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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 VI: When Two Cases Collide
Some murder cases haunt communities for decades, leaving behind unanswered questions and shattered lives. The brutal killing of Northwest Airlines flight attendant Nancy Ludwig at the Airport Hilton in Romulus, Michigan in 1991 is exactly such a case.
When Art Ludwig received a phone call that a body had been discovered in Detroit that might be his wife, his world began crumbling. Through a raging blizzard, he made his way to the airport, beginning what he would later describe as the worst days of his life. The devastating visit to the county morgue where he had to identify Nancy's brutally beaten body left him with images that would haunt him for years. "My last image of her is the four or five seconds of looking at her face," Art recounts. "It was so badly beaten you can't imagine going through it."
The investigation followed standard protocol—the spouse is always the first suspect. While Detective Milaniak conducted a thorough interrogation, Detective Snyder showed remarkable compassion, refusing to subject Art to a polygraph test given his obvious trauma. Meanwhile, the murders became particularly challenging as the transient nature of airport hotels meant potential witnesses scattered across the country. What makes this case even more compelling is its possible connection to another unsolved murder. Mark and Jonathan Eby noticed striking similarities between Nancy Ludwig's killing and their mother Margaret's murder in Flint in 1986—both women bound, gagged, raped, with their throats cut. Despite their efforts to alert authorities in both cities, these potential connections went largely unexplored.
Have you ever wondered how seemingly separate violent crimes might be connected? Listen to this episode to understand how two grieving families sought answers, how trauma reverberates through lives for years, and how crucial investigative connections sometimes fall through the cracks. If you appreciate true crime that explores not just the acts themselves but their devastating human impact, subscribe to The Murder Book for more compelling stories of justice delayed and the ongoing quest for truth.
Welcome to the Murder Book. I'm your host, kiara, and this is part six of Jeffrey Gordon's Deadly Secret. Let's begin. Art Lewick was not feeling well. He wasn't sinking fast, but he was sinking and his thought was when you're never sick, it seems to hit you so much harder than when you are. About 3 pm. The phone rang. He was lying on the couch reading, leading a perfect existence, thinking now and again about the ski trip to Tahoe and hoping that he would get rid of the call by then. When Nancy's supervisor was on the phone in the Bowman and she asked him is Nancy there? He said no, she's at work. She won't be back for a few days, he said are you sure? He said yes, I dropped her off at the airport yesterday. So Linda said Art, nancy did not make the connection with her flight this morning. Can you do me a favor? There's a policeman at your door. Can you let him in? He went to the front door and, sure enough, there was a Minnetonka cop on the porch. Apparently he had been in communication with the supervisor at her office. Art let the cop in and went back to the phone. He said well, Art, they found a body in a Detroit hotel and they are afraid it might be. Nancy, can you make it out to the airport tonight? There's a flight to Detroit and they want you to come.
Speaker 1:The rest of the day was a dark, hoarded, haze Time frozen, panic ebbing and flowing, nothing to do, everything at stake. The cop never said anything. Apparently he had been there just to make sure Art didn't kill himself or something. When he saw that Art seemed to be composed, he left. Art called his best friend from the TV station, art Kintup, an apt salesman who lived nearby, explained the situation and asked for a ride to the airport. There was a blizzard raging outside and it took them forever to get there, slugging and sliding their way at a few miles an hour. They got there at 7.
Speaker 1:Bowman met Art and sat with him in a private Northwest lounge. The blizzard would delay, maybe even cancel, the flight out. They sat in the windowless room waiting out the storm for nearly four hours. If there was anything Art wanted to do less than fly to Detroit right now, it was to be told. The flight was canceled and had to drive home. Then come back again in the morning and sit through this with Bauman one more time. While he was sitting there, detroit's Channel 4, wdiv-tv, went on the air with a report that a flight attendant named Nancy Ludwig had been raped and murdered at the airport Hilton. The body had not been ID'd yet and standard practice in the industry is to withhold the victim's name until immediate relatives have been identified. But someone at the hotel had leaked the name to a reporter and the station went with it. The story was picked up by Minneapolis TV stations. Nancy's six stepdaughters got the word that way, watching television, as did many of her family and friends. Finally, the storm abated a bit and they were cleared for takeoff.
Speaker 1:At 2 am, art arrived in Detroit and was taken to an airport hotel, not the Hilton. The worst day of his life was finally over. The next day would be worse, much worse. In his hotel room, art stared at the ceiling in hope against hope. He didn't have much. He didn't delude himself. He said end quote. I knew they wouldn't have called me without being pretty sure it was Nancy. End quote. Have called me without being pretty sure it was Nancy. End quote.
Speaker 1:Finally, mercifully, at a time of the year when night clings selfishly to its existence in Michigan, light broke the darkness. Detective Milaniak picked him up and they drove to the Northwest Flight Services office at Metro Airport, there was a handful of FBI agents waiting. Desert Storm was at his hide and since Ludwig was a flight attendant and her ID, passport and uniform was missing, the Feds were worried her death might be an act of terrorists plotting something worse. They put out a nationwide bulletin asking security agents at airports to watch for her stolen Northwest ID. The feds had a few questions for him. Melania had a lot and started in at 9.25 am.
Speaker 1:You always look at the husband first, for a good reason. Lots of them had killed the wives or hired someone to do it. They wanted to solve this first and fast, and when you solve a murder quickly it's usually because you have taken immediate and careful aim at the spouse. Art would be guilty unto proven innocent. There was no easy way to proceed.
Speaker 1:Detective Melaniac needed to clear Art and to do that he had to ask some pretty pointed questions. Was there anything wrong with the marriage? Had there been fighting? Was she seeing anyone? Was he seeing anyone? Was there anyone he knew of who might want to do this? Could he account for his whereabouts? It went like that for half an hour. Could he account for his whereabouts? And it went like that for half an hour. If he had not been a cop, according to Art, he would have tried to punch him out. He understood shortly thereafter that he was just doing his job. The husband is the first guy you suspect, and he starts with a similar circle and works out. But you resent getting asked those questions. Detective Milaniuk wanted to polygraph him, but Detective Snyder said no, not on your life, no freaking way. He didn't see him as the killer. He had been through enough. He wasn't going to have him hooked up to a machine.
Speaker 1:And then things got really bad. They drove for 20 minutes up I-94 to the county morgue in downtown Detroit. The morgue, which has since been replaced, was an old, creaky building not far from the even creakier police headquarters on Beaubion Street. All the bleach in the world couldn't get rid of the stench of death and embalming fluid that punched you in the nose when you walked in the front door. An employee lit art to a wide curtain-off window. Someone on the other side wheeled the body to the window and pulled the curtain.
Speaker 1:Art stared, however, at the mutilated, purple bruise and bloodied face of his dead wife being told someone has found a body in a hotel room and it might be your wife is one thing. Told someone has found a body in a hotel room and it might be your wife is one thing. To see that, to see her face and a neck nearly severed from his shoulders was beyond imagining. Art nodded that it was Nancy and they pulled the curtains and let him outside to air he could breathe. Art said, end quote. To this day I don't know why it was necessary to have me look at her. I would have thought they would be able to do it with fingerprints. My last image of her is the four or five seconds of looking at her face. It was so badly beaten you can't imagine going through it. It was the worst thing in my life and the rage that I felt afterward that someone could do that to another human being. End quote. They told him they wouldn't be able to release the body for a few days. They told him the cliché don't leave town without telling us. At 5 pm I called Detective Snyder and told him he was leaving town. He would be in Minnetonka if anyone needed him.
Speaker 1:A few hours later, back in Minneapolis, patty Alt had been feeling ill. Though it was in the middle of the day, she went into the bedroom and tumbled onto the bed. Seconds later, maybe minutes or hours, she had no idea how long she was that dead asleep. She was aware of someone shaking her. She gradually came back to consciousness. It was her husband, still sick. She struggled to sit up. He told her there was bad news. It was her husband, still sick. She struggled to sit up. He told her there was bad news. It was on TV. Nancy had been murdered. It pretty much killed me, say Art, breaking into tears. 12 years later, when asked about it, she says, unquote it was one of the hugest things that ever happened to me. It put me into a tailspin that was transforming. I just stayed depressed. It was one of those shocking things. People die of cancer or in a car wreck and you get over it, but this, it was so senseless that someone who didn't know her would do this for no reason. You never get over it.
Speaker 1:Art Ludwig went home in a blind rage and depression that lasted for months. Every time he tried to sleep, nancy's face shocked him into consciousness. Nancy's face shocked him into consciousness. He thought of suicide. He said that the first six months were really terrible. He started grief counseling but he decided the grief counselor needed more help than he did. He would fantasize for hours about getting a gun and moving to Romulus, hanging out in the bars and strip joints and hotels and motels until one day, sooner or later, he would come across Nancy's killer and shoot him dead. His family, like good families do, helped save him. They have resented Nancy at first but have grown to like him and love her in the years after marriage. Art said that his kids took turns babysitting him. He was getting daily calls, something like that If you don't have great family support and great friends, you don't know what you do. They spent a lot of time with him. Art hated living in the big house. Nancy had picked out and decorated Her keys and her ID had been stolen and he kept dreaming the killer was coming for him too. Eventually he sold it.
Speaker 1:Now the town of Romulus is like a big square donut, six miles on the side with a huge square hole in the middle. The sprawling Metropolitan Airport is the hole. The airport dominates the geographic area of the city and its tax base. There's no real downtown in the city. What people call downtown is more like an intersection at Shook and Goddard Roads with a couple of old buildings to show at least something in the city is more than 30 years old and that at least something here predates the airport.
Speaker 1:Romulus is a city technically, but not the way you would picture one normally. It has little culture, no movie theaters, no real place for people to congregate. The major business downtown is the Landing Strip, a current topless joint that says a sign on the building that offers nonstop live entertainment. The city is an odd mix of cornfields, trailer parks, a smattering of nude subdivisions of large homes. Rumless has always been an interesting place to be a cop. The city has more than a share of cheap bars and motels that cater both to the transients passing through the airport and to those passing through life, looking for cheap prostitutes or a cheap place to smoke their crack or snort their coke as tens of thousands of southerners flock to Detroit's auto factories in the city in mid-20th century, each blue-collar community that sprung up seemed to have a need to look down on its neighboring blue-collar community to feel that it somehow was a cut above, and the way it did it was the unique southeastern Michigan regionalism of taking the Taki ending of Kentucky and affixing it to the beginning of whatever city or town was in need of denigration Like Rummataki, will be Rummeless.
Speaker 1:In 1991, the city was in sharp contrast to many others in the county. Where average density in the county was more than 3,000 per square mile, it was just 477 per square mile in Romulus, thanks in large part to the huge chunk in the middle giving over to the airport. Over to the airport, it had just 17,165 residents. The city was known for having far more than its share of weird crimes drunken brawling, drug dealing, mayhem and murder. Borden was not a pair of a cop's job Mayhem and murder, for instance.
Speaker 1:Then Snyder had worked several cases like the girl who was set on fire on her 19th birthday and thrown out of a moving car, the mom who poured Drano down her daughter's throat while she was sleeping. There were a string of prostitute murders. Or the suicide. Who checks into a motel, drinks half a fifth of booze, lister his wrist but doesn't do a good job, finishes off the fifth, or his bleeds out, runs out of booze, gets in in the car trailing blood, goes to the liquor store, buys another fifth, leaving red stains on the counter, goes back to the motel, starts working on that fifth and finally dies Because of his expertise working weird homicides in Romulus, nearby Brunburen Township, asked for Snyder's help on a case of a gutted hooker. Not only had she been gutted but both breasts had been cut off, with one of them left over her face. While they were working the crime scene, a guy drops up in his van. A cop looks in the window, sees a bloody axe and a machete on the back seat and arrests him. True to the cliche, he had returned to the scene of the crime.
Speaker 1:Later, in the 1990s, snyder would work one of Dr Death's cases. Melaniac worked a lot of them. It was Jack Koworkins, the famous or infamous advocate of assisted suicide, that left a bunch of bodies in Romulus. His patients would fly in from around the country. He would meet them in a hotel near the airport, help them to do their deed, then call police. So it was always something in Romulus. So it was always something in Romulus. Snyder had seen it all, or thought he had, till he stepped into room 354. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1:There was one major complication with the Lowercase that set it apart from other murders. Detective Snyder had worked. This murderer wasn't some drunken grandmother passed out sleeping on a shotgun or some trailer trash who knifed a neighbor and is still covering blood when the police show up, or some crack-addled junkie pulling a gun on a clerk while the video camera films away. By the time the body was found, chances were most of the witnesses were time zones away and the murderer could literally had been anywhere on earth. They interviewed the hotel employees but didn't learn much more than they already knew. They got a list of Northwest Airlines employees who would have been at the Hilton and started putting out the word they needed to talk to them. It helped that Metro was a Northwest hub. So one by one, as their schedules allowed, phil Arcia, frederick Roybal, lynn Nelms and the others came back to town to give statements. The picture of the badly dressed stalker began to emerge. The all-news radio stations trumpeted the story for days. The daily newspapers played for a week.
Speaker 1:Mark Eby, who was living in Michigan in 1991 between assignments in Germany, was having his morning coffee and reading the free press the day after Ludwig's body had been found. The local story caught his eye. The details struck him as awfully similar to his mother's death. He called Snyder at the Romulus Police Station and left them a message that they ought to check with the Flint Police and look into a possible connection to the murder of Margaret Margaret Eby in 1986. And then he called his brother, jonathan, and he asked him did you see the article in the Free Press this morning? Is Brother Jonathan? And he asked him did you see the article in the free press this morning? And the brother said yeah, I just got off the phone with the Flint police. I told them they have talked to the Romulus Police Department. As far as I can tell, it looks like the same MO A dozen years later. Mark would say it went beyond the similarities of rape and murder. Both brothers were hit by it at the same time that somebody needs to look at this.
Speaker 1:So on March 8, 1991, jonathan Abbey wrote Arthur Ludwig a letter and the letter said the following Please accept my deepest sympathy on the terrible loss of your wife. You have been in my thoughts and prayers since the news hit the papers here in Detroit and I wonder then if I should write to you. Given the lack of substantive progress in the investigation and your personal appeals in the Detroit area for information, I decided to bring to your attention a similar situation to allow you to respond as you consider appropriate. My mother, margaret Ebby, was murdered in Flint in November of 1986 in the gateway of the mansion and the police had failed to solve the case. She had been bound, gagged, possibly raped, and her throat had been cut, and there was no sign of a forced entry.
Speaker 1:When the news about your wife was aired, we were struck by the similarities of the crimes and we alerted police both in Romulus and in Flint. In our experience, however, we were assured early in the investigation that they believed that the case would be rapidly solved and we were advised not to become involved or post a reward and basically to allow the police to handle it. We did. I regret not having done more earlier. We did post a reward and hire an investigator about 10 months later to know effects.
Speaker 1:I bring this before you not to cast aspersions on the efforts of the police, but to encourage you to continue in to personally do all that you can to move the case forward. While they certainly want the case solved, they have other agendas as well a lack of motivation of those whose lives have been so significantly affected by the crime. Lives have been so significantly affected by the crime. It is a long shot. I'm sure that our cases are connected, particularly if the perpetrator in your case is a very young man, but I wonder if publicity of the sort you're doing in Detroit might yield results if the situation and the man's picture were shown in Flint. So he said the officer who handled our case was Sergeant David King. If I can be of any other use to you, I can be reached at and give him the phone number. My prayers for God's grace, peace and strength continue to be with you and your family Sincerely.
Speaker 1:Jonathan S Eby Ludwig turned the note over to the Romulus police. He was getting a lot of crank mail and calls and didn't know if this was another one, but it seemed worth passing on. Neither one of the Abbeys heard back from the cops in either city. King didn't follow up on his tip. The Romulus PD did. Ludwig's further efforts at publicity, including posting and mailing flyers. Buying ads that displayed composite drawings and offering a reward, did not extend to Flint. Thank you for listening to the Murder Book. Have a great week.
