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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.
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