Murder in Battle Creek

by Blaine L. Pardoe

  “The murderer either walked or was driven to or near the Zick house,” Moore told the press. He continued:

  Either way he must have been seen. If he walked away after abandoning the Zick car, someone must have seen him and perhaps can give us a better description or can tell us in what direction he headed. If someone was waiting to pick him up in the area where he abandoned the car, that person can solve the murder now. Perhaps the driver is afraid to come forward. But now is the time. He—or she—should realize that one who conceals information of [a] crime is guilty of the crime himself.

  Detective Detzler threw in one theory they were looking at—that the killer might not be from the Battle Creek area. “It is possible that the slayer may have hitched a ride with someone passing through the area, such as a traveling salesman or someone who was stopping in the area on business and left before learning of the slaying,” said Detzler.

  The investigators continued to voice their theories. Robbery did not appear to be the cause the crime. “It is unlikely that a robber would have been so vicious in his assault of a robbery victim,” Moore said. In reference to the forty-five dollars stolen from Daisy’s wallet, he commented that it was “more likely the theft was an afterthought or was a cover up.”

  The police centered on the concept that the savage assault had to have been a crime of passion: “The physical evidence would indicate that the crime was either a crime of passion—incited by intense anger at the victim—or was committed by a sadist.”

  Was it possible that Daisy knew who it was that had come to kill her? According to the investigators, the service entrance door leading to the vestibule between the house and the garage was not locked and was the door that the man Mrs. DeFrance saw was standing at. Because the kitchen door was always locked, police had ruled it out as the point of entry, but Moore offered another theory: “Mrs. Zick could not see who was at the kitchen door. Therefore she could either have opened it in response to a voice she recognized or merely opened it in response to a knock without inquiring as to the visitor’s identity.”

  Lieutenant Detzler discussed the cut telephone cord for the newsmen: “The cutting of the telephone wire obviously took place before Mrs. Zick was fatally stabbed, as the slayer could see after he had stabbed her that there was little chance of her using the telephone. As to why the wire was cut, one guess is as good as another at this time—she tried to call for help or she started to telephone someone the slayer did not want her to talk to are just two possibilities.”

  They informed the press that they had one unidentified fingerprint that may or may not belong to the murderer. They also emphasized that Floyd Zick had been highly cooperative and had passed his polygraph test “with flying colors.”

  The media had some questions of their own. The police had never broadcast a warning to the Wattles Park or Battle Creek community that a murderer was loose in the vicinity. This lapse, the media was quick to point out, might have put people at risk but also could have restricted immediate tips coming in. Moore added, “No one now needs to fear coming forward with information because he does not want to have his name publicized.” He emphasized the point that the media might be excluded from information if it helped solve the case.

  Moore ended the conference with a plea for assistance: “A person with any information has no way of knowing how important his or her fragment of information might be. It may be that with that information we already possess the fragment may complete an important segment on this jigsaw puzzle we are trying to put together.”

  There were other violent crimes in the region that the Michigan State Police were monitoring for similar circumstances. On February 5, 1963, a fifty-six-year-old female in Winona, Indiana, had been savagely attacked. Her assailant, an eighteen-year-old man, had stabbed her with her own butcher knife in the garage of her home. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a month later, a white female was attacked by a twenty-two-year-old man with a steak knife. She was raped and then practically decapitated by her attacker. The Indiana State Police were able to ascertain that both of these killers had no connections to the area. Their names were not known by Floyd Zick as acquaintances of Daisy. Like so many hopeful tips, these quickly fizzled out.

  Other jurisdictions with similar crimes that were unsolved reached out to the state police as well. From Culpeper, Virginia, the investigators of the double murder of Waltine Hoover and Annie Snow asked for copies of the case file and the crime scene photographs in hopes of finding some link to their crime. This too proved to be another dead-end.

  In March, another crime in the western Michigan area seemed to offer a momentary glimmer of hope. Twenty-five-year-old Arthur Lee Jelks Jr. of Climax, Michigan, had been arrested for assaulting a woman. He had grabbed her and was attempting to drag her into his car when he was apprehended. Jelks was an employee of the Veterans’ Hospital at Fort Custer. Violent crimes against women made a man a potential lead in the eyes of the investigators, and at first, Jelks seemed to be a candidate for questioning.

  He claimed to know nothing about the Zick murder and agreed to a polygraph test. While he was clearly deceptive regarding the assault that he had been arrested for, Jelks appeared to know nothing about Daisy’s killing, though he did confess to two purse snatchings in the area. His fingerprints and the polygraph cleared him as not having any involvement with Daisy’s death. The investigators had to have been frustrated. But just as it seemed they were not making any progress, a new tip came in that changed everything. Someone had seen Daisy’s murderer the day of the crime.

  On March 23, 1963, the police got their first true break in the case in over two months. Forty-nine-year-old Garrettt Vander Meer contacted the state police to say that on the day of the murder he had gotten behind a white Pontiac on Michigan Avenue that had been driving slowly and erratically. When the car had come to a stop on the shoulder of the road near Evanston Street, he had finally gotten past it. Mr. Vander Meer stated that, as he had angrily passed the car, he got a good look at the driver. For the investigators, this was the first time that they got a good description of the man who had stolen Daisy’s car.

  Mr. Vander Meer had of course heard of the murder—it was the talk of Battle Creek. He had not immediately connected his encounter with Daisy’s car to the event, however. His wife’s friend Jane Millius had been talking about it when he started to draw the connection. When he pulled out the newspaper from that day, he recognized the photograph of Daisy:

  That woman’s picture, that got me too because at that grocery store at the corner of Wattles Park, they sell baked goods, Cummings Bakery, I guess it is. I go in there sometimes and get baked goods and go over to Jane’s house and have coffee and rolls and that woman [Daisy] was in that store and that happened about a week before I saw her in there for the first time; but with that picture in the paper, I tumbled right away. After I found out about the car being at the top of the hill by Rose’s house. That’s when I tumbled. That’s when I tumbled that that must have been the same car giving me a bad time at the bottom of the hill, and that’s where it stopped.

  A chance encounter with Daisy at the Wattles Park Grocery had spurred the most critical tip the investigators had received since the first week of the investigation.

  Detective Conn first took Vander Meer to the police garage where Daisy’s car was still parked. Vander Meer confirmed it was indeed the same car he had seen. He was immediately brought in with a stenographer to meet with Detective Conn and several other officers.

  Vander Meer had dropped off his wife to visit with a friend earlier that day and was on his way back to pick her up the morning of the murder. As best he could tell, it was just before or after 11:00 a.m. that morning. He had come up behind the Zicks’ white Pontiac on Michigan Avenue just after the Wattles Road intersection near Hoff’s Electrical: “I thought it was going to turn off the road and then go down there where that little side street is. Well, he didn’t do that. He stayed on the edge of the pavement with his wheels still going o
n, going too slow, just like he was up to something, then he kept going, and I wondered if he was ever going to pull off or turn. Then when he got to where I thought he was going to turn, he didn’t turn. He pulled off and stayed on the side of the road.”

  He estimated that the car was going ten to fifteen miles per hour and remembered that cars were beginning to line up behind Vander Meer’s own car. He had to downshift his car because of the slow speed. With the rush of oncoming traffic, he couldn’t pass the Pontiac until it finally pulled off the road. Vander Meer recalled: “His actions were definitely like he was looking for something, and he was looking out of his rearview mirror. But he wasn’t glancing at any houses of anything. When a person looks for a house number, you know how they do [it]. You can spot them right away. He wasn’t looking at house numbers, he was looking at something else.”

  As Vander Meer passed the car, he glared over at the driver that had been holding him up, and the two men made eye contact: “My car and his car weren’t over six foot apart, and I stared at him and he stared at me; and I saw his face right then. Yes, I know what kind of hair he had and what he looked like, I know. He had some dark jacket on, dark blue I’d say, didn’t look like black.”

  The police were very interested in every detail that Vander Meer could provide about the driver. The coat, they learned, was a thick winter jacket, similar to a navy peacoat. It had a zipper on the front that was pulled part of the way down. He wasn’t sure about the shirt underneath other than that he knew that it wasn’t white.

  In terms of the driver, “I’d say he was a good sized fellow, and a good looking man. He wasn’t homely, and he was bare headed, didn’t have no cigarette in his mouth and was staring right at me, and I was giving it to him because there were cars behind me too, and he slowed us all down.”

  When pressed for further details, Vander Meer was able to provide them: “He had a bit of color in his face. It was white, it wasn’t real red. Kinda medium-sized face.” He went on to describe to them a driver who was clean shaven and “healthy looking.” When asked to describe the nose of the man, “Well, that doggone nose—it wasn’t a fat nose, I know that. It was more on the slim side.” He added, “It wasn’t a skinny face, no. It wasn’t puffed up like some of them people have got—puffed up cheeks. It wasn’t like that.”

  Vander Meer described him as a man roughly his own size—five foot eleven—based on him sitting in Daisy’s car. He was slim in build. He guessed the age of the driver as thirty to thirty-five years old.

  The most distinctive feature the man had was his hairstyle. It was raised in the front and combed back. Rather than being sleeked back, it puffed up in the front. The hair was “combed straight back in the parts. Would have had maybe a slight wave but not real deep.” From his accounts the man’s hair was not black, but a dark brown.

  Detective Conn pressed for every possible detail. Did Vander Meer see the driver’s hand on the steering wheel by any chance? “When he was over the side of the road he had his hand on the steering wheel, I know that, but his hand looked like a normal hand, didn’t look like a fat hand.” He didn’t have any gloves on.

  Vander Meer worked with the officers to develop a composite drawing of the man that was behind the wheel of Daisy’s Pontiac. The police used an Identi-Kit to attempt to recreate the driver’s face. This was a set of transparencies with various facial characteristics that could be laid on top of each other to form a composite image of the driver. The only issue with the Identi-Kit was that it did not have the hairstyle that Mr. Vander Meer saw on the man.

  In terms of other cars alongside the road, Vander Meer replied, “All I remember was, I think, a foreign car in the snow in front of that greenhouse, looked like it had been sitting there a long time, lots of snow under it. And then up on the hill a little ways I thought there was a car there but I am not positive what it was.” He added that he did not see anyone walking on Michigan Avenue that day.

  He was sure that he could identify the man again if he saw him. When asked if he would be willing to attempt to identify the driver, Vander Meer said he would be glad to try. Having a witness that could potentially identify the murderer was useful but didn’t help the police locate the suspect for identification. The police were divided as to where to focus the search for Daisy’s killer.

  Kellogg’s, which had been such a promising area of concentration in the investigation, had proven to be a bust so far. While police had a good witness who could identify the killer, they did not release this information to the press, nor did they put out the artist’s image of what the murderer looked like. Vander Meer’s contribution to the case was kept quiet, as is common in such instances, so as to not tip off the perpetrator. They held out hope that he would one day be able to identify the killer in a court of law. For them, it was a proverbial ace up the sleeve.

  The first big setback in the investigation came in an unlikely form. On May 7, 1963, Undersheriff Wayne Fitch was doing his weekly work mowing the lawn at the First Presbyterian Church in Marshall. It was a warm day, proof that spring was finally settling into the region. He had been working long hours since January almost exclusively on the Daisy Zick case. As he pushed the power mower, Wayne Fitch suffered a heart attack.

  Wayne managed to call for help, and the Kelser Ambulance Service a block away got him to the hospital. The trip to Oaklawn Hospital in Marshall was only a matter of minutes, but despite the fast response and the proximity of medical help, Wayne Fitch passed away less than an hour after his arrival.

  His funeral service was one of the largest in Marshall that year. Police officers from countless jurisdictions attended, not out of obligation but respect. In his job, Wayne Fitch touched a lot of people’s lives, from testing students for their driver’s licenses to his swift and fair administration of his sworn duties. Fitch was an icon of the community. Sheriff Jess Purcell said, “He has been a very good officer. His loss will be deeply felt by our department and law enforcement departments in this part of Michigan. He was not only a good officer, but a good friend.” Sheriff Purcell’s comments were echoed by other police chiefs in the county.

  The truth of the matter was that Daisy’s murderer had taken another life, albeit indirectly. Fitch’s role in the investigation was to be filled by Captain Billie O. Patterson, a competent officer in his own right. Patterson was a big man but with a soft-spoken voice. He had been working on the case as needed, but after Fitch’s death, he was pulled in to take the lead for the sheriff’s department. Fitch’s death was the first loss to the investigation team.

  The police still held out hope that the evidence might tie the perpetrator to the crime. One of the most compelling bits of evidence was the yellow fibers recovered at the murder scene. These yellow cotton fibers were believed to be from work or hunting gloves, but so far, the state crime lab had not been able to match the fibers to any particular model or type of glove on the market. Still, they were a potential link to the killer.

  When Gilbert Sullivan broke out of the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, the police searched a house owned or rented by Patrick Densmore looking for their man. The Battle Creek Police Department search took them into every nook and cranny of the home. In the stuffy hot attic of the home, the city police came across a stained yellow work glove, with hair trapped in its fibers. Additional searching produced a white lady’s glove covered with a brown or yellowish substance. Since the home was in Battle Creek, the officers were well aware of the Zick case. The prosecutor’s office and the state police were informed of the find and issued a warrant to the search for evidence related to Daisy’s murder. Meanwhile, the officers put the gloves in a bag, and within an hour, they were in the possession of Detective Conn. He turned them over to the Michigan State Department of Health laboratory for analysis and logged them as Tip 198 in the voluminous Daisy Zick case file. The hope was that the fibers of the glove might be identical to those recovered at the crime scene.

  It took a few days for the result to come back
, and with it, more disappointing news. The gloves were not a match at all. The stains were not blood, and the hair that was recovered proved to be from an animal. It was another disappointing dead-end. Tip 198 proved to be no more revealing than its 197 predecessors.

  Another lead came in from neighboring Kalamazoo, where Vernon Bowers was under arrest for murder. He was a parolee living with his common-law wife, Averill “Bucky” Cropp, who was a female entertainer in the county. They had been living in the El Rancho Trailer Park, when Bowers had strangled Cropp using a wire coat-hanger. There was little question as to his guilt. Bowers had said that his murder of Cropp had been a “mercy killing.”

  Bower’s arrest record caught the attention of the Zick investigators. He had been arrested for larceny, indecent liberties, entering without breaking in and grand larceny. The police met with him to ascertain any possible connection with Daisy.

  According to Bowers, he didn’t know Daisy Zick other than from reading about the murder in the local paper. His alibi was thin, as he said that he was most likely at home with Cropp, the woman he murdered, on the night of the crime. The officers took a copy of his fingerprints and checked them against the print in the Zick Pontiac, and there was no match. Given the lack of connection between Bowers and Daisy, the police ruled him out as a potential suspect.

  After the Sullivan and Bowers leads in the case began to dry up, it seemed as if every potential avenue that the police checked into led them nowhere. And then the case suffered its next major loss on the investigation team: on Halloween 1963, Lieutenant Patrick N. Detzler retired from the Michigan State Police.

  Lieutenant Detzler had been sent to Battle Creek to perform two duties. One was to repair the relationship between local law enforcement (including the prosecutor’s office) and the state police. The other was to assume the leadership in the Daisy Zick murder and bring that case to a conclusion. In his first task, Detzler had been successful. His pairing up of sheriff’s department deputies with state police troopers and his cooperation with Noble Moore had gone a long way in smoothing over the damaged relationships.