[For the record, I do not know Andrew Trombley, his friends or family. I know no one involved in this case to the best of my knowledge. My reason for writing it simply because it seems to me to be a miscarriage of justice. Trombley may be a total for all I know but that by itself is not reason enough to waste the mans life away in prison for a crime in which some of the worst evidence I have heard about was allowed in court. I certainly wouldnt want this to happen to me or to anyone including Andrew Trombley. This is still America. More and more, though, I am less able to define what that means anymore.Omori]
On May 10, 1992, at about 3:00 a.m., Adeline Mary Deittrick a resident of Warren, Michigan, was unable to sleep in her house on Essex Street. She left her bedroom, came downstairs and looked through her front door. She later told police that she saw a van parked in the driveway of a neighbors house and saw a long-haired man carrying a sleeping girl in his arms. As she watched, the man put the girl down by the van as he opened the drivers door. He then picked up the girl, carried her to the back of the van, set her down again and opened the double backdoors of the van and threw the girl in or perhaps tossed her into the arms of another personDeittrick could not be sure. The man then climbed in after the girl and closed the doors. About 30 seconds later, Deittrick saw someone get into the drivers seat and speed off without turning on the headlights.
There had been a sleepover at the McCracken house. Lindsey McCracken had invited another girl she had met the previous day, 10-year-old Deanna Seifert, to spend the night. Lindsey and her siblings lived in the Essex Street house with their mother, Denise McCracken and a woman named Lori Menzo. The house had been rented by Lindsays father, Don Crikon. On this night, however, Crikon was serving a 90-day jail sentence for violating parole. Menzo was also not in the house at the time. Deanna, who also lived on Essex Street, was introduced to Lindsey by a mutual friend and both girls hit it off quickly. Deanna brought a nightgown with her and donned it as she and Lindsey retired to Menzos unoccupied bedroom in the rear of the house at about 11 p.m. Denise McCracken stated that she locked the front and back doors of the house at about 1 a.m. just before retiring.
Nobody in the house heard anything unusual throughout the night and into the morning. By daybreak, Deanna Seifert was missing. Her street clothing was left behind. After a perfunctory search turned up no sign of the girl, the police were called. They examined the doors and saw no sign of forced entry and speculated that the kidnapper might have had a key. The cops canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed residents. In addition to Adeline Mary Deittrick, a man named David Leija told police he saw a van parked in front of the McCracken residence at about 12:45 a.m. He said the van belonged to a man who used to live there until recently. That man was 22-year-old Andrew James Trombley, the nephew of Don Crikon and the former-boyfriend of Lori Menzo. Trombley had lived in the McCracken house on Essex very briefly but had moved out eight weeks prior to Deannas disappearance. Trombley then moved in with his mother, Joyce Crickon, who lived in an apartment above the Hitching Post Bar off Eight Mile Road. Trombley still visited the McCracken residence frequently. Police learned, however, that Trombley still retained a key to the McCracken residence.
Trombley was arrested on May 10th for apparently driving without a license and held in jail while the search for Deanna continued. Trombley insisted that he was innocent and that he had never met nor even seen Deanna Seifert in his life. The press was having a field day. Don Crikon was released from jail and promptly vanished from sight. The local media made it sound as though Crikon had the girl with him and that if he were found, she would be found with him. Eventually, authorities caught up with Crikon as he slept in a motel room. He was shocked and bewildered to wake up to guns pointing in his face. All he had done was leave jail, he said. He not only did not have Deanna Seifert with him, like his nephew, Crikon claimed had never heard of the girl nor had ever laid eyes on her.
As the days dragged on, the national media picked up the story while the search for Deanna Seifert continued. The series Americas Most Wanted even featured a segment asking viewers to call their hotline if they think they had seen the girl. Over a thousand tips, all of them bogus, flooded in. Deanna Seifert was nowhere to be found. The search came to an end over two months after her abduction and only a mile from her home when a tool shop owner discovered the girls corpse still wearing her nightgown in a scrap metal bin in a lot behind his business in an industrial park on Blackstone Road north of Nine Mile Road. The lot had been searched before by police, by foot and helicopter. They reported finding nothing unusual even though expert testimony concluded that the body had been there for about the length of time the girl had been missing. Warren Deputy Police Chief Carl Muschong had no explanation for how the girls body had been missed. Detroit television news crews had also searched the area on foot and by helicopter and had seen nothing. The corpse bore signs of blunt force trauma to the skull. Blood was found in the area and, despite significant rainfall during the time that Deanna was missing, was at least determined to be human. Deannas panties appeared to have been removed from her body and then replaced inside out. Three human pubic hairs were found on the panties.
At 2:00 a.m. on May 10, security guard John R. Williams was in the guard shack in front of the ACCO building (American Chain & Conveyor Co.) and testified that he saw a light-colored van with one headlight out turn onto Blackstone Road from Nine Mile Road and drive up and down the street before parking in front of a building across from ACCO. Williams left the shack to make his rounds and when he returned the van was gone. Deanna Seiferts body would eventually be discovered behind that building. Andrew Trombley drove a light-colored van with one headlight out.
As police further investigated Trombleys movements on the night of May 9th and into the early morning hours of May 10th, they interviewed John Sliwa who lived near the Hitching Post Bar. Sliwa told police that at about 2:00 or 2:30 in the morning, he had heard glass breaking. He looked out his window and saw three men walking down the middle of the street followed by a Chevy or GM van covered with gray primer. The van stopped in front of Sliwas house and a woman approached the van and spoke to the driver through the passenger side window. Sliwa said he heard one of men outside the van say, Are you going to help us do this, *****? If not, get your ****ing *advertiser censored* back home. The woman left and the men and van continued north for about two blocks and then the three men got inside the van which then left the area. This means that Sliwa either saw this on Griffin or Mullin streetsboth of which run north and south. Those are the only two streets in that neighborhood behind the Hitching Post that do run north and south. Sliwa stated he had seen the van at the Hitching Post many times since June of 1991 and had seen Trombley walk by his residence many times since that date and had even exchanged greetings with him on a number of occasions.
Police also located Donna Sherman who said she was stepping out of a cab on Rivard Street in front of her parents house at about 3:30 to 4:00 in the morning when a beat-up gray primer van pulled out of the back entrance of the Hitching Post lot and sped down the street at a high rate nearly side-swiping the cab. In the truck were two white males with long hair. She said she had seen the van quite a number of times in the past two weeks parked at the Hitching Post and identified the driver she had seen as being Andrew Trombley. Shermans sister, Tammy Bowers, also stated that she saw a beat-up, dull gray, rusty van with a loud exhaust pull out of the Hitching Post parking lot onto Rivard and nearly side-swipe the cab as she watched from the porch of her parents house. She said there were two men in the van and indentified the van as being Andrew Trombleys and said she had seen it several times parked at the Hitching Post. Cab driver, Ray Zander, stated his cab was nearly side-swiped by an old gray primer Chevy or Ford van and that the driver was Andrew Trombley who was laughing and turning his head as though talking to someone in the passenger side.
Trombley stated that he attended a birthday party at the Hitching Post and was there from 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. until around 2:00 a.m. when the place closed and that he had had a lot to drink and needed help to get back to his mothers apartment upstairs. Several witnesses testified that Trombley was heavily intoxicated. Sandra Lynn Miller stated she helped Trombley to the steps of Joyce Crikons apartment at about 2:15 a.m. and watched him crawl up the stairs. Crikon stated her son came up at about 2:30 p.m. and told her he was really loaded and then passed out on the couch for the rest of the night. One witness disagreesChristine Kahlwho stated that Trombley was not particularly intoxicated, left the party at about 1:30 a.m. and that his van was not in the parking lot when she left at 2:15 a.m.
Things did not look good for Trombley who was charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder. Forensics experts testified at the trial that blood matching Deannas was found on one of Trombleys shoes. Further, 39 fibers from a jogging jacket found in Joyce Crikons apartment matched those found on the corpse. They also testified that four of Deannas fingerprints were found in Trombleys van and that she had never had a reason to be in Trombleys van. The police and public prosecutor maintained that Trombley likely abducted the girl and sold her to people who raped and killed her. A jury agreed and Trombley was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison for 40 to 60 years. He remains incarcerated as of this writing. Trombley appealed his conviction but an appeals court upheld the original conviction.
The scene of this crime is very close to my neighborhoodpart of it, really. To familiarize myself with all these sites, I have driven what I think is the quickest route from the Hitching Post Bar (which is still in operation) to Essex Street. Leaving the back lot, one can only turn right on Rivard. To the left is a dead end beyond which is a large, old factory building. After turning right on Rivard towards the east, one immediately comes upon Mullin Road that runs north. If one continues on Rivard, one will come upon Griffin which also runs north. The neighborhood is bounded on the east by Hoover Road which is a major thoroughfare. Griffin ends about two blocks north and one is forced to turn left back to Mullin. Mullin runs through an industrial park and ends at Toepfer and then one turns left on Toepfer and takes it to MacArthur and hangs a right. MacArthur runs north past Nine Mile and then a few blocks up from that is Essex. It takes only a few minutes to go from the Hitching Post to Essex. Ive driven the route both at night and day and there is little difference in the amount of time it takes. Blackstone Road, although busy during the day, is almost entirely deserted at night except for the occasional trucker since it is an industrial park and hence a very good place to dump a body. The same is true of Mullin, part of which is pretty much deserted at night. Strangely, one of the factories on Mullin is Scion Steel, easily the biggest plant there. On Blackstone, there is another Scion Steel plant. Since this general area has a high number of children, I realized how easy it would be for a predator to abduct and murder a child out here and never be caught. Im amazed it doesnt happen more often. Whoever abducted and murdered Deanna Seifert would have had no shortage of places within a two-mile radius of her home to commit the deed with complete assurance of no witnesses.
While the narrative seems open and shut, it is riddled with flawsso much so that one is forced to ask if it is possible that Andrew Trombley could even be involved in the kidnap/murder of Deanna Seifert much less that there was any real evidence with which to try him. Much of the narrative I supplied here above came from the following link:
http://statecasefiles.justia.com/do...13_C172541(0061)_172541.OPN.PDF?ts=1323899974
This is the official State Court of Appeals report on why the conviction of Andrew Trombley is justified. Reading the report forces us to conclude the opposite. Whats strange is that the narrative lays out what seems to be a convincing case of Trombleys guilt yet the footnotes contained in the report virtually destroy the case so carefully laid out in the narrative. Furthermore, much of the information that was well known and frequently reported by the press when the murder and trial was fresh on peoples minds is missing in this report. Lets look more closely at the prosecutions airtight case.
On May 10, 1992, at about 3:00 a.m., Adeline Mary Deittrick a resident of Warren, Michigan, was unable to sleep in her house on Essex Street. She left her bedroom, came downstairs and looked through her front door. She later told police that she saw a van parked in the driveway of a neighbors house and saw a long-haired man carrying a sleeping girl in his arms. As she watched, the man put the girl down by the van as he opened the drivers door. He then picked up the girl, carried her to the back of the van, set her down again and opened the double backdoors of the van and threw the girl in or perhaps tossed her into the arms of another personDeittrick could not be sure. The man then climbed in after the girl and closed the doors. About 30 seconds later, Deittrick saw someone get into the drivers seat and speed off without turning on the headlights.
There had been a sleepover at the McCracken house. Lindsey McCracken had invited another girl she had met the previous day, 10-year-old Deanna Seifert, to spend the night. Lindsey and her siblings lived in the Essex Street house with their mother, Denise McCracken and a woman named Lori Menzo. The house had been rented by Lindsays father, Don Crikon. On this night, however, Crikon was serving a 90-day jail sentence for violating parole. Menzo was also not in the house at the time. Deanna, who also lived on Essex Street, was introduced to Lindsey by a mutual friend and both girls hit it off quickly. Deanna brought a nightgown with her and donned it as she and Lindsey retired to Menzos unoccupied bedroom in the rear of the house at about 11 p.m. Denise McCracken stated that she locked the front and back doors of the house at about 1 a.m. just before retiring.
Nobody in the house heard anything unusual throughout the night and into the morning. By daybreak, Deanna Seifert was missing. Her street clothing was left behind. After a perfunctory search turned up no sign of the girl, the police were called. They examined the doors and saw no sign of forced entry and speculated that the kidnapper might have had a key. The cops canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed residents. In addition to Adeline Mary Deittrick, a man named David Leija told police he saw a van parked in front of the McCracken residence at about 12:45 a.m. He said the van belonged to a man who used to live there until recently. That man was 22-year-old Andrew James Trombley, the nephew of Don Crikon and the former-boyfriend of Lori Menzo. Trombley had lived in the McCracken house on Essex very briefly but had moved out eight weeks prior to Deannas disappearance. Trombley then moved in with his mother, Joyce Crickon, who lived in an apartment above the Hitching Post Bar off Eight Mile Road. Trombley still visited the McCracken residence frequently. Police learned, however, that Trombley still retained a key to the McCracken residence.
Trombley was arrested on May 10th for apparently driving without a license and held in jail while the search for Deanna continued. Trombley insisted that he was innocent and that he had never met nor even seen Deanna Seifert in his life. The press was having a field day. Don Crikon was released from jail and promptly vanished from sight. The local media made it sound as though Crikon had the girl with him and that if he were found, she would be found with him. Eventually, authorities caught up with Crikon as he slept in a motel room. He was shocked and bewildered to wake up to guns pointing in his face. All he had done was leave jail, he said. He not only did not have Deanna Seifert with him, like his nephew, Crikon claimed had never heard of the girl nor had ever laid eyes on her.
As the days dragged on, the national media picked up the story while the search for Deanna Seifert continued. The series Americas Most Wanted even featured a segment asking viewers to call their hotline if they think they had seen the girl. Over a thousand tips, all of them bogus, flooded in. Deanna Seifert was nowhere to be found. The search came to an end over two months after her abduction and only a mile from her home when a tool shop owner discovered the girls corpse still wearing her nightgown in a scrap metal bin in a lot behind his business in an industrial park on Blackstone Road north of Nine Mile Road. The lot had been searched before by police, by foot and helicopter. They reported finding nothing unusual even though expert testimony concluded that the body had been there for about the length of time the girl had been missing. Warren Deputy Police Chief Carl Muschong had no explanation for how the girls body had been missed. Detroit television news crews had also searched the area on foot and by helicopter and had seen nothing. The corpse bore signs of blunt force trauma to the skull. Blood was found in the area and, despite significant rainfall during the time that Deanna was missing, was at least determined to be human. Deannas panties appeared to have been removed from her body and then replaced inside out. Three human pubic hairs were found on the panties.
At 2:00 a.m. on May 10, security guard John R. Williams was in the guard shack in front of the ACCO building (American Chain & Conveyor Co.) and testified that he saw a light-colored van with one headlight out turn onto Blackstone Road from Nine Mile Road and drive up and down the street before parking in front of a building across from ACCO. Williams left the shack to make his rounds and when he returned the van was gone. Deanna Seiferts body would eventually be discovered behind that building. Andrew Trombley drove a light-colored van with one headlight out.
As police further investigated Trombleys movements on the night of May 9th and into the early morning hours of May 10th, they interviewed John Sliwa who lived near the Hitching Post Bar. Sliwa told police that at about 2:00 or 2:30 in the morning, he had heard glass breaking. He looked out his window and saw three men walking down the middle of the street followed by a Chevy or GM van covered with gray primer. The van stopped in front of Sliwas house and a woman approached the van and spoke to the driver through the passenger side window. Sliwa said he heard one of men outside the van say, Are you going to help us do this, *****? If not, get your ****ing *advertiser censored* back home. The woman left and the men and van continued north for about two blocks and then the three men got inside the van which then left the area. This means that Sliwa either saw this on Griffin or Mullin streetsboth of which run north and south. Those are the only two streets in that neighborhood behind the Hitching Post that do run north and south. Sliwa stated he had seen the van at the Hitching Post many times since June of 1991 and had seen Trombley walk by his residence many times since that date and had even exchanged greetings with him on a number of occasions.
Police also located Donna Sherman who said she was stepping out of a cab on Rivard Street in front of her parents house at about 3:30 to 4:00 in the morning when a beat-up gray primer van pulled out of the back entrance of the Hitching Post lot and sped down the street at a high rate nearly side-swiping the cab. In the truck were two white males with long hair. She said she had seen the van quite a number of times in the past two weeks parked at the Hitching Post and identified the driver she had seen as being Andrew Trombley. Shermans sister, Tammy Bowers, also stated that she saw a beat-up, dull gray, rusty van with a loud exhaust pull out of the Hitching Post parking lot onto Rivard and nearly side-swipe the cab as she watched from the porch of her parents house. She said there were two men in the van and indentified the van as being Andrew Trombleys and said she had seen it several times parked at the Hitching Post. Cab driver, Ray Zander, stated his cab was nearly side-swiped by an old gray primer Chevy or Ford van and that the driver was Andrew Trombley who was laughing and turning his head as though talking to someone in the passenger side.
Trombley stated that he attended a birthday party at the Hitching Post and was there from 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. until around 2:00 a.m. when the place closed and that he had had a lot to drink and needed help to get back to his mothers apartment upstairs. Several witnesses testified that Trombley was heavily intoxicated. Sandra Lynn Miller stated she helped Trombley to the steps of Joyce Crikons apartment at about 2:15 a.m. and watched him crawl up the stairs. Crikon stated her son came up at about 2:30 p.m. and told her he was really loaded and then passed out on the couch for the rest of the night. One witness disagreesChristine Kahlwho stated that Trombley was not particularly intoxicated, left the party at about 1:30 a.m. and that his van was not in the parking lot when she left at 2:15 a.m.
Things did not look good for Trombley who was charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder. Forensics experts testified at the trial that blood matching Deannas was found on one of Trombleys shoes. Further, 39 fibers from a jogging jacket found in Joyce Crikons apartment matched those found on the corpse. They also testified that four of Deannas fingerprints were found in Trombleys van and that she had never had a reason to be in Trombleys van. The police and public prosecutor maintained that Trombley likely abducted the girl and sold her to people who raped and killed her. A jury agreed and Trombley was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison for 40 to 60 years. He remains incarcerated as of this writing. Trombley appealed his conviction but an appeals court upheld the original conviction.
The scene of this crime is very close to my neighborhoodpart of it, really. To familiarize myself with all these sites, I have driven what I think is the quickest route from the Hitching Post Bar (which is still in operation) to Essex Street. Leaving the back lot, one can only turn right on Rivard. To the left is a dead end beyond which is a large, old factory building. After turning right on Rivard towards the east, one immediately comes upon Mullin Road that runs north. If one continues on Rivard, one will come upon Griffin which also runs north. The neighborhood is bounded on the east by Hoover Road which is a major thoroughfare. Griffin ends about two blocks north and one is forced to turn left back to Mullin. Mullin runs through an industrial park and ends at Toepfer and then one turns left on Toepfer and takes it to MacArthur and hangs a right. MacArthur runs north past Nine Mile and then a few blocks up from that is Essex. It takes only a few minutes to go from the Hitching Post to Essex. Ive driven the route both at night and day and there is little difference in the amount of time it takes. Blackstone Road, although busy during the day, is almost entirely deserted at night except for the occasional trucker since it is an industrial park and hence a very good place to dump a body. The same is true of Mullin, part of which is pretty much deserted at night. Strangely, one of the factories on Mullin is Scion Steel, easily the biggest plant there. On Blackstone, there is another Scion Steel plant. Since this general area has a high number of children, I realized how easy it would be for a predator to abduct and murder a child out here and never be caught. Im amazed it doesnt happen more often. Whoever abducted and murdered Deanna Seifert would have had no shortage of places within a two-mile radius of her home to commit the deed with complete assurance of no witnesses.
While the narrative seems open and shut, it is riddled with flawsso much so that one is forced to ask if it is possible that Andrew Trombley could even be involved in the kidnap/murder of Deanna Seifert much less that there was any real evidence with which to try him. Much of the narrative I supplied here above came from the following link:
http://statecasefiles.justia.com/do...13_C172541(0061)_172541.OPN.PDF?ts=1323899974
This is the official State Court of Appeals report on why the conviction of Andrew Trombley is justified. Reading the report forces us to conclude the opposite. Whats strange is that the narrative lays out what seems to be a convincing case of Trombleys guilt yet the footnotes contained in the report virtually destroy the case so carefully laid out in the narrative. Furthermore, much of the information that was well known and frequently reported by the press when the murder and trial was fresh on peoples minds is missing in this report. Lets look more closely at the prosecutions airtight case.