1870
They organised a township in 1870 and then founded the village of Arcadia in 1880, with the village inside the township.
about 0:07:34The story
Florence Stern was born in 1966 and grew up in Huntington Woods, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Everyone called her Flo. The couple began dating after his graduation and married a few years later in a snowstorm. They had two sons, Max in 1993 and Tyler in 1996, and settled in Huntington Woods, the suburb where both had grown up.
Flo stayed at home with the boys. Flo went back to work as a mortgage loan officer at Royal Oak Bank to keep the family afloat. The couple slept in separate bedrooms. Flo had been considering divorce for six or seven years, and on 26 August 2003 she filed.
Flo told a relative she would live in a box before she let the children go. On Tuesday 21 October 2003 there was a divorce hearing at which she demanded that his gambling and drug records be put into the case. The next day a neighbour, Ronald Loeb, found her kneeling in her garden crying.
It had begun with emails and led to sex four or five times; the last time was a few days before the hearing.
On Friday 24 October 2003 the family drove four hours north to the Watervale Inn on Lower Herring Lake in Arcadia Township, a place they visited every year. They stayed in a cottage called the Mary Ellen, ate dinner at a local restaurant called Dingy's, and put the boys in front of a film. A fisherman, Fred Oeflin, came ashore about nine o'clock and chatted to them; he later said Flo told him she was afraid of the dark and would not go out on the lake at that hour, and that he heard no arguing. He said he was gone about fifteen minutes; when he returned Flo was not on the deck. He saw a light on at the house of the inn's owners, Maggie and Lynn Duncan, assumed she had gone there, and went back to the cottage.
At daybreak he woke, found she had not come back, and telephoned the Duncans in tears. They looked out of their sliding doors, noticed that a wooden lounge chair had been moved across the deck, and went outside. Maggie Duncan looked over the edge and saw Flo floating face down in the water, her feet towards the concrete break wall. Lynn Duncan picked up the blue blanket lying on the concrete landing twelve feet below the deck and found a pool of blood beneath it.
The first officer, Deputy Troy Packard, found the top railing broken out and a large pool of blood on the concrete. Flo had a fractured skull, a broken hip and internal injuries. The pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr Stephen Cole, listed head injury as the cause but could not rule out drowning. Dr Dragovich, an Oakland County medical examiner, concluded that she drowned and that the death was a homicide: she could not have got into the water by herself after the fall. Dr Paul McKeever of the University of Michigan, who examined brain tissue, said she could have lived on the concrete for an hour and a half.
A search of his car produced a pair of shoes with a white paint smear chemically consistent with the paint on the deck railing, and he had packed the car within hours of the discovery. He gave differing accounts of the night to the police and to Flo's hairdresser, Tesha Hanks. He hired the defence attorney Bob Harrison and passed a private polygraph, and the couple's life insurance policies named each other as beneficiaries, with about $750,000 payable to him.
A judge refused to return the boys to him and allowed only increased visitation; Flo's parents had temporary custody. The prosecution, led by Donna Pendergrast, argued that Flo would never have stayed out on a dark deck, that the pressure of the divorce and custody fight boiled over, and that whoever caused the fall then put her, still alive, into the lake. The pathologists disagreed with each other about the cause of death, and the judge excluded some of the animations.
In 2006 the sons sued their father and were awarded $10 million, based on Flo's projected lifetime earnings and the loss to her survivors; he did not contest it.