Posted:
April 18, 2010
Could Tom Cress really be innocent?
Conviction in teen's 1983 killing troubles cops,
lawyers
BY JOE SWICKARD
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
JACKSON — Shackled hand and foot in the prison’s drab hearing room last
month, convicted killer Tom Cress said he doesn’t care what happens.
Maybe.
Cress — who insists he’s innocent — told a state Parole and Commutation
Board panel that he’ll “rot here in prison.” Minutes later, he claimed
to be a cruelly framed man hoping to end his years with his children
and grandkids.
In 1985, Cress was convicted of raping and
battering Battle
Creek teenager Patty Rosansky, leaving her body in a trash-filled
ravine.
|
Tom Cress
|
Since then, his case has been argued through state and federal courts
in a bewildering history of lost and destroyed evidence, contrary
confessions from an Arkansas killer, pleas by a U.S. senator and
demands of prosecutors and the Rosansky family that he never go free.
Now his bid for release is before the board that will advise Gov.
Jennifer Granholm.
Meanwhile, Cress — mentally stunted and medicated against delusional
taunting voices — says he’ll take what comes: “I’ve been disappointed
all these years.”
Life sentence under scrutiny
A lot has changed along the Kalamazoo River west of Battle Creek since
1983, when Rosansky was abducted, murdered and hidden under debris
there.
A church parking lot now covers much of the pathway through the field
where the 17-year-old girl was found two months after she disappeared
on the way to school.
Unchanged, though, are Cress' conviction and life sentence for the
schoolgirl's killing, and the steadfast belief by two retired Battle
Creek cops that Cress didn't do it.
"There
is no way that Tom Cress killed Patty Rosansky," said Dennis Mullen, a
retired detective.
On March 15, attorneys from the Innocence Clinic at the University of
Michigan Law School tried to convince the state's Parole and
Commutation Board to take that message to Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
The board will have to decide whether to recommend a release to the
governor, who will make the final decision. There is no timetable for
the process.
Cress, the clinic argues, was convicted on dubious testimony. And
physical evidence that might have cleared him was lost by his original
attorney, while other evidence was destroyed by the prosecutor.
Adding his voice to Cress' case is U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who
said there is "a fairly overwhelming case" for Granholm to commute
Cress' sentence. Using Cress as a springboard, Levin helped with the
2004 federal law to preserve forensic evidence even after convictions.
But Calhoun County Prosecutor Susan Mladenoff, one of her former
assistants and Rosansky's two brothers oppose releasing Cress.
Joseph Rosansky placed a framed photo of his sister on the hearing
table and told the panel he's been torn by "guilt and pain that I was
supposed to protect her."
The turmoil is reflected in assistant Attorney General Charles
Schettler, who said the complexity of the case prompted him to get
permission to make his recommendation after hearing the evidence,
rather than automatically following office practice to join a case's
county prosecutor and judge if they opposed release.
"I'll even concede that you might be innocent," Schettler told Cress.
Functional or unbalanced?
Cress, now 53, might as well be two wildly different men.
As the Innocence Clinic sees him, Cress was marginally functional, but
essentially "a nice, friendly and reliable" guy who got by on odd jobs.
Prosecutors offer a vile alternative: Kidnapping, raping and pounding a
schoolgirl to death was just the start. They said Cress crudely bragged
of committing the perfect crime and pointed out the scene to friends.
One witness asserted that Cress claimed he kept and violated the body
for several days.
Since his imprisonment, he's had a closed
head injury and
episodes of madness that left him curled in a ball as voices urged him
to kill himself. Daily medication helps keep him stabilized.
Because of his mental condition, Cress' moods during the hearing
vacillated among cheerful, argumentative, contrary and indifferent. But
he always was adamant that he didn't kill Patty Rosansky.
A juiced-up story
The unsolved Rosansky murder had haunted Battle Creek for a year when a
local Crime Stoppers TV program featured the killing, doubling its
usual reward to $5,000. It worked: Viewers called with unsettling
stories.
According to brothers Walter and Terry Moore, their sister-in-law Candy
Moore and her sister Cindy Lesley, Cress admitted giving Rosansky a
ride, smoking marijuana and killing her when she refused to have sex.
At his 1985 trial, Cress testified he was delivering newspapers when
Rosansky disappeared. His partner and a supervisor backed his alibi.
There was little physical evidence in the case. No fingerprints were
found. And, in those pre-DNA days, only limited scientific information
could be drawn from hair found in Rosansky's hand, or a semen-stained
sanitary napkin found nearby.
Experts said the hair was not Cress'. But it was never linked to anyone
else.
Convicted of first-degree murder, Cress went to prison for life without
parole.
Then, in 1986, a call from Arkansas police
thrust Mullen and his boss, Cmdr. Joe Newman, into the middle of the
case.
Arkansas police were holding a former Battle Creek man, Michael
Ronning, for murder. He'd lived in an apartment below Maggie Hume, who
was raped and murdered in 1982.
Eventually, Mullen and Newman came to believe Ronning killed Rosansky,
as well as Hume and Karry Evans, from nearby Bellevue, Ark.
By 1992, Mullen had interviewed Ronning several times and had a
proposed deal OK'd by Calhoun County Prosecutor Jon Sahli. Ronning
would serve his time in Michigan if he confessed to murders here. The
deal was approved by the then-governors John Engler in Michigan and
Mike Huckabee in Arkansas.
But in May 1992, while the deal was pending, Sahli got a letter from
Michigan State Police who wanted to destroy the evidence from the
Rosansky case and many other cases in which the appeals were exhausted.
Sahli signed off on the destruction, but he didn't tell the cops about
the ongoing negotiations with Ronning. The evidence wasn't burned until
October 1992, but the detectives weren't told for four years.
|
Patty Rosansky,
killed at the age of 17
Key Events
February 1983:
Patty Rosansky disappears on her way to Battle Creek Central High
School.
April 1983:
Rosansky's body is found in a ravine west of town; hair and semen are
recovered, but not identified.
April 1985: Tom
Cress convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without
parole.
1986: Battle Creek
Police detective Dennis Mullen gets tip that possible serial killer
Michael Ronning was in the area when Rosansky and two other young women
were killed.
January 1992:
Ronning indicates to Mullen he committed the murders. Mullen reports
the information to Prosecutor Jon Sahli.
May 1992: State
Police ask permission to destroy evidence from Cress trial and numerous
other closed cases.
October 1992:
Destruction order carried out. The semen and hair samples never were
DNA tested.
November 1996:
Ronning passes polygraph test.
October 1997:
Ronning signs affidavit that he killed Rosansky.
December 1997:
Calhoun County Circuit Court orders new trial.
January 1999: Cress
passes polygraph.
March 1999: Calhoun
County Circuit Court reverses itself.
June 2000: U.S.
Sen. Carl Levin cites Cress case in a call for a federal law to save
biological evidence, such as hair and semen, for scientific testing.
February 2002:
Michigan Court of Appeals, citing Ronning confession and evidence
destruction, orders a new trial.
July 2003: Michigan
Supreme Court reverses Court of Appeals.
October 2004:
Federal Innocence Protection Act -- which Levin lobbied for -- becomes
law.
March 2010:
Eight-hour hearing before state Parole and Commutation Board.
Pending: Board's
recommendation to Gov. Jennifer Granholm for her final decision.
|
Sahli, now an assistant prosecutor in Saginaw
County, said last month that it was just routine state police
housecleaning.
"It was done in the normal course of business," he said, adding: "I
don't think Mike Ronning was involved in the Rosansky murder, or any
other of those things up here. He just happened to be in the area."
Mullen and David Moran and Bridget McCormack, the co-directors of the
Innocence Clinic, disagree. They are convinced Ronning is the killer
based on his statements and polygraph tests. And DNA tests of the hair
and semen -- had they not been destroyed -- could have proved or
disproved Ronning's confession, they said.
The clinic also argues the alleged witnesses who accused Cress
concocted their stories for the reward money, and that there's evidence
that some of the witnesses backed off their testimony.
With a $5,000 reward out there, "the retarded guy living next door" was
the perfect sap, McCormack told the panel.
Walter Moore -- who killed himself in prison -- supposedly confessed
that his family set up Cress for the reward, Tom Clark told the panel.
Clark, Cress' former brother-in-law, testified that he tape recorded
the tearful admission, but that Cress' original lawyer, Theodore
Hentchel, misplaced the tape.
On Friday, Hentchel said he's still unsure whether it was ever located:
"I don't know one way or the other on that."
Ronning's deal to swap confessions for serving time in Michigan fell
apart. But, in 2002, the Michigan Court of Appeals ordered a new trial
for Cress.
It was a short-lived victory. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in 2003
that Ronning was unreliable and that his confession was riddled with
errors.
After 27 years, the lines are still drawn. The ex-cops and the clinic
believe Cress is innocent. And the prosecutors are convinced he did it.
Even admitting there was some "very moving evidence" for Cress'
release, Schettler, the assistant attorney general, said it wasn't
enough: "In my mind, there must be conclusive evidence."
The final call is Granholm's.
Contact JOE SWICKARD: 313-222-8769 or jswickard@freepress.com
|
