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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.
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