Chapter 3
THE MYSTERIOUS MAN ON MICHIGAN AVENUE
A theory that more than one person may have been involved in the slaying of Mrs. Daisy Zick gained support last night with an account from a motorist who may have seen the killer drive away with a second man.
Battle Creek Enquirer and News
January 15, 1963
The state police combed the Zicks’ Pontiac Bonneville for any potential evidence that it might yield. Daisy’s car was remarkably clean, just like her house, which made some of the evidence easy to spot. There were blood smears on the white exterior of the passenger-side door in the area near the end of the door handle, similar to what would be left if someone with blood on his arm had brushed up against the car.
As they worked their way around and inside the 3,895 pounds of tough Detroit steel, the police searched for anything else of value and lifted over a half dozen fingerprints. On the chrome strip just under the front of the hood, about twenty-two inches to the left of the right side (facing the front of the vehicle), they discovered a faint fabric impression. It was the kind of mark that would have been made if someone had leaned onto the front of the car. There was no way to tell if the spot was made by the killer, a mechanic working on the car or a fellow shopper bumping into the vehicle in a parking lot. A negative photo impression was made of the imprint, nevertheless.
A closer inspection of the front of the car revealed several yellow fibers caught on the bottom of the front bumper by the hood release lever. These were carefully removed and saved to compare against those found in the Zick home.
Daisy’s Pontiac Bonneville. Note the smear of blood from someone brushing against the passenger door. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
The interior of Daisy’s car in the police garage. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
Any car picks up a lot of fingerprints, and Daisy’s was no exception. Most were fragments that would take weeks to exclude by getting prints from service station attendants and anyone that remembered riding in the car. Initially, there were three that stood out as the best samples. Two were on the inside rearview mirror, left probably from someone adjusting it. Another was on the interior chrome strip on the right front seat.
As the troopers crawled through the car, they checked the driver’s side door. There was another fingerprint at the back end of the armrest pull. This one stood out. If someone had been driving the car, this was where he would have pulled the door shut.
The detailed check of the car went on until 3:00 a.m. with the troopers checking for any other fibers, hairs or fingerprints. Even with the space heater running, it was cold work in the garage as they tried to find anything that would help them identify the killer.
Detective Conn noted what was not there: Daisy’s keys. Floyd had test started the car on Michigan Avenue using his set of keys. Daisy’s were missing, meaning that her killer had taken them either inadvertently or as some sort of souvenir of the crime. A check was made with Floyd. Daisy had a simple split key ring. She had two sets of keys for the Pontiac, one house key and one that was for her locker at Kellogg’s.
Police felt certain that someone must have seen the car or the driver on Michigan Avenue. It was one of the busiest pieces of roadway in Calhoun County. Despite the cold, it had been broad daylight. Whoever had killed Daisy had driven the car and deliberately abandoned it. The person would have been covered in blood splatters. Ralph Kartheu pointed out that if the killer had been wearing yellow cotton gloves, as suspected, they would have been soaked in blood. The investigators began to comb the area around Evanston Road and East Michigan Avenue in the hope of finding someone who had seen the driver or the vehicle.
On the morning of January 14, 1963, Sergeant Fred Ritchie of the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department had been late on his way to court to transport a prisoner. He reached the courthouse by driving on Michigan Avenue. As he came up the hill near Evanston Road, he had spotted the white Pontiac Bonneville. The extreme cold weather had killed a number of cars that morning, so the sight of a car on the side of the road was not unusual. Fred saw a single man in a blue coat, what looked like a navy peacoat, walking toward Battle Creek not far from the car. Fred didn’t check the time or get a good look at the man; he was more focused on being late for court. Little did he realize at the time that he had passed Daisy Zick’s murderer.
Sharon Brown’s home at 1189 East Michigan Avenue was where the car had been abandoned. When the troopers first visited her, she claimed that she had seen the vehicle at approximately 10:30 a.m. The car had been parked in such a way to force her to walk around it to get her mail that morning. Mrs. Brown recalled the time so well because she had been talking to a neighbor on the telephone, and after hanging up, she had looked at the clock. Shortly thereafter she had seen the car in front of her home. A few days after her initial report of the time, she contacted the investing officers to revise her stated time. Some minutes had passed between when she had noted the time and when she had first seen the Pontiac. She estimated that she had seen the car closer to 11:00 a.m.
The police made a check of the Dog ’n Suds on the other side of the street less than a quarter of a mile from where the car had been abandoned. The Dog n’ Suds was primarily a drive-in restaurant during the summer months and had a small interior eating area. Winters were the bane of drive-in restaurants, as their business dropped off dramatically. Dressie Lampkin had been working that day, filling in for her sister, who usually worked at that time. She remembered only one customer during that time: a man who came in, left and, later, returned. He came back at 11:30 a.m., just as she was leaving for the day. He was a white male, in light tan-colored clothing. He wore a topcoat. She remembered him because he flirted with her. Dressie did not notice anything out of the ordinary about him. There was no sign of blood on him.
The Brown house, where Daisy’s car was abandoned. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
The view of where Daisy’s car was located, from Sharon Brown’s house. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
Other neighbors provided little more in the way of details. Donna Brooker of Evanston Street did not see the car at 9:55 a.m. but did see it at 12:10 p.m. She hadn’t seen anyone walking about that morning. The Steen family—Ed, Beth and their two boys—saw the Zick Bonneville at 11:00 a.m., they were fairly sure. Pinning down the exact time the car arrived was proving to be difficult. Earl and Doris McIntire on Palmer Street left home at 11:00 a.m. and didn’t see the car, for example, but Carl Hoff of Hoff’s Gulf Station said he saw the car around 10:30 a.m. near Evanston road, though he didn’t see anyone there.
The view from where Daisy’s car was parked on East Michigan Avenue, facing east. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
Mrs. Maude Brooker on Evanston Street saw a light grey or tan car parked between her house and East Michigan Avenue near the mailboxes. It was there until around noon, when she noticed it was gone. Was this the killer’s vehicle, positioned so that he could make his getaway?
The view from where Daisy’s car was discovered looking west on Michigan Avenue toward Battle Creek. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
As the police combed the area around Juno Street and Wattles Road, more information emerged. Mrs. Beulah Hankey of Wattles Road claimed that she passed the Zick car being driven north on Wattles Road between 11:20 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. She was with Mrs. Habenicht, another neighbor who was able to substantiate this story. Mrs. Hankey felt her estimate of the time was accurate because Mrs. Habenicht left her home at 11:20 a.m. after giving her young son medication for a heart condition. Little did Mrs. Hankey realize that Daisy’s killer was behind the wheel.
The day after the murder, the Enquirer and News picked up one tip. An unidentified source said that on the morning of the murder, his car had stalled on Michigan Avenue, almost across from where Daisy’s car came to rest. He claimed that another car, “bluish in color,” had been parked behind Daisy’s Pontiac. A man got out of Daisy�
�s car and got into the passenger seat of the blue car and the driver took off.
This sighting, if accurate, would have helped immensely. It meant that two persons were involved with the murder, the killer and the driver of the final getaway car. But this witness’s story didn’t hold water. First, there were a number of witnesses who saw Daisy’s car that morning, but none saw the other mysterious blue car or the anonymous witness’s vehicle. Also, several people saw the supposed driver of the car walking along Michigan Avenue, heading west. If this had been the killer, he couldn’t have been seen walking if he had already hopped into a car and fled with an accomplice.
Detective Conn couldn’t simply disregard the account, however, especially since the story had already run in the newspaper. He tracked down the informant, and after a few minutes of questioning, the man admitted that he had made up the entire account of a second man in the car. He couldn’t say why he had lied about the story. He then said that he had seen another young man in the area hitchhiking that day, not far from where Daisy’s car had been abandoned.
Conn tracked down the twenty-nine-year-old man who had been seen hitchhiking in the vicinity. The man in question raised a number of eyebrows. He had previously been caught breaking into a woman’s home and rummaging through her lingerie. He had also been arrested before for making an indecent proposal to an unsuspecting housewife who had answered his knock at the door. In Conn’s mind, this could potentially be the same scenario that Daisy had faced. Maybe she had simply made the mistake of opening the door for him.
The hopes of the investigators were shattered when the man permitted being questioned under a polygraph exam and passed. He appeared to be a dead-end, but Conn remained convinced that the young man might be involved despite the results of the test.
Harper Creek High School had been contacted to see if there had been any absent students that day from the Wattles Park area. It was not a good day for boys to be playing hooky. Jim Fitzjohn, Art English and Bill Adams were out of school that day with unexcused absences, and the police visited all of them to see where they had been and if they had seen anything.
Another team of state troopers turned their focus on the neighborhood where the Zicks lived. What police learned was that tiny little Juno Street had been abuzz with activity the day of the crime, yet few people saw anything of use to the investigators. Margaret Simpson at 124 Juno had called Glenn White Heating to repair her furnace. It had conked out on the coldest day of the year. The deep-penetrating cold had caused a spike of calls for furnace repairs in the area. Two heating repairmen, Robert Lee and Richard Burning, were assigned the task of going to the Simpson house the morning of the murder, putting them on the street near the time of the killing.
Prosecutor Noble Moore had both men come in for questioning. Richard Burning lived on Wattles Road and knew the neighborhood, so it was hoped he might have picked up on some minute details of anything out of the ordinary. Burning carefully reconstructed his day for the officers. He and Robert Lee had another call that morning at the Friends Church parsonage on Katherine Street, only a few blocks away from where Daisy’s car had been abandoned.
Having finished at the church, the two repairmen had arrived on Juno Street around 9:30 a.m. It had taken them roughly a half hour to get the Simpson furnace working. Neither had seen anything peculiar or out of place.
The furnace repairmen were not alone in the sweep of people visiting near Juno Street that morning. An oil deliveryman was tracked down as well. He had been making a delivery at a home on Wattles Road, just off Juno Street, at around 10:00 a.m. Like so many people that day, he didn’t see anyone walking in the cold.
The police contacted two local dairies that did milk delivery in the area. Though milkmen were a dying breed in the age of the supermarket—Steve’s Wattles Park Grocery was only a block and a half away from the Zick home, and a half dozen other markets were within five miles—there were still some holdouts that had their milk delivered.-However, neither company had deliveries in that area the day of the murder.
Betty Habenicht had arranged for heating oil to be delivered that morning. With the icy weather, no one wanted to run out of oil. The deliveryman, Mr. Lloyd Eakins of Battle Creek, arrived at her home between 11:00 and 11:30 a.m. He told investigators that he didn’t see a car or person on Juno Street. He did remember seeing Mrs. DeFrance walking toward her mailbox. It stood out in his mind because her dog barked and chased his truck when he left. Mr. Eakins was a little confused why the police asked what kind of gloves he had been wearing that day. When he pumped oil, he usually wore red cloth gloves for heat and pulled on a pair of black rubber gloves over them.
Eakins’s story matched up with that of Mrs. DeFrance, who provided the police with a description of the man she had seen across the street at the Zick home that morning. When pressed for details of the man she saw, she could only offer a generic description. The alleged killer stood about five feet seven inches and weighed about 135 pounds. From what she could tell from across the street and from behind, he was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. The man had been wearing a blue denim–type jacket with lighter blue pants and had black or dark hair but no hat. From what Mrs. DeFrance could see, he was a white man.
Another person who was in the area at the time was Mae Tolls, the cleaning woman who was working at the Radford home across the street from the Zick home that morning. When she went out to shake the rugs at around 9:30 a.m., she noticed that Mrs. Zick had pulled the drapes open around that time, which was unusual for her. Daisy usually didn’t do that until around 11:00 a.m.
Lieutenant Paul Scoder of the Battle Creek Police Department tracked down the cab companies in town to see if they had picked up anyone in the vicinity. The killer had to have had a way out of the Wattles Park area after abandoning the Zick Pontiac; perhaps he had taken a cab. Only one fare came from the Wattles Park area that day, a woman who was taken to the Post Tavern—a bar in downtown Battle Creek.
Running down the list of people who might have been in the neighborhood at the time of the killing, the police contacted the postal deliveryman, William Newman Daily. Daily said that at 10:05 a.m., he had been driving past the Chuck Wagon Restaurant, going east on Michigan Avenue. The Chuck Wagon was approximately a mile west from where the Zicks’ Pontiac had been abandoned.
According to Daily, he saw a white male walking west on Michigan Avenue. The man looked around forty years old, standing five foot five or five foot eight inches tall, with black hair. From what Daily claimed, the man was bare-headed and weighed from 150 to 170 pounds. He had been wearing a black waist-length jacket like a gabardine. Daily claimed that the man had a dark complexion. He also stated that the man he had seen had a peculiar grin on his face, like he was smiling to himself.
Daily said that the Zicks were on his mail route and he had gone past their house at approximately 11:10 a.m. When he went past the home, he was sure that the garage door was closed. He volunteered to the officers that the car was usually pulled in straight in the garage and backed out when someone left. According to him, Daisy usually backed it out and left the engine running while she closed the garage door.
The only other witness that came forward in the early part of the investigation in regard to the car was Trooper Ralph Kartheu, who had been one of the first officers dispatched to the Zick home. He had been on patrol before 11:00 a.m., passed Daisy’s car and noticed someone behind the wheel. He had gotten a good look at the person there, Floyd Zick. Trooper Kartheu substantiated this much of Floyd’s story—that he had stopped to try starting Daisy’s car. Little did Trooper Kartheu realize that in a few short minutes he would see the man again at Zick’s home on Juno Street.
Detective Conn’s team was faced with the usual problems with witnesses and times. There was always a lot of variance in times as people remembered them. Slowly though, a pattern was emerging. At some time after 10:20 a.m. and just before 11:00 a.m., Daisy’s killer was driving her car from the scene o
f the crime to where it was abandoned near the Dog ’n Suds at Michigan Avenue and Evanston Road. The individual left the car and, after a few short minutes, disappeared.
William Daily’s vivid account of a man walking on Michigan Avenue was one of the wildcards. He claimed that when he had delivered on his route, the Zicks’ garage door was closed, which certainly wasn’t the case at 11:00 a.m. He seemed fairly aware of Daisy’s routine and seemed sure of the time of day when he had been in the area. He was the only one who saw the mysterious man walking near the Chuck Wagon.
The confidential informant’s account of seeing a car pull up to take the driver of Daisy’s car away certainly made sense, but no one else had reported seeing that informant’s car or the other car along the road that morning. Photos of Daisy’s vehicle were released to the Enquirer and News to see if anyone had seen anyone or anything of interest, but none could confirm the account provided. Credible witnesses, such as Sergeant Fred Ritchie, only described a single man walking along Michigan Avenue in the stinging cold that morning.
Where did the blood-covered killer walk to that morning? If he had been wearing a dark blue navy peacoat, it would have been harder to see the stains until you were up close. Regardless of its visibility on his coat, blood would have been on his lighter pants as well.
Police were going to have to wait to see if any additional witnesses came forward. Daisy’s Bonneville had yielded all the clues it had to offer at that point in time.
Prosecutor Noble Moore called a conference the second day of the investigation to attempt to go over the evidence and clues that had been gathered up to that point. Leads were starting to trickle in, but nothing with results had yet been found. “Now we have to sit down and see if any of the leads add up to certain persons on whom we can concentrate.”
Murder in Battle Creek Page 6