“I worked at the sheriff’s dept. at the time of that murder
and I dispatched the officers, detectives, and ambulance there. The problem
with solving that case is that the officers in charge of the investigation and
the store owners let everybody and there brother down the basement before they
decided to start an official investigation in other words they dropped the ball…” ~Raymond
Haight
I ran across
the above comment on a Facebook thread dedicated to the murder of Janette
Roberson, so I contacted Mr. Haight to see if I could get his memory of the
event. Raymond Haight said he had just come in to work about 3:45 to the
Osceola County Sheriff’s Department. His shift was from 4:00 to 12:00pm. Not
more than 3 minutes after his butt was in the chair, according to him, the call
came in from Gambles.
“It was David
Engels and he said there was a murder in the basement at Gambles.”
Haight says
he turned to the two deputies standing in the sheriff’s department at the time and
told them what they had. To his recollection, the deputies present were Terry
Oyster and Tom Kingsbury. Their shift change was the same time as the
dispatchers, so that’s why they both happened to be standing there at the time,
according to Haight.
“They weren’t
even out the door and I was on the line dispatching EMS. Then I contacted the State
Police post. They were the ones that called the Reed City officers.” Back then,
Haight said, the Reed City MSP post
dispatched the city police.
He said dispatches
would have gone out to all cars, but not the EMS, as they were on a different
frequency. So anyone manning a patrol car in the area would have heard the
dispatch. This, however, contradicts the Finkbeiner/Primeau report which states
they were notified by Osceola County Dispatch. I asked Mr. Haight again and he
was very clear. He said he did not dispatch the city police. He called
the State Police Post, and it was they who were to contact RCPD officers.
It was Haight’s
understanding that when the first officers arrived on scene, the doors were not
secured and the owner was “…letting people to go in and out, and down into the
basement.” That seems to corroborate the MSP report, based on how many people
had been listed as being in the vicinity of the body. Surely all of those folks
weren’t allowed near the body after Officers
Primeau and Finkbeiner arrived?
When asked if
any related calls came in about the scene that day, Haight said the sheriff’s department
got word about ten or fifteen minutes after the initial call that there was a
possible suspect on a bus leaving Reed City—someone described as having run out
the back door of Gambles in an army coat toward where the bus picked up, down
by the Osceola Inn, which was on Upton Avenue, about a block from Gambles. Haight
said he believed this information had come from the store owner.
I told Mr. Haight
that the Michigan State Police, Reed City, and Osceola reports all said the
call came in as a heart attack, and that EMT Gary McGhee remembered it vividly as a
heart attack because that was what he thought he was responding to until the
moment he saw Janette’s brutalized body. Haight assured me that the call did
not come in as a heart attack, and repeated that the call he took was from a
person saying they were David Engels calling to say there had been a murder in
the Gambles basement.
Could more
than one call have come in, I wondered, aloud? I asked Haight if 9-1-1 was in
use then, and he said no. So I asked if a citizen needed the police, who would
they call? He said they would call the sheriff’s office directly, or the state
post, and then he rattled off a number: 832-2211.
Haight was
silent for a few seconds, and then said, “You know what could have happened? It
didn’t come in as a heart attack, but
maybe we dispatched it that way because of the scanners. See, you wouldn’t want
to call in a murder, because too many other people would hear it because of the
scanners.” He said he thinks that’s what may have happened. The call came in as
a murder, but he dispatched it as a heart attack.
“But that
would have been done at the order of Sheriff Needham,” Haight said. “He would
be the only one to give that order.” It is of note, though, that Haight did not
have independent recollection of that occurring. This was just supposition.
“So Needham must
have been there at the time the call came in, then?” I asked. Haight said he
was always around. His residence was attached to the jail.
Another thing
Haight remembered was the birds. He had two parakeets at the time. On his way
to work that day, around 3:30 or so, he considered stopping into Gambles to get
some birdseed because he was out. But when he got downtown he remembered he was
in uniform.
“I didn’t wanna
go buying birdseed for a parakeet in uniform.” So he didn’t go. All these years
later, he wondered aloud, “What if I had? Maybe I’d have seen something.”
In all
likelihood, at that time the only thing he would have seen was that the pet
department clerk was missing. Nobody I spoke to could find Janette from noon
on.
But Raymond Haight’s
is not the only What if? story I
heard in relation to this case.
On the day of
the murder, Roger Soper picked up his then mother-in-law from Meadowview
Apartments, the same apartments where Janette and her family lived. Soper’s
mother-in-law and her son were friendly with Janette. Soper and his wife worked
at the hospital in Reed City, different shifts. He worked 3:00 to 11:00pm, his wife
worked the 8:00 to 4:00 or 9:00 to 5:00 shift, so his mother-in-law would watch
the kids for a couple hours until his wife got home.
Earlier in
the week they’d discussed stopping by Gambles because his mother-in-law said
Janette wanted her to come look at a parrot she wanted to sell her. The
mother-in-law even asked Mr. Soper to pick her up a few minutes early that day.
But as often happens when routine overrides best laid plans, they both forgot
on the day they’d planned to go.
When they
arrived at his house where he would deposit her for babysitting duty before
heading off to work, Soper remembered. “Oh, we forgot to stop at Gambles about
the bird.” Mother-in-law assured him they could go another day. Based on his
schedule, he said they would have been in the pet store around 2:30. They never
made it.
He heard
about the murder around 4:30 that day in the cafeteria at the hospital. He said
it was all over the hospital pretty fast. Little did he know that his forgotten
trip to look at a bird, along with a familial connection to someone related to
the case, would years later bring the Michigan State Police to his door.
2 comments:
I just read your book and it is very well written and riveting, very hard to put down ... but two other deaths in our area was not mentioned. Wondering if you did any research as to the murder of Arnold Holmes and Ed Sweet? Don't remember the time frame but do not recall hearing their cases were ever solved?
Thank you and I am glad you found the book well written. :) Just what an author wants to hear. Neither Arnold Holmes nor Ed Sweet were listed on the Michigan State Police District 6 Open Homicide cases that was provided to me by MSP. If they are, indeed, still open cases, perhaps they fall under the jurisdiction of their respective county sheriff's departments? Without any more information, I cannot say, but if you would like to provide me with where the homicides occured (county, address, area, etc.) and the dates, I could check into them. Feel free to contact me at deckerjeni@gmail.com or respond here if you have any other information. I can tell you that if they are old cases, even if they were worked/assisted by MSP at one time, often they are turned back over to the first responding department. I know of two cases on my list that have been turned back over to the county sheriff's office by MSP. Now whether they would be actively investigated at any point, I could not say. Often without new leads or information, they remain inactive.
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