Town note
The village lies within Ontonagon township, at the mouth of the Ontonagon River on Lake Superior.
about 0:06:28The story
Judy Diane Blake was born on October 16th, 1957 in Hancock, Michigan, the quietest member of a religious, private family. Her father Dale ran a business called Dale Service and her mother Marianne kept a home where the family life centred on the Redeemer Free Lutheran Church. Judy trained Springer Spaniels, loved the woods around the house and worked in the hospital system at Marquette General. He was six feet tall, outgoing but short of friends, convinced he was the smartest person in any room, and he worked as support staff at Marquette General, eventually driving its mobile CAT scan unit. The two met at the hospital in the mid-1970s, married in 1978 and had a daughter, Alice, on June 16th, 1989. Everyone who knew them said the same thing: nobody cared for Bruce, and everybody loved Judy.
In 1991 Bruce was on the roof of their Marquette house working on the chimney while Judy cut flashing on the patio below and their toddler played in the yard. A concrete chimney block weighing between 80 and 86 pounds went over the edge and struck Judy a glancing blow, giving her a severe concussion and several days in hospital. Bruce first said he must have nudged the block with his foot, then told someone a scaffold had collapsed, and years later told police that Judy had been on the roof and fallen. A few months afterwards the house caught fire while Judy and Alice were asleep and Bruce was away; investigators blamed wood stove ashes he had piled next to the firewood in the basement. Judy began telling friends she was thinking about leaving him, but she was embarrassed about the couple's mounting financial trouble, almost all of it Bruce's doing, and she stayed.
Through 1991 and 1992 Bruce pursued Gale Lampenin, a married woman who worked at Portage View Hospital in Hancock. He turned up unannounced at her office with flowers and cards, told her he knew her marriage was ending and that he was getting a divorce, and she ignored him and hoped he would go away.
For Thanksgiving 1992 Bruce, Judy and three-year-old Alice drove to Ontonagon to stay with Judy's parents. On Sunday, November 29th, 1992, the last Sunday of Michigan's deer season, the men went out in a large hunting party and Bruce went with them, though he later wandered off alone. In the early afternoon Judy took four dogs onto the trails behind the house, wearing no orange. She was shot once. The bullet went in the front of her chest, through her heart and out her left side, entering about an inch to an inch and a half lower than it exited, so the shot had come from below and travelled upward. Her mother and a family friend found the other dogs, then Judy's body five or six hundred feet further on, lying on her side across the trail partly in a puddle. Police were called at 5.12 p.m. Detective Sergeant Bob Ball, who came out from about 60 miles away, found no shell casing and no footprints apart from those of the searchers. On a maple tree 37 feet from the body there was a fresh blaze mark that tested positive for lead. It looked at first like the fourth hunting death of the Michigan season, and the family, including Bruce, supported him completely. But Bruce criticised his dead wife for not wearing orange and said nothing about having left the hunting party, and on December 2nd her father and brother could not say where he had been that afternoon. On December 11th he produced nearly 30 names but no alibi for the window when she died.
On December 13th Dan Castle, a local copper mine employee known as Marble Dan, fired marbles from a slingshot at the blaze mark to see where they ricocheted, then swept the spot with a metal detector and found the flattened .30-calibre bullet, still carrying fibres from Judy's clothing. No rifle at Bruce's house matched, and although he said he owned no .30-calibre gun, a bank loan listed one as collateral. On December 18th Gale finally opened the boxes of Judy's clothes that Bruce had left on her porch and found a letter he had written in his own hand pretending to be Judy, urging Gale to take up with him, with a postscript saying he was incredible in the sack. Judy's handwriting was ruled out. Insurance policies on Judy totalled $321,000, several of them paying double for accidental death.
In early 1993 the women he had been harassing agreed to log his calls. He said he had used a .30-calibre rifle, taken it apart and thrown it into the Ford River, and that he killed her because she had threatened to divorce him and he did not want to give her half. He said she was a tyrant at work and at home and a poor cook. He described putting the scope on her, lowering it, then raising it again 20 minutes later, closing his eyes and pulling the trigger. Detectives never found the rifle. He recanted in July 1993, claiming coercion.
Alice was adopted at five by her godparents. Marianne Blake died on November 29th, 2007, the fifteenth anniversary, aged 71.