Coed At EMU Stabbing Victim

Coed at EMU Stabbing Victim

By William B. Treml
(News Police Reporter)

The partially-decomposed, nude body of an Eastern Michigan University coed, stabbed five times and with the throat slashed, was found yesterday afternoon behind a clump of trees off a deserted dirt road at the extreme northeast edge of Ann Arbor.

Miss Joan E. Schell, 20-year-junior at EMU who lived with another coed in an apartment at 703 Emmet, Ypsilanti, was identified by jewelry she was wearing when she vanished on June 30. An autopsy performed last night at University Hospital revealed the slightly-built Eastern student died from the multiple stab wounds.

The murder was the second of an EMU coed in exactly a year. Mary Fleszar, 19, of 10746 Willow Augusta Township, was stabbed a dozen times, her body dismembered and then dumped on a rubbish pile on a Superior Township farm last July. She had been missing for a month when her mutilated body was discovered. Her murder has never been solved.

Miss Schell had been missing since last Sunday night after getting into a red car occupied by three white men on Washtenaw Ave. in Ypsilanti. At the request of Ypsilanti city police, local law agencies had put out an all-points missing person bulletin for Miss Schell after a witness reported the coed had been hitchhiking shortly before she was picked up by the three men in the car. The make, model and license number of the car were unknown, and police here said they were working a "blind alley" in looking for Miss Schell.

In midafternoon yesterday the search ended.

A construction worker assigned to the installation of water and sewer lines on Glacier Way between Green and Earhart Rds. stumbled on the naked body about 12 feet off Glacier Way on the south side of the dirt road. The corpse was lying behind a clump of small hickory trees and was barely discernible from the roadway.

A path of tramped-down grass was visible from the edge of the unimproved road up a slight embankment and around the back of the tree clump where the body lay on its back. The head was unrecognizable because of advanced decomposition.

The navy-blue summer dress Miss Schell had been wearing when she disappeared on the night of June 30 was pulled up to her shoulders. Her underclothing was down near her ankles. Cloth sandals were on her feet.

A gold ring set with a pearl was on her right hand and she wore gold earrings. The body lay about six feet from a wire farm fence extending along the south edge of Glacier Way. The corpse was partially covered with grass apparently pulled from the ground nearby, but if the thin grass cover was an attempt to conceal the body it was a feeble or a hasty one.

Senior police Capt. Harold E. Olson, who is also acting Ann Arbor police chief, was one of the first officers on the scene with Uniformed Lt. Raymond Woodruff. Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Thomas Shea and Dr. Robert Hendricks, a U-M pathologist, were brought immediately to the scene.

A task force of patrolmen was quickly recruited to begin a foot-by-foot search of a field near where the body was found. Officers hoped to find a purse or other identification from the

buried alive in an excavation cave-in only three months ago. City police called on the city assessor's office to ascertain if the area ws inside the city limits. Had the body bee dumped off Earhart Rd. only 100 yards to the east, the murder would have been the Sheriff's Department case, having occurred in the county territory policed by deputies.

Dr. Hendrix, who performed the autopsy, told police the decomposition of the head indicated the body had been exposed to the elements for about five days, corresponding with the time Miss Schell was missing. The autopsy report did not reveal if the victim had been raped, but further tests are scheduled.

Knife wounds were found in the small of the back on the right side, on one leg and in the shoulder and neck area. There was no sign of gunshot wounds, police said.

Capt. Olson said it is probable the corpse was lifted from a car and dragged or carried up the slight incline at the edge of Glacier Way and then moved around the path formed by the trampled grass. It was then apparently dumped beneath the tree clump. He said, however, a possibility exists that the five-foot, four-inch, 98-pound girl was carried from a field south of the farm fence at the south edge of Glacier Way and then thrown over the fence.

Investigating officers believe the killer or killers abandoned the body in some haste and with only scant planning. this contention is based on the fact that while there are a few houses in the area, the body was dumped only a few feet off a road--Glacier Way--which is now extensively traveled by construction trucks and motorists making their was from the University's North Campus to the Ypsilanti area.

Glacier Way, followed to where it dead-ends at Earhart Rd. in Ann Arbor Township, can be used to reach both Geddes Rd. and US-23 about one mile south. The body was on the south side of Glacier Way less than 100 yards from the Earhart intersection.

"They may have seen the Earhart Rd. dead-end ahead and decided to get rid of the murder victim right away," one investigator noted.

Officers also believe Miss Schell was not killed at the spot where her body was found. They reason her body was carried in a car for some distance before it was dumped out.

Heavy rains which have swept through the Ann Arbor area since Sunday have virtually wiped out any hope of recovering foot or tire impressions at the scene. Olson planned on sending patrolmen out to the area again today to search fields and ditches for additional clues.

Shortly after the body was discovered yesterday, Ypsilanti Police Chief Ray Walton was notified and he immediately sent Detective Lt. Verne Howard and Detective Sgt. Clare Maxwell to the scene. Both officers took a part in the notification of other law agencies last Sunday that Miss Schell was missing. Maxwell, who has been in touch with the murdered coed's parents, in Plymouth, accompanied Prosecutor Shea to the University Hospital for the autopsy last night. Sgt. Olmstead and Sgt. Canada, the principal officers in the homicide investigation, were the official police witnesses to the post mortem.

Both Maxwell and Howard admitted the similarity between the murder of Miss Schell and that of Mary Fleszar was "very remarkable."

"Many murders have glaring differences," Maxwell noted. "But there are outstanding similarities in these two."

Miss Fleszar's body, the throat cut and numerous stab wounds on it, was nude when found on a farm north of Geddes Rd., three-tenths of a mile west of LeForge Rd. that location is in Superior Township two miles north of Ypsilanti. The farm where her corpse was found is about four miles east of the spot where Miss Schell's body was discovered yesterday.

Both girls were reported missing by their roommates after they failed to return to their Ypsilanti apartments.

It was expected the two Ypsilanti detectives and Ann Arbor polic will confer today with Michigan State Police Detective Ronald Schoonmaker and other state officers who handled the Mary Fleszar murder case.

Last night friends and relatives of Miss Schell appeared at Ann Arbor police headquarters for interviews by detectives. Acquaintances of the murdered coed told police she was hitchhiking to Ann Arbor on the night she disappeared to see a friend. They said she had missed a bus which she had planned to take and so decided to hitch a ride on Washtenaw in Ypsilanti. One of the first cars which came along--a red one with three white men in it--picked her up. Police say that car and the three occupants of it are their lone lead in the murder at this point.

The slain girl's parents are Mr. and Mrs. James Schell of 875 Williams in Plymouth. The father is a manager of a sporting goods department at the Gem Department Store in Livonia.

The murder investigation is the first in Ann Arbor since Dec. 14, 1968, when the body of LeRoy W. Johnson, a city employe, was pulled from the ice-covered Huron River near the 1200 block of N. Main. Johnson had been struck repeatedly on the head and tossed into the river by two women and a man. All three are now serving prison terms.

(Related pictures on page 9.)

JOAN E. SCHELL