Town note
The township was first organised as Arcadia Township by an act of the territorial legislature, the same day Kalamazoo County was organised, and took in all eight northern tier townships.
about 0:05:16The story
Kalamazoo Charter Township, Michigan, lies in two unconnected pieces on the northern edge of Kalamazoo, in Kalamazoo County. It has about 22,705 residents and a quiet suburban reputation. The story begins with a family living there in the 1940s. Their mother worked nights in a paper factory; their father was an alcoholic who beat the family, made the boys drink whisky at seven and threw coins on the floor so that they would fight for them. The brothers never got on. At thirteen he began a relationship with Sue, a 23-year-old divorced mother of three. Spanky took against him at once. He took $150, made Pitts get into the cage with Spanky and drove on. In Kansas he let them go, saying later that he could not destroy the father-and-son bond he saw between the man and the chimp. On 30 May 1964 Gary Smock, a 30-year-old teacher from Plymouth, Michigan, was reported missing by his wife. That afternoon a patrol officer found his abandoned Chevrolet near the Kalamazoo Zoo, blood on the bumper, and his body was in the boot, shot twice below the ear with a .22, a cord round one wrist, his shoes and watch gone. The same day, sixty miles away in Elkhart, Indiana, service station attendant Charles Snyder, 33, was shot twice in the head in a robbery. On 6 April a 23-year-old airman, Vernon Laben, had been shot at a Mobile station on West Columbia Road near I-94 in Battle Creek. Two detectives met him walking out of the apartment. Asked if he had killed Gary Smock, he said yes, and handed over the pistol in his pocket. In a three-hour interrogation he described robbing Smock of three dollars and taking his shoes, which he was wearing, forcing him into the boot and shooting him twice in the back of the head, then driving to Elkhart to rob the station and shoot the attendant. He volunteered other killings, including Laben and men near Las Vegas and in Kentucky, South Carolina or Tennessee. The motive, he said, was money for steak and whisky, and each time he meant to kill himself afterwards and then killed someone else instead. Dr Donald Carrick testified that he was mentally ill, did not know right from wrong and was driven by an irresistible urge to kill. He waited an hour beside her car, then forced her into his van at knifepoint, taking the child too. He tied and raped her and stabbed her twice in the back when she fought. The child was left wandering the car park; Josephine Van Hafton found him, dirty and covered in someone else's blood, and then found Patricia's body behind a grain elevator. The knife had gone almost through her body. Motorcyclists found the bodies on 17 July. On 5 August they picked up Pamela Fiernoy, a nineteen-year-old Western Michigan University student, as she hitchhiked to a shopping mall. They held a knife to her, drove her into the woods, raped her repeatedly over six hours and suffocated her with a plastic bag when she began to scream. Her remains were found near Marrow Lake on 18 October. He died on 6 February 2022, aged 78, at the Lakeland Correctional Facility.