A very old murder
A very old murder in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, was apparently solved this week after 27 years. Not weeks, not months, but years. Five people were arrested, including one who worked as a nursing assistant at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. Police painted a picture of an almost unbelievably sordid crime. Michigan has never had a death penalty, but if the alleged facts of this case had occurred in a state which did, most or all of the suspects would be facing execution if convicted.
The victim, Janet Chandler, 23, invariably described as "pretty," was a senior at Hope College, a prominent Midwestern liberal arts college in Holland affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. She lived off campus and worked as a night clerk at the Blue Mill Inn, a motel along the highway. On the night of Jan. 31, 1979, she disappeared. Her body was found a day later by a snowplow driver in a rest area along Interstate 196, seven miles below South Haven, Mich. She had been raped and strangled, although I'm not sure if the rape part was disclosed at the time. Despite an extensive investigation by the Holland police, the final arrests were not made in the case until this week. DNA analysis didn't exist in 1979, and the police say that might have helped them if it had.
Janet arrived at Hope College from Muskegon, Mich., in the fall of 1975, a few months after I graduated. By 1979, I was living in Shamokin, Pa., and working at my first newspaper. My parents sent me the clippings about her murder from the Holland Sentinel, but I didn't think much about it again until I read in 2004 how a group of Hope students and their professor had made a documentary about the unsolved crime. Not long afterward, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox created a new "cold case" unit that adopted the Chandler murder as one of its first efforts.
Murders in Holland, a city (then) of 25,000 along Lake Michigan, are rare enough that you remember most of the ones in your lifetime. They have almost always been committed by outsiders, people who were not part of the majority Dutch culture even though they may have lived there. Not being Dutch and Reformed in Holland (I was the former but not the latter) is akin in some ways to not being Mormon in Utah. I always supposed that Janet Chandler's murder was connected to a robbery at the motel, that the killer had eliminated the only witness, dumped her body at the rest stop, then disappeared into the snowy night toward Chicago.
As the Grand Rapids Press reported today, it was very different than that. A group of Wackenhut security guards hired by Chemtron, a Holland company then having a strike, abducted her, raped her repeatedly, tortured her, and finally killed her. The strike ended soon afterward and they crawled back to whatever hole they called home. During their time busting heads at the strike, they had, police said, engaged in heavy alcohol and drug use in their off hours at the hotel. Sexual relationships are said to have developed between the guards and motel employees, possibly including Janet herself. The rape and murder took place at a party at a Chemtron guest house on Howard Avenue in Holland, not far from the Parke-Davis factory where my father worked. More than a dozen people were present, but even those who didn't participate in the crime kept the secret for 27 years.
Some of this came out locally last February, when the cold-case unit arrested Robert Michael Lynch, 66, and got a good confession from him. Many details were withheld at the time. What we know now is that Laurie Swank, 48, the Geisinger nursing assistant from Nescopeck, Pa., was Janet's off-campus roommate at the time and is said by police to have been the instigator of the horrors against her. Jealousy over a man?
I'm sure it will all come out, just as I'm sure that one or all of the defense attorneys will attempt to portray Janet as a willing participant in an orgy that got a little too crazy, went a little too far. That's how they do things in murder trials. Why? To get a lesser sentence for their clients than the life terms awaiting them if convicted of first degree murder. I pity Janet's parents for what they are going to have to endure in the name of justice, but there is no other way short of unlikely confessions. One or two will probably get off because of the difficulty of proving actions, proving intent, after 27 years.
How long did the alleged participants in this crime worry about getting caught? Was it in their thoughts every day, even two months ago, or did there come a time when they all but forgot about it? Some are parents now themselves, and perhaps better understand what they allegedly have done. What is clear is that this is a story the Russian writer Dostoevsky would have found as interesting as the world of murder and guilt he created in "Crime and Punishment."