The Shadow Over Lansing: Michigan’s Capital and Its Decades of Unsolved Murders
Lansing, Michigan — the state capital, home to Michigan State University and a seemingly stable government town — hides a dark chapter that stretches from the 1970s into the new millennium.
While the city tried to project an image of safety and progress, a terrifying pattern emerged: young and middle-aged women were being abducted, sexually assaulted, strangled, stabbed, and dumped in wooded areas, parks, and along the Grand River.
Between 1970 and the mid-1980s, at least fifteen women met violent ends under strikingly similar circumstances.
Police long suspected a single serial killer was responsible for the first wave.
When the killings seemed to stop after a dramatic survivor escape, many breathed easier.
Then the violence returned — just as brutal, just as random.
The terror began on Friday the 13th, November 1970.
Eighteen-year-old Marie Anne Jackson, a waitress at Sully’s Drive-In, was last seen leaving a McDonald’s on South Cedar Street with a tall man in his early thirties driving a battered Oldsmobile.
Two weeks later, a deer hunter found her body on Michigan State University land — sexually assaulted, strangled with her own bra, wearing only her tennis shoes.
She had been dumped just fifty feet off a dirt road in a popular “lover’s lane” area.
Police initially said it was isolated.
But the disappearances kept coming.
In July 1972, 19-year-old MSU psychology student Diane Osinski answered a babysitting job call and vanished.
In August that same year, 43-year-old mother of four Betty Jean Goodrich disappeared from a grocery store parking lot.
Her body was found stabbed and strangled two days later.
Just days after that, 58-year-old Irene Waters was lured from her home by a fake emergency call from her workplace and stabbed to death in her garage.
Witnesses described a stocky white man in his mid-thirties with dark-framed glasses fleeing the scene.
The pattern was unmistakable: phone lures, parking lot abductions, strangulation, stabbing, bodies dumped in remote wooded spots.
Yet authorities repeatedly stated the cases were not connected.
Then came 1973.
Twenty-year-old Dawn Maguiar vanished from a department store parking lot.
Her body was later found shot three times.
Nineteen-year-old Diane Littlefield disappeared after leaving her boyfriend’s apartment — only to be found alive months later after hitchhiking across the country.
And in June, 20-year-old Sally May Pazitka was abducted at gunpoint while walking.
She survived by jumping from the moving car and gave a detailed description: stocky, 35-40, sandy curly hair and mustache.
Her escape should have been the break police needed.
It wasn’t.
In 1974, the revolver used to kill Dawn Maguiar was pulled from the Shiawassee River.
It had been purchased by a man named Robert Shaw, but the lead went cold.
That same day, 30-year-old Pamela Hill was found stabbed to death in a rest stop bathroom.
The violence escalated again in 1975.
Seniors Stacy Roast and Morin Nichols went camping at Prienus Park and never returned.
Their bodies were found weeks apart in wooded fields north of Lansing — both stabbed repeatedly.
By the late 1970s, fear gripped the city.
In 1977, 19-year-old Martha Sue Young vanished after a date with her fiancé, Donald Miller.
Her clothes were later found neatly arranged in Prienus Park as if she had simply disappeared out of them.
In 1978, 27-year-old Marita Chuckette was stabbed 17 times and her hands cut off.
MSU student Wendy Bush and teacher Christine Stewart also disappeared.
Then, in August 1979, 14-year-old Karen Oatley — nearly deaf but attending regular school — went for a bike ride and was found strangled and slashed in woods behind her middle school.
The breakthrough finally came with Donald Miller himself.
Already under suspicion in Martha Sue Young’s disappearance, Miller was arrested after attacking 14-year-old Lisa Gilbert and her brother Randy in their home.
He eventually led police to the bodies of Martha Sue Young, Christine Stewart, and Marita Chuckette, and confessed to Wendy Bush’s murder.
Thanks to a plea deal, Miller avoided life sentences and has been eligible for parole since 2018.
He remains imprisoned.
With Miller behind bars, Lansing hoped the nightmare was over.
It wasn’t.
In 1983–1984, another wave of stabbings hit.
Twenty-two-year-old Tracy Forker, a sex worker, was murdered in an abandoned house.
Twenty-nine-year-old Bonnie Goolan, also a sex worker and friend of Tracy’s, was found floating in the Grand River.
Twenty-six-year-old Alfie Cooper was stabbed to death in her apartment.
In 1986, jogger Janette Kirby was found stabbed and strangled in Riverbend Park, wrists bound with plastic restraints.
The next day, Cynthia Miller’s body was pulled from the river.
A Riverbend Murders Task Force was formed but disbanded in 1986 with several cases still open.
Over the following decades, DNA and persistent detective work solved some cases:
Jerry Windingart was linked by DNA to Dawn Maguiar’s murder.
Charles Joseph Emory was posthumously identified in Betty Jean Goodrich’s killing.
David Draheim was convicted in Janette Kirby’s murder using a plastic cuff match.
Carl Watts, the notorious “Sunday Morning Slasher,” was suspected in several early cases but never officially linked before his death.
Carl Finch was identified by DNA in Marie Anne Jackson’s murder years after his suicide.
Yet eight murders from this era remain unsolved.
Police have long believed some are connected, possibly by local brothers or other unidentified predators who exploited the same hunting grounds.
Others may be the work of killers who were never caught.
The single cold case detective assigned to Lansing’s files remains overwhelmed.
Families still wait.
Communities still carry the scars.
The wooded trails, riverbanks, and parks around Michigan’s capital — places meant for peace and recreation — became killing fields where predators operated with terrifying impunity for years.
To this day, the question lingers in Lansing: How many killers were truly active in the shadows of the state capital?
And how many of them are still out there?
The Grand River still flows.
The MSU campus still sprawls.
But for the families of the unsolved victims, the nightmare has never ended.
Somewhere, someone still knows what happened on those dark nights in the 1970s and 1980s.
And until those answers come, the shadow over Lansing remains.
