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Plus, you are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good evening. During the depths of the Great Depression. In yipsul Aante, Michigan, a seven year old boy is found frozen to death under the Frog Island Footbridge and Depot Town after being reported missing the night before by his parents. Bons examination the Washingtonawk County Corner discovers the child is the victim of foul play. After three years of investigation, Ypsilante and Michigan State Police are no closer to making an arrest than they were when Richard Striker Junior's body
was discovered. Local gossips and many police are convinced they know who the guilty party is, but proving it in a court of law is a different matter. Who stabbed Richard Striker Junior to death? The book that we're featuring this evening is The Richard Striker Junior Murder, Ypsilanti's Depot Town Mystery, with my special guest, journalist and author Gregory Fournier. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Gregory Fournier, Thanks very much.
I'm anxious to be able to talk about this book. This will be my first interviews, so let's have at it.
Thank you very much for that. Let's go to a little bit of the background that you provide in your book about Yipsilante, how it became this hub of economy and manufacturing, and just tell us a little bit about depot Town. As we mentioned in the introduction.
Yeah, a man named, let's call him a pioneer named Mark Norris brought his family west, I think it was eighteen twenty eight and they settled just east of the here on river that cuts through Ippsilani. And he's a very industrious, shrewd businessman. Anyway, he convinced the Michigan Central Railroad to make Ypsilani a scheduled stop on the rail line, which they did, and the town within a town, depot town as it's called, was built right off the side.
They had a loading deck of freight warehouse and it became an economic and agricultural hub for the area. And it was at a time when ipsil Ani was a real going concern in the county and ann Arbor was
still a small little village. The time would change that, but the first train arrived in eighteen thirty eight, and sometime around the eighteen fifties, Mark Norris again seems to be the depot town mover and Shaker built a water powered flour mill and just off of what was called the Cross Street bridge, and that sometime in the early I believe in nineteen thirty two, was destroyed and there
was a fire. They took it out of there, and the Depression was hot on the heels of Ipsulani and the work WPA work program during the depression, public works program hired lots of people men, primarily to give them a salary, and they paved Cross Street and they also built what is called the Frog Street or actually the Frog Island Bridge, and it was a footbridge that led off of the main bridge to a little island recreation area.
Ifsulin High School a couple of blocks up the street would use it for the gym classes and there was you know, their football of was played there and so on. So the bridge was a real Frog Island Bridge was a real convenience, and that went in about nineteen thirty four. That takes us right up to the story. My book is about the murder of Richard Striker Junior and nineteen thirty five March March seventh, I believe nineteen thirty five.
His body was found under the Frog Island Bridge, frozen to the ground, and police, you know, once they broke the body free and took it to the funeral home and what it thought a little bit. They cut the boys frozen clothes off his body and they found that there were four Jean stab wounds on the body. So he had been murdered and then carefully placed under the bridge.
So let's talk about Let's talk about Richie Striker. His father's Richard and his mother's Lucia. Tell us a little bit about him as a student, and also just what happened according to police when they questioned him the next day, what had happened to Richie that afternoon and where were the parents at that time?
Well, Richie, as far as school was concerned, we would call him a special education student today special needs student. And you know, it's hard in retrospect to really know, but he was put into a special school with many studenttudents who had recovered from severe respiratory illness and you know, other handicaps. There was a you know, a special ed school on Eastern Michigan University's campus called the Open Air School.
And just from people being interviewed after his murder, the school of people, you know as school people were going to do basically said, oh, he was a lovely boy. You know, he was a great student. We're going to miss him so much. You know, they don't want to say anything negative about the kid. But neighbors who really knew the boy a little bit better than the people at school said that he was a kid who often fought with other kids, he didn't get along with kids,
and was somewhat of a problem child. And again those people aren't necessarily qualified to make an analysis of the boy either, but he probably was a hyperactive kid and the only child of Lucia and Richard Striker, and the relationship with the parents, I think what was a strained one from again retrospect accounts, but the boy came home from school, the mom said, you're now full of snow, doesn't go out and play for you know, until dinner time.
And he went out and he was playing across the street, sledding down a hill with an older boy, thirteen year old boy, and after a while, the thirteen year old had to had to you know, move on home. So Richie was standing out there by himself in the snow and decided to go home, and he was never seen alive again. So what happened to him between going home and ending up at the bottom of that bridge, you know, is the mystery that my book is based on. So the parent.
You have, the police contacted the night before and did you talk about the discovery in the early morning by a couple of boys. But the night before, after dinner, around seven thirty or so seven twenty, father had boarded a car because they didn't have one, and went to the police station to report the sun missing. What happened as a result in terms of police well, he got home from.
Work at six and that's when dinner was whereas Richie, his wife says, oh, he didn't come home, that darn kid. He's always you know, being light apparently, and so she went out on the front porch and started you know, calling his name, which is a common thing that people did in those days. You'd yell out your kid's name, and he should in most instances be within hailing distance.
And he didn't show up. And it wasn't until seven seven thirty that the father had checked all around the house and across the street in the park and had come back home and said he was going to borrow his sister's car, which he did and drove over to the police station and told the Ipsilani police that his boy was missing. And so the police, every officer who was on duty, began to search for him and the strikers,
you know. After the police had searched for a while, one of the officers took the squad car over to their house. He had returned the sister's car by that and he said, you know, I'll keep looking if you, you know, kind of give me some clues where to go.
So he got in the car and asked, you know, the wife if she wanted to come along, and Lucia seemed unperturbed and indifferent about coming along, but eventually they did get her to go in the car and they started, you know, driving around, and they went right towards uh, the Frog Island Bridge, and both of the parents discouraged the policemen they were with from crossing the bridge and you know, looking in the park because they said they had already done that earlier on foot. And when they
went there there there weren't any footprints or anything. They didn't see a body. They you know, they in other words, they checked and we don't need to check there. Let's don't waste time. Let's go someplace else, which, on the face of it, you know, might not sound too bad,
but in retrospect, I think it was very damning. And right from the get go, the police the next day, when there was a further her investigation, the police already suspected that the parents knew more than they were were telling them.
Right away. In these questioning Lucia has ideas as to whether or even she's been asked yet, but she's already offering suspects in this, isn't she.
Yes, uh huh, And that continues through the story.
She even implicates her brother in law.
She implicates her brother in law. And there's bad blood in that family on the Striker side of the family, because the father, Richard Striker Sr. Was going with a woman they really the family really liked, and so on and so forth. And then all of a sudden, Richard
shows up with Lucia and they had eloped. They went out and got married, and the reason for the hasty wedding was that she was pregnant with Richie, and so there was bad blood in that family, and she accused him, and she before the story ends, she accused six different people. Of them, you know, everybody is guilty but me, And of course that looked very suspicious to the police as well.
But the state of investigation in those days, especially in a small town, you know, a small rural town, they were not really equipped to conduct a thorough investigation, and a lot of the police were not particular trained to be police and investigators. So it was a bumbling affair. But Lucia really had apparently nerves of steel, because whenever she would get in a situation where people would suggest that maybe she was the guilty party, she would get very,
very defensive. And she must have been a forceful woman, because it seems to me that the police, the prosecutor, everybody connected with the case did not want to have to deal with her. She was hard to deal with person volatile.
So you talk about the autopsy by doctor Stacy Howard. There was something that you said that was very irregular for a homicide case, and that was how they dealt with the body in this case. Tell us what was this irregular? So irregular for a homicide case.
Well, you don't do an autopsy at the funeral home. You do it in the hospital at the county morgue. So that was the first problem with the first autopsy, because there were two. But well, getting ahead of myself, and they found the body around eight o'clock. They prided it from the ice at nine am and they took it and it was frozen solid. They took it to a funeral home, local funeral home, and the autopsy was not performed until nine o'clock at night. The clothes were
cut off the body. One thought enough, that was just the easiest way to just robe the body. So they cut the frozen clothes off and they threw it in a cardboard box and off to the side, which you know had evidence on it, but they weren't thinking of that for some reason. They just threw everything in this cardboard box and they examined the body and found fourteen stab wounds, eight shallow punctures on the top of the skull that didn't go through to the cranium. But Richie
was wearing a knit hat. You know, it's wintertime, so he had a winter hat on. And actually it wasn't in it. It was a kind of like an aviator sort of hat with wool inside and so on, so it had some substance to it. So uh, they found eight shallow punctures on the skull, two superficial slash wounds across the throat, and neither one of them would have
been fatal. Again very superficial. But they did find four stab wounds on the boy's chest and three of the four entered Richie's heart, and that's that's what killed them. And of course everybody was outraged and shocked at the murder. This is a you know, it was a small town and you know, things like this just don't happen in our town, but of course they do. So that was
the autopsy and the extent of it. They didn't check bodily fluids and I don't think they did a full autopsy and for whatever reason, and that was a critical flaw in the case. And it was nine months later that they had to exhume the body as if he hadn't endured enough, and it wasn't ghastly enough, and he was exhumed again and they cut up into his elementary
elementary canal. But I'm not an unanimous but they were looking for pineapple shreds in the boy's stomach that may have indicated that he had been poisoned, because that was not even an issue in the first autopsy. So you know, it's just a real sordid, sortid case.
You talk about in the first autopsy though, that they what they did realize too, was that where they found the body, there was no blood pool found under or near the body. So the conclusion was that he was killed, not killed there where the body was found, and the wounds were made by a specific slender sharp cutting instrument like a double edged stiletto or like a like a shear, like a sewing shear, so something unique in terms of
a weapon. Now you write also that the police had some strange theories initially before they put anything together, before they had very much information at all, but they had some theories. One was about that he was a victim of a hit and run accident, so tell us a little bit about just briefly about these theories that they had.
Initially, Well, I've got three, and that hit and run would have been a fourth, but that was I won't dignify that with the theory because it was the first thought that came to one of the detective's minds, and there was absolutely no evidence. But the first theory was that it was a pervert, depraved moron, or a sex maniac. And I would put that in the category of round up all the usual suspects because there was absolutely no indication that there had been any kind of violation of
the boy's body whatsoever. But I guess it made the public feel good that the police was out there rounding up all the deviants in the namehood. Remember this is nineteen thirty five, and you know, political correctness had yet to be invented. And then a curious theory. A transient train passenger came into town, decided he was going to kill somebody, found richie, kill them, and then left town.
Now that's a convenient theory for the police. But there and in fact that they said that perhaps it was somebody who got on and off trains and killed people that got a charge out of killing people in different times. Well, there had been no other murders up and down the line, so that and there was also somebody came up with a real whacked out, kind of a vampire type theory, and that was in a crime magazine, and I believe
that was in the imagination of a crime writer. But some vampire like a character, you know, it was in the area. And then the only reasonable theory was that somebody close to Richie, a friend or a family member, may have killed him because it was not a crime of well, if it was, may have been a crime of passion that brings in other connotations and that's not the word I want to use here, but because of you know, the careful placement of the body under the
bridge is a classic undoing behavior. And if somebody was just a psychopath and killed the kid and took off, he'd kill him. He wouldn't try to carefully place the kid's body under the bridge. And it was at the top part of the bridge, It wasn't it wasn't you know, on the ground on the river level. But there was a little abutment built under the bridge, concrete abutment that
held the bridge in place. And the boy had to be carried up a snowy hill and placed up there, and his clothes we're pretty much closed up around his body. So it showed that somebody took some care placing his body there. And I think it's not too hard to imagine that probably somebody very very close to him put his body there. But that brings up more questions than answers. Also, basically, this case is full of questions that go un answered.
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Now you talked about more questions and answers, and you have the deputy sheriff clavator he returns to several days later, he returns to the Striker home and now is carefully questioning Lucia, and he asked if she had searched along the riverbank the previous night searching, and her response was no. What are some of the things that she admitted to and some of the strange things she just said off the cuff in this initial interview.
Well, it was Richard Clavetter who was the Washington County Deputy sheriff, and Ralph Southard, who was the ipsil Any police chiefs. So they were working as a team and they both felt that and this is initially before the body was found, that Lucilla wasn't particularly distressed. She was sitting in a chair and knitting or crocheting, and you know, as if she was fully expecting Richie to walk in
the door at any minute. And she was also according to I believe it was Claviator in his report, said that missus Striker was you know, sitting in a provocative manner and probably you know, flashing the cops and thigh as what I am thinking. He didn't stayed it that way, but he said, you know, it was very obvious that she was trying to distract them and be provocative. Yeah,
she said that. Yeah, we went and uh we looked for the our son and uh, I you know, walked all over and and apparently the two boys who found the body kind of backtrack a little bit, said they thought they saw some woman's heels in the snow, and not not high heels, mind you, but you know, narrower one or two inch he'll kind of kind of shoe. But these were a couple of kids, so what do
they know. By the time the police got there at the town knew of the murder and were romping through the snow and destroying evidence because it took the police almost an hour to get there after the initial call.
So you know, they want to pick up the ground and they suspect that it's to see a striker, and so they, you know, ask her leading questions, and you know, she gets very upset with them, and you know, they forget exactly how it went, but something about her shoes and the boys upon the heel prints, and then she basically went ballistic and went to her closet and said, hey, I wrecked my shoes looking for him, and here they are, and if you want, you know, you want to arrest
me because of my shoes or something to that effect. Anyway, they both backed off. She was very bold and and that was her style and and I guess the best way to describe her would be she was an alpha female and she ran the roost at her home and the same seemed to be true when she dealt with the police and the prosecutors. She wasn't real forthwith and so she had to be their prime suspect. And the husband wasn't rolled out either, but he just sat there and allowed Lucia to concoct her story.
You talk about her defensiveness, but she was very aggressive, I mean from my reading of this where she says are you accusing? Twice she said are you accusing me of killing my son? So even clavittter backs off in this because she is so aggressive and defensive, and then other times says things that are just out of context than not necessary in this conversation as well.
Well, I'm trying trying to recall exactly what happened, and it's a it's a little bit foggy just because it's been a while, but I do know that if Solanie is a small town, and I think it's worth noting that mister Striker, his father owned a tool and die business in town, and you know, hired a good number of local people, so it was well known and had some clout as far as Lucia Striker. When they look into her background, they found find out that she comes
from a rather wealthy family. Her father, who is a Prussian immigrant, made good at Cadillac as an engineer and had a mansion on a lake, I think it was called Scott Lake around Mount Pleasant, and so a newspaperman went up there to interview him and it was quickly robuffed and knowing certain terms was sold. Never come back,
I'll set the dogs on you. So Lucia came from a very autocratic family and she did not get along with her father at all, and so it's probably because she was very much the same way, and she saw how her father dealt with people, and that's how she dealt with people. And she was backed into a corner. And she was a fan of true crime magazines and quite a few of those were, you know, laying around
the house. So she had a basic knowledge of investigative techniques and alibis and you know a whole lot of things that she's read in these magazines that are coming in very handy for her now, because she was able to withstand every interrogation that she went through, and she and her husband went through many. The first week it was eyes them together and she did the talking. After the first week it was eyes separately. But they seemed
to know what the answers were back and forth. That's how well rehearsed they were.
So you mentioned this journalist Harrington, and he went to see the grandparents of Richie and very Richie worked for the Cadillac Motor Corporation. But also when the two grandparents were there. Missus Mueller cries out, at last, she's done it.
She's done it. Before the officer could ask who was or the journalist could ask who we should be referring to, mister Mueller entered the room as you write, and said and ordered his wife to shut her mouth, and then ordered this Harrington journalist to leave the property, already sick his dogs on him.
Yeah, yeah, So you know, I think that there's no shortage of circumstantial evidence, and it's all pointing in the same direction. And yet the police and by extension the prosecutor seemed to be reluctant to charge her with murder. And you know, it's hard to understand why.
Now there was another character, and a very very important character, a local attorney who also has an office on Huron Avenue or Heroon Street. Pardon me, this is his name. His name is Clinton LaForge. So give us a little background on Clinton LaForge and his relationship or connection pardon me to Lucia.
Clinton LaForge was the son of a frontier family, one of the original families that came and settled at Farmland, and his family was wealthy enough to send him to college. So he went to I believe it was the Detroit School of Law or something like that. Eventually it became University of Detroit and Clinton barely made it through to get his law degree, but he did, and he was a very good lawyer. But he wasn't that interested in farming per se, and I think he must have considered
himself like a man about town. Now, he did have a wife, but she was stuck in, you know, their farm home of probably five miles out of town. In Clinton's office was here on Street, so he had a lot of time on his hands, and apparently he was having an affair with Lucia, and as the police were able to discern later that, in full knowledge of the husband and checking out the husband, he was also out
with some of the women in town. So this became a very sordid affair, and it should have been investigated, I think, much more vigorously. You know, everybody denies that there was an affair, but there were people who had seen them together and heard Lucia talking about it, and so there is a feeling that Clinton LaForge may have been in the apartment when Richie got home, and that Richie may have seen something that he shouldn't have seen and there was no way for him to unsee it,
and he was probably something dire happened to him. Now that's a theory also, But there are people in the neighborhood. There were was a group of several different women and I wrote him down here Missus Danike, Missus Horn, and Missus Freeman, who were neighbors, and they sent a letter to the prosecutor prosecutor rap and they said, yes, he was in the house with Lucia at the time. Now that's a letter. It's like hearsay. Evidence doesn't stand up
in court. But so it was not only the police, but it was people in the neighborhood, people who knew Lucia in particular as a very volatile vein maybe narcissistic personality. And again, the pieces of the puzzle seem to be fitting together. So there's got to be a caveat somewhere. And she concocts a number of theories of who could be guilty, but there's one in particular that she uses as a scapegoat, and she hangs her freedom on that that guy.
Before we get to Fred Leyton, who's the manager of a hatchery on hereon as well, and then the stories that were through the investigation of why this he could be a possible suspect. But Lucia is the one that floats his name almost immediately in this or shortly after, and then tells them as well later about something about following footsteps to the hatchery, which is something she didn't
say initially to police. But let's talk a story, right, Let's talk about the questioning, the further questioning by police because they suspect that Lucia has something to do with this, is involved some way, so they at the time. And then while as I mentioned before this interview, it's interesting to see the birth of polygraph and trucerum and use in courts. So tell us about the use of polygraphs, and Lucia Richard and Clinton LaForge tell us about that.
Well, the polygraph was a new invention, and I do explain rudimentary terms how it works. But she was given a polygraph test and asked some pointed questions and she passes the test. And then they put her husband on there and he passes the test, but not both of them, not in one hundred percent fashion. And because the analysis of the data is everything in a polygraph test, they were not able to establish clearly guilt by either party. And Clinton LaForge had to go in and also take
the same test. And it wasn't just one test, it was three tests, you know, given over a period of time, so it took most of the day, and you know, they tried to trip you up on the questions in the second test and so on and so forth. And although Clinton didn't come out as good as the strikers, as far as the analysis went, he did not have there was nothing damning that they they could detect from
his polygraph as well. So all three of them, you know, were able to convince the the data that the evaluator had that they were innocent. So it was in the early days the polygraph, and I'm sure that it got the procedure got better with time, but also with time it became clear that there's no corollary physiological corollary between what goes on and a person's mind and what goes on with your respiration and your heartbeat and your the
different things that they would would test. And the United States Supreme Court basically has ruled against polygraphs as being useless. But it was an attempt to come up and use technology, full proof technology, and even from the get go, I think they discovered that it was not full proof. So that went nowhere, but it just became a part of the body of circumstantial evidence that that made the police hesitant because they felt if there was a good defense attorney,
they needed a smoking gun. They needed some hard, fast, evident and so far they have hearsay accounts and not not much more.
You also talk about that the investigators thought that Clinton LaForge may have known more and been able to offer more information. So that's all the basically of the conclusion that they had. But they tried to pin him down to an alibi, and he had a series of witnesses that he provided instantly, you know, the blacksmith, the tin man, various people that he said they were at his office, and he said he was in his law office that afternoon until about six thirty, and that he had witnesses.
He said that we're there at five, five thirty, almost six. He had all these names ready. Then he said he went to dinner, and then he said these people were witnessed at the Continental Inn where I went and I met this person for supper. So all of those things seemed to.
A couple of policemen too. At the Continental end, a couple of policemen were there and gave him an alibi, so he couldn't have, you know, taking the body and taking it and put it under the bridge. On the other hand, it seems like he's the only one with any answers. He's a lawyer, and he has it all lined up being being bang with these people. So I don't know if they're the most most reliable, but but yeah, he had what appeared to police to be an airtight alibi and despite.
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That's Friends without the R Best Fiends. I was sorry to interrupt you, Gregory, but we were just talking about the case so far, and it looked like Clinton LaForge had access to information. It looked because he was a divorce lawyer at one time for Lucia and where they
dropped that divorce apparently, and Richard and her reconciled. But also, which was what we didn't mention, is that the day after, the day after the boy was missing, at her request, Clinton LaForge cleaned everything out of that room, all the toys and everything from Richie's room. Isn't that correct?
And then that's very curious because when that became known, there were you know, women in the neighborhood who said, you know that it's very odd because you would think she would want to keep those as momentous of her son. But of course you flip that over and the reminders of you know, this this ghastly murder, and which one, which one is it? And so he you know, she says, yeah, Clinton LaForge did remove my son's toys, and and it
was like the day after. And you know why if that was a problem, why didn't the husband do it? Why Clinton the Forge? So there seemed to be somew
of complicity there. And it wasn't long after that, you know, the police were, you know, closing in on Lucy about her affair with Clinton LaForge, and they inadvertently, the police inadvertently say well, Clinton LaForge is going around town implicating you in the murder, and she just turns on a dime, and she says a lot of unflattering things about Clinton la Forge and what a you know, terrible human being he is, and you know, he's unreliable and I haven't
talked to that man, and you know since you know, nineteen twenty eight and all kinds of you know, fascion, false information, and the police at least had struck a nerve with her. So that indicates, I think to any buddy above the age of thirteen years old, that these people had a you know, a romantic relationship with one another, because you don't have that sort of ire, you know, for a person that you're indifferent to.
You talk about March fifteenth, nineteen thirty five, article about the case hits hits the stands and then Michigan State Police Captain Donald Leonard and his partner, Sergeant Hudson, interview Gerard Young. And this guy's thirteen years old, and we talked about him. He's the kid that was playing with Richie. I really didn't know him. When they talked to me, he said, well, I didn't really know the guy. We were just sledding together. So they asked him questions like
did he say this, did he say that? But the important thing about what he did say was with he gave a description, and he's the person that said, oh, there was a man that called out in.
An overcoat, an overcoat and a fedora, and he, I believe, thought the man was He recognized the man as Clinton the Forge. But he was the last to play with Richie, the last two as far as we know, to see Richie until whatever happened to him and Clinton la Forge apparently, and I forget what the time, I don't have the in the book open in front of me, but that the timing was very suspicious. But again, it's a kid.
It's a thirteen year old kid, and I think especially you know, going back in those days, you know, kids were to be seen and not heard. And I don't think that the police adequately followed up on this. And of course the Clinton Forge had an alibi, which we've already discussed, and it seems a pretty airtight alibi. So Gerald Young's contribution to the investigation was that it helped
the police tighten up their timeline. And because he knew five point thirty five forty five whenever he had to something he had to do, and he left and Richie's standing out there in the cold, nobody to play with. And you know, so he apparently went back home, but nobody actually saw him go in the house.
So yeah, to be care to that, to be fair, the boy said that the man was far enough away that he couldn't actually see his face. It was like, you made a good description, a description of Lage in general.
Yeah, and you know, it's it's too bad that there aren't more people alive who I could interview. Nobody was alive. I thought, this is a little aside, until after I had first written the book a couple of years ago, and I'm doing a book talk and a guy comes in. His name's Paul Woodside, and he was the boy who walked home with Richie, walked home with him from school. And the man was like eighty six years old or ninety,
I don't know. And he came because he wanted to see me, and he said, yeah, we knew that this terrible thing happened to Richie, but the adults never talked about it, and so we never knew and I never heard. And then I read your book, and you know, he wanted to thank me for writing the book. So a little aside. There are no living history people to talk to about this, because you know, they all were dead, so I had to use police reports, which were spotty.
As far as the Truth Serum report, there was an account of the questions and the answers for Lucia, but not for Clinton LaForge or her husband. So there are lots of holes in the documentation and the story. And the two people from the Upsilony Historical Society that collected all this information took three years and repeatedly to get information and uh, and it's still is very spotty. H and I put together attacked as much of the information as I could find, uh into this volume and uh
and the story is really very thick with details. But again, UH, you're you're left with the feeling that there was nobody left in this world to stand up for Ritchie. And that's what makes this story so poignant.
Before we talk about Lucia and and Fred Layton, as we'd mentioned before the break and his and he's the owner of the manager of the hatchery down the street, and and why Lucia would point in how she points to Layton. But there's a very fascinating psychic that comes into this story, and unlike many other stories involving a psychic and the police utilizing or at least considering what the psychic has to say, or the vision that they have is that there's more to this psychic story than usual.
Tell us about this Missus Gordon.
Yeah, missus Brad Gordon, and that's all she's known by in the in the documentation, the police support of this. What is not unusual is that she contacted the police offering to help solve the case. And right, that's that's pretty common. And she thinks that she might be able to get enough from Lucia's unconscious mind implicator and the chiefs not to throw about doing this, but you know, the consensus is what we have to lose, and what they had to lose was fifty bucks because she wasn't
doing anything until she got paid. So you know, they paid her fifty dollars and then Lucia. And this is even hard to talk about because this is like of a scam within a scam, the whole story of Gordon. So you know, how do you get Lucy. I'm going to try to approach it differently. How do you get Lucia to see this this psychic Missus Gordon and I think it was a friend of hers gave her the name.
That was her right the alibi later, but so, you know, Lucia goes with the and that's the police who ask her if she would see a psychic and she says, well, you know, I don't have a transportation or time or one thing or anyway, they talk her into it, and I think, you know, she's probably thinking, oh boy, I've got the police hooked now. And so they bring her to the psychic and the police can't be in there,
just Lucia and Gordon. And then it takes forty five minutes an hour or something, and finally Lucia comes out and she's all upset and emotional and crying and you know, making a big show and take me home, Take me home, right now, take me home. And you know, so they do,
and you know, they try to find the story. You know, they asked Lucio of the interrogator after she calms down, and she concoct this whole alibi that it was Fred Lighton, who worked at the egg and chickatchery, which was half a block down the street from where they where the Strikers lived. The Strikers, the hatchery, the Huron River and then the bridge is on the other side of the river, so you know, she has a whole alibi worked out that Fred Layton was the killer. And this is the
kind of back by the psychic. Well, the police decide that they want to go out and question the psychic a day or two later, and when they approached the house, they know that Lucia Striker is there, you know, and meaning I mean they're scheming together, you know. So that whole thing was proved to be a scam and the police now see that you know, Lucy is trying to not only concoct an alibi, but to involve other people in it, you know, into what would you know, be
a conspiracy. So and that didn't work out, and then Gordon just basically she disappeared every time the police went looking for the neighbors that say, oh, she went shop and she'll be back in you know, five o'clock when you know the return bus comes in. And this was not in Ipsil any by the way, This was a psychic in Taylor, Michigan, which is about eighteen miles east
of Ipsey. And as it turns out, Missus Gordon and Lucia Striker basically her friends and they were trying to work out, you know, kind of a scam and Gordon's incentive in all this was a possible job because Lucia was trying to get ten thousand dollars so she could open a bar with a man that she was involved with, you know, to take her away from all this misery. You know, So she was trying to scam together ten thousand dollars. But that's an aside story that I can't speak authoritatively on.
It was interesting how much credence the police had with the psychic initially though in fact bringing this is one of the most bizarre elements of this book is that because she had a vision again because she said it was independent, she came and said, well, I had this vision of this man at the hatchery and you know, Rich was in there and he discovered some baby chicks
and they didn't like that. So she had this whole vision and so when the police said, okay, you have a vision, they took her to Fred Layton under police escort to look at him. And what does she conclude?
That's the man, that's the man in my vision, and they put him Fred Lighten under interrogation several times, and every time they came out more convinced that he was innocent. But they were playing the game too, because they figured they could catch Lucia up in this story, you know. And and then once they broke through that that cast iron armor that she seemed to have, that that she'd fall fall apart like a house of cards. And it's
if it wasn't so tragic, it would be laughable. How hard Lucia tried to implicate this innocent man and she didn't. And then she even will to say that for a little bit later, but she got to a point where she was even ready to eliminate him herself. And of course then he she could say he was guilty, and you know whatever, but she put all her eggs in that that bath.
M let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop for these messages.
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Now you talk about Lucia and she just seems to be a very desperate person. And then another character comes because you would alluded to this, maybe she can help the police get the information that will let them allow them to arrest this latent person. So there's a neighbor of Lucia's name Francis Weimer. Now, so what does she do? What does she think she knows? And then what's the
plan with their friend? And the police realize that they're watching Lucia's home and so they end up talking to her as well.
Francis Squeamer was about the weeks and the months we are on Francis was just about the only person who would ever go to the Striker's apartment. So the police follow her home one day and they ask her what her opinion is if she thinks that Lucy is involved, and basically she does, but she's still under the guise
of a friend. And so the police and we are come up with this idea that maybe we can you know, entrap Lucia, and Francis decides to go under cover, and so she becomes a you know, a trader to her friends, just for descriptive purposes. And she's I'm sure convinced that that Lucia is the guilty party, and I think most thinking people will come to that conclusion. So she says that she has a guy, uh who is a gangster phone number of a gangster who is really an undercover policeman,
but she portrays him as a gangster. And so they come up with the idea that we're going to hire these two cops and they're gonna get fred Lytton and you know, kidnap them, put him in a room, beat him up, beat a confession out of them. That's what she's thinking, you know, right out of True crime magazine. So she falls for it, and so she calls a guy called Jack Miller and goes to see him with
Francis too. You know a hotel in Detroit, the Leland Hotel, which is where all of the out of town athletes go, you know, they play the Tigers of the Lions and so on. They go to the Leyland and it was
still a pretty decent hotel in those days. So she goes there and secretly the two women meet with Jack Miller and al hellicker I think it is, And those were the names that they were going under, but they were really two Wayne County Deputy sheriffs who were working on the behalf of the Washington County Sheriff and so Miller just to get the names out there, officer Howard Heinrich and al hellicker I was the officer Alfred E. Ferrell. But of course she doesn't know that. She just knows
she's meeting Jack. They go in the room and then there's this other guy, Al. They all sai at a table and they talk and uh uh. Lucia basically says that there's this man who killed her son and and but he won't admit it, and the police are all over her for it and she's innocent and and uh so Jack Miller is the lead cop. Uh. And there's a dialogue that takes several pages. Uh, but essentially he says, well, how do you know he's guilty? What evidence do you have?
He starts kneedling her, and uh, you know she's defensive and uh, what Jack, you you don't think I'm innocent? Well, you know, I don't know what to say about that, but blah blah blah. You know. She just goes on and on that and Jack keeps you know, after her, but but not not too much, just as far as they know, to scare her away. And they want, uh to know what Lucilla wants done, and that was to kidnap the guy and be a confession, as I've said.
Uh So they go off and h it's several days later, and then there's a second meeting in the same room and so on. Uh and uh, Jack in particular starts telling her, Hey, we.
Talked to this guy. He's uh, he's innocent. He claims he's innocent, and he's got this and how do you know just because you say, we just can't go bump off a guy because you tell us to and you know, like that, and so she knows that, you know, she's
in a little bit of trouble. What she doesn't know, as far as we know, is that there is a microphone underneath the table where they're meeting in this hotel room, and there's a wire that goes under the carpet to the edge of the room and into the room next door, where there's a policeman with a newfangled dictograph machine and one of the first kind of recording devices out there, and it had a cylinder. The recording device had a cylinder that would record for about thirty minutes, and they
were in there for about an hour. So when they changed the one cylinder to put the new one on, there's a little bit of a.
Lapse in the narrative, which unfortunately I never heard, but I got a real sketchy transcript. In fact, I got two different transcripts, and it's amazing how different they are. But at any rate, so here's of an early use of a you know, not a wire tap, I wouldn't call it a wire tap, but using a dictograph recorder
to try and gather incriminating evidence. And as far as we know, she had no idea that she was being recorded, and it was an early use of that technology as well, like what the Truth serum once again makes this case very interesting from that point of view. So basically, at the end of the second meeting, Lucia I think has come to the conclusion that she has no alternatives left. She doesn't want to go back and give herself in. She's rolled that out. She doesn't want to go back
to Ipsiulani at all all. But she does the two men that she was going to hire, you know, that didn't work out, and her friend and her or you know, cops say that's the way we were. You know, we've
had enough, and they leave. Okay, they leave because they go into the other room to see to listen, uh, to hear if somehow Lucia says something incriminating when the police are out of the room, So it's her and Francis Weimer in the room, and Francis is Lucia, maybe you should just, you know, you should just give yourself in and throw yourself on the mercy of the court and h and Lucia just would not budget an inch.
But by this time I think she's very wary and she doesn't reveal herself, you know, on the tape and saying anything incriminating. So, although it's an interesting episode, it really didn't provide any incriminating evidence other than she was determined to get revenge on Fred Fred Lytton. And she even offered said, Jack, give me your gun. You know where is Fred? Is he in a room in this hotel? Give me your gun. I'll shoot him myself. That was incriminating.
But why that didn't result in her arrest, I have no idea.
It's interesting what she does say while they're still tape recording just and Francis says, hey, if you plead insanity, they don't only hold you for a year. And then so Lucia asked only a year, and he says, but but she considers it. She says, after I gained my sanity to have to stand trial and then I'd have to take a wrap anyway, So she says no, late and has to confess we're going to have to pin it on him.
We're going to have to have some way to prove, you know. And and then the police they damn up the Heuron river. Uh, and they're still going on this psychic story that there's a knife buried in the uh in the silt of the Huron River and so on, so they'd lower the level and you know, spend the whole day out there and found nothing. You know. So, I mean it wasn't because the lack of police effort at the crime wasn't solved. It was the lack of expertise and a very very cunning uh antagonists.
Yeah, I think she was real ahead of her time. You also, well, we didn't mention that when she was a true crime boff, and so was her friend Francis. But the book that investigators found or they saw, they didn't get to examine it, but they looked at it, and the title of the book was the perfect crime. Yeah,
just more circumstantial evidence. Also, the investigators when she was spinning this tale along with Francis about the the gun, the police investigators posing as gangsters were pushing her to say, well, if you know where the knife is, then why don't you tell us where the knife is apparently was buried on the riverbank. They pushed very hard in this regard, didn't they.
Yes, they did, And of course she came up with excuses and it's not coming to mind what they were but you know, she seemed to have an answer for everything, enough of an answer, even if you know, if it was a half truth, that's the best, you know, because it cast some shadow of doubt. And she was a very shrewd woman and educated in what we didn't talk about.
And if I could really take a minute to talk about her background, she was a phys ed student at Eastern Michigan before she got pregnant and dropped out, and she had taken anatomy classes. And when the autopsy reports came out and you had the four stablings in the chest, well one of them nicked a rib and that one was not the fatal blow, but the other three he went straight into the heart. There were no ribs nicked at all. So it was not a frantic, you know,
kind of Alfred Hitchcock psycho murder. It wasn't. It wasn't like that. It was very precise and lethal. So it just perplexed the police, the corner, everybody. And then when it gets to the point of, well, do we have enough circumstantial evidence to arrest her, I think that the prosecutor was ready to do that. I don't know it, but you know, my feeling is that he was just ready to get on with it because it had strung
on for three years. But he had a report and it was like a long report, and I had all of it. It was like sixteen pages, maybe more. And I didn't want to just drop sixteen pages into the book because some of the things were not that particularly compelling and interesting. But I took out information about Lucia and her personality, and it's kind of an armchair psychological evaluation of her and linking her aggression to her Prussian father and her submissive romany Gypsy mother and all this
kind of crazy stuff. And it went on and saying and what about this, and what about that, you know, just knocking down the arguments one after another that the prosecutor would use in court. But I find it myself to be the most interesting part of the book. And it wasn't until I sent the book to the printer in one thing or another, and I was going through my materials and you know, boxing them up, and I came across that letter again. And it is not written
on any kind of police official forms. There's no name attached to the letter, and it's it's a very rambling, unprofessional account. And then it struck me who wrote it, and it had to be that guy who worked for the Ford security department, because Ford had an interest interest in Ipsilani. And so this guy who worked with Harry Bennett's security department for the department, he was lent to the police as an investigator. So this guy may or
may not have been a trained investigator. And by the use of his language and the way that the letter was written and much, you know, much of it is in the book, it was very obvious it was not a police report. I think it was. I'm trying to think what the man's name is, and I will get it here because I wrote it down. But he had to be the person who wrote it. And E. L. Squires his name comes up quite a bit. Squires, and he was investigating the fortune teller in particular, but you know,
he was on every aspect of this case. And I think it's because of his letter that the prosecutor just threw his hands up. He says, I'm done with it. Brakers had moved away from from Ifsilani by then, and uh, they just let it go. Unfortunately, and uh, when he the boy was reburied, he uh, you know, he was the autopsy, there were two of them. Well he had to be reburied, and uh, we don't know what happened,
but there was no headstone, no tombstone for him. And uh, you know, I went to the cemetery in FC and you know, asked them about it, to check their records, and they did and they said there was no record. H They know the where the boy's body uh is buried, you know, according to their their map, but uh, they
didn't know anything about a headstone. Uh so whether there was one when he was originally buried and then he somehow got lost or fell into the hole when they exhumed the boy and reburied him, or if somebody stole stole it and it's sitting somewhere in somebody's basement or in their fatio somewhere. People are strange, they do things like that. And so everybody seemed to have forgotten about
poor little Richard. And it wasn't until one of the docents at the if Slane of Historical Society was having lunch with one of his buds and started telling the story that about this seven year old boy who was found frozen to death under this bridge and the Frog Island Bridge Bridge and that when he was a boy of about seventy eight years old, his father and him were walking past that bridge and his father told them there was a boy murdered under that bridge, and I
don't want you, you know, playing in Frog Island and hanging around the bridge and so on. Cautionary tale. And it stuck in the boy's head until he was a man. And they, you know, they're docents, historical docents, and they said, well, let's see what we have in our files on this boy. Nothing. Well that's not true. They had one obituary in their in their files and that was it. No other newspaper articles, nothing. So these two guys made it their business, their personal project,
to find out everything they could. George rid Hour and Lyle McDermott and I say their names because they should get a call out, and they collected stuff for three years. But George died. He was in real ill health, in a wheelchair and everything. But he was great with working with officialdom because of his Air Force training, so he knew how things worked and got a lot of information.
And he died and had just sat there and I got a call from Lyle and he said, hey, would you be interested in writing the story of Richard Striker. We've got the materials here, but none of us feel like we're up to doing it. And I had written the John Collins book, the Tarrying of Selani book with their help, by the way, and so I felt, you know, really I should do this for George. And it's a legacy project for the town to recover some of their
hidden history. And this is what I found. And I wish I would have had I wish you would have gone to trial, because it would have been maybe a little bit easier to find newspaper accounts and so on.
But I went back and looked, I have a Detroit Free Press subscriptions, So I went back in their archives and I checked everything I could, and the ipsil Ani Press that that ill fated newspaper had been burnt down over the years three times, so they had nothing in the way of you know, old issues to go back
and get information. So I had to rely on state police reports and the letters, the letter from the sense of Take or the letters from the concerned ladies and so on, and frankly that made it for much more interesting reading than I think, you know, some dry police reports because that's what really started to bring the story alive.
It's remarkable how you put this together. I know you mentioned it. It seemed that you didn't have complete but this book seems very seamless. And we're not wanting for any information, only that it would be fascinating to have a trial. But considering all the situation, the circumstances, that can see why it never did go to trial. In the theory by the MSP, the Washingtonaw County Sheriff's Department and yippsul Ani police, what was their overall theory on why Ricky.
Yeah, Richie, you know, I already gave my theory. I don't have any answer collectively for what they were thinking, although it was very obvious that nobody liked dealing with Lucia and they felt like she was a formidable opponent for whatever reasons. But I believe that the people on the street, they thought that Richie came in, caught Lucia and Clinton LaForge, who knows, kissing on the couch something, and because the kid had no impulse control and whatnot.
I think the mother, rather, Lucy had no impulse control. Uh. Frankly, I think she came up and hit the kid and knocked him out. And uh, I think maybe uh, you know, the the uh stabounds to the heart. Uh, those may have been to cover up, you know, a concussion of some kind, you know, to draw the police to to that conclusion. But something happened in that house.
Uh.
And there were only two people there of other than Richie, or at least alleged to be there, his mother and Clinton LaForge. And the interesting excuse me, the thing about Clinton LaForge is, you know, he was not a very good lawyer. He was a kook in his own way. He collected Indian arrowheads and different things, and that's not kooky. Uh. But and if Silani, a lot of Indian tribes gathered there and gis prehistory, and so Indian artifacts could be
found in the farms. The farmers would dig him up when they plow and so on, and so he fashioned himself to be an expert in Indian affairs, and he wasn't. But he got to speak at the kawanist glob and the eagles glub and the different things. He had a headdress and all kinds of stuff like that. But later in life, you know, he had he had this farm, uh, and he leased the farm out because he didn't care for farm work. He was like a gentleman farmer by then,
and quit practicing law. Uh, and he became a wood worker, and uh he would cut timber. Uh and he probably did it commercially and for his own use as well. But they had a a federal truck. It was a brand truck, and it was hooked up to the axle this saw sawmill a huge, huge blade, and the pulley was hooked up to the saw and then to the the wheel of the drive wheel of the car. And uh, you know, spun the blade around and you know, he cut wood, maple, oak, all these different kinds of woods, uh,
furniture typeoids and so on. And while he's doing that, uh, the saw kicks back, pushing some wid through, and it kicks back, and it throws the wood into his chest and kills him false dead. And his wife, you know, about an hour or so later, you know, she hears this saw. It keeps running and running. And he'd never leave it running like that, you know, burning all that gas up and so on. He'd you know, use it and then turn it off. And and it was running
and running, and and she could hear it. The saw was about one hundred yards from the house, and and he was supposed to come in for dinner. And she goes out there and she finds him dad laying there in a heap. So that was an interesting end. And the other two died of natural causes. The Strikers died of natural causes. But all those years and nobody ever thought to put a headstone on their boys grave or to go visit the boys grave. That's curious.
Also, Yeah, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about the Richard Striker Junior murder, Ypsilante's Deepot Depot Town mystery. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Gregory for coming on and talking about this amazing story.
Well, well, I really appreciate it. And you know, it's been a couple of years, a few years since I read it, so I need to reread it again. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I hope your your listeners, you know, can put all the salient parts together. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. Dan.
Absolutely. Is there a website or a Facebook page that people might take a look at for other work?
Yeah, my web page is Gregory a foreigner and that's fo you are Ni e er or Gregory a foreign your if you like you all of that, and dot com will take you to my author page and uh my other books. I've got four books and uh uh I've got a project going uh uh now, so uh you know, check me out and uh uh if you like what you see, uh thereby buttons.
Okay, thank you so much. You have a great evening.
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