On January 23, 2005, students found Carolyn Kronenberg, sixty, a professor at Lansing Community College in Michigan, dying on the floor of her classroom; she had been raped and beaten. Two days later police arrested Claude McCollum, a twenty-six-year-old homeless student with significant learning disabilities who took classes and often slept at the college. Told he might help solve the crime, he agreed to cooperate, and detectives asked him how, hypothetically, he might have killed her; they treated his answers as a confession. At his trial in February 2006 a forensic scientist testified that the DNA under the victim's fingernails did not match him but came from an unidentified man. The jury convicted him anyway, on February 14, 2006, and he was sentenced to life.
In the summer of 2007 women began dying in Lansing again. Matthew Emmanuel Macon, known as Chilly, had grown up in the city, had a long violent record and had been in and out of prison since 2001; by one account he was born on September 8, 1979. He was on parole. On July 26, 2007, he attacked Ruth Hallman, seventy-six, in her home; she died two days later. Deborah Cooke, thirty-six, and Debra Renfors, forty-six, stabbed to death in her home on August 27, followed. Karen Delgado-Yates, forty-one, was beaten with a toilet tank cover and found in a vacant house on August 28 with a fractured skull, a brain hemorrhage, a broken nose and cracked ribs. Sandra Eichorn, sixty-four, was killed that August too. A woman named Jackson survived when her dog attacked him and chased him from her home, and her attack led to his identification. He was arrested on August 28, 2007.
In August 2007 Macon confessed to killing Carolyn Kronenberg. The police and the Ingham County prosecutor reexamined the case and found that a previously unidentified fingerprint on a plastic bag near the scene was his. A state police report later obtained by the Lansing State Journal said a prosecutor and a detective had known before McCollum's trial that video showed him in another building when the professor was killed. On September 11, 2007, the prosecution asked for a new trial and an appeals court ordered one, and on October 25 the charges against McCollum were dismissed. Police also suspected Macon in the death of Barbara Jean Tuttle, forty-five, on December 20, 2004, whose body was found in the same house as Renfors's.
A judge ordered Macon to stand trial for the murders of Karen Delgado-Yates and Sandra Eichorn, with torture in the Delgado-Yates case, and for assault in a third attack; later accounts give his two murder convictions as Delgado-Yates and Renfors. He grinned as he was led into court, and victims' relatives were shocked at his manner. "No doubt," said the prosecutor, Stuart Dunnings III, about his guilt. On June 18, 2008, he was sentenced to two terms of life without parole. He was never charged in the other deaths.