Brutal murders, uncertain justice shake quiet U.P. town

MANISTIQUE — The trees were just beginning to bud the night they dumped the bodies. The long, gravel road in the woods near the Hiawatha National Forest in Michigan's Upper Peninsula was muddy with an April thaw, causing deep ruts. The killers worried they were leaving tire tracks.

The 2000 Oldsmobile Bravada was almost too small to handle its cargo — a dead man and dead woman in the back seat, another woman's body wedged behind that seat. Plus two 10-gallon cans of gasoline and a box of road flares.

The explosion lit up the dark sky, the killers would later recall. But there was no one to see it except them.

The SUV and the bodies were still smoldering the next afternoon when a local family came upon it while out for a drive and called police.

The victims, authorities were able to determine, were two local sisters and the older sister's boyfriend.

Within days, three Manistique area residents were arrested and charged with murder.

At the heart of the killings was a tale of drugs, sex and betrayal.

The case seemed solid. Police had confessions from two of the suspects, who both named the third as the mastermind behind the killings

But within months, the story of what happened that April night would take a dramatic turn, after one of the suspects died in jail, and a new confession emerged. And a young, inexperienced prosecutor would face allegations that he mishandled the case after he cut a plea deal with one of the remaining defendants, a move that outraged the victims' families.

'Everybody is mad up here'

The killings horrified residents in this remote, pristine community on the shores of Lake Michigan in the Upper Peninsula.

Schoolcraft County, population 8,100, is known for its superb hunting and fishing, its blue lakes and long snow mobile trails. It's a place where people from big cities spend quiet summer vacations and families move for a simpler life. Its largest city is Manistique, a tiny town of 3,010, without a Walmart or a McDonald's. The nearest traffic light is more than 50 miles away.

As details of the killings began to leak out, the initial shock turned into outrage. One of the victims was smothered with a plastic bag taped over his head, his hands tied behind his back, as his killer smoked cocaine and watched him die. The two sisters were shot up with drugs before being strangled, a kind of "last meal" for the condemned, the same killer would later brag.

"I was shocked," said Michigan State Police Lt. Tim Sholander, one of the investigators.

Sholander, who grew up in Schoolcraft County and heads a drug task force based in Marquette, has seen his fair share of crime, but nothing like this. While there has been a sharp increase in drug use in the tiny towns of the UP in recent years, he said, this was a new level of violence.

"It shows the mind-set of the people involved."

The police investigation, several hundred pages long, paints a picture of desperate lives — even among the splendor of a national forest and relative peace of a small, sleepy town -- of drug addicts living from one fix to the next, and dealers willing to kill if crossed. This report is based on those records, along with court documents and interviews.

If the killings brought into focus the growing drug problem in this quiet community, it also put its young prosecutor on the hot seat and is now threatening his fledgling career.

Timothy Noble, 39, is an affable man with an easy smile. A former Manistique City Council member, and the father of five, Noble was appointed as the Schoolcraft County prosecutor in 2011, just months out of law school, then elected unopposed to a four-year term.

A one-man office, Noble has never tried a murder case, and has declined to comment on the case, saying there are matters pending.. And he has declined to discuss his decision to allow one of the accused killers to plead to a much lesser crime -- amid growing criticism in a town where some think he was too green to tackle the most violent crime in the county's history.

Noble could have sought help from the MIchigan Attorney General's Office, which sends in seasoned trial attorneys to help prosecute complicated or violent crimes in rural counties with limited resources.

"We routinely provide advice and assistance to local prosecutors whenever they request such help," said Andrea Bitely, communications director for Attorney General Bill Schuette, in an email to the Free Press. "We very frequently take over difficult and complex cases whenever the local prosecutor asks for our assistance. We are also glad to partner with the local prosecutor on complex and difficult cases when they ask. We have several veteran prosecutors who have a great deal of experience on difficult homicide, sexual assault and other specialized cases."

"To the best of our knowledge, there was no formal request for assistance from Schoolcraft County..." she said.

Noble's decision to handle the case on his own infuriated the victims' families.

"He doesn't know what he's doing," said Rob Hutchinson, brother of the man smothered with the plastic bag. "Everybody is real mad up here."

A quiet but menacing man

Kenneth Brunke was a loner, divorced, with a history of depression and suicide threats, when he moved to Manistique from Illinois sometime in 2011. The 46-year-old lived alone in a large, rambling tri-level home on rural Kendall Road and worked as a seasonal employee for the Schoolcraft Road Commission.

His real money, police say, came from drug sales, with Brunke operating a narcotics ring that supplied local residents with cocaine and morphine. He was a quiet but menacing man, witnesses would later tell police, a man who kept an arsenal of guns, and made it known that he would not be crossed.

"I know what kind of guy this is, I know he's got a lot of guns in his house," one witness told police in the days after the killing as they began to focus their investigation on him. "When you go over there, you should make sure your bases are covered."

Sometime in early spring, Brunke heard about a young woman in nearby Germfask Township. Heather Aldrich, 25, was vivacious and pretty, a woman who had not lost her looks, despite 10 years of drug addiction. While she had used heroin, marijuana and alcohol, her drug of choice that March and April were morphine and cocaine. Brunke had plenty of that on hand. He put out the word he'd like to meet her.

There had been stretches when Aldrich thought she was going to make it. Hooked on drugs in her early teens in rural Newberry by a boyfriend who introduced her to the needle, she dropped out of school and began to have babies, five in all.

But along the way, she got her GED and, for a while, held a job at a local casino. She signed up for online university courses.

Her Facebook page shows a yearning for a life without drugs, big plans to move downstate, a young woman, excited on a Saturday night to be dressed up and going out on the town. She hoped someday to see her children again, all whom were adopted out to other families.

But she always came back to the needle.

"She would come home to me, sometimes, mostly to rest," said her mother Kellie Roll, 51, at her small home in Germfask Township. "I would fix her something to eat, and she'd stay awhile, but then she'd be gone," Roll said. "Look, my daughter was an addict. It was a sickness."

Brunke's neighbor, and the man selling Brunke's drugs on the street for him, Garry Cordell, a 46-year-old ex-con and addict himself, knew Aldrich and introduced her to Brunke.

Brunke, socially awkward, was immediately smitten by the woman with the long hair. And Aldrich, who sometimes slept in her car, or at a cheap motel where she traded sex for money, suddenly found herself with a free supply of drugs and a place to stay.

The relationship was strained from the beginning, with Brunke anxious for it to develop into something "romantic." But Aldrich would disappear for days at a time, only to return for more drugs. Brunke was growing frustrated.

And there was growing tension from another source.

Cordell, who was at Brunke's house almost daily, would later tell police he was not happy that Brunke, whom he referred to as "my dude," had fallen for Aldrich and was keeping her supplied with free drugs.

"I encouraged him not to have Heather at his house, to only treat her the way she wants to be treated, but he never took my advice and let her come to his house and they began to see each other on a regular basis," Cordell would later say.

Brunke grew even more upset when Cordell pointed out a new Facebook posting by Aldrich, announcing she was involved with another man.

"He saw that on Facebook, and he was f-----g madder than f---," Cordell would later tell police.

The jealousy grew. Aldrich would later tell a friend that one day in early April she came home and found Brunke with a handgun to his head. He then pointed it at her and she left the room.

But she stayed for the drugs.

On April 14, Brunke had given her a large quantity of cocaine, and she drove out to River Road, a rural county gravel lane surrounded by forest, with a male friend to share it. As they sat shooting up, Brunke happened by in Schoolcraft Road Commission truck and glared at them. Aldrich's friend would later tell police he was certain Brunke had seen what they had been doing.

The next day Aldrich, stopped by Brunke's house while he was at work for the road commission, and discovered he had hidden a large stash of cocaine in a PVC pipe buried in his backyard. The pipe was barely concealed beneath pine needles and Aldrich spotted it immediately. She drove back out to the spot on River Road with two friends, and shot up the drugs.

Within hours, Brunke was texting her with a tantalizing message - there is free morphine on my computer desk, come by and get it. "It sounds like he was baiting her to be honest with you," said one of her friends with her when the text came through..

Aldrich, panicked about stealing the drugs, and coming down from her high, hid her car at a nearby casino, worried Brunke was looking for her. And she called her sister, Carrie Nelson, 31, and Nelson's boyfriend, Jody Hutchinson, 42, and they all eventually met up in Germfask, at Aldrich's mother's house.

Above: Heather Aldrich, 25; Carrie Nelson, 31, and Jody Hutchinson, 42

"She told me she'd taken the drugs, and I said, 'Give them back,'" Kellie Roll recalled her conversation with her youngest daughter."But she was scared."

On April 16, she woke that morning and found that the temptation of free morphine was too great.

Before she hitched a ride with her sister Nelson and Nelson's boyfriend Hutchinson to Brunke's house for the free drugs, Aldrich posted on her Facebook Page a song about the struggles of addiction.

"The needle in my arm,

The thoughts in my head,

What's the matter anyway,

By morning I'll be dead."

It would prove an eerie premonition.

A gruesome discovery

The next day -- April 17 -- in the late afternoon, a Manistique couple and their two sons, 8 and 14, were driving on River Road near where Aldrich and her friends had been shooting up the stolen cocaine a few days before and saw an SUV stopped in the middle of the muddy icy road. As they got closer, they could see that it had been burned. One small wisp of smoke rose through the air.

The four piled out to investigate, peered into the windows and saw what appeared to be two smoldering bodies in the back seat. They fled back to their car and the shaken father dialed 911.

Police arrived and were able to determine there were three bodies in the Oldsmobile Bravado, two in the back seat and one in the cargo area.

The fire had been so fierce it melted the tires off the vehicle. The blackened bodies were still warm and smoking.

The victims were identified as Aldrich, her sister Nelson, and Nelson's boyfriend, Hutchinson. Because of the condition of the bodies, the medical examiner could not determine the cause of death.

Within days of the bodies being discovered, a witness told police she had been with Garry Cordell, Brunke's drug salesman and neighbor, when he threw items belonging to the victims in the Manistique River.

Cordell and his live-in girlfriend, Marietta Carlson, 27, also an addict, were arrested a few days later and both gave detailed confessions, admitting to the killings and implicating Brunke, saying he helped strangle and smother the victims in his own home.

The motive - to punish Aldrich for the theft of the cocaine.

Nelson and Hutchinson had been killed because they'd given Aldrich a ride to Brunke's house and were witnesses.

A few days later, Brunke was arrested in Illinois where he had fled after the killings. While he was in Illinois, investigators said, Brunke replaced the four tires on his car, worried police might match the tires to the ruts found near the smoking SUV.

Conflicting stories

In the beginning, the three defendants told shifting stories of what happened that night. But all agreed that Brunke had lured Aldrich to his house with the promise of free drugs.

Carlson insisted at first that Brunke had strangled Aldrich in his bedroom, while she held Aldrich's legs to keep her from kicking and flailing. She later said it was Cordell, who strangled Aldrich, under orders from Brunke, who couldn't do it himself but wanted her dead because of the theft of the drugs and her Facebook posting about another man. Meanwhile, Brunke, she said, was killing the other two victims, who were tied up in the basement.

Cordell, in a lengthy interview shortly after his arrest, told police that Brunke admitted killing Nelson in the basement, strangling her as she was tied to a pole. Cordell said he was upstairs at the time, but that Brunke provided specific details of his own murderous activity in the basement. "He said it took less than two minutes," to kill Carrie Nelson, Cordell told police.

Brunke, in custody, was interviewed only once by police before he hired an attorney. He admitted that he had been angry that Aldrich, with whom he had been having a relationship, was seeing another man.

"I was upset," he told investigators, "I didn't sleep that night. Someone that I cared about, you know, basically stabbing me."

All three suspects were charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to murder, and kidnapping since the victims had been held against their will in Brunke's home.But he denied that anybody had been harmed in his house, and insisted that he had nothing to do with the killings. "All I know is when those people left my house, they were vertical, they were fine."

Grieving family members braced for a trial. There were plenty. Carrie Nelson had two young sons. Heather, in addition to her five children, had a mother, step father, and brother, Zach. Jody Hutchinson had 5 children, two grandchildren, a mother and four siblings. They were all confident that the numerous statements made by the defendants would ensure convictions.

They would be deeply disappointed.

A jailhouse death and new confession

Marietta Carlson had been in the Schoolcraft County jail for 47 days, awaiting trial on three counts in the murders of Heather Aldrich, Carrie Nelson and Jody Hutchinson, when she woke up June 16, and complained of stomach pain. After a jail nurse examined her, she was taken to Schoolcraft Memorial Hospital.

Doctors initially thought she had gallbladder problems, but as her condition deteriorated, they prepared to send her by helicopter to a hospital in Marquette. She never got on the helicopter and died early the next day. An autopsy found that she had an inflamed heart, possibly because of 10 years of drug abuse.

Her statements to police about what happened in Brunke's house the night of April 16 had been crucial to the prosecutor's case. But they were inadmissible in court, since they were not under oath, and she could not be cross examined.

So now the prosecutor was down to two defendants, but with enough evidence to proceed to trial.

The two men were being held in separate jails, Cordell in Schoolcraft County Jail, and Brunke in Chippewa County jail. Both men began to explore insanity defenses and after their attorneys filed motions, were ordered to undergo psychological exams at the state's Forensic Center. Both ended up there on the same day Sept. 11. It's unclear from records whether their paths crossed while at the center.

But three weeks later, Cordell, to the astonishment of investigators, suddenly changed his story. In what was to be his fifth confession to police, he now said Brunke was not in the house at the time of the killings, and that he and Carlson had committed the murders.

He said the two women arrived at the house, looking for morphine, and that he forced the two women into the basement at gunpoint as Hutchinson waited outside in the car. He tied the women up, then invited Hutchinson in. In the basement, Hutchinson pulled a small knife and Cordell disarmed him, then tied him up.

"Jody was the first person to die," Cordell said in his written statement, dated Sept. 29. "I placed a bag over his head and duct taped it around his neck at which time he told me he couldn't breathe, and I said, 'no kidding, dummy.' "

He then strangled Nelson, he said. Carlson choked Aldrich to death.

Brunke arrived home from work a short time later, Cordell said. "Once talking to me and finding out that I killed all three of them and that we need to get rid of them, he is really mad at me…" Cordell said in his statement.

His reason for the triple homicide? His dismay at Alrldich's theft of the drugs from his friend Brunke, and his suspicion that all three victims were working with undercover drug enforcement officers, a claim law enforcement dismissed as ludicrous.

Cordell continued. The three loaded up the bodies into Hutchinson's SUV, then Brunke drove it into the forest, with Carlson and Cordell following in Brunke's car. Once far enough off the main roads, they stopped and doused the SUV with gasoline. Brunke, Cordell said, threw a flare into the car "and it exploded into flames."

'One man shall die so that the other may live'

The prosecutor, who has declined to discuss the case with the Free Press, called all the victims' family members together in early October to say he didn't think he could make the murder charges stick against Brunke without Marietta Carlson's statements and in light of Cordell's new confession. The murder charges against Brunke were being dropped and he was going to be allowed to plead to obstruction of justice and lying to a police officer, convictions that could have him out of prison in five years or less. In exchange, he was going to testify against Cordell.

"We were all crying," Kellie Roll recalled about the meeting in September. "There was all that evidence. It just didn't make sense."

Some people, including the victims' families, believe Cordell took the fall for Brunke in exchange for cash, or a promise by Brunke to take care of Cordell's elderly mother once Brunke is released from prison in a few years.

Indeed, there is some evidence money Brunke, or someone acting on his behalf, got money to Cordell after Cordell's last confession, exonerating Brunke.

On Oct. 19, moments before Brunke was brought into court to testify against Cordell at Cordell's preliminary exam, the prosecutor heard from a source that Brunke owed Cordell $6,500. When Brunke took the stand Noble asked him about it. Brunke seemed caught off guard by the question, then admitted he owed Cordell the money, but was vague about why, saying Cordell had done chores around his house, including landscaping.It was a peculiar answer, since Brunke's rural home sits on a large lot, unkempt with no sign of landscaping at all. Reporters from the Free Press walked the 3-acre lot in October.

It was also odd because multiple witnesses in the investigation told police that Cordell, unemployed and indigent, often owed money to Brunke, an employed homeowner, and not the other way around.

The debt had been paid by the time Cordell was back in court three weeks later to officially plead guilty to the three murders. When the prosecutor in court asked whether Brunke still owed him money, Cordell said "not anymore."

The prosecutor continued. "What did Mr. Brunke owe you money for?"

Cordell responded, "I don't think that's any of your business."

And then he added, with a slight grin, "One man shall die so that the other may live."

Unresolved questions

Brunke will be in court Jan. 21 when he will be sentenced to prison on the lesser felonies.

According to his October testimony, he arrived home that day to find Cordell and Carlson in his home with the three dead bodies. He said he was in fear of his life, and helped dispose of the bodies in the woods. When asked by the prosecutor why he lied to police, he said, "Because I thought I could get away with something at that point."

The prosecutor then asked, "Did you think you had done something criminal at that point?" And Brunke said "I didn't know but I wanted nothing to do with what happened."

Once facing life in prison, he will likely do less than five years, under sentencing guidelines.

The community was both mesmerized and suspicious about how the case unfolded.

"It's torn this town apart," said Ken, who was drinking at Marley's, a tavern in downtown Manistique, with his friend Dan, and discussing the murders one night in October.

They asked that their last names not be used, worried about antagonizing the prosecutor in this small town, where everybody knows everybody, but also leery of angering any friends Brunke and Cordell might still have in the drug community.

The killings have been the topic du jour at this longtime bar and grill, known for the homemade buns on the hamburgers. The consensus, said Ken, is that Brunke got the deal of a lifetime.

"How is that they can say this guy wasn't involved? There's something going on here," he said. "We're not getting the whole picture."

Out on River Road, where the bodies were burned, the trees are now bare in the late autumn light. It's been eight months since the killings. There is still a faint stain of soot on the road, now almost washed away by rain.

Not long after the killings, the victims' families and friends put up a makeshift memorial at the site, with small crosses and stuffed animals, and balloons, now-deflated. The crosses read, "mother," "sister," "daughter," "dad."

But within days of Cordell's sentencing in November, someone smashed the little shrine, breaking the crosses and destroying the mementos.

"It was where we could all go to remember them," said Kellie Roll. "And now that's gone too."

And they are still faced with one haunting question:

Did someone get away with murder that day?