"Murder Book" explores a Highland Park story with chillingly familiar details

I started watching a new true-crime doc show a week or so ago -- new to me, anyway. It's called "Murder Book," and it was released in 2014, now streaming on Tubi. I'm a few episodes in and really liking it. The show has a very easy storytelling style, and the presentation centers around the "murder book" of information a cop uses to solve a cold case. Well, as the third episode of the show's first season unfolded for me, I was surprised to see it was exploring a case in an area I researched heavily for my own true-crime project, Highland Park, Michigan, the three-square-mile enclave of Detroit, site of most of the murders of convicted serial Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins.

The case this episode was delving into wasn't the Atkins case, though -- it was the murder of a young man named Melvin at a home in Highland Park in December 1983. His cousin, Melissa Koontz (below), was interviewed about how she tenaciously worked to solve the case after it went cold, having been a 13-year-old girl and basically a witness (by sound and smell and a little sight) to the crime that night it happened. In more recent years she teamed up with Paul Thomas of the Highland Park police, and together they helped bring the perp to justice.

What grabbed me in this story, though, was the discussion of a mystery I attacked in my own book about the Atkins case -- the mystery of the missing police files. I had been told early on in the FOIA requests for my case research that a tornado had blown through Highland Park and destroyed the case files. That never made sense to me, and no one I interviewed for the project (including several retired officers who worked the case) ever mentioned or remembered this. They more remembered the files just not surviving the police move from one building to another in the years following the Atkins case. The bottom line was that years and years of various case files were left in the old building where the police had once been located, and they disappeared over time. The building was prey for vandals and others. Anyone could come in and loot through what was left behind. It's a kinda long story, which I delve into deeper in the book, but suffice it to say I was always skeptical of that tornado story. Well, "Murder Book" goes into the tornado -- multiple tornadoes, actually -- that ripped through the region on July 2, 1997. So yeah, evidently the old building suffered some damage from that (though it's not overtly said in the doc), leaving it more open to vandals and thieves. It still would have been vulnerable if there was no tornado -- and the files were still left behind -- but maybe the tornado helped. Maybe. 

The real issue was that the building was left vacated and the files were not moved to the new location. One person who worked for HP at the time of Melvin's murder case, James Francisco, gave a better explanation, I felt, in this TV doc: The city collapsed financially, a lot of city workers were laid off, and those remaining had no guarantee of being paid next week. That's not much motivation to move a bunch of old files. That jibes more with the officers I spoke with.

Anyway, this TV doc also felt quite familiar to me in its discussion of Highland Park's history. The city had its heyday, as the cops told me, and as Detroit Free Press reporter Joe Swickard discusses in this doc, when Henry Ford's new plant was located there, when a President visited, when families prospered there. But then you have the fall of the enclave, and how that affected its police department, which is just as significant. And it really continues to this day. It's certainly not a thriving part of the metro Detroit. And it's sad.

At any rate, I can highly recommend this TV series, and I just may be finding more stuff to blog about as I roll along!