INARGUABLY AU SABLE by Brandon Rushton
I don’t know much about the Coen Brothers, but when they directed Peter Stormare to feed Steve Buschemi to the wood chipper in that infamous Fargo scene, it felt like they knew a lot more about Michigan than most. In 1985, two friends, two 27‑year-old mechanics from the St. Clair Shores area, disappeared on their hunting trip “up north” in the town of Mio. It’s been said David Tyll and Brian Ognjan didn’t so much like hunting as much as they liked getting away from home and drinking. In other words, they were, in fact, quintessential Michigan hunters. They went missing in November of 1985 and the mystery of their disappearance, the lack of details about what happened that weekend, led to a cold case that went unsolved for nearly twenty years. As might easily be imagined, stories surfaced and local legend developed. In 2003, two brothers, Raymond Duvall and Donald Duvall, were convicted of the murder of both Tyll and Ognjan that took place eighteen years before. The story goes that the Duvall brothers killed Tyll with a blow from a baseball bat and beat Ognjan to death with their hands, all of it taking place in a field – or on a road – in rural Mio. The story continues that they fed both the victims’ bodies to a wood chipper, mixed the remains with slop, and fed it to their pigs. No trace of Tyll and Ognjan’s bodies – or the Ford Bronco they drove from St. Clair Shores to Mio – have ever been found.
* * *
In 1973, my grandparents bought a little piece of property – two acres – in Luzerne, a town eight miles from Mio, Michigan, the home of the Mio Dam, the first dam in the six-part hydroelectric system along the Au Sable River. In the early seventies, many folks who made a living on the Michigan assembly lines looked north for their retreats and recreations. Luzerne became a popular location for these blue-collar cottage seekers, my grandparents among them. On the two acres they purchased was a small rustic cabin, with no running water and a short walk to the outhouse. Save for some new shingles and a new porch, nothing about the cabin has changed in the 46 years they’ve owned it. In fact, other than the faces, not much has changed about Luzerne, either. There’s still a post office, a canoe livery, and an abandoned corner store where once you could – at the same time – buy a ring of pickled bologna and rent a recently released VHS. Despite that, still to this day, passing the old haunts in a pick‑up truck or on an ATV one can read – however one chooses to take it – the plea, threat, or reminder written on the marquee of Ma Deeters, the town’s only restaurant, that “This is God’s country so please don’t drive through town like hell.”
* * *
The Au Sable is a 138‑mile river that veins out across five counties (Ostego, Crawford, Oscoda, Alcona, and Iosco) in the northeastern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula that, after its eastward run, empties into Lake Huron. A six-part dam system owned and operated by the Michigan power company, Consumers Energy, partitions the river and changes its character and pace. Between two of the dams (Cooke and Foote), the river broadens and is easily mistaken – at least by the average looker – for a lake. Along the banks of the broadening river, between those two dams in Iosco County, along River Road, is a Consumers Energy-owned campground, called Old Orchard Park.
* * *
The girl on the bike had been pedaling back and forth beside our campsite for the better part of an hour. It was 2001. It was summer. I was twelve and poking the leftover coals in the fire pit and felt I already had all the friends I wanted, waiting for me – three hours away – back at home. That’s probably why, when she finally rode into our site and asked me – through the smoke rising up from the coals – if I wanted to go for a ride, I said: “No.”
My parents were unpacking the camp-carpets and running extension cords through the fallen pine needles and leaves when they overheard me tell her, the girl on the bike, that I had to help set up. Mom called my bluff, said I’d done enough, said – smiling – “Lucky you. Dad already got your bike out of the back of the truck.” I took a deep breath, stopped prodding the fire pit, dropped the stick, picked up my bicycle, and made sure I shot a few glares over my shoulder as the girl and I pedaled away. I don’t recall much of what we said to each other. I remember it being awkward in a way that two kids at a campground in the middle of nowhere with nothing to talk about can be awkward. I did my best to act annoyed and disinterested and dragged a few bike-lengths behind her. She didn’t care and said if we double-timed it toward the boat launch, we could catch a glimpse of the River Queen: the paddlewheel riverboat that’s taken (for 50 years) tourists up and down the Au Sable – between the Cooke and Foote Dams – at regularly scheduled intervals. I asked her if her and her family camped here regularly. They didn’t. I asked her where she was from and she said, “Around.” She was vague and avoidant, but whatever though. She liked the riverboat. She said she liked horses and I – as that boat propelled by its big wheel passed on the river before us – started liking my chances.
* * *
The River Queen isn’t a particularly exciting sight and most people turn back to their tasks before the boat is out of view. It wasn’t any different for us. I’d followed the girl along the path through the primitive tent section and then gawked with her at the giant motorhomes, whose owners could afford seasonal lots: from March to November. We’d pedaled past the pavilion and the playground and the kids on the court making-do with an underinflated basketball. We pedaled past the people on the picnic tables and on the porch of the general store who licked ice cream that ran down their wrists, but – it’s important to note – the two of us stopped pedaling when we came to the power lines. It was the far end of the campground and the campfires had already started getting farther apart. “To the horse stables, right?” she asked; and after sensing my hesitation said, “Come on. You know you can’t go back.” So, I took one last, good look behind me and didn’t.
* * *
The Duvall brothers were put behind bars based on the testimony of the prosecution’s main witness, Barbara Boudro. On the night of Tyll and Ognjan’s murders, Boudro encountered both hunters and the Duvall brothers in the same social setting when she went out for a few celebratory drinks at Linker’s Bar with her friend Robert Emery. Boudro testified that the two hunters were handsy and inappropriate and causing a disturbance in the local establishment. Later that evening, at her home – on Mapes Road not far from Luzerne – about one and half miles from Linker’s Bar, Boudro and Emery heard voices outside the house, one that said, “You’re dead, you rotten mother fucker.” They followed the sounds through the snow where, crouched behind some foliage, “they saw a Bronco and a pickup truck with their lights on.” She testified that Donald Duvall struck Tyll with a baseball bat and that “his head exploded.” They then laughed at Ognjan who had begun pissing himself in the snow – and then the brothers proceeded to beat him to death. Boudro and Emery went back to the house and within a few minutes the Duvall brothers were on her doorstep. When she answered their knocking, Donald Duvall said, “You saw nothing. You heard nothing. Pigs have to eat, too.”
* * *
The campground’s horse stables, at that time, were a set of recently renovated outbuildings that, once used for horses, served then as auxiliary storage units for campground equipment. I’d been up to them a couple of times before. They were accessible by a utility road that a few decades back served as an ancillary route on one of the county’s horse trails. It’s a winding, rocky ride that begins in some sand ruts in the far corner of the campground that then stretches on, up and away – about a half-mile or so – from the campsites. The girl was different on the horse trail. She grew quiet in a way she hadn’t been while watching the River Queen. But, for that matter, the trail got quiet, too. The smell of the campfires, the smoke sent up from their burning, was far behind us now. She rode on ahead watching the trail. I rode on watching her. The jack pines rose up around us while we rode farther, together into the thick of them.
* * *
Boudro said fear kept her from coming forward sooner. Actually, every time the cops came around asking questions, Boudro said the brothers sent messages to remind her how important it was for her to maintain her silence. In fact, two of her dogs were murdered in front of her, in her yard. Message received. And just in case it wasn’t, the Duvall brothers went out of their way to remind her of her “pretty granddaughters.”
* * *
In the late ’90s and the early 2000s, the generation of cottage seekers who had built a recreational weekend community in Luzerne started passing away. The properties went to their children and because their children didn’t care for their properties, many of the cabins and trailers rotted into the landscape – the roofs collapsed, limbs grew in through the screens.
Oscoda County, the towns of Luzerne and Mio in particular, are – and have been – at an economical disadvantage. What businesses and opportunities that are there revolve around wildlife and the river. The costs of living, like real estate rates, are low. The area didn’t have the industrial advantages afforded to the southern counties and because of that the population rates began – and remain – low. Many of the families who owned cabins on the land in Luzerne let them return to it. Whether it was out of negligence or from what their owners thought would be more of a hassle to sell, property taxes went unpaid, and cabins – the salvageable ones at least – went back to the banks. During the first decade of the 21st century the land changed hands while new faces – and names – moved in.
* * *
A year after Tyll and Ognjan went missing, police were confounded by the lack of clues in their disappearance. In 1986, The Argus Press, an Owosso, Michigan-based newspaper, caught up with officers working the missing case. Detective Sergeant Norman Maxwell of the Michigan State Police said he’d “never had a missing persons case where there was no lead or anything.” At that point in the investigation, all that was known was that Tyll and Ognjan had headed north with the intention of hunting at the Tyll family cabin in White Cloud, Michigan. White Cloud is 164 miles southwest of Mio, in the opposite direction of where Boudro and other witnesses would eventually testify about their murder. The 1986 Argus Press piece does a great job of exhibiting how, within the short time span of a year, the case of these two missing hunters had already become a part of Michigan lore, taking on a life of its own. Tyll’s father, with what was most likely frustration, uttered, “Everyone’s got their theory.” In the non-excitement of small-town Michigan life, people began to see the Tyll and Ognjan case as an opportunity to play a part. According to The Argus Press, a waitress in White Cloud told police she saw somebody matching Ognjan’s description. Police put it to the wayside, already assuming the two hunters never made it to Tyll’s cabin. Ognjan’s girlfriend at the time, Jan Paye, succinctly summed up the opportunistic tip-reporting that was coming in when she said, “No one (in the White Cloud area) would say they saw them until the TV cameras came on. Then everybody saw them.” In a tip that, looking back, has most likely frustrated investigators because of the good chance of its accuracy, a hunter told police he “saw an abandoned Ford Bronco matching the description of the men’s vehicle around Thanksgiving Day in deep, swampy woods about 18 miles southeast of Grayling.” The distance between Grayling and Mio, where witnesses would eventually say the murder took place, is 31 miles. Eighteen miles southeast of Grayling would have put the reported sighting of the Bronco smack dab between the two towns. Police pursued the hunter’s tip, but to no avail. Lt. John Hardy, with the State Police at the time, found it hard to believe the Bronco, if it was hidden anywhere in the woods, wouldn’t have been found by the time The Argus Press article was written. Hardy said, “With all the recreational vehicles and snowmobiles and hunters and mushroom pickers, there are too many people in the woods nowadays. With the growth up here, there aren’t very many really remote regions anymore.” The 1986 piece is heartbreaking for the way it captures how family members were still holding on to that sense of hope, even if that hope was misplaced. Tyll’s mother, Catherine, told reporters, “People just don’t disappear. Everyone says you’ve got to be realistic. But you don’t have to be realistic.”
* * *
Despite how lonely they look, jack pines never leave you alone. They were unusually still at the end of the horse trail and as the girl stared off at the stables I swore somebody, somewhere was staring at us. She laid her bike on its side and called back to me, “You coming, or what?” I kept my hands on the handlebars and kept my eyes on the trees, then noticed the old machines; the new grass growing over the dirt dozed into a hill. “You know you didn’t come this far not to see inside the stables,” she said. I laid down my bike beside hers in the weeds.
* * *
According to court documents, many witnesses eventually testified to seeing a black Ford Bronco in the years immediately following the hunters’ disappearance. Connie Sundberg said she lived with Donald Duvall from 1980 to 1989 and while they were together, Raymond Duvall “lived across the street and kept pigs.” She testified that on Thanksgiving 1985, “a nice black Ford Bronco pulled into the driveway.” She testified that she thought it was being driven by another Duvall brother, Rex Duvall, and that Raymond went out and told him “to get the fucking thing out of here before we all get in trouble.” Patricia Abbott was a neighbor of Rex Duvall’s and testified that she, too, saw a Ford Bronco at his property and that, around that time, he got rid of his pigs “though it would not have been unusual to butcher them.” A cousin of the Duvall brothers, Charles McMullen Jr., said he saw a black Ford Bronco at a family member’s house in 1985 or 1986. Eileen Seitz, a witness who passed away before trial, had her testimony read into record that said she remembered yet another Duvall brother, Randy, driving “a nice black Bronco.” Seitz’s testimony also revealed she knew “the Duvalls chopped up cars and buried stolen car parts.” Randy Duvall, in his own testimony, “acknowledged that he scrapped cars.” Donna Holbrook, a one-time lover of Raymond’s, said she knew he “dealt in scrapped cars and car parts.” Another of the Duvall brothers, Kenneth Duvall, testified that Alzheimer’s had impaired his ability to remember why he had told “the police about the dismantling of a 1980 black Ford Bronco” ten years prior.
* * *
I hadn’t gotten very far from my bike before the girl said, “It’ll be great. My friends will be here soon.” I froze where I was. I’d already had a feeling we weren’t alone and now, her nonchalant acknowledgment of the soon-arrival of others had (intentionally or not) brought more people into the picture. I felt like I’d just ridden into a situation I had to get out of and fast. She noticed I’d stopped following her and turned. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but I have to go.”
“Wait,” she said, and for a few seconds I did. I said again I was going and then I did. I picked up my bike and started riding away. Over my shoulder I could hear her yelling after me. As I put more distance between us the more it started to sound like a chorus of yelling, like there were others up there yelling after me, with her. As I rode, I tried to stay as close as I could to the middle of the trail so that the tree lines, on both sides of me, remained at a safe distance. It was hard telling what might come out from the pines. I rode as fast as I could. I sped back down the horse trail with the dusk eating the dust of my return.
* * *
On Halloween 1969, two Oscoda High School students, Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley, disappeared. It was initially reported that they were last seen walking down River Road, 5.6 miles east of where Consumers Energy would eventually construct Old Orchard Campground. They’d decided to skip school, but planned to return that evening for the Friday night football game, after which they’d attend a Halloween party. They didn’t. Police first considered the two girls runaways. Rumors circulated that they had hitchhiked toward Flint. Days passed and neither girl contacted friends or family. By the time police took their disappearance seriously it was too late. If the two girls had left a trace, it was most likely already gone. Oscoda Police Chief Mark David, who reopened the case in 2010, did so because he saw the flaws in the initial investigation, and the window for correcting those faults, as winnowing away. Jason Odjen, of the Iosco County News Herald, reported that, “David said there are several issues with the information on the case. One is that many of the people that were interviewed at the time, even those who were high school kids at the time, are getting up in age. He said going through the files, which he does on a weekly basis to run down names, he has found that more and more of the witnesses on the case have died over the years.”
The inadequacy of the initial investigators has had a reverberating impact across the history of the case. For 44 years it was believed the girls were last seen walking away from the high school but, according to Erin Donaghue with CBS News, “In May of 2013, however, a witness came forward saying he picked up the girls as they were walking along River Road, which runs alongside the Au Sable River, and dropped the two off in downtown Oscoda. The man said he came forward to police with the information years ago.” Odjen’s piece echoes that by including the man’s frustration: “I don’t know why all the authorities said (they were last seen on River Road).” Odjen’s piece continues with Chief David saying the man who picked them up “worked as an attendant at a gas station that was once on the corner of US-23 and River Road” and that “he picked the girls up and gave them a ride into town, dropping them off at the station as he was coming into work that day.” Chief David said the man was not a person of interest and that the investigators didn’t include the man’s statement in any official reports during the initial investigation. It is largely believed that sometime after arriving in downtown Oscoda, the two girls again hitchhiked but, this time, got in the wrong car with the wrong person at the wrong time. It is believed that whomever the driver was – that stopped to give them that final ride – is the same person that drove them to their deaths.
* * *
Toward the end of the horse trail, under the power lines, I squeezed my handlebar brake, kicked up some dust, and came in sideways to look back up the trail behind me. I knew of no other way out than back this way, the way we’d gone up. Surely she wouldn’t be far behind. Certainly it’d been a misunderstanding that we’d laugh about. The bugs started making their sawing sounds in the grass. It got darker and darker still. There was nobody else around. It feels like I’ve been waiting for her, since then, to ride back down.
* * *
In 2005, the first fresh faces of Luzerne began to arrive. People we didn’t know began to occupy the old properties of the people we did know. Fewer people waved and more people looked suspiciously at us as we drove by. Privacy became important in a place where it felt like it hadn’t been. Down the road from my grandparents’ cabin, a man started putting together his property-project that, since its construction, we’ve called The Compound. The Compound is made up of four or five haphazardly interconnected outbuildings situated behind a house on an acre protected by a makeshift sheet metal fence that encloses it all. The man wants his privacy and just wants us to respect that. He also wants to protect what’s his, so a watchtower rises up and looks over his land.
* * *
Fear might have the power to suppress the truth for years, but it hardly has the power to suppress it forever. According to court documents, an old landlord of Donald Duvall’s, Edward Lavere, testified that after having to evict him, Duvall “threatened to do the same thing to him that he had done to the hunters.” Additionally, Raymond allowed the threat “the family sticks together” to hang in the air. A cousin of the Duvall’s, Tammy Morris, said she overheard a conversation at a birthday party that the brothers “put them [the hunters] through a shredder, and fed them to pigs.” According to the documents, “Morris admitted that she denied hearing such conversation when she first spoke to the police because she was scared.” Lloyd Harmon, the ex-husband of Tammy Morris, was at the party and testified to hearing the same story his wife had heard at the time. Court papers say Harmon “moved to Kentucky after receiving threats.” This time, though, those threats came through proxy: the brothers’ cousin, Susan Younkin, delivered them when she “threatened him three days before he testified.” Connie Sundberg, while living with Donald, remembered him coming home drunk and weepily admitting to committing murder. Sundberg said he was abusive and knowing that she’d overheard his admission “called her a ‘fucking bitch,’ hit her, and warned her not to say anything.” Sundberg testified that she broached the topic with him again the next morning and that Duvall said, “shut the fuck up or I will kill you.” Sundberg’s sister, Donna Sholl, overheard a discussion theorizing about “who might have spoken to the police” and that Raymond said “there was a snake in the woodpile and they had to find it.” According to those same court filings, “Sholl subsequently asked what they did with the skulls because the pigs would not eat them, and [Raymond] threatened to cut her up and feed her to the pigs.” Court documents say Raymond told Donna Holbrook “that people who talked too much did not stick around long and that the police would never find anything because they covered their tracks.” When Charles McMullen Jr. reported what he knew to the police, he made sure they understood the chance he was taking by doing so, because the Duvall brothers “would kill him if they found out he was talking.”
* * *
According to a piece published on Medium, after the initial 1969 investigation into the disappearance of Hobley and Spencer grew cold, “the case remained cold and silent until 1985” when “police were told that the two [girls] were murdered by ‘two area men’ and buried by a barn.” The article said the “barn was a popular location for teenage parties in the area.” In a piece published by The Guardian, Chief David recalled “that when he was a teenager it was rumored that the girls had been buried under a barn in Wilber Township, around 11 miles from Oscoda.” When he became chief he realized that those tips and leads had never been investigated. He ordered the excavation of the ground around the barn and – despite the assistance of cadaver dogs – wasn’t able to unearth any human remains.
* * *
In 2010, the owner of the cabin next to my grandparent’s sold the property. During the opening week of rifle season, a car pulled up and a woman, with a few boxes of belongings and the key to the cabin, got out. The car then drove away. The woman had come from Wisconsin, said she was an engineer, and was looking for a fresh start. Surely she found it by becoming the new owner of a couple acres, a small stretch of woods, and the cabin upon it with its insides stripped down to the studs.
* * *
In the January 7th, 1970 issue of the Oscoda Press, Arlene Spencer, the mother of Patricia Spencer, wrote a letter pleading to the public for help. In it, she wrote, “I have done everything I can think of to find my daughter. So now I am just plain begging. Some of you have to know how the girls left here.”
* * *
Seven years after the disappearance of Tyll and Ognjan, in 1992, the Owosso newspaper, The Argus Press, again followed up on the status of the case. Michigan State Police Detective Sgt. Curt Schram told reporters, “We believe that there are certainly enough people that know what happened and when they’re ready to come forward, we’re ready to talk with them.” The lack of leads and evidence was frustrating for investigators. Schram said, “Everything is on hold pending the discovery of the vehicle, vehicle parts, bodies, or other evidence.” The families of the two missing men were so desperate for clues that they consulted a psychic, but not even the psychic’s supposed ethereal clairvoyance could help them. Tyll’s mother said, “It’s like MIAs. You know they’re gone, but you can just never be sure. You’ve just got to have some kind of proof to grieve the loss and put an end to it.” Likewise, Ognjan’s mother’s grief, over time, had been replaced with the frustration of the unknown: “It just seems impossible that two healthy men just vanished from the face of the earth. Someone out there knows something.”
* * *
The woman who moved into the cabin next to my grandparents’ was self-sufficient and, intentionally or not, practiced sustainability. Electricity was her only amenity. For groceries and other necessities she had no automobile, but walked or rode her bike into town. She bought large jugs of water since the property had no tap or well. She lived alone up there year-round in the cold and the quiet, while other cabins sat empty through the season, the pine needles accumulating along their roofs. Her only human interaction came by way of those she crossed paths with in town or with her neighbors (my family members), on their hunting trips and weekends away.
* * *
Time passed and the mothers of Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer died without knowing what happened to their daughters. Their bodies were given the burials their daughters’ bodies were denied. As time goes on, the bodies of others from the area return to the ground and it’s hard telling what kind of information, what kind of clues to the case, go with them.
* * *
In 2012, after two years in her new cabin, the woman who moved into the property next to my grandparents went to town for groceries, leaned her bike against the wall outside the sliding doors of the store, and disappeared. We heard a few rumors: that she had a bad boyfriend that did her in, that she got in the car with a passer-through, and that she staged her own disappearance to get out of debt. It wasn’t hard to see through the shades of her windows and into her cabin. It clearly didn’t look like she had planned to leave. Unless, of course, she planned it to look like she wasn’t planning to. By 2014, debt collectors and lawyers had intermittently shown up. We could tell by the notes they taped to her door: “If you’ve seen _______ please contact the firm of _________” or “If you know the whereabouts of ________ please tell her _________ is trying to contact her.”
* * *
The assistant state attorney general who successfully prosecuted the Duvall brothers was Donna Pendergast. According to the Michigan Sportsman, in her closing statement, staring into the eyes of both Donald and Raymond, she said their faces were “nothing more than the masks for monsters.” The jury reached their verdict quicker than reporters and lawyers had anticipated and the guilty verdict was read aloud by 23rd Circuit Judge Ronald Bergeron. According to the Sportsman, as he did so, “Raymond Duvall dropped his head on the defense table briefly. Donald Duvall sat stoically.” Ognjan’s mother, in her eighties at the time the verdict was handed down, said to reporters, “I’m glad. I’m just glad.” Tyll’s father, who, according to the Sportsman leaned on his cane, said, “They took my son. It doesn’t bring him back, but it’s something.”
* * *
I left Michigan in 2012, but return annually to kayak the Au Sable with my father. Every year we pull onto my grandparents’ property and see the empty cabin next door. A can that was left out with a rusted lid sits by the half-painted siding, her gardening gloves still on the steps, the windows along the bedroom cracked open – the whole scene sending the message that, when she left, she had every intention of returning to finish the summer projects she started. One night, sitting beside the campfire, I watch my dad disappear into the dark behind the outhouse and – after a few moments – reemerge from that dark with a pile of logs. As he hatchets them down into strips of kindling, I ask if he knows if anyone ever reported her missing. He doesn’t. He leaves the hatchet in the top of a log and turns his head toward her cabin. We’re both quiet until I say, jokingly, that I bet her body’s inside.
* * *
The jury in the Duvall case convicted the brothers of murder without any actual physical evidence against them. Instead, the jury relied solely on the testimony of Boudro and the other witnesses. According to court documents, Boudro had some credibility issues: “She acknowledged various discrepancies in between her police statements, preliminary examination testimony, and trial testimony.” In addition to that, the court papers say, “Boudro admitted that she had a drinking problem, but said she stopped drinking in 1994. She also admitted using drugs. She had been taking medication for depression for several years, but denied being delusional.” The Michigan Sportsman interviewed Pendergast, the prosecutor, in their piece covering the trial conclusion and she said, “I’ve never had a trial quite like this. We had a witness who had some problems, but I’m glad after all these years we went for it. I thought the family deserved closure after 18 years.’’ There’s little doubt the Duvall brothers fit the bill, but it’s hard to believe they were the only ones – literally – with blood on their hands. Maybe they were the only ones in the field that night with Tyll and Ognjan, but there were too many people seen behind the wheel of the Bronco to assume others didn’t play – at the very least – an ancillary role in the cover‑up. That doesn’t matter now, though; the jury believed Boudro and the other witnesses and Pendergast got her men. It can be assumed that the hair on the back of every jurors’ neck stood up when, in her closing statement, Pendergast said the brothers’ crime was “an evil so dark your worst nightmare pales in comparison. There is no understanding of pure evil, only the recognition of what it is.”
* * *
In 2013, ABC12, a Mid-Michigan affiliate, conducted a 44‑years-later retro-report on the missing girls, Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer. In it, they interviewed Mary Buehrle, the younger sister of Hobley, who said, “Someone in this town killed them.” The reporter asked, “That’s what you feel?” Buehrle said, “No. That’s what I know.”
* * *
I hadn’t thought about the girl on her bike at the campground for years. I was lesson planning one evening in my office, coming up with a writing prompt that asked my students to consider a time in their lives when a situation sent them, one way or another, a sign that made them feel like they urgently needed to find a way out of it. I thought of the trees at the end of the horse trail. I thought about the girl’s clothes and her “friends” on their way to meet her. I spent a lot of time, after that experience at the stables, thinking it was simply delinquent: a few kids planning to cause another kid some harm. I was older than I’d like to admit when I first considered maybe she was being used as bait, to lure a kid away from his campsite, away from the campground, so whomever might have been waiting in the stable – all those years ago – could take both of us away.
* * *
The black Ford Bronco pulled into Walker’s Bar in Mio at about 9:30 on the Saturday of their fateful hunting trip and Tyll and Ognjan got out, walked in, pulled up a pair of barstools, and began a conversation with David Welch, a local who would later testify in the case against the Duvalls. The two men asked him where they could find some women. They probably asked him about the beer, probably talked about the tail they were chasing, and whatever other stories three men shoot over a round of drinks on stools at a bar. In his testimony, Welch said Tyll and Ognjan “told him that they were staying at Ma Deeters in Luzerne and were deer hunting.”
* * *
We’d pulled into the cabin hell-bent on redeeming the poor decision-making we made on our kayak trip the year before. The year prior, we’d put in just below the Mio Dam, right off of Highway 33, and paddled the five-hour trip to McKinley Bridge. The 33 to McKinley trip starts shallow, the kayaks moving slick and slyly just above the bedded stones. We were on the river early, the fog guarding the riverbanks, while wildlife intermittently came down to its edge to feed. The first three hours of the trip go by like that, smoothly and with ease. The last two hours, though, as we found out, slow down; the water widens out, gets deeper, and winds through a section of residentially owned embankments. The river loses its remoteness, its wild, and what energy we’d had when we started paddling petered out. This year would be different, though. Dad was eyeing a section of the South Branch, a speedier segment between the Chase and Smith Bridges.
* * *
Missing person’s fliers with Pamela Hobley’s face can still be found stapled to telephone poles around the Oscoda area today. Mary Buehrle, her sister, returns to the area a few times a year to replace the damaged ones, the ones torn apart from the weather, the ones that have faded with time.
* * *
The grass had grown up around the cabin and before we did anything else Dad wanted it cut. He was weed whacking out front and I’d done all I could with the push mower so I shut it off, brushed the pine needles off the back steps, and sat down. I could see from where I was sitting that – in the half decade she’d been gone – the frame on the door of the woman’s cabin had come loose. Dad was still whacking the weeds as I crossed the lot. I realized the door was open. The weed whacking stopped.
* * *
Police Chief Mark David, who reopened the Hobley and Spencer case in 2010, was also featured on the ABC12 retro-report. The case was personal for him. He was a product of the town, too. In just the few moments he spoke to reporters, it was apparent to viewers that for him, identity is tied to place, land, and the events that play out upon it: “It’s close to home because I’ve grown up here and I’ve worked here for thirty years. So . . . we’ll get there.”
* * *
Dad and I didn’t debate about it very long. What was, early on, a joke about her body became a real concern. If her remains were in the cabin, how many more years would have to pass before they were found? We pushed open the door and went in. I’ll save you the drama: we found no body. What was there, though, was everything the way she left it whenever she last left: a fossilized meal still in a pan on the stove, her notebooks and engineering texts open on her desk by the wall, dirty clothes in a hamper by the bathroom, and photos along a bookcase of her and somebody else somewhere – we guessed – was home. Her coat, hung on a hook on the back of a door, startled me; inside that door was a room in which it appeared she slept and in that room was a sleeping bag, one flap flipped back like she’d just gotten out of bed.
* * *
I can’t say what kind of plans I dismantled by hightailing it away from the horse stables or, for that matter if – in the first place – there were any plans at all. I know that I waited nearly a half-hour under the power lines looking back the way I’d just come, up the path. It was dark when I rode into the campsite and I didn’t say anything about her, not for a long time. Time is like that, though: a tunnel the past sends its pleas through and us – on the other end – unable to find a way to speak back. I’m here, but I’m there, too on a cool afternoon, the summer of 2001 coming to a close along the banks of the Au Sable, Old Orchard park emptying out, and my mom smiling through the glare I give her as the girl and I pedal away.
* * *
We had planned – the next morning – to get on the river early and it was, in fact, early; the first few drips of coffee were just starting to drop musically into the decanter. It was dark outside the window and Dad had a map of the river spread out across the dining table. “Right in here is our best bet for quick water,” he pointed out. It was damp inside the cabin and a little of last night’s rain had come in through the screen and settled on the sill. I’d hardly shaken off the sleep when I told him I’d never before been on that part of the river. “Sure you have,” he said, “you stopped and watched that eagle there.”
* * *
In early November 1985, in St. Clair Shores, David Tyll and Brian Ognjan packed their clothes into their duffel bags and into the back of Tyll’s black Ford Bronco. Certainly, they were feeling the elation of the almost-adventure, the long weekend before them. They must have carried their gun cases from the house to the truck flashing smiles back and forth, knowing how close it all was: the beer, the lack of responsibilities, the chance to play runaways for a bit, to get away from it all, and break the routines of regular life. Anyone from Michigan – if you asked them – would tell you that the two men certainly smiled as they shut the back hatch of the Bronco, backed out of the driveway, and drove north.
* * *
In 2016, NBC24, a local Michigan news channel, conducted an interview with the family members of many of Michigan’s missing persons. They asked Mary Buehrle what it was like waiting – for 46 years – for closure. For Buehrle, it was like walking through life with “a hole in your heart.” Years roll by, but the bricks of the unknown build the years. She said, “You always wonder where they’re at, what’s going on, what happened to them.”
* * *
The cabin next door to my grandparents’ in Luzerne has sat empty now for seven years. The woman who showed up one winter hasn’t returned to it. Her gardening gloves still sit on her front steps, the paint can in the grass grows more rust. Shingles slide off as the seasons pass and the structure itself is beginning to lean. The land, though, waits like it always does: ready and eager with its bid to reclaim. The woman’s been gone for seven years. Shortly after she disappeared somebody said she’d gone back to Wisconsin, someone else said they’d seen her walking along 487, a road that leads away from – and never toward, it seems – town. But, and this is the important part, most of us have never said a word about it at all.
SOURCES QUOTED AND CONSULTED
“2013 story on Patricia Spencer, 16, & Pamela Hobley, 15, from Oscoda, MI, kidnapped 31 Oct 1969.” YouTube, uploaded by c28timeline, 9 Nov. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy-piJylFws.
Boyle, Louise. “New appeal in hunt for girls who vanished without a trace on their way to a Halloween party 45 years ago.” The Guardian. 31 Oct. 2014, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2816071/Mystery-teenage-girls-vanished-way-Halloween-party-45‑years-ago.html. Accessed 3 March 2019.
“Case of Two Missing Hunters Mystifies Relatives, Authorities.” The Argus Press [Owosso, Michigan], 3 Nov. 1986, p. 7. Google Newspapers, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=nloiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=dasFAAAAIBAJ&dq=david%20tyll&pg=1201%2C118080. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Donaghue, Erin. “Halloween Mystery: Where are girls who vanished forty five years ago?” CBS News. 31 Oct. 2014, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/halloween-mystery-where-are-girls-who-vanished-from-oscoda-michigan-45‑years-ago/. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Donald Dean Duvall vs. Thomas K. Bell. Case No. 2:09‑CV-11663. United States District Court Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division. 2012. Government Publishing Office Govinfo, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-mied-2_09‑cv-11663/pdf/USCOURTS-mied-2_09‑cv-11663‑0.pdf. Accessed 3 March 2019.
McDiarmid, Hugh. “2 Brothers Found Guilty of Murdering Hunters.” Michigan Sportsman, 29 Oct. 2003, https://www.michigan-sportsman.com/forum/threads/2‑brothers-found-guilty‑of‑murdering-hunters.51347/. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Nelson, Jim. “Missing in Michigan: Families banding together to find strength.” NBC24 News. 18 Feb. 2016, https://nbc24.com/news/local/missing‑in‑michigan-families-banding-together‑to‑find-strength. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Odjen, Jason. “Investigation into Oscoda Missing Youths Still Active.” Iosco County News Herald. 4 Dec. 2018, http://www.iosconews.com/news/article_ae3bff08‑f7e5‑11e8‑a43e-3f41ec47dcc9.html. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Ramsland, Katherine. “Lost Guys, Pig Feeders, and Dark Places.” Psychology Today. 16 Dec. 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201512/lost-guys-pig-feeders-and-dark-places. Accessed 3 March 2019.
“Seven Years After Leaving for Hunting Trip, Two Michigan Men Still Missing.” The Argus Press [Owosso, Michigan], 5 Oct. 1992, p. A3. Google Newspapers, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=8ToiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=sqkFAAAAIBAJ&dq=david%20tyll&pg=1306%2C4960009. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Unexplained Realms. “Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer.” Medium. 2 Nov. 2018, https://medium.com/@unexplainedrealms/pamela-hobley-and-patricia-spencer-had-a-few-things‑in‑common-they-attended-the-same-school-were-a6ef91367961. Accessed 3 March 2019.
Brandon Rushton’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, Pleiades, and Passages North. “Inarguably Au Sable” is his first creative nonfiction work to be published.