From 1997: The story of Rose Larner, her life and her murder

These three stories on the 1993 murder of Rose Larner were originally published on Feb. 9, 10 and 11 of 1997, several weeks before John Ortiz-Kehoe went on trial for Larner's murder.

Part 1: Who was Rose?

Lansing teen tested the limits

Rose Larner slumbered all day and roamed all night with a rugged band of buddies on the streets of Lansing's southwest side.

Her family called her "The Vampire," a name that fit the wiry 18- year-old l ike her $60 bluejeans.

She was a whirlwind with a hair- trigger temper. Rose traipsed about town doing who-knows-what with who-knows-whom.

She was mouthy and streetwise, fearless and friendly. The boys liked Rose, and she liked them right back.

Diagnosed in her early teens as hyperactive, she stopped moving only to sleep, take three showers a day and talk on the telephone. Rose was a big-hearted pain who craved attention and nearly everyone who knew her knew it.

"She could be a headache and a half," her mother, Rose Markey said. "If she were kidnapped for ransom, the kidnappers would pay me to take her back."

This is the story of Rose Larner's 18 years. A life that ended Dec. 7, 1993, the day police say she was strangled and dismembered, her body burned to hide the homicide.´ Her story is of triumph and trouble. Good and bad. Promise and doubt.

"It's like she was two totally different people," her former step mother Sheryl Larner said. "She wasn't every mother's dream. But she was generous. If you needed anything, she was there."

Rose went to church twice a week, adored children and clicked with old folks. She wanted to be a cop like her uncle Timmy in Wisconsin and liked making tuna-noodle casserole for her two brothers.

"She always had her Bible and she always knew her memory verse when she was little," said Larner, of Bath. "When I said, `Who's going to help me set the table?' Rose was the first one up off the couch."

Rose loved holidays, and at 18 she hunted for Easter eggs with the same thrill as when she was 8.

Eight.

That's just about how old Rose was when she met up with Billy Brown for a rock-throwing battle beneath a tidy row of power lines.

More: Serial killers, unsolved homicides: A look at some of Lansing's infamous cases

She grabbed a stone from the field near her Miller Road home and chucked it at a pack of boys across the way. Rose teamed with her brothers against the kids they'd never met.

"We talked to them later and found out they were the Browns. They lived on Hughes Road," Rose's youngest brother Jami Larner recalls.

That was 1983.

Rose - whose parents divorced when she was 4 - earned mostly A's and was unbeatable in fourth- grade spelling bees.

For most of her growing-up years, Rose spent more time on the phone than doing almost anything. She'd talk for hours to friends.

Even friends of friends. Anybody who would listen.

"Any number she could get, she would call," Markey said. "Anytime you picked up the phone downstairs it was hot - warm from her ear."

Often her conversations were with Billy Brown, who became her fifth-grade classmate at Maplegrove Elementary.

They shared a school, a home room, teachers and a friendship that grew as they grew.

They played tag and built tree forts, dug tunnels and romped through the woods in and around Lansing's southern parks.

Rose drew a heart in blue ink around his school photo in her Gardener Middle School yearbook and scrawled "Billy" beneath his school-boy smirk.

She liked him and he liked her.

By the eighth grade, their friendship was firm.

They kept tabs by phone and went to Gardener together, often palling around their gritty neighborhood east of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

A decade after that stone-throwing brawl across the open field, Brown says he stood and watched another man strangle the girl he'd spent much of his young life with. Then Brown says he helped a killer dispose of her body.

And he helped clean up the mess.

Best friends

Rose had other friends and freckle-faced Ginger Bailey ranked highest on the list. Bailey was a third- grader when she met Rose and quickly learned her rough-and-tumble ways.

"We had a fight. I don't even know why. Then she came over and said, `Come outside and play hide and seek,'" Bailey said. "She even helped me wash the dishes."

Bailey became Rose's best friend, and their relationship included a series of hair-pulling brawls over issues too petty to recall.

"We were inseparable. We liked to ride the bus to the mall," she said. "We got in a fight a week, but we were still best friends.

"Rose would always call and make up."

They strolled to the Quality Dairy for frozen Cokes, gum and half-priced ice cream doled out every Tuesday. They perched on the skywalk that looms over Miller Road between their houses, sharing gossip and stories, dreams and disappointments.

They even shared a birthday: Aug. 19.

When Bailey spent the night at Rose's house, they would sneak out late and roam the neighborhood just to see what was up.

Rose's dad, Bill Larner, says his only daughter was a pill - usually the one to start something at his house, where she spent every other weekend.

"I always knew who the culprit was. She was a holy terror,'' he said. "They'd be out playing in the yard and then a little yell would go out, and Rosie had the voice that carried the most."

He'd peek out the window, then trudge out to hear each side.

"I'd have to say, 'C'mon Rose,'" Larner said.

Through it all, she was the thoughtful one, and he has Father's Day coffee mugs to prove it.

"She always remembered, even when the other kids didn't," Larner said, his voice shaking. "She was daddy's little girl."

Rose walked a narrow line through her adolescence. She was giving and warm, hot-headed and temperamental.

She and Ginger were cruising Cedar Street in Rose's navy blue Ford Granada when they spotted a man clutching a cardboard sign that read, "Will work for food.''

Rose stopped the car.

"She got out and gave the guy $5," Bailey said.

Teen-age troubles

The same Rose Larner that gave to the poor had a mouth and an attitude.

"Rose Larner didn't care what she said or who she said it to," retired Lansing police Det. John Caudy said. "She had enemies."

When Rose was 15, she used a fork to threaten a girl who ticked her off. Markey was away for the weekend. Rose had a party, drank some beer and argued with the girl, who had showed up for the fun.

No one was hurt, but Markey was alarmed. She thought counseling might change Rose's difficult ways.

The divorced mother of three exaggerated her daughter's complicated personality so she could admit her at Rivendell Psychiatric Hospital in St. Johns. It was a move Markey thought would calm Rose down and bring some stability to her often-turbulent household.

"Rosie had a tendency to pick up a shoe and throw it at her brothers or lock them outside until they had to break the windows to get back in," Markey said.

She remembers sitting in the waiting room at Rivendell.

"Rose looked at me and said, `Mom, this is a looney bin.'" Markey said, chuckling. "I told her it was her choice to be admitted and she said, `OK.'"

She used a pencil eraser at Rivendell to burn the letter 'B' for Brody into her thigh. He was a patient, and Rose was smitten.

She cried when she left after three months of new friendships, counseling and attention.

"They liked her, and she felt safe there," Markey said.

Rose went home, landed her first job at Kentucky Fried Chicken on South Logan and flouted an attitude that her mother can't forget.

"She was testy. She wanted to be sent back, I think," Markey said. "She got picked up at Hudson's for shoplifting, and she had alcohol at school."

It was March 1991 when Rose left Everett and enrolled at Sexton High School, hoping things would be different. She was 15 and hoping to fit in at a new school.

Rose missed her friends - Billy Brown and others, including Ginger Bailey. She returned to Everett in the fall for the start of her junior year.

Trouble dogged her and threatened to undermine her dream of being a cop. Like uncle Timmy.

Rose and Brown remained buddies, and, when she turned 16, her Ford Granada was a shuttle for her friends, Brown included.

Bailey, slender and athletic, loved to shoot baskets at Maplegrove. She and Rose were sinking jump shots there on a warm and carefree day when a man appeared near the tennis courts.

He and Rose began to chat.

"They kept talking, and so I started walking home," Bailey remembers.

Rose turned up later at her front door, shaken, her hazel eyes filled with tears.

"She said she was raped. We called the police," Bailey said.

Markey recalls looking out to the gravel driveway and seeing Rose in the backseat of a Lansing police patrol car.

"She seemed embarrassed, and she didn't even want me to know," Markey said. "She never wanted to talk about it much."

The man pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and spent a month in jail.

Rose still yearned to be a police officer. She set her sights and, despite pushing the limits at home and in school, knew the difference between right and wrong.

"For Mother's Day, she bought me a book at Meijers," Markey said. "The clerk gave her $20 too much in change, and Rosie gave it back."

"I know she would have been a police officer some day."

Rose dropped out of high school in December 1991, and - at 16 - enrolled at Harry Hill Center for Academics and Technology. She quit that same month.

She signed up for the U.S. Army, hoping it would give her a better shot at getting into a police academy, and waited to hear if Uncle Sam would want her.

After more than a year away from high school, she enrolled in vocational training in Grand Rapids to finish her high school education. At 17, she lived there for a few months in a dorm with other girls.

Rose caught up with her math and English in a hurry and earned her general equivalency degree in June, 1993, just as her Everett classmates were graduating.

Meeting John

Summer's freedom came, and Rose reveled in it.

"She tested the waters, and I found myself not sleeping," Markey said.

She set a 1 a.m. curfew and used a pager to keep in touch with Rose and her two boys. "I either wanted to be called or to see her, so I didn't have to worry."

That's about the time Rose met a local rapper named John Ortiz-Kehoe. The handsome, dark-haired teen was a friend of the Brown brothers. He loved rap music, and he liked Rose.

She liked the funny and charismatic music-maker.

"She really was into him. She talked about him like he was a god," Rose's older brother Bill Larner remembers. "She wanted to do anything he wanted to do."

They began to date.

"She talked about wanting to be like John. She wanted to rap with him," Jami Larner said.

Rose, Kehoe and Billy Brown spent hours together - mostly hanging out at the Brown's house, Bill Larner said.

"Everything always centered around the Browns," he said. "I didn't like any direction she was heading. She didn't want to listen."

In September, Rose heard from the Army - they didn't want her, despite her excellent grades. Army officials said her stay at Rivendell and her eraser-branded `B' made her undesirable.

"She cried for about a half hour one day," Markey said. "Then she stuffed it - put it out of her mind."

In October, she asked her mother if Kehoe - who was making a rap album - could move in.

"Rosie said he was a real nice guy and he needed a place to stay," Markey said. "She was 18 and thought she'd push."

Markey agreed and Kehoe joined her, Rose and Jami Larner in their cozy Cape Cod.

"He was nice. Then I found out he had guns in my house, and he had lots of money. Wads of money laying on the table," Markey said.

Markey turned him away shortly after she learned about the weapons.

"He was just hanging out there, and he had other places he could go," she said. "I don't allow guns."

Kehoe left the house and started backing away from Rose and their relationship.

"There was a breakup, basically," Michigan State Police Det. Don Brooks said. "John wasn't giving her the time of day. She got mad because she had an interest in him, and he had no interest in her."

"It infuriated her," Brooks said. "She spent her life for a couple of months trying to monitor him. And he was dodging her."

Brooks said evidence will show that Kehoe threatened to kill Rose if she didn't leave him alone.

"She kept it up," he said.

In late November or early December, Rose and Kehoe had a blowup at a party at the Montie House, a cooperative house at Michigan State University.

An angry Rose rammed her van into Kehoe's brother's truck, Markey said.

Billy Brown made sure Rose got home safely. He drove her back to Lansing.

`A mother's feeling'

Days later on Dec. 6, 1993, Rose worked a night shift at the Meijer Pizzeria, a job she landed a few months earlier.

She left about 11:30 p.m. and headed home. Rose bounded through the door wearing a new oversized brown coat with the fashionable Carhartt label and a matching knit cap pulled down over her brown, shoulder-length hair.

Her brother Jami, then 16, was asleep on the living room couch.

"She threw a hat at me and said, `I bought this for you,'" Larner said. "It was a Florida State Seminoles cap."

Rose went into the dining area, sat on the oak floor and leaned against the wall. She dialed the phone as her little brother continued his school-night slumber on the patterned sofa.

"I remember hearing her get loud, kind of like a half yell - a small argument," Larner said. "I don't know what it was about."

He doesn't even know who his sister talked to.

At some point that night, Rose used a pencil to draw three perfect circles inside circles over the flat pink paint on her bedroom wall.

Her mother - a painter by trade - had promised to do a psychedelic pattern there, and Rose wanted to push the project along.

Rose told her brother she loved him and walked out into the 32-degree December air.

"She said that a lot. She was like that when she gave us presents," Larner said.

She strolled a quarter mile west along dimly lit Miller Road to the Quality Dairy convenience store at Miller Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Markey worked nights there part- time, helping fill her 60-hour work week.

"That was my whole life. Work and my kids," she said. "I worked to give them the best. We didn't always spend a lot of time together, but we were a close family - close enough that I knew Rosie was in trouble that night."

At 1:20 a.m., Rose showed up at the QD to check in with her mom before spending another night out with her friends.

"I had told her the van was low on oil, and I didn't want her driving it," Markey said.

But when Markey realized Rose was walking that chilly, damp night, she pushed her to take the 1980 white, Chevy van after all.

"I told her to bring it here, and I said I'd put oil in it," Markey recalls. "I didn't want her walking. I just had a mother's feeling that this was one of those nights."

Rose insisted on taking her urban hike and headed toward the door.

"I said, `Rosie. I love you,''' Markey said. "She said, `I love you, too.' And then she left."

Part 2: The search

'Something was terribly wrong'

Rose Markey was in bed, wide awake and a tangle of nerves when her phone rang. It was just after 8 a.m. that Monday.

She grabbed it on the first ring, and Lansing police Detective John Caudy introduced himself. Markey wanted to talk to him about her only daughter, and she needed him to believe her.

Rose Larner was missing, and Markey knew she was in peril.

"I was afraid he'd think she was a runaway. It was much more than that," Markey said. "Then the more he believed me, the more scared I got."

Caudy listened to her chilling tone for just a minute, but long enough to know.

"Something was terribly wrong," said Caudy, a cop for 24 years. "Mothers know. And my gut told me something."

That call touched off one of the longest, most extensive and intense criminal investigations ever undertaken in Lansing. It launched a massive search for the 18-year-old, whose body has not yet been found and likely never will be.

The case - expected to go to trial on March 18 in Battle Creek - began in south Lansing in 1993 and ended nearly three years later in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. That's where Mexican police caught the man local investigators believe strangled, then dismembered Rose the very night she vanished, Dec. 7, 1993.

Prosecutors will try John Ortiz- Kehoe without the most important evidence of all - Rose's body.

When Markey first talked to the detective, six days had passed since she had watched her daughter leave the Quality Dairy convenience store where Markey worked at Miller Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

She punched out at 7 a.m., the end of her night shift, and headed straight home to her two-story, tan cape cod on Miller Road. It was a pit stop between jobs for the 37-year- old divorced mother of three, who worked 60 to 80 hours a week and slept when she could.

"I went right to her room," Markey said. "She wasn't there, and I was immediately concerned."

Markey - a painter by trade - had to hurry off for her next job painting the Alcoholics Anonymous office in the former Walter French School on Cedar Street.

"First, I went back to the Quality Dairy and said, `Let me know if you see Rosie. She's no call, no show at home.'"

Markey had an eerie feeling the night before when she tried to talk Rose into taking the family's white Chevy van out on the town.

Rose had popped into the convenience store about 1:20 a.m. to touch base before spending the night out with friends - a practice that had become a way of of life for the night owl whose family dubbed her "The Vampire."

She was determined to walk, despite the winter chill.

Markey and her daughter exchanged "I love you's," and Rose walked into the night.

Roughly 24 hours later, Markey finished a long painting shift and returned home early in the morning. It was Dec. 8, and she was hoping to find her daughter in a familiar place - talking on the phone in the family's dining room.

Rose was a phone freak, an addict who spent hours every day on the line with friends across the city and state.

She was known to make up to 1,200 calls a month on the family's two lines, and monthly phone bills of $300 or more were common.

"I talked to people who changed their pager numbers because she drove them nuts," Caudy said.

Rose wasn't home, and there was still no sign of her. There was no note, no message, no dirty dishes in the sink.

The search begins

Rose's father, Bill Larner II, got a call in Bath.

"Rose said she was missing for 20-some hours. I didn't know where to look so I checked up and down streets - looked in every ditch," Larner said.

Markey called Rose's friends, Carla and Charla Cummins, teens she spent much of her time with. They said Rose's childhood friend, Billy Brown, was gone, too.

"She's probably with him," they told her.

Markey called the Meijer Pizzeria on Pennsylvania Avenue to see when Rose was scheduled to work next. Employees told her Rose hadn't shown up for work Tuesday.

Rose, typically a conscientious worker, hadn't even called.

Markey phoned Brown's house on Midwood Street and talked to his mother, Theresa Brown.

"She said she'd check with Billy. The first thing Thursday she called back. Billy wasn't with Rose.

"I told her Rose was still missing and she said, `Oh my, God. Someone must have gotten her.'"

Markey and her son, Jami, went to the Lansing Police Department to report Rose missing. That same day - Dec. 9 - Markey and her oldest son, Bill, searched Benjamin Davis Park for the hazel-eyed girl.

"We realized we were looking for a body," Markey said. "My daughter and his sister's body."

That night, Markey designed a "missing person" poster with a picture of Rose taken at a family wedding that summer.

"As soon as I saw her picture on that poster I knew we'd never see her again," Markey said.

Friday was payday at Meijer - a day that typically nudged Rose out of bed early.

She loved getting paid.

"She would get up at 7 a.m. and take the bus to get her check," Markey said. "That was the only day she would get up before noon."

Markey went to Meijer about 8 a.m. that day, Dec. 10. Rose's $128 check was still there.

Panic grabbed her and wouldn't let go. She raced to Kinko's Copies on Pennsylvania Avenue and ran off 50 posters showing her daughter's lipsticked smile. They gave her the fliers for free and wished her luck as she pinned them up at stores and gas stations.

Markey painted building interiors all weekend - Dec. 11 and 12 - and by Sunday she was in a frenzy.

"I had a breakdown. I went in to paint, and I started crying hysterically. I couldn't stop," she said.

Markey dialed Lansing police the next morning, Monday, Dec. 13. Caudy later returned her call.

Rose's phone fetish gave him the first sure clue that she was in real trouble.

Phones had stopped ringing at the homes of Rose's friends. Beepers stopped beeping. Answering machines no longer were recording Rose's voice messages.

People who talked to Rose daily hadn't heard from her since Dec. 7.

Not a single word.

"You don't make that many calls and then just stop," Caudy said. ``She would call somebody."

Hoping for answers

Markey placed a small light signifying hope in her front window and vowed to leave it lighted until Rose was found. Caudy asked questions, visited Billy Brown's house and gathered dental records.

Many of Rose's friends thought she might be with Brown, the blond-haired boy she met in grade school at Maplegrove Elementary.

Brown's mother, Theresa, said he was with John Ortiz-Kehoe.

Kehoe, a local rapper, had ended a relationship with Rose less than two months earlier and was trying hard to escape her attention.

On Dec. 20, Caudy headed up the first of nearly 50 searches for Rose's body. Lansing police combed Benjamin Davis Park and tips began trickling in to the city's detective bureau.

As the days turned to weeks, hope turned to dread.

"She'd call me if she needed me. She never did," her dad, Bill Larner II, said. "I knew deep down something had happened. But I didn't know when or where."

Markey found the simplest of tasks impossible. She couldn't work, sleep - even go to the grocery store.

The pain of seeing mothers and daughters together was unbearable. Markey was losing weight and living minute-to-minute with the hope of news.

Good news, bad news, any news.

Helicopters searched south Lansing by air and with the days ticking down to Christmas, Markey knew the worst had happened. Rose would be home for her favorite holiday if she was able.

"She wanted to get a tree up," Markey said.

Crews combed an area bounded by Jolly Road, Wise Road, Wexford Drive and Pleasant Grove Road.

"Nothing panned out, and I had no crime scene," Caudy said. "She just disappeared off the face of the Earth."

Lansing started to stir over the mystery, which was widely publicized as police asked south Lansing residents to help search for Rose.

Caudy urged folks to meander through their own backyards to look for anything that might tell police where she was or what might have happened to her.

Tips started coming in:

Someone thought they saw Rose at the Lansing Mall.

Someone else heard she was beaten to death with a baseball bat.

A tipster thought she was in St. Johns, north of Lansing.

One caller said Rose was "in the river."

Someone else simply said, "You'll never find her."

Caudy began hearing names - names confirming early hunches.

"The tips were Billy Brown and John Kehoe. There were close to 100 of them," Caudy said. "Nobody had first-hand knowledge. They heard it at a party or they heard it from so and so."

He talked to Brown, who told him he didn't know where Rose was.

"I talked to him enough times to know I was talking to someone who was somehow involved."

Caudy found a sign while he walked in the thickets at Moffit park where teens were known to gather. The 4-foot piece of wall paneling wore a derogatory message next to a black painted rose.

The handwriting was Rose's. Part of it read, "John is a whore."

Psychics called Caudy. More than one envisioned Rose buried in a mound. Another said there was something black around her neck. One saw the number 1108.

Caudy's need to find her bordered on obsession.

He took his wife for motorcycle rides on his big Honda.

"She'd say, `You aren't looking for a body are you?'" Caudy said. "She'd get so mad."

He met almost daily with Markey, in the kitchen at her house. Markey smoked one cigarette after another as they brainstormed.

Markey looked through Rose's room for clues.

She leafed through the Bible Rose kept at her bedside and a slip of paper revealed itself. The prayer request was for John Kehoe - the dark-haired young man she was trying to woo back right up to the day she disappeared.

"The prayer request asked to deliver him from sin, evil and drugs," Markey said.

She told Caudy about it, then tucked it away.

The holidays began to come and go without her.

A Valentine card from her family read: "You may not be close at hand, but you're always close at heart. Love, Mom, Bill and Jami."

Three more searches by air, ground and water in March and April of 1994 turned up nothing but dog bones, swimming pool liners and empty beer bottles.

"I thought we'd find a body in the springtime," Caudy said. "It didn't happen."

Big break?

In May 1994, Caudy got a call: Rose's body was dumped in a private gravel pit near Holt.

The woman was sure Rose was killed there, her body flung into the chocolate-brown water from the end of a rope tied to an oak tree on the pit's steep bank.

Caudy headed up a search and on May 26, divers, detectives and a German shepherd named Odin set up for a daylong exploration. Rose Markey couldn't stay away.

Odin was one of just four dogs in Michigan trained to smell body gases of people submerged in water - a search tactic common in Vietnam.

The dog perched on the boat's bow and looked out over the lake.

"I heard the dog howl, and I thought the body would float right up there," Caudy said. "Everything just got quiet. It was dead silent."

Divers disappeared in the 30-foot deep waters, leaving only a swirl of air bubbles chasing on the surface.

Rose Markey's expression turned to stone, and she leaned against a maple tree for support. The suspense was thick.

The answer wasn't there. The pit bottom was laden with 2 feet of opaque silt and riddled with cinder blocks, debris that made the search impossible.

Divers bumped into barrels, and one shone a flashlight into his face and couldn't see the light.

"One of the divers told Rose he really thought she was down there," Caudy said. He was sure, too.

The foot-tall initials R.L. were spray-painted into a cement drain just 20 yards from the water's edge. A shirt found on the shore was just like one Larner wore.

Caudy kept searching for clues, and the case consumed his work. He couldn't walk into his office without fellow detectives asking: "Did you find Rose?"

He became the subject of ridicule among those in the know on Lansing's southern streets: "Caudy will never find the body."

Then a song was penned with Caudy as the subject.

"Billy told me he and John made up a rap song. It said Caudy was naughty, and it went on to talk about blood and body parts," he said.

Caudy retired in May 1995, and Markey was devastated, worried that no other investigator would care about her case like he did.

"That was one of the hardest things I had to do in my 26-year career," Caudy said. "I didn't want to let it go."

Two other Lansing detectives carried the case - Lucius Hayward and John Hersman - who headed up a search in August 1995.

This time in East Lansing.

A search warrant let police dig up the basement of 548 M.A.C., The Montie House, a cooperative inhabited mostly by Michigan State University students.

Crews used special tools to cut concrete flooring where they thought Rose's body was encased.

She wasn't there.

Shortly after that search, Michigan State Police Detective Donald Brooks learned some valuable information about Lansing's missing person case. The morsel came from a confidential tipster. His interest piqued, Brooks helped Lansing police form a task force.

By late 1995 he was leading the investigation.

Starting over

"We went back to Dec. 7, 1993, and reconstructed it from day one," he said. "Billy said he wasn't involved, his parents said he wasn't involved."

Former Ingham County Prosecutor Donald Martin said Brooks had a challenge.

"Rose was dead, and it was covered up. Somebody made a body disappear, and they destroyed evidence," he said.

Adding to the mission: A core group of people who knew what happened worked hard to be sure the truth didn't surface.

"They protected the death of Rose Larner. Rather religiously," Martin said. "They were loyal and they weren't going to snitch."

The group perpetuated lies and were willing to swear to made-up stories, he said.

Brooks - one of Lansing's top state police detectives - learned about the breakup between Rose and Kehoe. He learned that Rose was dogging her rapper ex, and he learned that Kehoe was doing what he could to dodge her.

Brooks said he learned that Kehoe was impatient with Rose's persistence.

Then Brooks found a man who picked up Kehoe and Brown at a bus station. He told Brooks a story.

"The details were significant and very consistent with what we have now learned," Brooks said. "That was a big break."

He was sure Rose was killed in a house, but didn't know which one. He inched toward the answer police sought for two years.

Then in April 1996, he heard from Billy Brown. He wanted to talk.

"He knew his days were numbered," Brooks said.

Brown talked to Brooks, telling of a night involving drugs, sex, murder and body parts inside the home of Kehoe's grandparents in Albion, 40 miles south of Lansing.

The 20-year-old claimed he wasn't Rose's killer.

But Kehoe was.

Warrants followed, charging Brown and Kehoe's brother, Tim, with being accessories to murder. Kehoe was charged with murder.

On April 14, Brown turned himself in and appeared in court a day later for arraignment. Kehoe was another matter. He was at large, and police knew his capture would not be easy.

Search for a suspect

A national manhunt began, and local police headed for Chicago, searching for the 22-year-old Albion High School graduate who spoke Spanish and had Texas ties.

Kehoe - who once attended Eaton Rapids High School - was declared a federal fugitive, and local detectives turned to police in six other states, Mexico and Canada to help find him.

On April 15, police searched the Albion home, nestled beside a country road. John and Pearl Kehoe were wintering in Arizona the night Brown says Rose was killed in their comfortable home.

Inside the white bathroom that juts off the kitchen, crime lab experts found a single drop of blood. They later concluded through DNA testing the blood was almost certainly Rose's.

On April 24, the case took a turn. Detectives arrested Lansing's Robert Michael Wood, accusing him of planning to firebomb Billy Brown's house, Martin said.

Martin said the motive was to "get rid of the witness or intimidate. Investigators believe there was going to be a firebombing, at a minimum."

Police seized bomb-making materials from his house at 814 Max St., and Wood, 23, was charged with possession of bomb-making devices. Police said they found items that could be used to make a Molotov cocktail, including a bottle with a rag in it and some gasoline.

He later pleaded guilty to attempted possession of a Molotov cocktail, being a felon in possession of a handgun and concealing stolen property.

Wood is serving a 5-year prison sentence, his Lansing lawyer Allan Fiorletta said.

In July or August, state police crime lab experts made a trip to Meredith, a tiny town in northern Michigan's Gladwin County, where police thought Larner's body might have been destroyed. John Kelsey, Calhoun County assistant prosecutor, said bone fragments were found there and they are being tested for a DNA match.

Martin said experts are trying to determine whether the bones are human and if they are Rose's.

"They are tiny charred pieces. You wouldn't look at them and say, `Gee, that looks like a piece of bone,'" he said.

The search for Kehoe continued, and in August 1996, police followed his older brother, Tim, 26, from near Battle Creek to Nuevo, Laredo, Mexico. John Kehoe was at La Mina, a crowded bar and grill just south of the Texas border.

It was late afternoon when the older Kehoe walked into the business and Mexican authorities pounced, ending the four-month manhunt.

Brooks won't talk about how detectives tracked Kehoe except to say, "It was a combination of modern technology, surveillance and confidential information."

"And it was unbelievable. Extremely stressful."

As soon as Kehoe was in custody, Brooks placed an important call.

"I said, `Rose, can you talk?' I said, `We got him, Rose. We got him.'"

Part 3: The crime

Death, betrayal filled final night

This story contains graphic and unsettling passages that some people might not want to read. The Lansing State Journal, with the support of Rose Larner's mother, has decided the information is necessary for complete telling of her daughter's story.

Rose Larner pulled a brush through her wet brown hair and giggled nervously as John Ortiz-Kehoe gently tugged from behind with a cord that caught her strong chin.

Thinking her ex-boyfriend was toying, she played along, slipping the line down around her neck.

It was no game.

According to testimony by Billy Brown - Rose's friend since grade school - he watched as Kehoe increased the tension, then yanked the cord tight, snuffing Rose's last breath.

She fell to the bathroom floor, and Brown interrupted Kehoe's task only to ask why he was killing Rose.

"The bitch has got to go, and that's what's going to happen," Kehoe told him.

Minutes later, Rose was dead - there in the brick ranch home in Albion owned by Kehoe's grandparents. The brush, still in her hand. Her hair, still damp from a shower the three had shared.

It was Dec. 7, 1993. Maybe 5 a.m.

Forty miles north in Lansing, Rose's mother was ringing up fountain drinks, cigarettes and gasoline at the south Lansing Quality Dairy store. Rose's brothers, Jami and Bill, were sleeping at their homes - oblivious to their sister's gruesome fate.

Rose's family, and the Lansing community, would wait nearly three years to hear one man's story of how her life ended that night.

Billy Brown's Sept. 18, 1996 testimony in a Calhoun County courtroom told a saga of drugs, death and deceit. Brown, who pleaded guilty to being an accessory after Rose's slaying, is expected to tell the same story again at Kehoe's trial, set for March 18 in Battle Creek. Brown, awaiting sentencing, will be one of 70 witnesses during the trial that could last a month.

Brown's explanation of Rose Larner's long-mysterious disappearance is widely disputed by Kehoe's Bloomfield Township lawyer, Jerome Sabbota.

"The trial will show who the real killer was, if she was killed at all," Sabbota said.

He says Kehoe didn't kill Rose.

Police, prosecutors and Billy Brown say he did.

A gruesome tale

Brown's story begins at his family's home at 2906 Midwood St. around 3 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1993. Rose asked Brown to get ahold of Kehoe that day and arrange for the three to spend the evening together.

She and Kehoe dated for a few months that summer, but his interest in her waned and by late October and early November, Kehoe wanted little to do with his tough-acting girlfriend.

Police say Rose didn't deal well with the rejection and spent the next month dogging the handsome Albion High School graduate. Kehoe hung with Brown, who kept in touch with Rose, urging her to give Kehoe some space.

Brown and Rose had spent much of their childhood together, roaming the streets of their south Lansing neighborhood. They talked on the phone, went to the same schools and hung out as teens. Brown was known to be somewhat protective of Rose.

But he couldn't convince his hyperactive and street-wise friend to leave Kehoe alone, her mother, Rose Markey, said.

The three left Russell Brown Sr.'s Midwood Street home about 3 a.m. riding in Kehoe's brother's white Chevy pickup.

Brown said Kehoe took them down an unfamiliar country dirt road. The truck stopped in the darkness, and Brown said Rose rested her head on his lap while she and Kehoe had sex in the cab of the late 1980s truck.

They left there and stopped a short time later at a Meijer store near Albion, 40 miles south of Lansing in Calhoun County.

Kehoe went inside alone and returned a half-hour later with a bag, heavy with items. He placed it into the bed of the pickup and told Rose and Brown he had, "things for the night's festivities."

Brown said he learned later that the bag contained a fillet knife, two bottles of charcoal lighter fluid, a hatchet and some trash bags.

The three drove to a house just outside of Albion, a small community of 10,066 people best known for its private college.

Kehoe went inside through a back door then let the other two in the front. Brown assumed they were there to "have sex, get high ... do just average party kind of things."

He was ready with a night's supply of marijuana and cocaine.

Kehoe and Rose had sex before all three stepped into the warm shower together. Brown says Kehoe reached for the shower ledge and tried handing him a fillet knife he apparently had stashed there.

"There were funny looks exchanged and the knife was put back," Brown said.

All three got dressed in the bathroom, and Kehoe left as Brown and Rose brushed their hair.

He came back holding a cord and slipped it around Rose's neck: "Quit, John. Quit playing," Rose laughed.

Kehoe strangled her, and Brown watched as he dragged the spunky teen's 5-foot 1-inch body into the white shower and sliced her throat with the new knife.

Kehoe took a break from his job to do some cocaine with Brown in the bathroom.

"I told John I could tell this isn't the first time he did this," Brown said. "He said, `What do you think?'

"I vomited, and he kind of laughed at me."

Kehoe - wearing only boxer shorts - rinsed pints of blood from Rose's body with a hose, then got a hatchet and a block of wood.

Brown heard whacking, and he saw Kehoe hacking.

"He started to take off her arms, feet and hands. Her head, too," Brown said. "He came back with a foot sticking on a knife. He held the head up like `Clash of the Titans' before he took it to the basement."

Kehoe chucked her body parts into the basement fireplace, burning them until mostly gray cinders remained.

"You could still see the shape of the skull, but most of it was ashes," Brown said.

The doorbell rang.

Sammy, a friend of Kehoe's was at the door. His girlfriend, too. The couple came inside and visited for an hour, unaware that a woman's dismembered torso was stashed in the shower stall around the corner.

"We cleaned the house up, put the body in a trash can, grabbed some shovels, 10 gallons of gasoline, some trash bags and left," Brown said.

The coverup

The men loaded the garbage bin into a compact car owned by Kehoe's mother, and the two headed north. They drove 100 miles to Brown's family property on Island Lake in Meredith - a Gladwin County retirement community.

"Its far away and secluded. We were going to burn her up until there was nothing left," Brown said. "No body. No crime."

The sun was coming up, and their headlights sliced the waning darkness as they arrived in the sleepy northern village dotted with satellite dishes, mobile homes and woodpiles.

The car turned onto Ruby Drive - a narrow road surrounding the 75-acre lake - then stopped at its destination. A crooked wooden sign nailed to a tree confirmed their destination: "Brown."

Kehoe and Brown dug a hole in the sandy ground and laid a bed of logs in the pit that sat a few yards in front of a plywood shanty.

The men unloaded Larner's mid- section onto the pit, poured gasoline over the pile and lighted a fire. Orange flames quickly engulfed Rose's limbless body, and a stream of smoke billowed over the quiet lake known for its virtual absence of crime.

"We've had one break-in in 25 years here, and that was solved," said Ron Parkinson, a retired detective who lives across the lake from the Browns. "The only noise you hear is an occasional horseshoe hitting a stake, and that disrupts the whole place."

Rose burned for 10 hours.

As the fire crackled on the hilly lot, Kehoe took some of her cooked flesh from the pit.

"He put it on a piece of bread with some mustard and ate it," Brown said. "Just for the experience. Just to know."

When the fire was spent, the men filled garbage bags with Rose's ashes and loaded them into the car.

"We spread the ashes along the roadside and highways all the way to Big Rapids," Brown said.

He said some of Rose's ashes went into a dumpster at a rest area.

Kehoe's brother, Tim, lived in Big Rapids. They arrived there, tired and dirty.

"Tim asked, `What'd you do with her? What happened?'" Brown said. "John smiled. Tim said, `Never mind, I don't even want to know.'"

Brown said Tim Kehoe was surprised to see gasoline, a hatchet and shovels in the car.

"He said, `Don't worry about the stuff in the car.' He would take care of it," Brown said.

The three men sat in a bedroom and talked about an alibi. If asked by police, they would explain that they were at Tim Kehoe's place in Big Rapids the night Rose vanished.

Tim Kehoe's lawyer, Randy Lewis, said his client isn't guilty of being an accessory. Lewis said his cross-examination of Brown at the September hearing showed that Tim Kehoe was unaware of the killing.

"He specifically stated that Tim Kehoe knew nothing about any homicide and had no involvement," Lewis said.

Brown said he and Kehoe spent two days with Tim in Big Rapids, then Tim drove them to the bus station in Grand Rapids where they bought Greyhound tickets and boarded a bus for Florida - a break in the warm, southern sun.

Seeking closure

More than two years later on May 22, 1996, Rose Markey's search for the truth took her to a place she never imagined. She visited the Albion home of John and Pearl Kehoe - the place where police say her daughter spent her last moments.

Markey had to see it. Had to feel. And she was hoping to find some peace there. Peace she couldn't yet grasp without her daughter's body to bury. The house nestled beside a county road was her only clarity.

She walked through the front door and straight into the arms of a stranger. A tall and gentle John Kehoe embraced her.

"I think about you every day," the elderly man told her. "We both have a tragedy."

Markey cried and tried to soothe him.

"It's been terrible," she said. "It's not your fault."

Markey explained to Kehoe her need to see his home. She needed to walk through the same rooms her daughter might have walked through.

"This is the closest I could come to Rosie," she said. "I always wanted to be there when they found her, and I didn't get that."

She meandered through the clean ranch home, asking to see certain rooms - especially the bathroom. Markey walked slowly through that door, stopped, turned in a tight circle and gazed. She took in every detail.

Markey cautiously slid back the shower door and looked inside, tears flowing down her cheeks. Kehoe then took her to the basement so Markey could see the fireplace.

Kehoe said the ordeal has been overwhelming for him and his wife who had last seen their grandson, John, on Christmas Day, 1993 - 18 days after police say Rose was slain in their home.

"He was late for Christmas dinner," Kehoe said, gesturing toward the dining room table. "And he was real quiet."

"I try to carry on the best I can. but this is constantly on my mind."

Six months after her Albion visit, Markey trudged through a new December snow at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Lansing to visit a new granite memorial marked "Rosie."

It was the third anniversary of her disappearance. Markey wasn't by herself that day.

"I called Billy Brown to see if he would go with me," she said. "He was the last one to see her alive. And I wanted to see if he was truly sorry."

He agreed. Brown's brother, Russell, and two other friends went along and the group reminisced about Rose on their ride to the small open field where her stone lies.

"They were talking about the time they ran out of gas, and I had to go pick them up," Markey said with a soft laugh. "And Billy talked about how Rosie was doing better than the rest of the bunch. She had a car and a job."

When they reached the cemetery, Markey said Russell Brown placed a dozen yellow roses next to cold stone already adorned with a pine Christmas wreath left by an earlier visitor.

Russell spent a quiet minute at the stone that marks no body.

"He was talking to her," Markey said.

Russell's brother was quieter.

Billy didn't say much, but he did talk about Rose's gentle ways. Markey said he talked about her ability to forgive.

"He said he knew that if Rosie was standing right there with us, she would say, `I forgive you.'"

John Ortiz-Kehoe was convicted of Rose Larner's murder in April of 1997. Now 44, he's serving his sentence, life without the possibility of parole, at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer. He's had five misconduct violations in state prison, including fighting, possession of dangerous contraband and assault and battery.