His second role, however, remained incomplete. By October 1963, the leads in the Zick investigation had all but disintegrated. Troopers such as Ralph Kartheu had been told to put their uniforms back on and return to patrol duty. There simply weren’t enough tips coming in to warrant keeping men on the case full time. Soon, the only men left to the case were Detective Conn and Captain Patterson.
Chapter 6
THE COLD SETS IN
It is still not too late for that person to come forward, to put aside the fear of what the killer might do or because he or she is afraid of becoming involved.
Detective Charlie Conn
One year after Daisy Zick’s murder
One state police detective told me that some cases are allowed to go cold on purpose:
When a perpetrator knows that we are hot on their trail, they tend to clam up. Nervous criminals are more careful about what they say and to whom they speak. Sometimes we allow a case to go cold so that a criminal will relax. He or she will start to talk to others, get lax in his behaviors. When they relax they share secrets with others that helps us sometimes fill in the missing gaps on an investigation. They have a slip of the tongue about their crime, then a jilted friend or lover comes forward and talks. Allowing a case to go cold sometimes can really help us with an investigation.
This was not the case with Daisy Zick’s murder. Her case went cold because every lead seemed to evaporate. There was hope that, as the citizens of Battle Creek relaxed, someone would come forward with new information, but that simply didn’t happen.
There were other reasons the investigation had stalled as well. The investigation team had focused on the motive as the pathway to finding the murderer. In reality, however, they had not agreed among themselves as to what the motive of the killer was. This meant that each investigator had his own theory as to who might have committed the crime and why.
Daisy in the 1950s with Bubbles, their dog. Courtesy of James King.
Detective Conn believed that the killer had to be a psychopath to have been so brutal. He favored the young hitchhiker, though the man had already been cleared in the investigation. The man had several crimes involving women under his belt and was known to be strange for collecting newspapers. He had been seen hitchhiking in the area the day of the crime, though that tip had come from the person that had claimed he had seen two men driving away from Daisy’s car—an admitted lie. Despite the fact that he had been cleared by both polygraph and by fingerprints, Conn felt that his mental state might have allowed him to falsely pass the polygraph.
As Ralph Kartheu put it, “You can’t beat the polygraph, but you can beat the operator.” The physical reactions to lies are difficult to conceal, but operators do make mistakes. As another detective, Gary Hough, on the case years later, said, “Sometimes it’s as subtle as the wording of a question that allows someone to slide by. The skill of the operator is what makes it a useful tool.”
Others felt that the savage nature of the murder clearly pointed to someone who had an existing relationship with Daisy. Their logic was that this appeared to be a crime of passion and that only someone who had an intimate relationship with Daisy would have been so brutal in his implementation of the crime. This had dominated the thinking of the investigators and had led to the detailed probe of the workers at Kellogg’s and the attempts to track down the men that Daisy may or may not have had relationships with.
Others on the investigation team, such as Ralph Kartheu, felt that the killer wasn’t a man at all:
Months before the crime I had attended an FBI training course up in Lansing. It was about profiling killers. When I saw the wounds on Daisy, I remembered that training, and it struck me that the murderer was likely a woman. The attacks on Daisy in the guest bedroom were almost all on her left breast. Women often do that kind of brutality against another woman. It is a way to attack the sex of the victim.
In Kartheu’s mind, the killer was a woman; perhaps the spouse of someone that Daisy was having an affair with. Criminal profiling was in its infancy in the 1960s, but there was some good logic behind Kartheu’s thinking: “One of the problems I had was that the other investigators had a hard time thinking that a woman could be so vicious. In the 1960s, you just didn’t have a lot of woman murderers—not like this.”
Not many female suspects had been considered. The only one brought in directly for interrogation was Audrey Heminger, and she had stormed out of her interview session. While it was possible that a jealous wife had come after Daisy, it seemed unlikely that she would have opened the door for such a confrontation when preparing to leave for her lunch appointment.
With each investigator looking for someone fitting his own mental picture of the killer, the investigation lacked continuity. The team really didn’t have much of a choice but to follow their instincts on motive in the hope that they would lead them to a suspect. The other option was to follow the crime scene evidence, and in this case, it was relatively thin for 1963 standards.
The evidence still retained by the Michigan State Police numbers thirty items, each meticulously maintained to this day. The recovered evidence includes:
Hairs and fiber from the victim’s pants and slacks.
Known fibers from the carpet in the bathroom and hall.
Hairs and fibers recovered from the bedspread.
Scrapings of blood from the footboard of the bed.
Fibers and hairs from the victim’s blouse.
Hair recovered from Daisy’s vanity stool.
Green fibers from a plaid skirt.
Blue fibers from slacks found in the southwest bedroom closet.
Red fibers from the trousers of Floyd Zick.
The victim’s blouse, brassiere, shoes, slacks and panties.
Blood and hair samples taken from the victim.
Yellow fibers recovered from behind the victim’s right ear.
The bathrobe sash used to tie her hands.
The white bedspread.
Yellow fibers recovered from the garage door.
Scrapings (presumed to be blood) taken from the kitchen sink.
Scrapings from the door handle of Daisy’s Pontiac.
A terry-cloth towel from the kitchen.
Hair samples from Floyd Zick.
A pair of cotton work gloves.
Fibers recovered from the bumper of Daisy’s Pontiac.
Fibers recovered from inside of Daisy’s show boots.
Daisy’s handbag and contents (her checkbook, billfold and papers, two one-dollar bills, one half-dollar coin, three nickels and two pennies).
A jackknife recovered from the Zick home.
One cotton glove.
One cloth bag.
The Spoilage knife believed by some to be the murder weapon.
One white button.
Two pieces of telephone cord taken from either side where it was severed by the killer.
Photographs and negatives of the fabric impression on the car.
The evidence told a story in 1963, but at best, it was a jigsaw puzzle in which the assembled image was unknown. In an age before DNA testing, Daisy’s bloody clothing could only be tested for the blood type and verify if it was human. The Spoilage knife recovered from the Zick home could not be verified as the murder weapon. There was a button recovered from the floor of the Zick bedroom that was not Daisy’s or Frank’s, making it most likely the murderer’s, but that assumption was impossible to prove without the garment that it was from.
That only left the fiber and fingerprint evidence recovered from Daisy, the crime scene and her car. The evidence, while tangible, did not steer investigators in any one direction or toward a potential suspect. It simply stood mute, waiting for a time when it could see its day in court. Unfortunately, that day still has not come.
On the one-year anniversary of the crime, Prosecutor Moore tried to stir up tips from the public. By 1964, the world had changed. Meat prices had “soared” to thirty-nine cents a pound. The Bijou Theatre in Ba
ttle Creek was playing The Prize, and the top song in the country was Bobby Vinton’s “There I’ve Said it Again,” followed shortly by one from a new group, the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
This time, Moore went in two different directions. The first was in the form of an article in the Battle Creek Enquirer and News. The second was an interview on the case in True Detective magazine.
The decision to turn to True Detective was not unprecedented but was a stretch. The entire genre of the early pulp magazines dedicated to true crime was one that was a bit seedy but, at the same time, had great potential reach. The genre had been born in 1924, when a number of the magazines had emerged on the market, catering to detailing true crime tales complete with artwork and photos.
Originally the magazines focused on gangster-style crimes. Even the legendary J. Edgar Hoover was said to be a fan of the magazines, as were many in law enforcement. The magazines sensationalized criminal cases and the officers who cracked them, and for some law officers, it was a way to get national exposure for what might be a local crime. What made the magazines of this genre stand out at first were the graphic images of victims that newspapers or other more reputable magazines rarely showed. Because of this sensationalism, there was an air of “adult content only” when it came to these magazines. Despite negative rap, at its peak, True Detective had over two million readers each month.
The people that wrote the articles for True Detective sometimes were law enforcement officers but usually were newspaper journalists. People that covered crimes in their local paper found that writing articles on the same crimes for True Detective allowed them to make significant money. They would even take photographs from the newspaper archives they worked for and used them in the articles. To avoid being caught and reprimanded, they often wrote under a pseudonym.
By the 1950s and ’60s, the genre had started to devolve. The covers almost always had a female in either some sort of bondage pose or taking part in some crime either as a criminal or, more often, a victim. Oftentimes, the covers had little to nothing to do with the actual articles inside; they were images aimed simply at drawing attention. The May 1964 issue of True Detective, which featured the article on the Daisy Zick murder, was no different. It featured a woman viewed through a keyhole, paralyzed with fear with a switchblade held to her throat.
In the newspaper interview, Moore drew out the thick folder that constituted the case file for the Zick murder. He, Detective Conn and Captain Patterson sat in his office and allowed the reporter to grill them. After a year of investigation, there had been a total of 243 tips and leads that had come in from the public, all of which had been investigated. The investigation team had interviewed over eight hundred people, with polygraphs given to over a dozen individuals. None of these had yielded a suspect for them to focus on. Whereas a dozen officers from the sheriff’s department and the state police had been working the case in the beginning, only Conn and Patterson remained.
Moore and the investigators did not reveal everything they had in the case, such as Garrett Vander Meer’s good visual of the driver of the car and the fiber evidence they had recovered. It was a fairly standard procedure in such a case to withhold information that would help them if a suspect was potentially identified. What they did emphasize was the fingerprint they still had not identified: “The print, the only one of several that was not identified by the state police fingerprint experts, was found on the inside of the car of Mrs. Zick; the car that the slayer drove from her garage and abandoned on East Michigan Avenue near Evanston Avenue, about a mile and a half from the Zick home.” Conn also commented that whoever the killer was, he had taken Mrs. Zick’s car keys with him.
Conn was candid with an admission that despite their hard work, the investigators had not settled on one theory regarding the killer: “Mrs. Zick, police say, was wary of admitting strangers to her home. The solid door leading from the garage into the Zick kitchen was usually locked. Did she open it to her murderer because she recognized a familiar voice, or did a stranger trick her into opening the door?”
One thing most investigators agreed on was that the ferocity of the assault pointed to someone who had a deep personal issue with Daisy. The crime was, “either a crime of passion—indicated by intense anger at the victim—or the act of a sadist.”
Moore solidified that they had not given up on finding a killer: “The case is not marked ‘closed’ or even ‘inactive.’”
The interview with True Detective included Noble Moore, Captain Patterson and Detective Conn as well. Its title was “Michigan’s No. 1 Murder Mystery” and was a somber plea for help from the public. Moore summed up the investigation: “Except for having eliminated a great number of possible suspects, we are no closer to the solution of this case than we were a year ago.
“During those first weeks, a number of tips were received as a result of press, radio and TV interested in the case. We hope that by opening our files to True Detective Magazine someone, somewhere, might remember and provide us with new, important information.”
Detective Conn was even more somber: “This case is unlike most murder cases. In most murder cases you discover a motive—robbery, sex, jealousy, fear. In this case any one of these could have been the motive.”
When one looks at these motives compared to the evidence, they seem to be strained. Robbery didn’t make sense. Daisy’s purse was missing forty-five dollars, but its theft certainly didn’t warrant the kind of brutality she suffered in her last minutes. There was no indication of rape except her pants’ zipper being pulled down, though had her killer wanted to rape her, it certainly would have been possible, as her hands were tied behind her back.
Out of all of the motives considered, jealousy seemed to be the one that warranted the level of violence that had been committed. It could have been a former or current lover or a spouse of one of Daisy’s suitors that had gone after her. “From the stories we have heard so far, Mrs. Zick was friendly and had a warm personality. If the slayer did know her, it could be someone that misinterpreted a smile or a friendly word. Also she might have been interested in some other man before her marriage to Zick in 1945, or after. We will have to try and find out if there might have been such a man, and who he was,” Conn contributed.
It was possible fear had caused the extreme violence. The killer could have come to commit one crime and things had simply gotten out of hand, leading to murder. But that scenario seemed highly unlikely because of the extremes the killer went through to reach the Zick home—a sign of premeditation. One clue did seem to point to the spontaneity of the crime: the fact that the potential murder weapon, the Spoilage knife, was in the house. Other than that, the case did not appear to be a crime run amok.
The interview, similar to the newspaper article, focused on the one piece of evidence that the team felt could tie the killer to the crime: the unidentified fingerprint recovered from Daisy’s Pontiac. “We believe it is the murderer’s print,” Moore stated.
The publication of the article in True Detective elevated the status of the Zick case. No longer was it simply about a murder in Battle Creek; it was now playing out on a national stage. Wayne Moore of Flint, Michigan, contacted the state police and said that he had read the article and that two of his young boys had recently found a set of keys. He remembered from the magazine article that the killer had taken Daisy’s keys with him. Could these be those keys?
Floyd Zick had to be contacted for a description of what keys were on Daisy’s ring. There were two sets of Pontiac keys (two each), a house key and one for her locker at Kellogg’s. The six keys were on a split ring. The keys that Moore’s boys found were ten total, ruling them out. Sadly, this was the biggest tip that came out of publication of the article.
Ultimately the article in True Detective had no great sway in the case other than to bring the story to a wider audience. Daisy’s status as Michigan’s number one murder mystery would continue for a few more years until other events superseded
the crime.
The unfortunate turnout of tips wasn’t to say that there weren’t some tantalizing moments when the investigators thought they might have a break. A week before the first anniversary of the crime, Derwin J. Workman of Big Rapids, Michigan, had brutally killed his ex-wife in her apartment.
Workman was a troubled man. He and his wife had divorced eight months earlier. He claimed that she had promised that they could get back together. Derwin had secured a marriage license on January 6, 1963, the same day he killed his former spouse. When he had contacted his ex-wife, she told him that she had changed her mind.
It was too much for him.
Workman crashed through the front window of her apartment and went after his wife with a hunting knife, while his two small sons screamed in terror. He trapped his wife and savagely stabbed her eighteen times, mostly in the chest. Police apprehended him quickly and locked him away.
Apart from the brutality of the attack and the use of a knife, there didn’t seem to be much that might tie Derwin Workman to Daisy’s death. Detective Conn and Captain Patterson decided that it was worth checking into Workman’s whereabouts a year earlier, if only to rule him out. What they found, however, was that Workman had been in Battle Creek in February 1963, two weeks after Daisy’s murder. Suddenly, Workman became a momentary focus for the investigators.
Workman had been living in the Battle Creek area in February 1963. He had been committed to the veterans’ hospital at Fort Custer in May after another incident in which he had attacked his wife with a knife in December 1962. A probate judge in Midland, Michigan, had ordered him committed to the hospital for treatment. It was a sentence that had eventually doomed Mrs. Workman to be killed as her children watched.
Murder in Battle Creek Page 11