Lowell Cauffiel - Forever and Five Days: The Chilling True Story of Love, Betrayal, and Serial Murder in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Forever and Five Days

The Chilling True Story of Love, Betrayal, and Serial Murder in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Lowell Cauffiel

For Deborah

Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices with the truth.

1 CORINTHIANS, Chapter 13.

Prologue:

Wednesday, November 30, 1989

The blows of the sledgehammers rang out in the building, shaking loose the remnants of earth still clinging to the vault. It was no easy task, breaking the seal of the burial chamber that held the casket of the woman.

The interior of the utility garage at the Rosedale Park Memorial Cemetery was frigid and full of shadows in the last minutes of the afternoon. It smelled of earth and fertilizer and motor oil. But mostly, it was cold. An undertaker, a cemetery manager, a vault company representative and two detectives from a suburban Grand Rapids police department shuffled and stamped, waiting for the grisly work to be done.

The air seemed colder inside than out, where earlier the plot under a maple tree had been roped off by yellow crime scene tape. The sun was setting as a backhoe devoured the first layers of earth in the section called Garden of the Gospels. By the time the excavating machine was finished, the scene was illuminated by the harsh, blue glow of television lights beamed in from beyond the yellow tape. The halogen spots turned the pupils of the gravediggers into pencil points, blinding them to the contents of the cavity. When they jumped in with their shovels, they felt like they were about to dig in a bottomless pit. Finally, large flakes of new snow softly pelted the vault as it was chained, lifted to a flatbed truck and shuttled away to the garage.

Some reporters and photographers were waiting outside in the dark, while the workers in the garage went about their work. The news media had showed up at the cemetery after learning of the court order to exhume for autopsy the body of the sixty-year-old woman. She had been embalmed, blessed and buried nearly two years ago. The mere fact she was being dug up was news.

Already they had fragments of a more astounding story. There had been tips that police were investigating deaths in a nursing home called Alpine Manor. Routinely, the facility in the suburb of Walker averaged about forty deaths a year.

Its not unusual for people to die in a nursing home, a spokesman for the facility had said, trying to calm concerns. They are all expected to die, sooner or later, of natural causes.

However, they were not expected to die of suffocation. Police were looking at the possibility that patients had been smothered. The homicides, the story went, were the handiwork of employees. One victim had been an Alzheimers patient. Another had been suffering from gangrene of the leg. One news source claimed to have talked to a witness of the killings. The source wasnt sure if the deaths were to put patients out of their misery or just a way of getting kicks.

Later, the identities of eight possible victims were reported. The number alone shocked the quiet, middle-American city, home of the presidential museum of its favorite son, Gerald Ford. The number of homicides in the city of Grand Rapids for all of 1989 stood at only six. Soon, reports would also surface that the killings were part of some kind of love bond, an unholy cement in a union of lust and death.

Grand Rapids had always been immune to such stories. The city by the Grand River was designated an All-American City four times by the National Municipal League. A local minister once dubbed it the Christian Capital of the World. Beer and wine were available on Sunday, but first you had to find a grocer open on the Sabbath. Civic brochures promoted the ratio of one church for every thousand people. The city was the home of the Christian Reformed Church, the American outpost of Dutch Calvinism. The western side of Michigan was the states Bible Belt.

Inside the utility garage, the detectives directing the men with the sledgehammers were obsessed with a more earthly pursuit. The investigative process had proven as difficult as the burial seal. Questionable witnesses, elusive facts and hidden agendas had dominated the inquiry. Perhaps the truth was inside the vault.

Finally, gravediggers pried open the long concrete container with crowbars. As they wrestled the heavy top from the vault, the atmosphere of the garage quickly changed. They couldnt get the casket into the medical examiners van soon enough. With a blast of exhaust, the van left behind the pungent, fleshy smell of death.

Not a half hour later, the casket itself was opened in the autopsy room of a Grand Rapids hospital. Inside the woman of sixty was dressed in a pink jacket and skirt, white ruffled blouse, brassiere, panty hose, a slip and shoes. Her blond hair was highlighted with natural gray. It was still shaped from her final hairdressing.

There was, however, a problem. Some in attendance at the postmortem examination suspected as much when the vault seal was broken. Also, someone had heard something sloshing in the casket when it was carried into the hospitals autopsy room. The womans final resting place had not been immune to disturbance. In the twenty-two months of her interment, water had somehow invaded the casket. Extensive mold in a surreal shade of blue-green clung to the womans face, the back of her neck and portions of her extremities.

At 7:00 P.M., the search for answers began with the stainless cut of a pathologists knife.

Image Gallery

Cathy and Ken Wood with Kens father on the night of their wedding.

Gwen Graham in Tyler, Texas before she moved to Grand Rapids.

Bed one, the position near the window in an Alpine Manor room.

The exterior of Alpine Manor.

The interior of a typical Alpine Manor patient room.

Myrtle Luce, victim.

Mae Maisy Mason, victim, with her daughter Linda.

Marguerite Chambers, victim, in healthier days.

Bell Burkhard, victim.