Steinbacher spoke with another rural mailman, Rupert Hoxie, to get a feel about Daily. From what Hoxie had heard, Daily was planning on moving to Florida to look for a job. Hoxie also told Steinbacher that Daily was currently living in Springfield in a trailer park. It took some time for officers to find Daily. He had separated from his wife, Virginia, and was living with a Mrs. Cooley who lived next door to his former spouse.
Daily was finally asked to come to the state police post in Battle Creek. At 8:10 p.m. on January 6, he came in.
The forty-two-year-old Daily was not an easy man to interview, even for the seasoned Steinbacher:
This subject appeared to be highly emotional, very sensitive, overly talkative and somewhat nervous. Although he is noted to be a heavy drinker, did not appear to have been prior to this interview. He was informed of his constitutional rights as this interview was being conducted. He stated that on the day he noted a subject walking toward town near the Chuck Wagon restaurant about 10:10 a.m. He changed his original story in stating he thought the subject could have been a woman. When confronted with this change, states the officer must have misunderstood him. Daily being a very difficult individual to interview, as appears to be able [to] anticipate the next question. He recalled the garage door on the Zick garage as being closed as he remembers. He was asked if he had any suspects on his route that he might believe should be checked and commented he had no ideas.
Steinbacher queried Daily as to why he was going to Florida to live and if he intended to return to Michigan to resign from the post office. He claimed that he was going down to Panama City to get employment as the manager of a nightclub. His aunt, Daisy Kennedy, was helping him secure this job.
Dick Stevens, familiar with the case from day one, was present during the interview:
I remember going to the Post and setting [sic] in an adjoining room from where Kenney was questioning him, and it seemed a couple of times he was on the verge of saying something useful and Kenney gave up and came next door. And Stein wanted to go in with the guy and not be as easy as Bob had been. Kenney vetoed any further interrogation, and we went home and mailman went to Florida.
His reasons for leaving Battle Creek revolved around the break-up of his marriage a year earlier. Daily had a run-in with the law as a result of his divorce. When asked about his previous arrests, he described an assault charge he had received on September 28, 1966. Daily admitted that he had parked his car four blocks from his wife’s dwelling and walked over to her home, breaking down the door and assaulting his wife’s current suitor. For that crime, he had been fined and received a thirty-day suspended sentence. That was what he admitted to the investigators interrogating him. In reality, Steinbacher and the other officers knew that he had not gone over to assault his wife but had gone to attack his daughter-in-law that evening. The fact that he had so blatantly lied about the event was not lost on the investigators.
Daily said that he would be more than willing to take a “lie detector test,” or “truth serum.” Steinbacher noted that, during his interview, Daily answered every question by looking straight into his eyes and did not show any guilt reactions. At the same time, his story did not match up with some of the known facts, and it was a red flag for the officers.
William Daily said that he would be glad to take a polygraph test when he returned from Florida. His fingerprints were submitted to the crime lab but did not match those recovered from Daisy’s car. It appeared, at least on the surface, that he might not have anything to do with the crime. But his inconsistencies stuck in the mind of Steinbacher. William Daily remained in the forefront of his thinking on the Zick case.
Detective Steinbacher wasn’t the only officer who was probing in the chilled files of the Zick murder. His partner, Robert Kenney, was also following up on active leads. A detective of the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s department, Gilbert Kinney, said that while he was interviewing one George Worden for a parole violation for circulating a bad check, Worden had asked to meet with the Calhoun County Prosecutor in regard to the Zick case.
The new prosecutor, John Jereck, was younger than the investigators that he worked with. He had been born in 1936 and was a graduate of the University of Detroit and the Detroit College of Law. Jereck had been admitted to the state bar in 1964 and had run for the job of prosecutor that same year. While his political leanings were conservative, he ran as a Democrat. In quiet Calhoun County, the role of prosecutor was a part-time job. Jereck had hoped to win the job because it would be good on his résumé and would help his civil law practice. He rode into office in 1964 as did many Democrats, tugged in on the coattails of President Kennedy’s election two years earlier. He inherited the Zick case from his predecessor, and like Kenney and Steinbacher, he wanted to see it solved on his watch.
Arrangements were made at the Kalamazoo County Jail to interview Worden about what he might know. Detective Kinney along with Detective Robert Kenney joined Jereck in the talk with the prisoner.
George Worden said that he had been involved with several breaking and entering crimes with Norman C. Baker. In May 1966, Baker had told him that he had killed someone. At the end of that month, Worden traveled from Battle Creek to Florida and stopped in Lima, Ohio, where he picked up Norman Baker for the trip south. They eventually moved into a mobile home park in Miami, Florida, along with a June McDonald.
One day, Norman had been drinking and laid down on the ground, talking and generally “running himself down.” While lying there, he admitted to Worden that “he had killed the Zick woman.” Baker went on to state that he had been getting money from her, and as he was hot, he went to get some money. Daisy allegedly refused and slapped him, so he got a knife out to scare her. When she slapped him again, he stabbed her. She began to scream, so he stabbed her several more times.
Baker supposedly had told Worden that he had walked to the Zick residence and had hoped to get $300 from Daisy’s account at the Kellogg Credit Union. Baker had allegedly admitted to Worden that he had had an affair with Daisy, and he had been blackmailing her to call Mr. Zick at the store where he worked if she did not provide him the money.
Worden had also said that another man in jail who knew Baker might be able to offer additional information, one Arvin Davis. Davis was pulled in and admitted to meeting Norman Baker in January 1963. Both men had been sentenced to some time in Jackson State Penitentiary in May 1963.
According to Davis, Baker had talked to him about Daisy Zick as well. He said that he spoke about her continually, “stating that he knew her real well.” He told Davis that he knew where she lived, that he had a girlfriend that lived on High Street and her car had been left on East Michigan Avenue on the day of the murder. Baker had also said that there had been a big storm the day that Daisy had been killed.
Detective Kenney’s notes on the interview indicated that Baker had told Davis that he was extremely nervous and he wanted to get onto a prison farm so that he could escape. His fear was that the Calhoun County authorities would find out about some matters and keep him in jail for the rest of his life.
It was an amazing amount of information, but even the young prosecutor knew that jailhouse confessions were often inaccurate. While Worden’s revelations about Baker killing Daisy were tantalizing, there seemed to be some gaps. Daisy did not have that kind of money in the bank on the day of the murder. The threat to tell Floyd was a hallow one that Daisy would not have been intimidated by. The sheer amount of overkill indicated someone who had a serious emotional grudge with Daisy, yet the version Worden told was of a spontaneous crime. Much of what Davis revealed, in his discussion with the investigators was information that could have been gleaned from newspaper and magazine accounts. It could have been a case of an inmate bragging to make himself seem more of a threat in jail as easily as a series of potential confessions to a murder.
Detective Kenney wasted no time. He ordered Norman Baker’s fingerprints submitted to the crime lab in Lansing. They came back as not a match to th
e car fingerprint.
Both Steinbacher and Kenney had managed to bring new life to the Zick case. Things changed in the autumn of 1967, however, when another crime, with possible links to Daisy Zick, erupted six miles down the road from her murder scene.
The investigation of the Zick murder went onto the back burner in August 1967. A most unusual crime took place in Calhoun County’s quaint town of Marshall, just a few minutes from where Daisy died. A postal bomb had been delivered to the Tasty Café on Michigan Avenue, the main street of the postcard-like city. The explosion killed one of the owners of the small diner, Nola Puyear.
Bombings in 1967 were rare and in stark contrast to the pastoral setting of Marshall. Where Battle Creek was an industrial city, Marshall was a town out of the 1950s in both appearance and culture. Both detectives Kenney and Steinbacher found themselves as lead state police investigators on the case. The bombing had sent ripples of fear throughout Calhoun County, and for the first time since 1963, a crime superseded Daisy Zick’s murder in the minds of citizens.
Being a bombing, the case dealt with complex evidence and new scientific techniques for testing what had been recovered at the crime scene. Things were evolving in the state of criminal investigations, and it became clear that men like Kenney and Steinbacher were on the bleeding edge of such technologies and techniques.
After three months of investigation, an arrest was made thanks to the Detroit News’s Secret Witness program. The man arrested was Enoch Dalton Chism, a portly wife abuser. The bombing murder was not Chism’s first brush with the law. In 1963, he had tried to burn down a rental home that his brother owned in downtown Marshall. He was a man who was violently obsessed with his wife. How he remained free of jail is a matter of some conjecture, but what was known was that Enoch Chism was more than capable of committing violent acts, including blowing another person up.
As Kenney and Steinbacher learned after his arrest, Chism had been an employee of Kellogg’s from 1960 until July 30, 1966, when he was fired for drinking on the job. The first thought in the detectives’ minds was that Enoch Chism was employed at Kellogg’s at the same time that Daisy Zick was. More importantly, despite the in-depth sweep of the Kellogg’s employees done in 1963, Enoch Chism had somehow been overlooked.
Was it possible that the bomber from Marshall might be involved with the Zick murder? If so, it would have solved two of the most publicized crimes in Calhoun County in one fell swoop. Fred Ritchie, who had worked on the Zick murder and was placed on the Chism investigation for the sheriff’s office, sent a copy of Chism’s fingerprints up for checking against the print found in Daisy’s car. At the same time a check was made of Chism’s timecard for the day of the murder to see if his time was accounted for.
Chism’s fingerprints were not a match for the unidentified print from the car, and his time was accounted for the day of the murder. What also ruled out Enoch was that the crime didn’t fit his modus operandi. Other than beating his wife, Chism was not a man given to direct, face-to-face attacks. Even his use of a postal bomb was a passive way to commit a violent murder. His motive for the bombing was to force the owners of the restaurant to sell so that he could purchase it and have his wife work with him, a means of keeping her tightly under his control. His obsession with his wife simply didn’t fit as any sort of scenario where he might be compelled to kill Daisy, if he had even known her.
While the Puyear murder drew in the investigators, by the end of October, they could once more turn their attention to Daisy’s death. More importantly, they had two potential avenues beyond Chism to pursue. One, the postman William Daily, who seemed suspicious, had made comments to people regarding Daisy’s death that seemed inappropriate at best and threatening at worse. Two, Norman Baker, had allegedly confessed his involvement to one cohort in his criminal activities and had mentioned the crime to another.
One of these two men would be ruled out as being involved. Another would be the only named suspect in Daisy’s murder.
Chapter 8
THE PRISONER, THE POSTMAN AND THE EVER-CHILLING TRAIL
Everyone was talking about it because she was a Kellogg employee. She was a colorful lady, well liked at the company and very petite, and good-looking.
Detective Leroy Steinbacher
Battle Creek Enquirer and News
February 1, 1999
The bombing murder of Nola Puyear disrupted work on the Zick case. There were only so many resources that could be rallied to such a complex investigation. By December 1967, with Enoch Chism under arrest for the Puyear murder, Detective Steinbacher turned his attention back to Daisy Zick. His primary focus was the Zicks’ postman, William Daily.
Detectives Steinbacher and Kenney contacted twenty-four-year-old Susan Denny. From 1962 to 1966, she had been married to James Daily, the son of William Daily. Susan had remarried, and her new husband was a member of the Battle Creek Fire Department. At the time of the murder, Susan and her then husband, James, had been living with William and his wife, Virginia.
From her memory, her father-in-law had been acting odd the day of the murder. He had mentioned seeing a man walking down Michigan Avenue by the Chuck Wagon restaurant. The mention of Daily seeing a man near the Chuck Wagon restaurant must have stood out with the detectives. In his own interview, Daily had insisted that the original officer that had taken his statement had gotten it wrong, that he had actually seen a woman. Yet in his own personal admission to his daughter-in-law, he stated that it was a man. This kind of inconsistency raised suspicions with the seasoned detectives. According to Mrs. Denny, Daily had claimed that he had not turned this information over to police—another lie. He had gone so far as to tell her that, on several occasions, he had taken a polygraph test in relation to the Zick murder, another misrepresentation, since he had moved to Florida before taking a polygraph and had never returned to Michigan for further examination.
Daisy in 1948. Courtesy of James King.
There was more. At one point, William Daily had made inappropriate advances toward his daughter-in-law and threatened that he knew who killed Daisy Zick. Daily had been involved with a violent clash with the Denny family. In 1966, he had broken down the door and attempted to choke Susan. During this assault, he had further charged that Susan was his wife and that her baby was, in reality, his child. The unstable Daily had claimed that Susan had been responsible for setting the police after him.
Susan had suggested that the investigators talk to a Beverly Iden who worked with William Daily. It seemed promising, but other tips came in, delaying the investigators getting to Mrs. Iden. In June 1968, they finally arranged to meet with her.
Beverly Iden had been a sub-carrier for the U.S. Mail and had worked with William Daily in 1963. When Steinbacher met with her, she was open in admitting that Daily had acted “rather odd” after the murder. She also mentioned that he had a dark-colored jacket that he wore most of the time, but after the crime, she noticed that he stopped wearing the coat altogether. The coat’s style was described as being similar to an Eisenhower.
Mrs. Iden recalled that on one occasion, she and Daily had stopped at a drive-in restaurant on East Michigan Avenue for dinner. Just after they had gotten their meal, the men at the next table started talking about the murder loud enough for the two of them to overhear it. Daily, per her recollection, became upset and told her, “Let’s get out of here.”
On another occasion, she added, Daily had told her that he had seen Daisy Zick in the nude, taking sun baths in her backyard. Mrs. Iden told officers that she had wanted to come forward to talk to the police, but her husband held her back from making any report.
Daisy’s sunbathing nude was only mentioned in the police reports in this instance, but several individuals came forward during the writing of this book to confirm these activities. Both were young boys at the time who admitted that Daisy’s provocative sunbathing was the stuff of legend. As one young Zick neighbor put it, “I was fourteen years old when she lived there. We would
peek through the hedge to watch her sunbathing topless. For us, this was incredible.”
Detective Kenney was doing his own probing into the Zick file. He received a tip regarding Wayne Cox, an AFL-CIO Community Service Representative in Battle Creek who knew of a friend of Daisy’s that might have information relevant to the case. The information was thin. Cox had dated this woman, known only as “Chelida” (spelled phonetically). He didn’t know her last name. Cox had said that she claimed to be a close friend of Daisy’s.
Kenney spoke with Floyd Zick, who remembered the woman. Indeed, two decades ago, Chelida and Daisy had been close friends. She had been married and divorced several times since then. He had not seen her in years and had heard that she had moved to California.
Detective Kenney reached out again to Garrett Vander Meer regarding his observations of the driver of the Zick car. For his part, Vander Meer offered no new details about the driver. Kenney had heard that Vender Meer had been in a fight with a man at the time of the murder, which he confirmed, stating that he only knew the man as Bush. Prior to the Zick murder, he had gone so far as to follow this Bush person home on Wattles Road. When Kenney pressed him, Vander Meer indicated that Bush was definitely not the person he had seen driving the car the day of the murder.
Murder in Battle Creek Page 13