Murder in Battle Creek

by Blaine L. Pardoe

  Turning the focus on the employees of Kellogg’s seemed logical for the investigators. Initially they looked at Daisy’s rather wide circle of co-workers and friends at the factory. That was expanded to include anyone who missed work or couldn’t be accounted for the day of the murder.

  Kellogg’s, like any large company, had a culture all its own. When you have thousands of people working closely, you are bound to have a number of people that have affairs. Male employees sometimes referred to their romantic partners as “shop wives,” though they may have been married outside of work as well. Romances at Kellogg’s didn’t necessarily take place on the factory floor. Many people were discreet, only occasionally holding hands in front of co-workers. On the other hand, lunchtime trysts in the parking lot were not entirely uncommon. The couples that did this would often park next to each other each day. Others would leave the plant and either go home or to any number of known parking places for a quick fling. Those that couldn’t wait could always find an isolated spot in the plant. As one person said, “My first day at Kellogg’s, I got out of my car and saw a used condom in the parking lot. That seemed to say it all.”

  The night shift tended to be less stringent with the rules. As one summer employee working in the 1960s said, “The day shift was on the straight and narrow, but the night shift was like an ongoing party in the packing rooms. Couples would be playing music and dancing. It was bizarre.” Alcohol was brought in to liven things up. In that kind of environment, Daisy’s alleged promiscuity could only flourish.

  Not everyone at Kellogg’s was embroiled in such activities; in fact, the vast majority of employees just showed up and did their jobs. As Dorothy Kajcienski, a former co-worker of Daisy’s, put it, “This kind of behavior wasn’t prevalent. A lot of the female workers at the plant came from countries like Croatia and were good, hard-working people who concentrated on doing a good job.” Dick Stevens of the prosecutor’s office at the time had previously worked at Kellogg’s with Daisy. “She worked in a fishbowl. It would have been impossible for her to carry on anything while on the line.”

  But Daisy did draw attention working out in the open. As Mrs. Kajcienski stated, “Daisy did turn heads…most people took a second look at her. She was a sharp dresser. She also wore makeup in the plant; that was something that most women didn’t do.”

  Her reputation at Kellogg’s was mixed, depending on whom you spoke to. Most spoke of her flirtatious attitude toward men, which fed many of the rumors that she was fooling around with a number of men at the plant. Others, like Lynnette Rich, remember a warm and compassionate person who cared deeply about her fellow workers: “I remember that Daisy was the person who took a card around and collected money for my mother who had been in Ann Arbor for cobalt radiation treatment for cancer.”

  Daisy, left, with co-workers at the Kellogg’s plant, 1940s. Courtesy of James King.

  The police sweep of Kellogg’s started with those individuals who knew Daisy. Some were off sick, such as Thomas Hurst, who was still in bed ill with the flu when the police located him. Others were ruled out because their timecards showed that they were still at work during the murder, but even they were asked to provide fingerprint samples to check against the unidentified latent print found in Daisy’s car.

  The police reports of these discussions indicate that some of the people at Kellogg’s suffered from personal issues. One was a person excused because of his nervous breakdown and heavy drinking. Another had been fired from Kellogg’s a week before the crime. According to his mother, he been home drunk on January 14 and was still drunk on the twenty-first, when the police called on him. One subject was known as a womanizer in the plant and was known to hit on numerous employees. His time was accounted for on the day of the murder, but like everyone else, he provided fingerprint samples.

  The search of Daisy’s locker spawned a number of rumors as well within the plant. The notes between her and Raymond Mercer leaked out somehow and grew as the story was retold. It evolved to be one in which the police had uncovered letters from a number of Daisy’s lovers, all from Kellogg’s, including some senior managers at the company. As time passed, these rumors took on more substance than reality.

  The check of employees that were unaccounted for on the day and at the time of the crime netted nothing of use for the investigators. So they cast their search wider, pulling in any former Kellogg’s employees who had left recently that might have known the victim. The ex-employees were a mix of individuals. One had been let for excessive drinking but had been cleared by witnesses at his new job. Others had simply taken other jobs and were surprised by the sudden appearance of police asking questions about the Zick murder.

  The interrogation of Kellogg’s employees was far from over. Daisy’s co-workers on the line were interrogated next. Most, like Charles King, Eddie Lewis and Richard Darlington, knew Daisy but had no information of use. As many of the people at Kellogg’s did, they proactively offered to take polygraph tests if it would help the police. Jack Motley, who had had a fender-bender with Daisy at the Kellogg’s parking lot a year earlier, suddenly found himself being visited by police. Loretta Wierenga was cleared by witnesses that saw her paying her bills at the time of the crime. Her only connection to Daisy was that the two of them were part of a birthday club with Audrey Heminger and others at the plant. The investigators’ zeal brought many people under suspicion.

  The police expanded their search even further at the factory to look at anyone who fit the general description of the potential suspect provided by Mrs. DeFrance. This included people on other shifts who, in many cases, didn’t even know Daisy. Investigators brought in a total of eighty-seven men from the line at the plant, asked for their alibis and fingerprinted and palm-printed them as a result of the sweep. Those that closely matched the physical description, as well as their friends, co-workers and wives, were contacted to validate the employees’ whereabouts on January 14.

  The effects of the investigation’s focus on Kellogg’s were staggering. Many people told me, off the record, that “Daisy’s death broke up a lot of marriages.” Certainly the police’s probing at Kellogg’s was the foundation of accusations of infidelity. While impossible to track, it is possible to imagine that spouses contacted to verify their husbands’ connections, if any, to a murdered woman with a reputation for dating around would cause trouble for many innocent men. In all fairness, in numerous interviews, not a single couple was ever offered as an example of a marriage that ended because of Daisy’s murder. It is most likely that these alleged shattered marriages are the stuff of urban legend tied to the Zick murder.

  After three months’ worth of digging into the workers at Kellogg’s, the investigators still lacked anything useful to work with. All they had succeeded in doing was fuel the rumor mill at the factory. They continued to pursue other avenues of investigation. Two former boyfriends of Daisy were contacted, but both had solid alibis that ruled them out. A tip came in regarding a man that Daisy had been seen dancing with at the CIO Club, a bar in Battle Creek. A waitress at another bar, the Blinkerlite, reported that Daisy had frequented the establishment and that she and a man had been seen there twice in January prior to her murder. These leads turned out to be dead-ends as well. While they supported the theory that Daisy did date around and get out quite a bit, they did not help provide investigators with any information that could help the investigation.

  Checks were made of criminals that were on parole for violent crimes, but Calhoun County had a remarkably small list of these. As these individuals were tracked down, each was found to have an alibi. Rapists were checked, though there had been no sign of sexual attack on Daisy. Also checked were individuals who had burglary charges, though there was little to indicate that Daisy had been killed as the result of a robbery. The lack of useful leads had forced police to search out even the improbable.

  The Battle Creek Veterans’ Hospital at Fort Custer became a focus for potential suspects. It was a common practice with l
aw enforcement at the time given the number of mental patients housed there. Daisy’s murder was so violent, the thinking was that it could potentially be the work of a mentally unstable person. The veterans’ hospital’s population of mental patients was sometimes released on passes. Historically, some patients on leave had contributed to Battle Creek’s criminal activities, though nothing as horrific as Daisy’s murder. Still, at the time, it seemed a viable line of investigation.

  There were thirty-four patients on leave from the Veterans’ Hospital who had not checked in by January 14. Most of the men unaccounted for were spread out all over the state. Thirteen different state police posts were enlisted to track them down. The effort to find them and validate their alibis consumed a massive number of hours. A handful of these men gave nonexistent addresses of where they were going while others were found to be on drinking binges while away from the hospital. Two were at YMCAs in different towns, and one was on a bus when the murder took place. Four men had left Battle Creek to go home and then checked into other veterans’ hospitals in the state. The vast majority could not validate their activities but were clearly out of town at the time of the murder. Few of these men had heard of the crime, let alone the victim. Ultimately, these leads proved to be fruitless but required manpower to confirm.

  The Kimball Sanatorium was checked to see if any of its male patients were unaccounted for at the time of the crime. There were eleven patients on the first floor that might have been considered, but all were accounted for. It was difficult to leave the sanatorium during the daytime hours and return undetected. While during the summer months the patients were allowed to walk the hospital grounds, in the winter, most were confined.

  The police visited the Kalamazoo State Hospital, a mental care facility, on a tip that one of its patients, Alice Dodd, was claiming that she had killed Daisy. When the police arrived, however, they discovered a woman who was incapable of committing such a crime due to her mental state.

  Other people turned in former spouses. Some of these men were unsavory at best. One man’s former wife turned him in because he bowled at Ken Notke’s Bowling Alley, which Daisy was known to frequent. He was an abusive man who had worked at Kellogg’s and was known for his “deviant sexual activities,” according to the ex-wife. This man was found to be living with his stepniece, now his wife, with a solid alibi.

  In late January, Raymond Mercer came back to the forefront in the investigators’ minds when a tip came in about a woman named Minnie Smith whom he was said to be having an affair with. Minnie and her husband lived next door to him at Long Lake in the 1950s. On top of that, she worked at Kellogg’s with Mercer. Minnie had left Michigan to move to Florida two days after the murder. The day of the murder, she had come into the Kellogg Federal Credit Union and withdrawn all her money. That attracted the attention, as it appeared Minnie was leaving the state to flee from investigators.

  Mercer’s affair with Minnie lasted from 1955 to 1959. Investigators questioned him as to whether his wife had ever assaulted Minnie, to which Raymond responded that he was unaware of any such incident. They then looked into whether Minnie was a jealous former lover who wanted Daisy out of the way. Minnie indicated that she was long over Raymond Mercer by the time of Daisy’s death and didn’t know who Daisy Zick was. Furthermore, the time of day when Minnie withdrew her money roughly corresponded with the time that the murder took place. Minnie Smith proved to be another disappointing lead to Detzler’s team.

  An unnamed couple stopped by the Battle Creek Enquirer and News a few days after the murder and dropped off a check to start a reward offering for the crime. The newspaper deposited the money in an account called the Daisy Zick Reward Fund and invited local citizens to contribute. The money would be paid for any tip that led the prosecution and conviction to the murderer. Noble Moore and the state police would make the determination as to the distribution of the funds. Despite the plug in the paper, the fund never gained momentum.

  A week after the death of his wife, Floyd Zick reached out to the investigators. He had received four phone calls at his home. On the other end was nothing but heavy breathing. He made arrangements to have his phone number changed to a new unlisted number. These were not the first phone calls of this type that he and Daisy had received. They had been getting what he thought were prank calls for the better part of the last year. The calls would come on Saturdays when Daisy was at home, and whoever it was would even call Floyd at Fales’ Market. It sounded as if someone was talking through a piece of cloth to muffle his voice. In the era before caller ID, the phone company could not provide details on local calls. After Daisy’s murder, these seemingly innocent calls took on new importance.

  Floyd wasn’t the only person who got mysterious calls. Mrs. DeFrance, whose name had been plastered in the newspapers as the eyewitness who saw the killer, started getting phone calls in January as well. She and her son, Jon, received calls from a female who simply stated, “A woman killed Daisy.”

  Chapter 5

  NEW HOPES

  I knew something was wrong—the kitchen rug was wadded up against the sink.

  Floyd Zick

  Battle Creek Enquirer and News

  January 15, 1963

  We’ve all become a bit misled about how police investigations work thanks to movies and television. In our era of CSI and DNA, we’ve been shown that lab technicians solve most crimes by providing physical evidence to link the killer the crime. That is the Hollywood version of how it’s done.

  In the 1960s, and even today, a great deal of work was done by interviewing people, paying close attention to details, sharing information and following the directions of logical thinking. Evidence plays an important role, but many crimes are prosecuted every year on circumstantial evidence rather than something a lab tech has found.

  The investigators of the Zick murder relied on this kind of police work to attempt to solve the crime. One of the early leads that came to investigators came in from observation. This particular lead began a few months before the murder. Fred Ritchie of the sheriff’s department had been visiting with John Blodgett, the owner of the CIO Club in Battle Creek. The bar was frequented by the shifts coming off work from Post and Kellogg’s. Ritchie, who was single at the time, was sitting in the car chatting with Blodgett, when they noticed an attractive redhead walking by.

  The thirty-seven-year-old Blodgett made the comment that while the woman they were watching was attractive, he knew of another redhead that frequented his establishment. While he didn’t name her, he gave tantalizing clues that stuck in Ritchie’s head. She was from Wattles Park and was married. Furthermore, she was an employee at Kellogg’s. According to Ritchie, Blodgett described her as “a wild one.” At the time, the deputy gave it very little thought; it was simply the idle chatter of two men.

  Unbeknownst to Fred Ritchie, the day after the murder, Wayne Fitch had stopped at the Mar Creek Inn in Ceresco, Michigan, about four miles from the Zick home. Fitch saw John Blodgett coming out of the bar, his clothing disheveled and a nasty cut on his face as if he had been scratched. It was obvious from what Fitch said he saw that Blodgett had been in some sort of fight. When he pressed the man as to what had happened to him, Mr. Blodgett answered that someone had told him a funny joke and he had fallen off of his bar stool. It seemed unlikely, but there was no reason to think differently.

  The two officers, both working the case, brought up John Blodgett and compared notes. Was it possible that Daisy hung out at the CIO Club and that Blodgett had been involved with her?

  A check of the tips that had come into the investigators certainly added some substance to their suspicion. Tip 122 was that Robert Allen of Marshall had been seen dancing with Daisy at the CIO Club a month or so before her murder. Police found that Allen worked at Kellogg’s. In their check of Kellogg’s, investigators validated his alibi. While Mr. Allen had proven to be a dead-end, this inquiry did place Daisy at the CIO Club.

  The investigators turned their focus
on Mr. Blodgett, eventually bringing him in for questioning and fingerprints. They even went so far as to propose that Blodgett take a polygraph examination. He agreed to do so and passed. His fingerprints did not match those recovered from Daisy’s car either. While at first John Blodgett appeared to be a promising person of interest, he quickly became yet another painful dead-end for the investigation team.

  As the winter slowly crept to an end, Lieutenant Detzler’s team found itself floundering in a sea of dead-ends, pointless leads and other failed tips. The strategy of concentrating on Kellogg’s that had seemed so promising back in January had done little more than cause marital strife with some of the employees who had been questioned.

  The difficulty of pinpointing a suspect was uncommon in Calhoun County murders. Only two remained unsolved in the history of the county. Most killings were resolved relatively quickly, but after Daisy’s death, the methods police had used to solve these cases were all used up with nothing to show. They opted to reach out to the public.

  On February 2, two weeks after the murder, Prosecutor Moore assembled the investigative team along with the reporters from the local newspapers. The Battle Creek Enquirer and News intently covered the conference since the crime was still the talk of the town. The purpose of the meeting was to try to convince the public that they were indeed working hard on the case, while at the same time hopefully generate some new leads for the investigators. What unfolded was a candid discussion of some of the details of the case in hopes that the public would respond to them. Unfortunately, the press conference created more questions than answers.