The view down Juno Street toward Wattles Road. The Zick home is on the left with the state police car in the driveway. Courtesy of the Michigan State Police.
A description of the man that Mrs. DeFrance had seen was released to the public, if not to provoke identification, at least to calm its fears. To Mrs. DeFrance’s horror, her name was also released to the newspapers. She became very concerned that the murderer knew that he had been seen, and now her name and address had been printed in the Battle Creek Enquirer and News for the whole world to read. According to one neighbor, “Mrs. DeFrance was petrified that the killer would come after her to keep her quiet.”
Many of the neighbors on Juno Street and nearby neighborhoods were nervous that the killer might strike again. Myrtle Evans was a young housewife on Wattles Road whose driveway opened up to Juno Street. Myrtle recalled the day of the murder: “I was a young mother with four children. One was ill with tonsillitis; the youngest had to go with us to the doctor in Jackson County. When I returned home, the neighborhood was swarming with police cars, that’s when I learned about Daisy…my husband worked nights, and I was a nervous wreck. I went to my cousin’s in Jackson County for a couple of nights, then my father-in-law came and stayed for about two weeks.”
Having a murder strike such a pastoral community shook many families’ calm and sent ripples of fear into their homes.
In the meantime, Detective Conn contacted Daisy’s work, the Kellogg’s Factory in Battle Creek. He went to recover the affects from Daisy’s locker, optimistic that there would be some clue or clues as to who might want her dead.
Her locker proved a boon for the investigators. Most of its contents were the mundane articles that any female factory worker might have: a hand mirror, a can of Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder, a can of Breck hair set mist, a multicolored umbrella, a shoe horn, white tape, a gray and aqua sweater, three calendars, shoe polish, roll-on deodorant, a spool of white thread, scissors, a marking pencil, a scarf and five slips. However, there were other items that caught the detective’s attention. Two gift-wrapped packages addressed to “Raymond Honey” were in the locker, and there were numerous notes and cards—all of a romantic nature.
The items uncovered in Daisy’s locker and the statements of her friend Audrey gave investigators a set of clues that would take the them into the corporate culture of the Kellogg Company and the sex life of Daisy Zick.
Chapter 4
THE AFFAIRS OF DAISY ZICK
I had a good life and loved my mom.
Jim King
Daisy’s son
If you want to know about the personality of a person, you have to understand the culture in which they were raised and where they lived. We are all the products of our surroundings, and that was especially true of Daisy Zick. The city she worked in governed her life. It determined whom she met, worked with and associated with. To know Daisy as a person, you have to look at where she lived, her life history and the place where she spent so much of her time—the Kellogg Company.
At one point or another in our nation’s history, everywhere was considered the frontier of the United States. In 1823–24, that frontier was western Michigan. To mark the wilderness for settling, teams of surveyors were sent out from Fort Detroit. One such team set up its camp along the river known by the local Indians as Waupokisco, meaning River of Battle or River of Blood, which commemorated a great battle fought on its banks years before the white settlers came. This river met with a larger river, named the Kalamazoo, and it was at this juncture that the surveying team led by Colonel John Mullet had set up its camp.
The local Indians, at first, were simply onlookers to the group’s work, but over time, they began to interfere with the work being done by standing to block the surveyors’ lines of sight. Colonel Mullet became so enraged that, on one occasion, he took his Jacob’s staff (an iron rod on which the surveyor placed his compass) and attempted to run through one of the natives who was interfering with his work. Only the swift action of a Frenchman attached to the party prevented the incident from being one of bloodshed. It was becoming clear to both parties that conflict was inevitable.
One day, while the surveying party was working, two men from the camp—a cook named Taylor and another man named Edwin Baldwin—were attacked by two large Indians. The assumed motive was robbery, but the white settlers fought back. The Indian fighting Baldwin managed to grab Colonel Mullet’s musket and fired the weapon. Baldwin was narrowly missed, the musket ball tearing a hole in his coat. Baldwin seized the rifle from his assailant and clubbed him about the head with it. Meanwhile, Taylor was on the verge of being overpowered, when Baldwin came in and killed Taylor’s attacker with another blow from the musket. Realizing it was far from security, the survey party retreated to Detroit. What it left behind was the name that the Waupokisco River and the community that would settle there would adopt as its own: Battle Creek.
Battle Creek was formally founded six years after the surveyor-Indian scuffle, when Sands McCamly purchased the first plots of land for a dollar and a quarter an acre. The early settlers’ names still resound in the streets, parks and neighborhoods of Battle Creek—McCamly, Convis, Wattles, Ethridge, Harper, Willard, Kingman, Browning, Crosby and others. The position of the settlement near the middle of the state’s east–west Territorial Road made it a perfect resting place for travelers. During the Civil War, Battle Creek sent its sons off to fight for both sides of the conflict. It became a station on the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom. Sojourner Truth, the famous escaped slave and advocate for women’s rights, made Battle Creek her home in later life.
The city grew as the state of Michigan grew. The Michigan Central Railroad pushed through the heart of the city in 1845, bringing with it more settlers and more business. While the city emerged as the largest community in Calhoun County, it was not the seat of county government, which resided eight miles down Michigan Avenue in quaint, bustling little Marshall. The surrounding lush farmlands were celebrated for raising wheat and corn. But like many small cities, Battle Creek would need a catalyst to make it thrive and become recognized. Usually this catalyst comes in the form of a business that brings people and jobs into a community. For Battle Creek, that catalyst came initially in the form of a church, but it would eventually lead to changing how the world ate their morning breakfast.
Today, Battle Creek is known as “Cereal City,” but that title emerged from the Church of Seventh Day Adventists rather than an oven. Battle Creek became the founding city for the religion. One of the distinctions of the Seventh Day Adventists was their belief in nutrition as a way to purify the body and spirit of a person. Good health was an important principle to the members of the church and leading this nutritional reform was one of the church’s founders, Mrs. Ellen White. She encouraged and helped fund sending a young Adventist, John Harvey Kellogg, to college to become a doctor.
Dr. Kellogg took over the Adventists’ health institute, reorganizing it into the Battle Creek Sanitarium. There, he experimented with and tested a wide range of foods to determine their benefits on patients. Dr. Kellogg advocated the use of grains and cereals at the sanitarium, or the “San” as it became known. He made granola for patients for a breakfast food and experimented with yogurts and other cereals. Patients from around the world came to Battle Creek not just for the headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventists but also to spend time at the San. It became a resort for the rich and famous coming to Battle Creek.
With Dr. John Kellogg focused on experimenting with nutrition, he needed his brother, Will, to help manage the business side of his operation. The brothers were far from close. As their sister Emma put it, “The Kellogg women are amenable, but the Kellogg men can be mean.” John ran his brother ragged in keeping the San a viable operation.
In 1894, Dr. Kellogg changed the world in a subtle way. While attempting to come up with a viable food for a patient who had false teeth and could not chew well, he boiled some wheat and ran it through a
press before baking the flattened material in his oven. The first true breakfast cereal was born. Kellogg had not only devised the means of providing a nutritious breakfast food but also found a way of taking the corn and wheat that farmers had been growing in mid-Michigan and dramatically increasing their commercial value. Battle Creek spawned a new industry, and Kellogg created a magnificent redbrick plant along the Michigan Central Railroad line so that its products could easily be distributed to Chicago to the west and Detroit to the east.
One of the San’s former patients, Charlie Post, saw the benefits of the foods that Dr. Kellogg made. He created his own natural coffee substitute, Postum, which he had allegedly proposed to Dr. Kellogg only to have the good doctor turn him down. Postum, thanks to a brilliant marketing campaign, became a nationwide hit. The byproducts of this grain-made coffee became a new breakfast cereal, Grape-Nuts. Post, too, set up his production facility in Battle Creek. While Kellogg claimed that Post had stolen his concepts from the San, Post seemed to be ever defiant that his creations were his own. The two plants were set up within a block of each other, locked in marketing combat for decades to come.
Seemingly overnight, Battle Creek had become a boomtown for the cereal business. Anyone attempting to get into this new market seemed compelled to set up his operations in the growing city. Healthy breakfasts became synonymous with Battle Creek. Countless products sprang up from the two large manufacturers and the dozens of smaller companies that sprouted in “Cereal City.” As the comedy magazine Jabs put it, “Battle Creek, Michigan, has a population of 21,647 persons, all of whom are engaged in the manufacturer of breakfast cereals.”
Inevitably, the Kellogg brothers were to come to blows over the business. With the introduction of Toasted Corn Flakes, the brothers finally began a legal battle for control of the company. For a while, the two ran opposing businesses, but eventually, the younger W.K. Kellogg managed to purchase and consolidate the holdings into the one Kellogg Company that is known today. Dr. John Kellogg still spent much of his time at the San, but by the Great Depression, the stream of celebrity visitors to Battle Creek had dwindled to a mere trickle. The bitter sibling quarrels of the Kellogg brothers were often overshadowed by the fierce competition between Kellogg’s and Post. The companies played a constant game of chess to out-maneuver and out-market each other.
Battle Creek was transformed by the cereal business, as it brought in jobs, fostered a boom in agriculture in the Midwest and put Battle Creek on the world map as the birthplace of healthy breakfasts. Even in the 1950s, when the trend was to turn breakfast cereals into sugar-laden treats rather than nutritious food, the town still wore its mantle of “Cereal City” with pride. By the 1950s, Kellogg’s had become a corporate giant. General Mills and Ralston Purina had factories in the city as well. W.K. Kellogg’s legacy, the Kellogg Foundation, was also based in Battle Creek. While there were other industrial plants in the city such as Union Pump, it was the breakfast industry that defined the place.
The Battle Creek of 1963 was not all that different than the city is today. The railroads that bring in supplies and transport breakfast out to the world cut around and through the city. Most locals will tell you that if you wanted to get from one side of Battle Creek to the other you had better add fifteen minutes to account for being stopped by a slow-moving train. Even as far out as Wattles Park, the mournful diesel horns echo in the evenings. Many residents can tell which cereal lines were running at Kellogg’s by the aroma in the air. Cornflakes had a soothing smell whereas burned Rice Krispies made you cringe. Fruit Loops left a sugary taste on your palate.
In 1963, Battle Creek was a city overshadowed by the businesses that made it. Its identity was not its own but driven, instead, by Post and Kellogg’s. And the cereal companies defined not only the town but also the people that lived there.
Police officers look at murder victims differently than authors or historians. They dig into their past looking for possible suspects—relationships with possible murderers. They seek individuals with motives to kill someone in the present, not looking into the whole life story of the victim. To really understand Daisy Zick, you need to understand her as a person rather than a label of “a party girl” or a “loose woman.”
Daisy Holmes (later Zick) was born February 5, 1919, on a farm in Assyria township near Hastings, Michigan. She was born to Gaylord Charles Holmes and his wife, Pearl A. (Woods) Holmes. Her father’s family had been from Ohio in the 1850s but had moved to the Hastings area in the 1880s. They had been there ever since. Daisy’s parents, Gaylord and Pearl, had been married in Battle Creek in 1918 in a tiny service attended by the bride’s parents. They took their honeymoon on his Assyria Township farm.
Daisy’s father had farming in his blood. He had worked for a short period of time as a road commissioner in Assyria Township in the early 1900s and then as a blacksmith, but in the end, farming was what spoke to him. He had registered for the draft for the Great War but had never been called up. While he dabbled in carpentry, he set up his family on a farm on Mud Lake Road, and the place became the center of their world.
Assyria Township is a rural community surrounded by the towns of Battle Creek, Charlotte and Hastings. The citizens tend to see themselves as part of the Hastings community since the township is in a different county (Barry) than Battle Creek. Hastings is poised on the wandering Thornapple River, situated north of Battle Creek and west of Lansing. Hastings is the county seat of Barry County and had become a city more because of its positioning as a potential stagecoach stop than any other reason. Lumber had been a big business in the area in its early years, but that shifted to agriculture as time passed. Hastings has an incredibly quaint Victorian feel in its architecture and appearance.
The city’s position near Grand Rapids, Lansing, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo offered its residents numerous employment opportunities. It had two tiny movie theaters, the Strand and the Barry. The cinema is one of the few forms of entertainment that linked the locals to the outside world. As the municipal center of Barry County, Hastings was a hub of activity. The end of summer was always marked with the Barry County Fair. Downtown Hastings had redbrick roads, which gave cars and trucks passing over them a distinct rumble.
The Holmes family were farmers, and Daisy was born on the family-owned farm. Her sister, Dorothy, was also born there, in 1921. The farm was ten to twelve miles outside Battle Creek. The Holmes family was hardworking. Daisy’s father had lived on a farm his whole life in a rental arrangement, and when the farm came up for sale, he purchased it as his own. The Holmes family was not rich but was by no means poor.
For schooling, Daisy attended a one-room schoolhouse called Eagle. She completed the eighth grade, which for the late 1920s was considered a good education. The fact that she didn’t attend high school was not surprising, as many of the rural citizens of Barry County, Michigan, only went as far as their one-room schoolhouses allowed.
Daisy and her sister, Dorothy, 1925. Courtesy of James King.
Daisy’s world was small. There simply weren’t a lot of opportunities to meet people that didn’t live beyond where you could walk or ride to. She met an older man named Neville “Bill” King, who lived only three-quarters of a mile down the road from the Holmes farm. He was twenty-two years old, and when she met him in 1933, she was only fourteen. Despite the differences in their ages, Daisy was swept off her feet. Today, the concept of a fourteen-year-old marrying an older man would be the fodder talk, but it was not entirely out of the ordinary in the 1930s. They went down to Angola, Indiana, and were married by a Reverend Davies on September 29, 1933. Neville’s family was from the region, and the marriage laws were more flexible there.
Daisy, a young farm girl, in 1930. Courtesy of James King.
Neville worked at the United Steel and Wire Company in Battle Creek, making slightly less than thirty dollars a week, a good wage for the period. Shortly after they married, he moved from Hastings to Battle Creek, taking his young bride with him. They mo
ved into a house on North Division Street in the city limits. Together, Daisy and Neville had a son, James (Jim), born on April 1, 1936. Daisy was seventeen when James was born. James’s birth was fine, but the boy was born with a birthmark on his face, a dark pink, almost purple, coloration.
Daisy’s life with Neville was not the idyllic one that she had hoped for or deserved. Neville was cruel to his young wife. While she had been pregnant with Jim, she had left Neville for her parents’ home. She didn’t stay away long though, eventually returning to Battle Creek and her husband.
To characterize Neville as abusive was to be kind. His abuse of Daisy was not just physical. He “call[ed] her vile, indecent and sacrilegious names,” erupting with the slightest provocation. He often struck her in anger. He twisted Daisy’s wrists and, on more than one occasion, kicked her. Records from the divorce filings reveal that Neville “ha[d] otherwise beaten plaintiff (Daisy) to an extent that is difficult to believe a husband would beat his wife, that on one occasion he struck plaintiff a violent blow upon her nose and broke the plaintiff’s nose,” causing her pain and suffering for days afterward. His explosions of rage were so loud that neighbors and passersby could hear and, in the case of the neighbors, complain.
Daisy and her first husband, Neville King. Courtesy of James King.
Neville’s rage against Daisy was so strong that on one occasion he threatened to kill her. For her, that had been the breaking point. She had taken James and had returned to Hastings and her family.
Divorce in the 1930s was not as commonplace as today, and exacting details of offenses had to be documented by the courts. Furthermore, since she was under the age of twenty-one, Daisy was declared an “infant” in the eyes of the court. They went through formal proceedings to have her father named as her “Next Friend,” entitling him to sue for the divorce for his daughter. At the age of eighteen, young Daisy had been through a tough life already, experiencing what many people do not experience in an entire lifetime.
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