From Something Brewing
In early 1968, Okemos, Michigan, looked very much like the tidy middle-class neighborhood featured in the popular TV sitcom Bewitched. Fathers in the Lansing suburb drove to their nine-to-five jobs in the morning, kids skipped off to school, and housewives gathered in the kitchens of carpeted split-level homes for coffee and idle gossip. Yet on the cold Tuesday morning of February 27, a conversation between Eunice Klewicki and her neighbor Sally Sue Mercer called to mind another hit TV show of the season: Peyton Place.The two women were at the table in Sally’s house, a two-story brick ranch on Yuma Trail. “She was talking about wanting a divorce from her husband,” Klewicki recalls. “She insinuated that he had a lady friend.”
Talk of divorce was not new for Sally, but Klewicki was surprised at how distraught her friend seemed. A warm, petite and attractive 31-year-old (“I wanted her figure,” says Klewicki), Sally was married to Dr. Charles W. (Bill) Mercer, a 33-year-old osteopathic surgeon and the son of a respected local physician. They had two daughters—Cindy, eight, and Sara, two—whom Sally doted on. “She tended to Sara so sweetly,” says Klewicki. In fact, Sally and Klewicki had gone upstairs to care for the toddler when Sally dropped a bombshell. “She just all of a sudden said, ‘He told me that the day he would give me a divorce would be the day he’d take Sara and me and throw us off the upstairs,’” says Klewicki.
Moments later, Dr. Mercer came home from the hospital. “I was uncomfortable,” recalls Klewicki, “because we had just been discussing these things … He was, I think, surprised to see me there. I said, ‘Hi, Bill. Well, I guess I’ll go home now.’ And I left.”
Klewicki never saw Sally again.
That afternoon, another Yuma Trail neighbor, Aggie Kately, rushed to the Mercer house after her daughter, a friend of Cindy’s, had called her over in a panic. The two girls had returned home from school to find Sally lying on the floor in the upstairs bedroom. “Her arms were mottled and discolored,” remembers Kately, a former nurse, now 74 years old. Sally was wearing a white blouse, madras plaid shorts and white knit socks. Her eyes were open; her hands, squeezed tightly into fists, were frozen in place from rigor mortis. Sitting on her lifeless body was her daughter Sara.
To the amazement of those who knew Sally Mercer only as a vital, healthy housewife, Dr. Charles Black, a local pathologist, ruled the cause of death as polio. It seemed an oddly incongruous demise. Polio had been virtually wiped out by 1968; rare cases generally occurred in summer, when the virus could spread more easily in water. And Sally had exhibited none of the deadly symptoms—paralysis and difficulty breathing—associated with the form of polio Dr. Black had cited.
Nonetheless, within days of her death, Sally was buried in her hometown of Shelbyville, Illinois. Despite numerous questions and the suspicions of many, any criminal investigation was dropped entirely due to the pathologist’s ruling.
The Cover-Up
But last summer, Dr. Mercer, now 73, was arrested and charged with his wife’s murder, 38 years after her death. The case is pushing the limits of human memory and forensic science. Prosecutors contend that Dr. Mercer, who has not denied having been involved with a nurse at the time Sally died, killed his wife with a lethal injection of the prescription painkiller Darvon. During a preliminary examination that concluded earlier this year, prosecutors presented a financial motive. At the time of Sally’s death, they pointed out, Michigan’s fault-based divorce laws could have awarded her a substantial payout given her husband’s extramarital affair.
The doctor is scheduled to stand trial on September 10. Mercer’s lawyer, Chris Bergstrom, says his client is innocent and that the evidence will show that Sally indeed died of polio or a similar viral infection. (Dr. Mercer, who currently lives alone in the same house where Sally died, did not return requests for an interview.) Paul Merrifield, former husband of the Mercers’ daughter Cindy, calls the case against the doctor “a witch hunt. I would be very shocked if they find him guilty.”
Others wonder why it took so long to bring charges in the first place. One of them is Detective Evan Bennehoff, now retired from the Ingham County Sheriff’s Office. He observed Sally’s autopsy on February 28, 1968, at the Hoffmeyer Funeral Home in Lansing. As a trained mortician’s apprentice, he was surprised to find Dr. Mercer’s father (now deceased) also in attendance at the autopsy, and was shocked that Sally had already been embalmed. Looking at her body, he spotted a number of bruises. “There were bruises that appeared to be fingerprint bruises on the right arm,” he said, suggesting she had been violently restrained. “There were some scrapes on the knees and some scrapes on the bottom rear of the torso.”
Dr. Black, the pathologist (also now deceased), told Bennehoff that he had approved embalming the body before realizing it had suffered trauma. Later during the autopsy, Bennehoff noticed severe bruising and contusions to Sally’s skull. “I asked Dr. Black what he thought would cause that trauma,” said Bennehoff. “He indicated to me that it would take significant force.”
Then, listening from the hallway outside the coroner’s office, Bennehoff heard Dr. Black say to the elder Dr. Mercer, “Don’t worry, Bill. I’m sure we’re not gonna find anything … I’m sure everything will be all right.”
Donald Reisig, Ingham County prosecutor at the time of the autopsy, was incensed when Dr. Black ruled the cause of death as bulbar polio, which invades the brain stem. “I was absolutely convinced this woman did not die of bulbar polio,” he testified. Like Bennehoff, he was troubled by the rush to embalm the body and the close relationship between Dr. Black and Dr. Mercer’s father. “I was concerned about the potential lack of objectivity,” he said.
Detective Bennehoff recalled a heated confrontation in the prosecutor’s office between Reisig, Dr. Black, the coroner and Leo Farhat, an attorney then representing Dr. Mercer. Theories about the death were batted back and forth. According to Bennehoff, “Dr. Black looked at Don Reisig and said, ‘You need to tell these investigators that she died of bulbar polio. This investigation is over.’”
And over it was, officially, for a very long time. Reisig reluctantly closed his investigation within a week of Sally’s death, but the questions continued to mount.
Some of them arose from the actions of Dr. Mercer himself. Sally’s friend Eunice Klewicki testified that he came to visit her within a day or two of his wife’s death. “Do you realize you can be held liable and sued if you talk to people about other people?” the doctor asked her.
Replied Klewicki, “Are you threatening me?”
“Just be careful what you say,” said Dr. Mercer.
Conflicting Stories
Diane Brown, a childhood friend of Sally’s, pointed out to investigators in 2006 that Dr. Mercer had given her a different version of the events surrounding Sally’s death. He said his wife had died in the night—and that he was the one who had discovered her body. “He said he had been in bed with Sally. She’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, and after a while, he got up to see why she didn’t return and found her dead on the floor.” Jo Ellen Tamen, another old friend of Sally’s, testified that Mercer told her he had returned home in the afternoon with daughter Cindy to find Sally on the floor.
In 2004, when Dr. Mercer was subpoenaed by Ingham County’s current prosecutor, he gave a different story, according to court testimony. In it, he said he received a call at work from his hospital switchboard operator telling him there had been a family emergency and to go home immediately. There he found Sally on the floor, surrounded by paramedics.
Just days after the autopsy, Detective Bennehoff received a package at work postmarked from Okemos the day Sally died and addressed to Sharon Hover, a friend of hers in Grand Rapids. In it were several photographs and a letter, written in red ink and signed by Sally. “The letter said she was frightened for her life,” said Bennehoff, “that she felt she was going to be killed that day, that she thought her husband, Bill, was going to kill her and that if she was found dead, the recipient of the note and the pictures was to forward same to law enforcement authorities.”
The photos had been taken in a Howard Johnson hotel room. “The covers of the bed were folded back,” said Bennehoff. “There was a very large wet spot in the middle of the bed.”
Virginia Kay McCorkle, a nurse who babysat for the Mercers, testified at the preliminary examination that one morning in early 1968, Sally had come to her apartment and said, “Bill came home drunk this morning. I went through his pockets and found this key.” She then held up a key and a handful of Polaroid photographs that she claimed to have taken after going to the hotel room.
Dr. Mercer’s affair with Michelle Kelly, a married nurse at the hospital where he worked, was “fairly common knowledge,” according to the testimony of at least one doctor who had accompanied the two on a health care mission to Mexico—without their spouses. In her own testimony as a hostile witness for the prosecution, Kelly admitted she and Mercer were having sex before Sally’s death, including at the hospital and in the Mercer home when Sally was not around.
Sally was by then intent on getting a divorce. She had enrolled in classes at the Lansing Business Institute, and she told a fellow student her husband was abusive and that she was afraid of him, according to the student’s testimony. She was trying to gain skills that would allow her to care for her children on her own. But despite her dreams of a new life, it was not to be.
A Nonsensical Ruling of Death
Michelle Kelly, who divorced her first husband in 1966, testified that she met her lover shortly after his wife’s death for a tryst out of town, to avoid suspicion. It wasn’t long before their relationship became official. In October 1969, Kelly and Dr. Mercer married.
It was a stormy union. At the preliminary examination, Kelly testified that her husband kept syringes in the house and regularly injected her with the prescription drug Demerol, a habit-forming synthetic opiate, until she passed out. She said the injections were for the purposes of intoxication and conceded that initially she was a willing recipient—until she became addicted. Claiming to now be drug-free, she said that Dr. Mercer was brutal at times and once tried to smother her with a pillow. In a moment of eerie déjà vu, she once sent a package to her sister because she was concerned about her welfare. When the couple divorced, in 1989, Kelly was awarded $125,000; she testified that in their 20 years of marriage, the subject of Sally’s death never came up.
Once the case was closed, “everybody else thought it was a dead issue,” says Detective Bennehoff, who was reassigned to the undercover narcotics unit shortly thereafter. One official who did not want to be identified noted that the authorities responsible for the cause-of-death ruling remained in power well into the 1970s. Most of the original evidence in the case (including Sally’s letter to her friend) was eventually discarded. But Bennehoff had kept copies of the autopsy photos in a file in his office and his own police reports at his home. Those reports were lost in a 1973 fire, but the photos will likely count as key evidence at trial. “He’s a hero to me,” says Sally’s friend Diane Brown.
Responds Bennehoff, “I’m not a hero—just a dyed-in-the-wool cop who believes justice was overlooked.” Still, his efforts might have languished forever if not for the work of another detective, Donna Townsend. In 1995 Townsend was working for the Ingham County Cold Case Task Force, a joint effort of law enforcement agencies with unsolved murders. Like many communities, Lansing had plenty of unsolved murder cases. Sally Mercer’s wasn’t one of them, but after Bennehoff told her how the polio diagnosis had bothered him, Townsend agreed to take a look.
She asked Dr. Stephen Cohle, a forensic pathologist and the medical examiner for nearby Kent County, to review Sally’s autopsy report. Besides being a noted expert in the field of pathology, Dr. Cohle had performed many exhumations, which Townsend suspected might be necessary in this case. And for Dr. Cohle, polio was personal: His own brother had contracted the disease. He concluded that the ruling of death by polio was “nonsensical.” In a subsequent report, he noted there is “strong evidence from the autopsy photographs that this was a violent death.” In 1998 a forensic pathologist in Lansing said he believed Sally Mercer was murdered.
Three years later, after reviewing Dr. Cohle’s report and the opinion of the local pathologist, the Ingham County medical examiner changed Sally’s death certificate, ruling her death an unsolved homicide."She Didn't Deserve It"
On the morning of April 20, 2003, a truck pulled into Glenwood Cemetery in Shelbyville and parked near a freshly dug six-foot-deep hole. In the hole was the coffin of Sally Mercer, whose body was being exhumed. After detectives broke open the sealed casket, Sally’s remains—her skin darkened black after 35 years in the ground—were transported to a hospital in Springfield. There Dr. Cohle cut open the sutures of the original autopsy, then removed from the abdomen a plastic bag containing her internal organs.
Tissue samples from the organs were sent to a forensic laboratory in Pennsylvania to be tested. Results showed lethal levels of propoxyphene, the active ingredient in Darvon—a drug Dr. Mercer admitted to keeping around the house for his headaches. The distribution of the drug suggested that the dose was administered by injection—though Dr. Cohle had been unable to find evidence of a needle mark on the body. At the time of Sally’s death, Darvon was sold only in capsule form, suggesting that someone with medical knowledge had created a homemade injectable solution by dissolving capsules in liquid.
Based primarily on the findings from the Pennsylvania lab, Michigan authorities in 2003 began interviewing witnesses and ultimately arrested Dr. Mercer on June 5, 2006.
While on the surface the case against Sally Mercer’s former husband might seem strong, it is hardly open-and-shut. In the preliminary examination, experts acknowledged that they could not say how decomposition or embalming might affect drug testing; because there are no long-term studies, the results could be highly skewed. A respected forensic toxicologist testifying for the defense called the testing “junk science.”
In addition, key original evidence, including Sally’s blood samples and the contents of her stomach, are missing from the Ingham County Sheriff’s Office. Also missing are Sally’s letter, written in red ink, and the hotel room photos. The friend in Grand Rapids who received the letter has since died.
Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, while admitting that she is convinced Sally was murdered, ruled out the propoxyphene testing as it related to the cause of death in the preliminary examination. If the trial judge follows suit, it’s not clear what evidence a jury will hear. Still, Ingham County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Eric Matwiejczyk says, “We are confident of the evidence we’re going to present at trial.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Mercer’s lawyer will certainly question the memory of witnesses who are now elderly. And Dr. Mercer himself has his share of supporters, including his younger daughter, Sara, who attended much of the preliminary exam. (Daughter Cindy, one of the first to discover her mother’s body, died in 1998 while in treatment at a drug rehabilitation facility.)
Silver-haired and possessing the distinguished good looks of a soap opera patriarch, Dr. Mercer has built an impressive professional reputation over the years. In 1989 he was named Surgeon of the Year by the American Association of Osteopathic Specialists. “He’s a very bright man and a good person,” says Pat Munshaw, retired senior vice president of Ingham Regional Medical Center, where Dr. Mercer practiced.
Frank Garrison, retired president of the Michigan State AFL-CIO and a friend of 17 years, says the doctor performed lifesaving surgery on his wife after she suffered a heart attack in 1990. “He is the most gentle human being. He’d have a hard time killing a fish or a butterfly.”
Under Michigan law, if convicted of first-degree murder, Dr. Mercer would go to jail for life without parole.
As a potential witness, Diane Brown, Sally Mercer’s childhood friend, can’t talk about the upcoming trial. But she never passes up an opportunity to reminisce about Sally, an only child who came after her parents had tried for years to have a baby. “She was the most positive and optimistic person I’ve ever been around,” says Brown. “She had a pony in her backyard, and we all rode and played. She shared everything she had. That was just Sally. She was killed, and she didn’t deserve it.”