MUSKEGON, MI - It will go down in history as one of the Muskegon area's most tragic cases: the Thanksgiving Day foundry-ladle deaths of two young boys at the hands of their mentally ill father.

It happened 30 years ago today, on Nov. 26, 1987, at a Norton Shores foundry. Bartley James Dobben, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, placed his two sons in the ladle and turned on the gas burners.

The children's deaths came mercifully quickly, according to the coroner who said they suffocated in the heat that climbed to 1,200 degrees. But it took nearly two years to bring Dobben to trial as he was found mentally competent, incompetent and then competent again.

The conversation about what led to the boys' deaths lingered long after as Dobben's family worked to provide education about their struggles to keep him on his medication and away from the fanatical religious beliefs that consumed him.

Today, Dobben, 56, is serving two life sentences in the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility, a low-security-level facility in Ionia where he's an "exemplary inmate," according to his brother, Bruce Dobben.

"Once medicated, the affects of my brothers schizophrenia are non-existent," Bruce Dobben said in an email.

Mental illness

It was just before 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day when Dobben swung into his workplace at Cannon-Muskegon Corp. on Lincoln Street in Norton Shores. His pregnant wife, Susan, and sons Bartley Joel Dobben, 2, and Peter David Dobben, 15 months, were in the car with him.

He needed to retrieve his Bible, Dobben told his wife, and brought the kids with him, saying he wanted to give them a tour of where their father had worked for nine years.

Once inside, he placed the toddlers inside a transfer ladle, suspended by cables and about 7 feet wide, that was used to move molten metals inside the foundry. And then he turned on the burners.

Afterward, he walked up to a security guard and told him "My kids are in the furnace," according to a Norton Shores Police report. When asked if they fell in, Dobben responded, "No I put them in and lit it."

Dobben and his wife had been having marital problems, brought on by his illness that had been diagnosed about a year earlier and his refusal to take his medications. Brett Gardner, Muskegon County's chief assistant prosecutor at the time, would later argue that Dobben had planned the murders as a way to get back at his wife.

Following the deaths, Dobben was taken to the state's Center for Forensic Psychiatry and was found by psychiatrists to be competent to stand trial. That ruling was reversed in April 1988. It was reversed again in August 1988 and his trial was set for May 1989.

The trial

During the nine-day trial, defense attorney Terry Nolan argued that Dobben should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Co-workers had said he was a religious fanatic that carried his Bible with him at work. His family said his "fanatical" religious rantings disrupted family gatherings and contact with him had been cut off several months before the children's deaths.

Dobben's mother, Marialyce Dobben, said he had been doing well, staying on his medications, until he became involved with the Emmanuel Fellowship, a small religious group led by Rood Vaughan.

Vaughan, according to later testimony, urged Dobben not to take his medication, and when that occurred Dobben would become obsessively religious. Vaughan would speak on Dobben's behalf at court hearings where he at times was disruptive.

It was Vaughan who put the the idea of "soul-cleansing by fire" into Dobben's head, Bruce Dobben said.

He remains angry than Bartley Dobben's desire for a bench trial, presumably before a judge better equipped to understand the insanity defense, wasn't realized.

"My brother is a good man, unjustly tried by a jury when a bench trial was requested," Bruce Dobben said. "Few lay-people are aware of the life that a person suffering with any mental illness lives. That is why a bench trial was requested."

Following a nine-day trial, a jury on May 17, 1989, found Dobben guilty of first-degree murder but mentally ill, meaning he would be imprisoned for life without parole, but also required to receive treatment for his illness while incarcerated.

He was sentenced on May 23, 1989.

Aftermath

The Dobben case prompted debate about the state's insanity defense law. If Dobben was found not guilty by reason of insanity, he would have been required to spend a minimum of 60 days in the state's Center for Forensic Psychiatry and until psychiatrists determined that he no longer suffered from mental illness.

There were calls for a life-time parole-like system to assure the person takes necessary medications, and to increase the amount of time the individual would be required to be under direct supervision of the Center for Forensic Psychiatry.

In August 1989, Susan Dobben and Marialyce Dobben appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to present his story and push for better understanding and treatment of mental illness. Marialyce and her husband, David J. Dobben, became advocates for families of those with mental illness and were members of the State Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

David J. Dobben died in 1992. At first supportive of her husband, Susan Dobben, who had given birth to another son, eventually divorced him in 1992.

And in 1992, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld Dobben's two first-degree murder convictions.