward and was hinged on the north. Hanging on the outside of the bedroom doorknob was a black-slash-gray wool skirt. This skirt had two small drops of blood, one being on the folded edge toward the west and the other was on the back. Hanging on the inside of the doorknob was a white plastic bag containing two pairs of women's underwear.
Speaker 1:There was a bed located approximately in the middle of the room. From south to north, the headboard was on the west wall and room from south to north, the headboard was on the west wall and the bed extended to the east. On the bed was the body of a white female, later identified as Margaret Ebby. She was lying on her stomach, nude, with her head at the northwest corner of the bed and her feet extending southeast to the middle of the bed. The victim's head was turned and facing south.
Speaker 1:The right arm was hanging over the north side of the bed and the hand was touching the floor. Under the hand was a dried pool of blood measuring 10 inches north to south and 5 inches east to west. The victim's left arm was bent at the elbow and the left hand was at the lower back. Both wrists show signs of being bound. Both were reddish color, with the right wrist showing a very definite impression, where the left wrist was more red. The left exposed side of the victim's face was blood covered, along with the back of her head and hair. The blood also covered the top half of her back from the neck down. There was a massive wound to the victim's neck and around the neck and partially in the wound was a gold neck chain. Next to the victim on the south side, under the left arm, was a leather watch band. Also next to the victim to the south, was a yellow bath type rope. The rope, shoulder and neck area was lying in a pool of blood.
Speaker 1:A large concentration of partially wet and dry blood was on the mattress and under the victim. The concentration measured three feet north to south and two and a half feet east to west. The victim appeared to have been moved from a position of lying on her back in the middle of the bed to the position she was found. Folds on the blood-covered robe matched bloody areas on the victim's back. The bed the victim was laying on consisted of a mattress and a box spring and a metal frame. The frame was not attached to the headboard. The top blanket on the bed was a brown, white, tan and green striped with fringe edges. The second blanket was a white electric type. This blanket was in the on position and turned to number seven. Controls for the electric blanket were slightly.
Speaker 1:Under the north side of the bed there was a blue sheet on the mattress and two pillows on the head of the bed, against the headboard. The pillowcases were blue in color with yellow flowers. Both pillowcases were blood splattered. On the southeast bottom corner of the bed was a purple skirt Draped over the edge. On the top of the bed was a beige tan women's suit still on a hanger. The wall above the headboard and the headboard itself had several small blood spatterings.
Speaker 1:On the bedroom's east wall, extending south from the bedroom door, was a dresser. Above the dresser, just to the south of the door, was located a light attached to the wall in the off position. Attached to the top of the dresser were two mirrors. On the top of the dresser was a laundry receipt for ProClean Laundry. Photos of the victim, partially burned candles, ten pieces of different colored candy, two pieces of bubble gum, a large correspondence envelope from U of M addressed to Raymond Roth, flint Music. There appeared to be a small blood drop on the envelope. Also on the envelope was a piece of yellow cloth material matching the yellow rope on the bed. On the carpet in front of the dresser was a pair of gray women's shoes. Next to the shoes. On the carpet was a white plastic or rubber covered wire approximately seven inches long. The wire had three insulated inner strands of red, green and yellow.
Speaker 1:The south wall of the bedroom had a window covering approximately one-half east to west. There were no coverings on this window. West of the window was another dresser and on top of the dresser was a clown figure that held earrings. On the front of the dresser, two feet three inches off the floor, were several small blood drops. Just north of the bed in the northwest corner was a glass-topped wood table being used as a nightstand. On top of the table was a clock radio, two crumpled yellow tissues, a jar of moisturizing cream, two books, number one being Special People. Written on the first page was a note from Lynn Roberts dated 10-28-86. The number two book was Falcom and the Snowman. The bottom shelf of the table had a white telephone, another jar of moisturizing cream, a box of yellow tissue. On the floor between the table and the wall was a plastic flyswatter.
Speaker 1:The victim was later turned over by Michigan State Police crime lab personnel, warner and Thomas. The wound on the victim's neck was approximately two inches wide and covered approximately an area from ear to ear under the chin. The right side of the victim's face was blood-covered. The victim was wearing post-type earrings along with the aforementioned gold necklace and a ring on the index finger of her right hand. The mark on the right wrist appeared to match the wire found on the floor. There also appeared to be a dried white substance in the vaginal opening of the victim. The victim's chest was also blood covered. The yellow rope was moved and the face of the watch was found on this rope. The yellow rope was missing, the cuff on the left sleeve.
Speaker 1:The medical examiner would later report that the gaping wound to Evie's neck was so deep it nearly reached the spinal cord that the murderer had used a serrated knife and would have had to use it like a saw to inflict the damage he did, and that she had also been stabbed in her chest and left breast Almost lost. In the detail of Effort's report was something that would prove crucial that Abby had an electric blanket and that he was turned up to seven Lab tests would later show that the time between Abby's murder and the point when samples could be taken from her vagina, combined with the heat of the blanket, degraded the semen to the point where it could tell nothing about the killer Not his blood type, not his subgroupings. If the samples taken from Abby were to yield any treasures, they would have to be frozen and stored away, waiting for breakthroughs in DNA technology. The report was the last one EFORD would write on the case until 2002. It finished with one simple but scary declarative sentence. It said it should be noted that during the search of the victim's home, no wallet or cash could be found. The killer might have been a thief, but he was not a simple thief. If he had taken Abby's ID he might be a collector too. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1:Gary Erford was in charge of the crime scene Sunday night. He knew from the start that Sergeant Dave King would be in charge of the case but to his surprise, two days later he was pulled off it altogether. His boss, lieutenant DeCatch, wanted to take his place. Highly unusual, but then so was the case. Some of it was DeKatch wanting the spotlight. Some of it was that effort had not worked homicide. Very long he went to work typing up his meticulous notes.
Speaker 1:Today, king Sergeant Dave King is retired from the Flint Police Department and is a civilian employee of the Michigan State Police with a division called the Michigan Commission on Law Enforcement Standards, mcoles. It publishes a 470-page training manual that serves as a guide for Michigan police and sheriff's departments. As communications coordinator, king helps update the manual and give presentations about it and proper police procedures around the state. He loves police work. He loves the idea that he can help define and communicate standards that can teach young cops how to do things right. King is extremely quiet-spoken and mild-mannered. He is the antithesis of what you would expect from a homicide detective who has spent 20 years working some of the meanest streets in America. He was never a tough guy, not one of those cops who commanded respect with his fists or his guns. A college graduate before that was common on the Flint PD. He graduated in police administration from Michigan State University in 1969. He always prided himself on a recent cerebral approach to solving crime.
Speaker 1:His dad was a parole officer for the state and King, a Flint native, made the journal in 1947. When he was born, on the seventh day of the seventh month of 1947, in room 711 of the hospital, his dad even bought lunch that day for 77 cents. When King graduated from Flint Southwestern in 1965, the plans were running three shifts a day, seven days a week. There was no end to overtime, or the Buicks cranking off the assembly line until semis, or the Buicks cranking off the assembly line and until semis. Through most of King's career, though, flint was a city in despair.
Speaker 1:King married his high school sweetheart, is a regular churchgoer and sometimes Sunday school teacher. He is a former marathon runner and many times has run the local 10-mile road race known as the Krim. It is the one bright day each year in the city, the biggest economic day of the year, when 15,000 runners and walkers come to town. Runners World magazine and ESPN come too. Until his knees got funky, king was thrilled to be part of his city's big day. He was a popular cop, and a good one. He made it to lieutenant before he retired, but no matter how many cases he solved, no matter how much of his ingenuity sent large numbers of bad guys to Jackson Prison, king would always be associated with the one case he couldn't solve by far the biggest case of his career, and he will always be haunted by the what-ifs and the hindsight criticisms that shine so clearly in the mistakes he made, criticisms that shined so clearly in the mistakes he made.
Speaker 1:King graduated from MSU on a Saturday, moved his stuff back to Flint on Sunday and Monday and started work with the Flint PD on Tuesday he spent four days in training and was in a uniform and a scout car on Saturday. King spent a year writing traffic tickets and hated every minute of it. He spent three years on general patrol and then was moved into something new called the Special Operations Bureau. They were called in a euphemism most cops would die for the SOBs. Despite his self-ascribed sobriquet, he said quote I wasn't the kind of big hulking cop going in knocking doors off hinges end quote. He then moved up to the first tactical operations unit in Flint's history. He was, he says so, enthusiastic, gung-ho and naive Tactical ops men working Flint's North End, and no one stayed naive there for long. It was a place riddled with drunks, druggies, stupidity and meanness. Heroin addicts were doing a lot of home invasions and they always had the same MO. They busted in, grabbed as much as they could, then then ditch it in some field or behind the nearest vacant house. Later they would come back for it. King and his crew wouldn't bother trying to track down the perps. They have just scouted out the nearest fields and abandoned houses, invariably find a stash of stuff within minutes, then sit around waiting for the thieves to come back and pick it up.
Speaker 1:From 1977 to 1980, king worked homicide. His first case was one of those easy ones where you know from the start who did it and it takes you a couple of hours to prove it. He got the call and they had the suspect in custody before he even left the house. The second case was a double homicide execution. Two dudes shot their head in a car. It was an intractable case that got to him. He started dreaming one of the dead guys was alive. He would come to King in his sleep talking to him. It got so bad that King took a week off and visited his in-laws. Out of town he says you need to build barriers, but you can't build them too high or you're no good. The case never did get solved. Procedure then was to rotate out of homicide after three years. So he moved over to the B&E squad as a supervisor, then into narcotics for five years and in 1985, back to homicide.
Speaker 1:King got the call Sunday late afternoon about the call at the Mott's estate. It should have gone to another sergeant. The Mods estate you should have gone to another sergeant. King had picked up the most recent unsolved murder two weeks ago and another sergeant was due up in the rotation. But in those pre-pager, pre cell phone days the other guy had not answered his phone, effort answered his and King answered his. Effort was already at the scene when King got there. So were his already at the scene when King got there, so were his bosses. The catch and peek.
Speaker 1:The scene was unusual in several regards. Number one, of course, was that it was the most famous piece of land in Flint. But on a practical level it was unusual because, unlike most murder scenes, flint cops go to the Ittdidn't-offer-our neighborhood. The main house was at the other end of the estate. There were no neighbors to canvass about what they might have seen or heard. Ironically, as new a world as the modern state proper was to the detectives, many of them in one way knew it way well.
Speaker 1:The gatehouse stood next to the fence. On the other side of the fence was a large parking lot, part of the cultural center. It was a favorite spot for Flint cops to duck into to grab a coffee or a donut or even a snooze. Like his fellow cops, king had been there many times Also. Like them, he would never notice the house tucked in the shrubbery and trees just on the other side of the fence. He said that he grew up in Flint and any kid growing up in Flint knew Mr Mott. But oddly enough he wasn't familiar with the Mott estate. Though the estate was fenced in, there was no guard at the entrances and nothing to prevent anyone from driving or walking in. The estate's caretaker was supposed to double as a security guard in theory, but in reality he had little to do with protecting the grounds or the estate's inhabitants.
Speaker 1:After the state police crime scene crew arrived, king entered the house. He was impressed by how homey it was, not elaborate or pretentious Like effort. King was struck by the lack of curtains, blinds or shades. It would have been easy for some pee-pee tom to climb a tree and look inside, had some pervert crossed the line from voyeurism to violence. King left the crime scene while the state police were still working it heavily and went back to the headquarters nearby to interview Hyde and Smith, the two guys who had found the body. They were suspects, of course, simply because they had found the body, but were soon cleared.
Speaker 1:The phone on his desk ran and it was Jonathan Ebby. He was irate that the police had not called him to tell him about his mother's murder. A friend had heard something on the news and had called him. King told him that while they suspected the body was his mother, no official identification had been made yet. Moreover, he didn't have a phone number for him, didn't know his name, had no way of contacting him so quickly. He tried to calm him down and said they would be doing everything they could and would be in touch. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1:Margaret Lynn Reimer. Margaret Ebby's youngest child has always gone by her name. Though the spelling on the first name is different, the pronunciation is the same. Today she is an emergency room nurse at the Beaumont Hospital in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, and she and her mother had plans for Saturday afternoon, november 8, 1986. Lynn was working then as a waitress at Restaurant Douglas, a posh suburban eatery in Southfield owned by one of the first nationally popular TV chefs, douglas Douglas. He was sort of like the Emerald, I guess, of his day.
Speaker 1:Lynn and her husband had been having marital troubles off and on, and shortly after her mom moved to Flint, lynn had moved into the gay house with her mother for six months. She had reconciled with her husband, though, and they have just moved into a rented bungalow on the west side of Detroit. Her mom was an avid grandmother. As soon as Jessie was born in 1983, margaret had redone Lynn's old bedroom upstairs at the gay house into a kid's room and she frequently took Jessie on weekends. She frequently took Jesse on weekends. When Margaret was taking Jesse, she and Lynn generally would meet halfway between the two cities at the I-75 exit at Joslyn Road near the city of Pontiac.
Speaker 1:Margaret was supposed to take Jesse this weekend, but plans this time were a little different. She had picked Jesse up at home around noon, take her to the Detroit Institute of Arts downtown, then out to eat and then the two would go back to Flint for the rest of the weekend. Lynn left early for the day shift at the restaurant, leaving Jessie with her husband. When she returned from work early in the evening, to her surprise, jessie was still there. And she asked surprise Lynn, jessie was still there. And she asked, surprised Lynn, mom didn't come. And she answered no. So what did she say? She said she didn't call either. And so Lynn said well, maybe she forgot, and it wasn't like her mom to miss out on a date with her granddaughter.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that Lynn says years later is. She says, quote you have to understand my mother. She always had things going on three burners. She was the opposite of a couch potato. It wasn't like her not to take Jesse, but knowing her schedule I wasn't that much concerned about it. I figured I would hear from her that maybe she had called and Ted had been in the shower or something. End quote. She called her mom and left a message. She and her husband had dinner and went to bed. There was no word from her mother.
Speaker 1:Sunday, sunday night, the phone rang. Is this Margaret and Abby's daughter? Yes, are you alone? What's this about? Are you alone? And she said quit beating around the bush. What's going on? Someone has been found dead at the Mott estate Today. Ripper says of the rest of the conversation he just dragged it out horribly. He went on and on and finally she said are you telling me my mom's dead? And they said well, we don't know. And she said I knew it was her, because who else would it be? They found a woman in her bedroom and my mom is the only one who lives in the Mott estate. So it's her mom. So it's her mom. So she told the caller, sergeant Dave King, that she would be in Flint as soon as she could make arrangements.
Speaker 1:Lynn had been living with her parents 11 years earlier when her father died of a massive heart attack at home. Her reaction now was the same as then Surreal, this can't be happening. This cannot be real. This is a bad Miami Vice show. It's not real. She then called her older sister, dale, who was a lawyer in Indianapolis, and she said Dale, mom's dead. You gotta get on a plane and get here.
Speaker 1:Dale had already gotten the news from her brother, jonathan, upon arriving home from an Indianapolis Colts football game and she said Lynn, when we go through mom's things, we're going to find a bag of tulip bulbs Tulip bulbs. He said, yes, tulip bulbs. She was going to surprise you and plant them this fall. And when they came up in the spring, you would say where did they come from? Nearly two decades later, when Lynn would recount the tulip anecdote, tears would well up, her voice would break and her boyfriend would need to hold her hand while she regrouped. That's the kind of woman my mother was Someone who had 500 things to do and she would take the time to plant my garden for me. So I have a surprise in the spring. Dale caught an early flight to Detroit in the morning, was met at the airport by Jonathan and they drove directly to Flint to identify the body.
Speaker 1:Today Mike Thomas is a captain with the Michigan State Police, one of its highest ranking officers and the director of the Forensic Science Division, which includes seven regional crime labs around the state and three DNA labs, which includes seven regional crime labs around the state and three DNA labs. Back in November of 1986, thomas was one of a four-person crime scene crew working out of the Bridgeport post half an hour north of Flint up I-75. He was watching TV in his home in Bridgeport, just down the road from the state police crime lab, when the phone rang. Just down the road from the state police crime lab. When the phone rang, he got called out a lot, which meant vanderroosing at the lab with the rest of the team to pick up their specialized van. So it didn't make sense to live too far away.
Speaker 1:Thomas was one of the new breed of cops when he joined the state police in 1978. He graduated from Madonna University in Livonia in just three years with a degree in criminal justice and had been accepted to grad school at Eastern Michigan University but when word came he had been accepted to the 85th recruiting class of the MSP grad school was quickly forgotten. He was assigned to the Bridgeport Post as a trooper in January of 1979, across the driveway from the crime lab. As a uniformed trooper he worked various crime scenes with the lab. Folks got intrigued by what they did and applied. When a position opened up they did and applied. When a position opened up In 1982, he moved across the driveway to start a two-year training program.
Speaker 1:By the time of the Ebi murder Thomas was a crime scene vet working 35 to 40 major scenes a year, many of them called in by the Flint PD. His crew knew the Flint cops by name and after working together there they would often all head over to the White Horse, a cop hangout in Flint, for burgers and beer. The dispatcher said that there would have been another murder in Flint, this one of a woman in a cottage at the Modestate. James Silva, john Wilmore and Michael Warnard met him at the lab, gathered up the stuff and drove down to Flint, arriving at 7.55 pm. The Modestate meant nothing to Thomas. He was surprised when he got there that the cottage was a mansion by his standards, not your typical Flint crime scene.
Speaker 1:Silva and Thomas were fingerprint specialists. The other two would concentrate on serology and trace evidence. They entered the house and worked slowly through it toward the body. They took photos of everything from every angle. They'd use contrasting powders to look for prints and when they found them they put tape on the powder and lifted it. The impression of the print would remain on the tape. There were a ton of prints which didn't mean much. Most houses have a ton of prints which the trick is to link one of them to a bad guy. As suspects will evolve, they would check the prints versus the prints from the house and see if any matched. They used high-intensity lights and a magnifying device known as a linen tester to help find prints. As the lights burned, the house got hotter and hotter. Wilmer and Wollner picked up bits of fiber, hair, other trace evidence and put them in evidence bags.
Speaker 1:Once they got to the bedroom they had lots of serology to deal with. There was blood everywhere and obvious semen stains on the victim. Thomas was struck by the lack of curtains in her bedroom. A peeping Tom, he wondered. He was shocked that her head was nearly severed. He had seen lots of ugly scenes, lots of crimes of passion, but usually it was an angry stabbing or slashing. Something done quick. This one had taken a while Playing the role of plumbers. They pulled the trap from the bathroom sink. They have searched through its gunk later and while there was usually a long shot, sometimes the stitches normally found in the trap would contain a trace of the killer's blood. It might not be such a long shot this time. There was a bloody partial print on the porcelain near the cold water handle. Obviously the killer had washed up. Thomas photographed the print and lifted it.
Speaker 1:Now it was time to roll the body over, look for other trace evidence that had been under it and check for lividity. This is the pooling and the bruising of blood next to the skin which can help fix the time of death. As they were getting ready to roll her, king entered the bedroom back from interviewing Hyde and Smith. When they turned her over, a stench hit them all. Since Margaret had died on top of a heating blanket that was turned up. The heat had helped hasten the decay. There was a lot of lividity and she was rigid. King blurted out holy moly, she's been dead a while. The body was then lifted onto a gurney by attendants from Lifeline Ambulance and at 12.02 am left for the Hurley Medical Center which served as the county morgue. Its pathologists performed autopsies on a contract basis for the county. This one would be done by Willis Mueller, considered by the cops to be brilliant at his work with the dead. Thomas was sweaty and fingerprint dust kicked his face and arms. He went into the bathroom downstairs and washed up. The cops then secured the scene at 12.40 am and left.
Speaker 1:Monday morning Alford and a crew from the Flint PD searched the estate for evidence. They found nothing unusual. King and Alford re-entered the gatehouse and gathered up some of Abby's personal papers, including a list of 16 men's names and one woman's name. All day Monday the Abby murder dominated the Flint TV news. Thomas was surprised to see himself doing one Abby segment. He was caught on camera washing his hands and face and the camera had zoomed in on him. There had been a TV camera outside the fence and with all the leaves blown off, all the trees, they had had a clear shot at him A pipi tom. He wondered again If the TV crew could see him so clearly. Maybe some nutball had seen Abby just as well and the sight of her in her bathroom had set him off. Soon Mott employees were telling police that she liked to walk through her curtainless windows naked as a jaybird, and she used to like to sunbathe nude out behind the gatehouse too. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1:The autopsy was conducted Monday morning. King was there, along with John Wilmore, both Bob Avery and Mike Thomas of the State Police Crime Lab, who would take samples for toxicology and serology purposes, and Mueller's assistant and a photographer. First the body had to be formally identified, with Jonathan and Dale Eby taking on that horrific task. The last time Jonathan had seen his mother was when they had driven to Stratford, ontario, six weeks earlier, to see a play. Officials only let them see her face and the top of her head. They wanted to keep as much of the horror hidden from her children as possible. Dale wanted to stroke her mother's hair, but they wouldn't let her. Jonathan and Dale left and the rest went about their grim tasks.
Speaker 1:Abby's neck had been sawed with a serrated knife going left to right. The murderer was right-handed. Her carotid artery and jugular vein was severed. The gaping wound was the result of two separate slashings, one across the top of the neck on an upward angle and the other horizontal at mid-throat. There was another stab wound in the neck. There were three stab wounds on her chest, going onto subcutaneous tissue and stopping at the sternum, but they showed no signs of bleeding, which meant they have come after death. There was a diagonal stab wound on the inner portion of her left breast, a diagonal cut that perforated her left atrium just above the mitral valve. There was bruising inside her labia, a blue-black discoloration about 12 millimeters in length. Her labia a blue-black discoloration about 12 millimeters in length. There were visible semen stains, but the rectal area tested negative for sperm.
Speaker 1:Mueller went to work with his bone, saw a sound. No witness to an autopsy ever forgets to examine her organs. A Y incision was cut down the front of her chest and her rib cage was pulled back. An incision was cut down the front of her chest and her ribcage was pulled back. An incision was made in the back of her scalp, from one ear to the other, and her scalp was pulled down over the front of her face. Her brain was pulled out and weighted, as were her organs. Tissue samples were taken.
Speaker 1:Food much of it undigested, uncooked Vegetables was taken out of her stomach and photographed. It would turn out that they would come from her last meal at the dinner party Friday, which was an array of vegetable munchies and dip. Array of vegetable munchies and dip. Mueller's conclusions manner of death homicide. Cause of death incised neck wounds. Later King would show the photos of Abby's stomach contents while seeking out advice from Dr Warner Spitz, the nationally renowned medical examiner in Wayne County where Detroit ruled as the nation's murder capital. And Spitz said quote that's fresh food, she just ate that and her digestive processes just stopped. What stops the digestive processes? Extreme fear, end quote. Processes extreme fear, end quote. It raised the hackles on King's neck, the image of a woman coming home from a dinner party with friends and immediately finding herself in such horror that her stomach juices stopped digesting food.
Speaker 1:When King got back to his office from the autopsy, the media circus had clearly started. His desk was covered in pink, he says. While you were out notes from every radio and TV station in town and from many of the state's daily newspapers. One was from the editor of the Flint Journal, the first time the editor had ever called him. And King said that he had worked 40 previous homicides in Flint and he didn't even know who he was. Early on.
Speaker 1:Heen and DeKat made a tactical decision. Michigan Sunshine Laws made it a legal obligation for police to turn their reports, minus some deletions, over to news reporters. But if King and the Catch didn't file very many, there wouldn't be much to turn over. They stopped typing up official reports. They took to scribbling things down on scrap paper and sticking them in drawers Years later. The lack of desirable reports and the excess of badly written scribbling, often in some sort of shorthand, would drive other investigators nuts. But that would be then.
Speaker 1:After the autopsy, king met with Lynn Reimer. That evening he went back to the scene for a slow, detailed walk around the house. He missed something interesting, though there was a good reason. It was inside the CD player and in 1986, not many people had heard of CDs or CD players. Certainly not King heard of CDs or CD players. Certainly not King. He didn't recognize it for what it was and had no way of knowing there might be something of interest in that little slot on the front. Her family would soon discover it and give him a call. What popped out was a CD of a Schubert piece titled Death, and the Maiden Ebi had recently put together something she had built as Schubert Tide. It gave King a jolt. A single woman is killed and inside her music player is something called Death and the maiden. A weird coincidence. What were the chances or a clue from her killer, deliberately and diabolically planted? What were they dealing with here?
Speaker 1:Things got worse for Lynn Reimer, if that was possible. When she met with King she had not been able to get to Flint in time to join her siblings in identifying the body, she says. Almost the first thing King asked was what her mom was involved in. He said that it looked like a gang head. Why would she be involved in gangs? What was she up to? Was she into drugs? He said the FBI was being brought in. The whole thing went from bad to worse. Gangs, drugs, my mom. It had all been strange enough, but when the Flint police started adding in all those fun facts, it got even more surreal, and she remembered being in a fog not enough of one, though, because she can remember the pain and terror of everything. Lynn gave King something to ponder in turn when she was staying with her mom during her separation several years earlier.
Speaker 1:She got home late one night, about 3 am, having worked the late shift waitressing at Patty McGee's, then a popular Flint eatery. Her mom routinely worked 14-hour days. Then she said, quote, she loved her job. I would call her at the office at 10 pm and said, mom, you have been at work for 14 hours, it's time to come home. And she would say, oh, I just lost track of the time. End quote.
Speaker 1:So in walked Lynn at 3 am and the place was a mess. Nothing too bad, but messy for Margaret, who was an immaculate housekeeper. Everything in its place. Lynn thought maybe she had worked one of her 14-hour days, didn't have time to straighten up and decided for once to go to bed with the house untidy. At 7 am Margaret woke her, yelling at her to get up. How dare she come in and make such a wreck at the house? I think you can clean up your mess, she said. She said my mess, what are you talking about? She said.
Speaker 1:They soon realized that it was neither's mess. An intruder had been there. Ling's underwear drawer was open. So was Margaret's, since the house had been tidied when her mom came home at 11, that meant the intruder had been there in her mother's bedroom, going through her underwear drawer while her mom slept just a few feet away. They called the police, who found a window, a jar and footprints leading up to it. The back door was open, the means of egress. King Scribble notes as Lynn told the tale.
Speaker 1:A week after her body was discovered, a memorial service for Abby was held at the First Presbyterian Church. As the body had been cremated, there was no public viewing. The huge church was packed. In attendance were her children, her three brothers, john George and Siegfried Fink, her mother, martha Fink, who was now living in Texas with Siegfried, her sister Ruth Becker, the missionary in Brazil, and her granddaughter Jessie. Also there was the entire staff of Restaurant Douglas, where Lynn worked. It was the first time the restaurant had ever shut its doors on a day it was rescheduled to be open.
Speaker 1:The family asked that, instead of flowers, contributions be made to the Margaret F Ebby Keyboard Scholarship Fund at the UN Music Development Office in Ann Arbor. At the UN Music Development Office in Ann Arbor, reverend Donna McFerrin, her pastor, praised her as a musician, as a member of his choir, as a community activist and as a friend. She was the best thing that ever happened to us, he said. After the service, the family gathered at their Aunt Pauline's house in Milford and traded stories about the strong-willed woman they had lost Over the years, lynn had thought off and on of having her name legally changed, dropping the Margaret no more. They will still call her Lynn, but she will be Margaret forever. Thank you to listening to the murder book. Have a great week.
