From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
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.
Advertisement 
