#359 Guest Host Susan Simpson with Jeff Titus

November seventeenth, nineteen ninety, was the first Saturday of deer season in Michigan. Eager hunters took to the woods, including at the Fulton Game Area near Calabazoo. Around four point thirty that afternoon. Not long before sunset, two gunshots rang out, and not long after that two hunters, Augustus and Jim Bennett, were found dead. A couple of days later, Jeff Titus, whose farm was directly adjacent to the State Game Area, found a shotgun near his property and turned it over

Thanks nice to be here, Jeff.

Before we talk about what happened in November of nineteen ninety, why don't you tell listeners about yourself.

Well, I come from a family of nine kids. I'm the second oldest. There was four boys, a girl and four boys. I started working at a dairy fireman at twelve. While I went to Penfield High School, I played football. I worked on the farm after school, none as summers, and then I went to the Marine Corps.

And as a result of that, you had the honor of serving under the president.

Yes, I was a military policeman in the Marine Corps. I was a White House security guard for a President Nixon. Then I come home. I went to college and met my wife when my future wife and got married in August of seventy nine.

And then you had your two daughters and ended up buying a beautiful old farmhouse on eighty acres in Fulton, Michigan.

The house built in eighteen seventy three, and we went through and totally restored it, and we went through and brass ceilings and ten ceilings. The original windel still had wooden plugs in them. I mean it was old and.

It was directly adjacent to the Fulton Game Area state land where people can go and hunt. So, Jeff, let's go back to November seventeenth, nineteen ninety, the opening Saturday of deer season. You were thirty eight at the time, and I know you're an avid hunter. So where were you hunting that weekend?

I owned the first two days at my house. The third day I left and went hunting at the northern part of Calhoun County, north of Battle Creek, twenty seven miles away.

And your friends Dan Dreschool was with you as well. The two of you hunted on two adjacent farms owned by family friends of yours, the Crandalls and the Shepherds.

Yes, they're next to each other. Crandalls have like fifteen hundred acres. Shepherds have five to seven hundred acres. I think something like that.

So on that Saturday, the day of the murders, you were nearly thirty miles north of your place, around forty five minute drive by car. That was a pretty typical weekend for you in deer season, right.

Well, stand and me would hunt crandalls. He would go to his spot. I would go to Minke and usually we're separated aways and Stan would get deer some year, some years he wouldn't. I always seemed to get him. I mean, I can shoot. And that night at four thirty, I thought I was shooting in the buck, but I hit a dough and went up to the farm, got my truck, come back, loaded it up with sand, and then we left and waved to the farmer and went to burger King to eat, and then went home.

And what did you and stand fine when you got back to your farm.

That night we got back home, I talked to my wife and said we were going out back to take care of a deer. And where my woods was there was all kinds of lights. So I drove over there and I introduced myself and said I was a police officer, which I was for the Veterans Administration, and I said, you know what happened? And they didn't really say much. Later I learned that two people had been shot.

In the Fulton Game area.

Several hunters heard some shots fired, very loud, shots fired in short succession, and when other hunters went to investigate, they discovered two bodies in the woods and both had been shot in the back, fatally by shotgun. The wounds were different because there were different types of shotgun ammunition used on the two men. So it was within the game area, but it was less than one hundred yards from the property line of the back of Jeff Titus's farm.

I offered for them to go on my farm to dry back to the scene, and that's what the ambulance did later that night when they went back to get to bodies. Then I went down to my neighbors and told her what had happened, and that was between eight and nine.

And both their neighbor, Bonnie Huffman and her mother later told police that you'd stop by around eight pm that night and visited with them for about twenty minutes. The police later confirmed that the two victims in the case wereked Augustus from Kalamazoo and Jim Bennett, who lived near Fulton and Leonidas. They had both gone to the Fulton game area that day separately to go deer hunting, and

They were searching for a missing gun, and they said that they were never more than two feet apart walking that whole wood area. Now, the day after that, I walked back. I was checking my traps. I walked over to that area and found the shotgun. I went up, never touched it, went up, called the Sheriff's department. I said, I just found the shotgun back on State Land and I don't know if it's related to what happened or whatever. Then, like I say, I called the press and let them know,

That shotgun turned out to have belonged to Augustus and had moved away from the box bodies fairly close to your property line, actually not on your property, but much closer than the bodies were. And at first the police said, well, we would have found it if it was there, but as later it was determined their actual notes suggest they didn't search the area where you did find the shotgun,

They went to Shepherd's Dairy Farming, Crandles and talk to them. They did this statement they took from Shepherd's. Shepherds signed it and both detectives signed it saying that I was there and never left that night.

So at this point the police knew that they had the owners of the farm where you were at the Shepherds, saying that you'd been there hunting at their farm until a little after sunset when you and Stan packed up and left. They also know that the two victims in the case were killed a little before sunset, around four thirty pm. So at the time that they were killed, you had these alibi witnesses saying that you were there at this farm north of Battle Creek, a forty five minute plus drive away.

And my vehicle was sparked right behind their house, and you cannot leave that house without making noise because they had a crush stone driveway, they would have heard me leave.

Yeah, So on the strength of this alibi, the original detectives where Seema and Dallatt had excluded you as a suspect. Now, there were other suspects in the investigation, including a man who'd run his car into a ditch off the side of the road near the Fulton Game area and the aftermath of the murder, but that lead, along with others,

People would ask me questions about the case where I worked, and I would say this or I would say that, and they would hear it in a way that they wanted to hear it, like I say, And I told them, I said, I didn't do nothing. I was another place hunting and I'm innocent. But these people turned around start calling you better to look at Jeff Titus.

So eight years go by, and then in nineteen ninety eight, the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's Department forms a new cold case unit. They're tasked with looking into some of the area's cold cases, of which there were quite a few. At that time, they had had some initial successes. I think they'd solved around eight cases, and they were very proud of their

I do think that the problem with some cold case units, and particularly this one, is to justify their existence, that they have to not only go back and look at old cases, but they have to purport to solve them. If they go back and say, yep, that one's a toughie, there's really nowhere to go with it, and they do that in case after case, Well, people are going to wonder why are we funding this exercise and futility in

And we'll talk later on about how that tunnel visionality came into play in Jeff's case. But in nineteen ninety nine or so, they decided to reopen the case of the Fulton Game Area deer hunters, and then in two thousand Jeff he received a subpoena and.

Then I went to Kalamazoo talked to them, and then when I got done, they said, well, we got a search one for your house. So they followed me back to my house when I got back there, the bomb squad was there, the FBI was there, the sheriff's department was there, the different police departments were all there, and then each took a section of my barns and houses and rooms and started searching.

And what was some of the evidence, as they put it, that they found on your property.

Had the newspaper articles of when I found the gun, and then my videos of being a marine corpse sniper, my thing on a Gillly suit, the movie Sniper.

Yeah, the movie based on that Tom Clancy.

Novel, right, right, But they know they had that.

As evidence that you were inclined to commit murder, right, Yeah. The cold case team, well, they did a very thorough in some way as investigation. They talked to a lot of people, and I know from following their footsteps and trying to retrace all their interviews just how much ground

See. I had a house that was out in the country. I had no neighbors for a quarter mile each way, and one of the things I said is if you come to my house and break in, I'll be picking up your body parts when I come home because my house was wired, and that was demolitions expert. Well, that didn't go over with people, but I'd never had a break in.

But to clarify, your house was not actually wired, No, no, it was not. When Jacinna and I were investigating your case, we interviewed one of the detectives from the cold case team, Detective Workima, as well as one of the prosecutors, Stu Fitton, and I remember Detective Workima describes something about his investigative technique that he called waking a memory. That's his process of going to a witness, talking to them once, and then going back to them as many as six or

Night, right Monnie Hoffman and her mother both said I was there between eight and nine that night, because it was after the ambulance come to my house that I went down there and I told them what was going on.

However, when the cold case team did their investigation and went back to talk to Bonnie Huffman again and again, they and to awaken a memory, a new one where she said first that she saw you at six fifteen and then that she saw you at five point thirty that afternoon, so very shortly after, within a half hour to an hour of when the murders had happened.

She said, it was just getting dark when I pulled in the yard. Now, if I would have been there at that time, and she said, I stayed like twenty minutes. Then it would have been totally dark.

Right. The deer haunt ends at dusk, when it's too dark to haunt me longer. And that's when the shepherd said you and Stan took off from their place. But the cold case team came up with a theory of their own to account for that. What did they say happened?

Well, they decided that I had this feeling that there was guy's trespassing on my property. I went down there in front of them, shot him, stole their deer, and drove back to Shepherd's and then left with that deer. But now we stopped at Burger King. We had a receipt at six forty five. We left. We called Stan's wife and there is a receipt showing that if it takes me forty minutes to get back there, and then it's another time limit to get down to the Burger King. It don't make sense.

Yeah, the cold case team believed that the original investigators had not adequately vetted your alibi. Their crucial realization was that although you had people who could vouch for the fact you were hunting at the Shepherd's farm, those people couldn't vouch for the fact that they had seen you at the exact moment when the murders happened. Because when you're hunting, you're going into the blind, you're out alone.

Yep, that's what they say, ludicris.

So having done that drive, I would have to agree, But the Cold Case team didn't see it that way. So on December twelfth, two thousand and one, you were arrested and take him to jail where you remain until the trial started the following June. You had an attorney, Bill Fetti. What did he do to help a pair for your case?

He hired a detective whose name was Swabash, and he was supposed to get would the original detectives and have them testify. Well, then you never did that. Then they had asked about other things, and he would make phone calls questioning different things, and that's all I knew.

So the trial began on June twenty sixth, two thousand and two. The prosecutor at trial was Scott Brower. Dave, can you tell us about the trial? How did things go for Jeff?

First of all, he had a lawyer who, charitably I can say is was not very good. By the time that we got involved in the case years later, that lawyer had been disbarred and wasn't particularly cooperative with us. But the biggest problem in the trial was that the lawyer had never contacted detectives Weirsima and Ballot who had cleared Jeff way back in nineteen ninety nineteen ninety one, and so because he hadn't talked to them, he didn't

They said that the Shepherds had dementia, but it was only him, not her. She was sharp as a whip and she could have testified, but she was never called.

But both Shepherds had written out and signed a statement just a few weeks after the killings confirming that Jeff was there, and that statement should have been able to come in through the testimony of the detectives who took it. But again, because Jeff's very poor defense attorney didn't even interview the detectives who had cleared his client in the first place, the jury never heard about any of that.

Cold case team.

So the two guys who had done the initial investigation clearing Jeff were just left out in the wilderness while this train went through the station and in our opinion, went off the rails.

So the only alibi witness the jury heard from and Jeff's defense was Stan, and Stan unfortunately was not the best of witnesses.

Yes, made it worse.

Stan was a very problematic witness. And from the transcript it sounds like, you know, he doesn't want to cooperate, he wants to nitpick questions. And I met Stan on a couple of occasions, and that's just the way he was, That's the way he talked. But I think to the jurors who were there, it comes across like you hiding something. And so it was just a memorably bad alibi witness.

And then of course Jeff's alibi was undermind by Bonnie Huffman's testimony or as Detective Workma would say, her awakened memory that Jeff had been by to see her at around five thirty that day.

Right.

And again that's an area where the defense lawyer's failure to even interview detectives Weirsima and Ballot was fatal, because had he interviewed them, he would have learned that they spoke with Bonnie Huffman and her mother just days after the killings, and that they told the detectives that the conversation with Jeff happened around eight pm, so hours hours

He just let it go. Just a atrocious job.

There was also the prosecution's theory that Jeff had wiped the shot unclean when he found it in the woods. Their story, of course, is that Jeff did not just find it in the woods. Rather, he had taken it from the crime scene after comuting the murders, and then wiped all the finger prints off and then pretended to

No, I think Jeff will admit he's a talker.

And two of the things Jeff was very interested in is hunting, so he often talked about hunting and killing animals, and he often talked about the murders that had happened near his property line and how they remained unsolved. And over the years, in the minds of the cold case team, that became evidence that he'd committed the crime because you know who else but the killer would like to talk

So Bill Fetti, jess attorney, was really just phoning it in apparently. But he did raise one significant issue at trial, something that had it been fully explored by the original investigators might have actually brought this case to a close back in nineteen ninety because there was an alternate suspect in the case.

Yeah, and that's the guy who was seen with his car stuck in a ditch near the game area not long after the shots were heard. It turned out to be the fatal shots that killed Mistersses and mister Bennett.

Right. So, this man was seen with his car stuck in a ditch by a number of people, including a neighbor of Jeff's named Helen Knopf's and her son. When they saw the car stuck there, they'd stopped and offered a call, but he turned them down, saying he didn't need any help and that he'd get his car out somehow. They would describe this man to the police as being nervous and sweaty. The car, they said, was a blue or black hatchback similar to a Chevy Manza, and the

But that was an obvious alternative suspect, somebody who just committed the murders and was driving away at a high rated speed and failed to make a curve and went into the ditch. At trial, Jeff's lawyer had a theory as to who the guy and the ditch might have been, but really didn't have any evidence to back it up, so.

There wasn't much there to sway the jury. Nope, they did deliberate though, for several days.

Finally they come back and said that I was found guilty, and I was in a state of shock. I couldn't believe it. I looked at my family and they couldn't believe it. And then I was gone and taken back to the jail, and then three days later I was in prison. I was sentenced to life in prison with no parole, and I was devastated. I have always been

What did you do while you were in prison? To survive and to pass the time?

I worked as a tutor. First, I had my college degree, so I was teaching people how to do stuff, and I taught basic aged. Then I took a horticulture course, did it in a month and became a tutor. When I left there, I was starting to make greeting cards. I had wildlife cards, which was my fortepe because I loved the outdoors. I made religious ones, I had thinking of use, I had birthday sympathy, but I made all kinds. I would be doing that every day to pass the time.

During that time you were also working on your post conviction appeals. With an attorney named Peter Van Hoague. You filed a habeas petition, which unfortunately was denied by a federal district court and then again in the Sixth Circuit, and then the Michigan Innocence Clinic got involved as well. Dave, how'd you hear about Jeff's case?

When I first heard of the case was in I believe late twenty eleven, possibly very early twenty twelve, when detectives Weirsima and Ballot contacted me and told me that there was a double murder in Kalamazoo County and that the wrong man was in prison, and they knew the wrong man was in prisoned because they had cleared him.

And when Jeff was convicted, they were blown away and they became Jeff's advocates because they knew the wrong man had been convicted.

So of course we started digging into it, and within a fairly short time we decided to take the case. And by the time we took it, we had a third decorated veteran officer on board on our side, Rich Madison, who was a member of the cold case team, and it turns out he was a dissenter and he believed the case against Jeff made no sense, and because he didn't go along, he was actually removed from the Cold

And then there was the matter of Jeff finding the gun, which the prosecution had also brought up a trial.

The prosecution made a big deal about Jeff finding the gun, and they said that there's no way that that gun was there before Jeff found it, because the police had done this grid search. Well, Detective Weirsomuch showed us exactly where the gun was found, exactly where the bodies were found, and it was well more than one hundred feet away, and so the grid search wouldn't have found it.

So just imagine if the jury had been able to hear three different detectives up there, two of them saying that they'd investigated Jeff and cleared him back in nineteen ninety and a third from the cold case unit saying that his team had gotten it wrong.

The impact of that, I think would have been incalculable.

And so we had the evident here hearing in front of the judge, and we presented all three of those decorated police veterans, and yet the judge said no, and his reasoning was that none of it would make a difference because of all of those people at the.

VA Hospital who heard Jeff talk about the crime.

I mean as if, as if the fact that Jeff talked about the crime without actually admitting he did it to all of these people at the VA hospital somehow overcame all of that.

But that was the judge's ruling.

But then in twenty twenty, when I was investigating this case with Sinda and Kevin, we learned of someone who'd actually been a suspect back in nineteen ninety three, a guy named Thomas Dillon from Ohio. Dave, do you remember when I called you about him?

Yeah?

I do. It came completely out of the blue.

You called me and asked if I'd heard of a guy named Thomas Dillon, and I said, no, should I have?

And you proceeded to.

Tell me about his work in Ohio, and I couldn't believe it. I did a search of the transcript of Jeff's trial and confirmed that the name Thomas Dillon had never come up once during his trial.

That's right. Thomas Dillon, as we learned, was a serial killer with a very specific target he hunted hunters. In fact, he'd killed one hunter the week before the Fulton State Game Area shootings, and he'd killed another the week after. He was ultimately convicted in nineteen ninety three of killing five hunters in Ohio, but he was also a suspect in a number of other killings and other states, including

Yeah, it's stunning.

When we saw the side by side comparison of a photo of Dylan after he was arrested with drawings of the man in the ditch, it was a dead ringer.

And here's where things get really weird. In nineteen eighty three, not long after Dylan was arrested, Detective Warsma had actually brought Helen Nos and her son down to Ohio to view a lineup which included Dylan. They were shown the line up separately and told that if they recognized the man from the ditch to write the number of that man down on a piece of paper and hand it over, which they both did, and which Sinda and I learned from those Ohio files is that Helen and her son

And the two guys in the game area were killed with apparently two different types of shotgun ammunition.

I also found some notes showing that after dylan arrest, he'd been bragging to his cellmate Mike Chappelle about his life of crime and the people he'd killed, and he even told him about what he called his double header, where he'd killed two hunters and one event. But when Chappelle told the authorities what Dylan had said to him, they did nothing. One of the reasons for that seems to have been that the FBI had developed a profile that said Dylan would never kill two people at once

So I went to the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's department and searched the entire file for the sson ben At killings, and I spent hours and hours going through it. Very near the end of my search, I found a thin, little manila envelope in the back of one of these giant red ropes.

Somebody written serial killer on.

It, and it had about thirty pages of materials, mostly the materials that we've already discussed, the identification procedures in Ohio in which Nobsiner said picked him out, the borrowed shotguns, the description of the wife's car to.

Sketch, all of that.

But it also had math calculations, and it turns out that that morning of November seventeenth, nineteen ninety, Dylan had gone hunting in Revenna, Ohio, on a piece of private property, and he got a deer that morning, and then he checked out of the game reserve very shortly after noon with his deer. And there were calculations that had been done by the police that purported to show that Dylan couldn't have made it from Revenna to the Fulton Game area in time to kill ss and Bennett late in

Of the police.

So first the cold case detectives concocted a near impossible round trip journey to prove Jeff guilty, and then they came up with an equally ridiculous math equation to clear Thomas Dillon of the murders. So right around the time we started our investigation, there was also a new development in Michigan. The Attorney General created a statewide conviction integrity unit, headed up by a former criminal defense attorney, Robin Frankel.

So I immediately contacted Robin to tell her about two of our cases in particular, and Jess was one of those cases. And then eventually Robin got some investigators, and the investigators started going out and interviewing witnesses, and then they interviewed Jeff himself. So the whole process took years of investigation and patients. But this whole time we had a habeas but pending, and so we agreed with the conviction integer unit to put the habeas on hold while

And then finally in February of twenty twenty.

Three, February sixteenth, the fifteenth was my seventy first birthday. The next day the students I called them and they said, Jeff, we're all together, all three students, as they said they would be. And I said, are you telling me you got good hoops? And they said yes, And then I started bawling like I'm doing now, and I.

Know your release got delayed a few more days. Unfortunately there was an ice storm among other things. But on that Friday morning, the twenty fourth of February.

What finally happened, Well, at ten thirty they said, Jeff, we're here to take you up front. I said, it's happening, and so they took me up front. Twelve o'clock. I walked out. I hugged you, Cinda, I hugged Dave and the other two students that were there, Naomi and Olivia. I was still in a shock that had happened. I mean, even listen to me, I sounded like I was crying.

I should remember that day. And I know that Roy Ballot, one of the original detectives in the case who passed away a year ago, would have been there too if he could have been. But his two sons and his honor made it a point to drive through the ice storm to be there when you came out.

Both of them were there, and they had their dad's badges and their police ID, and they said, here, hold our dad's ID, and they held their badges and we had pictures taken.

So, Jeff, I know it's only been a few weeks now, and I'm sure it's been a whirlwind. What have you been up to you since you've been out.

The past month. I have been organizing my cards to sell them. I have been trying to get some kind of IDs so I can open the bank account, and just trying to get caught up on the things that I need to do to move my life along.

And I know you're loving getting to be outdoors again.

Oh yeah, I've seen as many as fifteen deer in the yard. I've had eight gobblers with great, big long beards. I've kicked up bunny rabbits. I have all kinds of squirrels. I feed the birds. I mean the one day I had fourteen cardinals out there, all males.

So, David, Jeff, what's next? Are there any current projects that you guys are working on, or any Michigan issues that you're hoping to address? Now?

Sure, well, Jeff's case isn't quite over. The prosecution hasn't actually dismissed the case against Jeff, so that needs to happen, and then there may be some issues, the systemic issues that we may have Jeff come in and talk about.

Well, thank you so much for your work on Jeff's case. We'll have a link to the Michigan Innocence Clinic and our bio in case any of our listeners want to help support the great work that you and your students are doing. And now we come to the part of our show called closing arguments. First of all, thank you both for being here. Jeff, it has been an honor to help tell your story, and I'd like to hear from each of you just your final thoughts ending at

Sure?

Well, this is one of the craziest cases that we've

Thank you, and I guess say, it's an honor to be here on this show and to tell me, excuse me, I'm starting to cry again, to tell my story and what happened to me was truly a miscarriage by my defense attorneys, by the cops and so on and so forth, because the stuff was there and it was ignored. I said, I'll take truth serum, I'll take hypnosis. I'll take an

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'm your guest host Susan Simpson. Thanks to executive producers Jason Flahm and Kevin Wardis for inviting me to be here, and thanks also to our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, Leyla Robinson and Jeff Cliburn. The music in this production comes from Free Time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction,