A Matter of Timing
written & narrated by Mark Bielecki
It was a sunny Saturday morning. The birds were
singing, the flowers blooming and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A perfect
day to go to the beach, take in a ball game or just go for a walk in the woods.
So naturally I was sitting at my desk at State Police headquarters in Lansing
catching up on the paperwork I’d been putting off all week. My name is Gregg
Maguire. I’m a Captain in the Michigan State Police, in charge of the Special
Investigations Division.
Around 8:30 the phone rang which was unusual for a
Saturday morning.. The call was from Harvey Clement, Sheriff of Montcalm
county. I’d talked with Harvey off-and-on over the last couple of years, after
we’d met at a police training seminar and had dinner together. I’d told him
that if he ever ran across a ‘puzzler’ of a case, to give me a call.
He runs a small department out of his office in
Stanton, which is a small town about 50 miles Northwest of Lansing. The
Montcalm County detective squad covers 705 square miles and is stretched pretty
thin working on a wide variety of cases from auto theft to drug violations. He
said he had a case where a man had died and he thought that the circumstances
were suspicious. He told me that none of his detectives had experience with
this type of death and asked me to drive over and take a look at it.
When I got there, Sheriff Clement took me to a hunting
cabin on First Lake, which is the first in a chain of lakes in the aptly named
Six Lakes area. We met with a man named Louis Yeager, owner of the cabin where
the person had died.
Yeager had been a friend of Sheriff Clement for years.
Clement told me that they’d worked together on charity functions around the
county and that Yeager was always very supportive of his department.
The dead man’s name was Fred Fortin. He & Yeager
were partners in a chain of retail sporting goods stores in the Grand Rapids
area.
Yeager was extremely upset. He told us that Fortin was
his closest friend and they’d been business partners since the early 1980’s. He
said that they’d started in a cubby hole sized space in East Grand Rapids,
which had grown to three locations throughout Kent County. The stores
specialized in high-end outdoor sporting apparel, fishing tackle, and hunting
equipment.
I asked him to tell me exactly what had happened. He
started speaking, slowly at first and said “Our business did well early on. We
had a couple of premium apparel lines that no one else in town had. Lately, sales
were down because the internet offered the same brands at lower prices. Fred
had become very depressed. We’d both invested everything we had in the stores,
so if the business failed, we would both be on the brink of bankruptcy. It was
so bad that Fred even talked about committing suicide.”
He took a deep breath and continued. “I was worried
about him and suggested we come up here to my cabin. I thought the fresh air,
exercise, and some fishing would do him good. Help snap him out of his funk,
you know. We’d been here about three days and he seemed to be improving. He
wasn’t as glum as he’d been and his appetite was getting better. He wanted to
have a fish-fry, complete with coleslaw and hush puppies. His ‘can do’ attitude
was coming back and I thought he’d turned a corner and was ready to take on the
challenges again”
“Thursday morning we decided to go fishing at a trout
stream that empties into the lake. We didn’t catch anything and after a couple
of hours, he said he was going to try a stream about a half mile away. I
thought that was a good idea and said I was going to try a different stream,
kind of in the opposite direction. We joked that if we couldn’t catch the fish,
at least we’d have them surrounded. We agreed we’d meet back at the cabin
around lunchtime.”
“Well, my luck changed at my new fishing spot. I’d
caught my limit by 11 o’clock and started back to the cabin. As I was getting
nearer the cabin, I started to sense that there was trouble ahead. Something
just felt wrong and I ran the rest of the way back. When I opened the door, I
saw him. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. He was sitting at the
table with white foam coming out of his mouth. His face was hideously
contorted, like he was in incredible pain.”
He buried his face in his hands. “That sight will
haunt me forever. I’d got there not five minutes after he did and there he was
– dead. Why couldn’t I have been just a few minutes earlier?”
“What else did you notice?” I asked him.
“There was a bottle of Irish whiskey on the table and
a glass. Both the glass and the bottle smelled of bitter almonds and I’d seen
on TV that cyanide smells like that. It made me think that it was cyanide that
he took. I thought he was getting better, that he was on his way back to being
his old self again. Turns out I was wrong. He’d killed himself after all!”
I then asked “Have you had any visitors to the cabin?”
“No, not since we’ve been here” Yeager replied.
“Was Fortin a smoker?”
“No”
“How were his drinking habits? Was he a heavy
drinker?”
“No. He’d have a couple of glasses of Bushmills at the
end of the day, but nothing excessive.”
“What about doors and windows? Were they open or
closed?”
“They were all closed. Why?”
“No particular reason. Just being thorough.” I
replied.
“Sheriff, let’s take a look around outside. Maybe we
can find something out there”.
When we were safely outside and out of Yeager’s
earshot, I turned to Sheriff Clement.
“Harvey, I know this is going to be tough for you,
especially since Yeager is a friend of yours. You need to detain him as a
‘person of interest’ in the murder of Fred Fortin.”
Sheriff Clement looked aghast! “Why?” he said.
“He’s lying. He said he got back to the cabin not five
minutes after Fortin did. There’s no way for him to know when Fortin
returned to the cabin. I also doubt that Fortin had talked about suicide with
his business partner. If you look into it, I don’t think you’ll find anyone
else that Fortin talked about suicide with. Finally, take a look at their
partnership agreement. I’ll bet you’ll find that in the event of a partner’s
death, the surviving partner becomes the sole owner of the business. I think
this is plain, old fashioned murder for profit.”
I returned to Lansing and my day-to-day duties. I
spoke with Harvey again about two weeks later. Turns out I was right. The
detectives hadn’t found anyone that Fred Fortin had discussed suicide with.
They also got a copy of the partnership agreement which did make the
surviving partner the sole owner of the business in the event of a partner’s
death.
The business was actually doing quite well – sales
were not down because of the internet. Profits had gone down because Yeager was
skimming them into a private account using phony purchase orders to a
non-existent clothing supplier. It appears that Fortin was on the cusp of
discovering Yeager’s embezzling and Yeager knew his theft would soon be
exposed. He murdered Fortin in an attempt to cover it up.
When the detectives confronted Yeager with the
evidence, he broke down and confessed. He pled guilty to murder in the second
degree with a sentence of twenty-five years to life to avoid getting life
without possibility of parole.
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