Between November 1981 and October 1982, four women in their late seventies and eighties died in three Michigan cities: two in Lansing, one in Ypsilanti and one in Ann Arbor. Michael Darnell Harris, a young man from Muskegon Heights, was arrested in Jackson in December 1982 for an assault on a fifth woman, who survived. Within a year an Ingham County court had convicted him of second-degree murder in both Lansing deaths and sent him away for life. The two Washtenaw County cases stayed open for nearly two decades. Harris was charged with them in December 2001, while already serving his Lansing terms, and separate juries in Ann Arbor convicted him of first-degree murder in both in 2003. He received life without parole on each count.
Harris has never accepted any of the verdicts. "I am 100 percent innocent," he wrote from custody in 2016, when new laboratory work on evidence from the first Lansing case appeared, for a few months, to point to another man. Further tests on the same evidence were later matched to Harris, and in June 2017 the Ingham County judge hearing his motion refused to let it go further. "The jury got it right," she said.
Harris was born in about 1962 or 1963. He was 19 at the time of his arrest in December 1982 and 20 when he was sentenced in Lansing a year later; in September 2016 he was 53. Muskegon Heights was his hometown. He has also been known as Michael Stiggles and as Malcolm Hakeem Abdul Ali.
He did not stay in one place. Before the autumn of 1982 he had lived for a time in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, the neighboring Washtenaw County towns where two of the four women died. In about October 1982 he moved to Jackson.
Ula Curdy was 77 and lived in Lansing. She died on November 2, 1981. It was her case that brought Harris to trial first, and it is the case on which, thirty-five years later, he staked his claim of innocence.
Denise Swanson, 81, also lived in Lansing. She died on November 30, 1981, four weeks after Ula Curdy.
The two Lansing deaths did not stand alone. When Harris was charged in January 1983, Ingham County Prosecutor Peter Houk said that he was also under investigation in three other Lansing homicides and four assaults from 1980 and 1981. In December 1982 the count given for Lansing was four elderly women killed and four more attacked between August 1980 and August 1982, and Lansing police said they could place Harris in the city during that period. None of the other Lansing cases led to a charge against him.
The first of the Washtenaw County deaths came early in 1982. Florence Bell, 91, had lived in the same part of Ypsilanti for more than sixty years. She died in January 1982. Harris was never charged with Florence Bell's death. Evidence of it was put before both of his Washtenaw juries in 2003, as part of a pattern the prosecution said linked the killings.
Marjorie Upson, 85, was a widow who lived in Ypsilanti. She died on September 29, 1982, and hers was the first of the two Washtenaw cases to reach a jury.
Louise C. Koebnick, 84, was also a widow, and lived in Ann Arbor. She died on October 1, 1982, two days after Marjorie Upson.
By the end of October 1982 the police in Washtenaw County had three dead widows and little to work with. Detectives from the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti police departments, the Michigan State Police and the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department were meeting regularly to compare what they had. "We're still working on what skimpy information we have," said Maj. Walter Hawkins of the Ann Arbor police. In Ypsilanti, Detective Jess Foley said, officers had begun calling on residents over sixty who lived alone, but the effort had lost momentum after a strong start.
The break came from Jackson. In early December 1982 police there arrested Harris on charges arising from an assault on a 68-year-old Jackson woman on December 4. He was arraigned in the 13th District Court and held in the Jackson County Jail on a $100,000 bond. At his request, the preliminary examination on December 14 was closed to the press and the public. Jackson Detective Lt. Dennis M. Drake said Harris was also under investigation in three similar assaults in that city.
Detectives from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti met with the Jackson investigators, and evidence went to the Michigan State Police laboratories in Lansing and Northville. In Lansing the link was quick. Det. Sgt. Thomas Munshaw of the Lansing Police Department said evidence in the Ula Curdy case matched Harris, and on January 12, 1983, he was charged with her first-degree murder. In Washtenaw County, detectives named him as their prime suspect in the Upson and Koebnick deaths, but they could not connect him to either case through witnesses or the evidence then available, and no charge was brought.
The Jackson case was tried first. On April 1, 1983, a Jackson County Circuit Court jury convicted Harris of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, breaking and entering with intent to commit larceny, and breaking and entering with intent to commit criminal sexual conduct. He received 60 to 90 years on the criminal sexual conduct count, 10 to 15 years for breaking and entering, and 6 to 10 years for the assault. The woman survived. A federal appeal from that conviction reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1993.
The two Lansing cases were tried separately in the Ingham County Circuit Court, one before a jury and one before a judge alone. Although the Curdy charge had been brought as first-degree murder, both cases ended in convictions of second-degree murder. Harris was sentenced to life for the death of Ula Curdy on October 19, 1983, and to life for the death of Denise Swanson on November 30, 1983. Ingham County Circuit Judge Robert Holmes Bell imposed the second sentence. Harris was 20.
Detectives from Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti said at the time of that sentencing that Harris remained their prime suspect in the deaths of Louise Koebnick and Marjorie Upson. They would wait eighteen years to charge him.
The Washtenaw cases were reopened in the late 1990s, when testing methods that had not existed in 1982 became available to the state laboratory. Material kept from the Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor cases was examined again, and the laboratory matched it to Harris. In December 2001, with Harris already nearly two decades into his Lansing terms, the Washtenaw County prosecutor charged him with the murders of Marjorie Upson and Louise Koebnick. A single district court preliminary examination covered all three counts, and he was bound over for trial in the Washtenaw County Circuit Court.
The cases were tried before separate juries. In the Upson case, after amended charging papers filed late in 2002, two counts went to the jury in February 2003: premeditated murder and felony murder, the second resting on breaking and entering with intent to commit third-degree criminal sexual conduct or larceny, and on third-degree criminal sexual conduct. The jury convicted him of first-degree premeditated murder and first-degree felony murder. In November 2003 a second jury returned the same two verdicts in the Koebnick case. In each case the court entered a single conviction of first-degree murder, supported by both theories, and sentenced Harris to life without parole. Each trial heard evidence of the other killings, including the death of Florence Bell.
Harris appealed both convictions, and the Michigan Court of Appeals heard the cases together. On February 10, 2005, a panel of Judges Murphy, White and Kelly affirmed both verdicts in an unpublished opinion. The panel rejected each of his arguments in turn. The evidence of the other killings had been properly admitted to prove identity through a common pattern. The long gap between the crimes and the charges was investigative rather than tactical and had not caused him actual and substantial prejudice. The laboratory evidence was enough to support both convictions, and his objections to the chain of custody went to its weight rather than its admissibility. The panel found that charging two counts of murder for one death in the Upson case had been an error, but that the single sentence on two alternate theories had cured it. His argument that the Upson verdict barred the Koebnick prosecution also failed, because the first verdict had decided no fact in the second case.
In 2015, on Harris's own motion, an Ingham County court ordered post-conviction testing of evidence that had been kept since the 1983 trial. The result did not match Harris. When the Ingham County Prosecutor's Office learned of it, Prosecutor Gretchen Whitmer arranged for him to have a lawyer, and the court appointed Edwar Zeineh. In August 2016 Zeineh said he would ask for an evidentiary hearing and a new trial. He described the cases as linked like dominoes and said that if the first conviction fell, it would have "collateral consequences on the remaining convictions." He added that fear of serial crime could push a community and its prosecutors toward quick convictions.
The Michigan State Police opened a review of how its laboratory had handled all of the Harris cases. The laboratory supervisor who had testified against him in several trials had been forced to retire in 2004, after authorities said he had a subordinate take a proficiency test in his place. The court set a hearing for September 23, 2016.
In a court filing in October 2016, Zeineh disclosed that the material had been matched to another man, who was never named or charged. The filing said Harris "has for 33 years exclaimed his innocence." Peter Houk, the prosecutor who had charged Harris in 1983 and was by then in private practice, said he still believed Harris was the right man.
Whitmer, then serving as interim Ingham County prosecutor, said the results had "created questions about everything" in the case and that she wanted to "get it right" for Harris, for Ula Curdy's family and for the public. She also said that his release any time soon was unlikely, given his record, and that his situation would change dramatically only if he were serving a single conviction. After a hearing on October 21, 2016, the judge ordered more of the evidence tested and told both sides to return on January 23, 2017.
The further testing turned the case around. Prosecutors told the court that recent tests on evidence in the case matched Harris, and they withdrew from the evidentiary hearing they had earlier agreed to. Harris, by then representing himself, called the reversal a "break of public trust." He argued that the samples could have been contaminated and accused the state laboratory of falsifying the results.
On June 27, 2017, Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemarie Aquilina denied the request for a hearing. She said state law did not allow her to let it go forward on evidence connecting other people to the scene or on Harris's own request. "The jury got it right," she said.
Harris took the ruling up on his own. The Michigan Court of Appeals denied leave to appeal on February 6, 2018. On May 1, 2018, the Michigan Supreme Court also denied leave, though it struck language from the trial court's June 2017 order that had declared the case closed.
On June 12, 2018, Harris filed his seventh federal habeas corpus petition, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. He raised nine grounds: that the new results proved his innocence, that the state had broken agreements for hearings and for defense experts to monitor the testing, that he had been given no notice of new claims arising from the testing, and that his right to confront witnesses and to see the evidence had been denied. Five earlier petitions had been filed in the Eastern District of Michigan. On May 24, 2018, the Sixth Circuit had ruled that his claims based on the new testing did not count as a second or successive petition, though one other claim did.
Chief Judge Robert J. Jonker dismissed the petition on July 24, 2018. He declined to review it under the concurrent sentence doctrine, because Harris would remain in custody on his other life sentences whatever the outcome in the Curdy case. In the alternative, he found that none of the nine grounds stated a meritorious federal claim. The judge noted that Harris had been charged in Lansing only with murder, not with sexual assault, so his complaints about new allegations arising from the testing had no basis, and that the newly tested evidence was not favorable to him. He granted a certificate of appealability only on the concurrent sentence ruling.
In July 2018 Harris was serving his life sentences in the custody of the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Harris's 2015 motion was brought under Michigan's post-conviction testing statute, MCL 770.16. The law lets a person serving a felony sentence petition the sentencing court for testing of biological material collected in the investigation. For a conviction entered before January 8, 2001, as all of Harris's Ingham and Jackson convictions were, the statute overrides the usual deadline for new-trial motions. The court must order testing if the defendant shows that the evidence is material to the question of identity, that a sample is available, that it was not tested before or can now be tested with technology unavailable at trial, and that identity was at issue at trial.
The statute separates testing from any new trial. If the results are inconclusive or show that the defendant is the source, the motion is denied. If they exclude the defendant, the court appoints counsel and holds a hearing, at which the defendant must prove by clear and convincing evidence that only the perpetrator could have been the source, that the material is not contaminated or degraded, and that the exclusion, weighed against the rest of the evidence, justifies a new trial. On the prosecutor's motion the court must order retesting and stay the new-trial motion until the results are in. That was the path the Curdy case took between October 2016 and June 2017. The statute also requires police to preserve identified biological material for as long as anyone remains incarcerated in the case.
Harris denies all four murders and the Jackson assault. He has called his prosecutions the product of hate, racism and revenge.
The 2015 result that excluded him in the Curdy case was the strongest point in his favor. The man it was matched to was never charged, and no court has made any finding about him. The later results that prosecutors said matched Harris have been accepted by the state courts and by the federal court in 2018; Harris's claim that they were falsified has not been upheld anywhere.
Florence Bell's death was never charged against Harris, though the Washtenaw juries heard evidence of it. The three further Lansing homicides and the Lansing and Jackson assaults for which he was investigated in 1982 and 1983 also produced no charges against him.
November 2, 1981: Ula Curdy dies in Lansing.
November 30, 1981: Denise Swanson dies in Lansing.
January 8, 1982: Florence Bell, 91, dies in Ypsilanti (never charged against Harris).
September 29, 1982: Marjorie Upson dies in Ypsilanti.
October 1, 1982: Louise Koebnick dies in Ann Arbor.
December 4, 1982: A 68-year-old woman is assaulted in Jackson and survives.
Early December 1982: Harris is arrested in Jackson and arraigned in the 13th District Court.
January 12, 1983: Harris is charged in Lansing with the first-degree murder of Ula Curdy.
April 1, 1983: Jackson County Circuit Court jury convicts him of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and related counts; he is sentenced to 60 to 90 years.
October 19, 1983: Sentenced to life for the second-degree murder of Ula Curdy.
November 30, 1983: Sentenced to life for the second-degree murder of Denise Swanson.
Late 1990s: The Washtenaw cases are reopened.
December 2001: Charged in Washtenaw County with the murders of Marjorie Upson and Louise Koebnick.
February 2003: Convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and first-degree felony murder (Upson); life without parole.
November 2003: Convicted of first-degree premeditated murder and first-degree felony murder (Koebnick); life without parole.
February 10, 2005: Michigan Court of Appeals affirms both Washtenaw convictions.
2015: Court-ordered testing in the Curdy case excludes Harris.
September 23, 2016: Ingham County hearing set on the new evidence.
October 21, 2016: Judge orders further testing.
June 27, 2017: Judge Rosemarie Aquilina denies an evidentiary hearing after further results are matched to Harris.
February 6, 2018: Michigan Court of Appeals denies leave to appeal.
May 1, 2018: Michigan Supreme Court denies leave.
July 24, 2018: Federal court dismisses his seventh habeas petition.