In the 1990s, Grand Rapids’ red-light district was so well-established that it drew workers from other states, including two sisters from Omaha, Nebraska, who arrived in Grand Rapids on July 7, 1995. One of them would never return home.
“We caught the bus to Grand Rapids that Friday and we got us a hotel room,” Deanna Dennis recalled in a May 2023 Zoom interview from her Omaha home. “We went down what they call Division … which was a track … where all the working ladies were. We were ladies of the night.”
She was 34 in the summer of 1995. Her sister, Cathleen Dennis, was 28. Both women did sex work to support their families, explained Deanna Dennis, but neither wanted to work in their hometown. So the sisters traveled out of state together.
“She was just a joy to be around,” Deanna Dennis said of her sister.
“She was just goofy. … The life of the party. Me and her, we used to be in that hotel room, laughing and wrestling on the bed. Doing all kind of crazy stuff.”
On that Friday evening, she said, the sisters started their night with a couple drinks at a long-shuttered club before parting ways to go to work.
“I was walking down one side (of Division). She’s down the other. I seen her through passing,” the older sister recalled.
“About 4 o’clock in the morning, I was ready to go home. I was walking around, and I don’t see her,” she said.
“I flagged the police down first and told them, and they treated me like, ‘Oh, it’s just another one of those girls,’ so they didn’t give me help or nothing,” Deanna Dennis said.
“We made flyers, passed them out everywhere, looked in alleys and dumpsters, thinking somebody might have dumped her body. We had to do all the footwork ourselves,” Deanna Dennis said.
Cathleen Dennis is still missing today.
GRPD Chief Eric Winstrom did, however, respond to concerns raised by Cathleen Dennis’s sister, who felt officers were dismissive when she reported her sister missing in July 1995.
“While I can’t speak to this family’s experience or the standards in the department almost 30 years ago, my expectation is that all victims and their families are treated with compassion, dignity, and respect,” Winstrom said. “Cases like these may grow cold, but they are not forgotten. Any new information that leads to justice and closure for families will be pursued.”
“It’s been 29 years at this point, and I feel like there hasn’t been enough done to try to figure out what happened to her,” Cathleen Dennis’ son, Tommy Dennis, said. “I want folks to remember the name Cathleen Dennis, and anybody who knows something, come forth. Help us. Help us get closure on this. Don’t just act like she was a nobody. She was somebody to us.”
In the mid-1990s, 17 women, many of them sex workers, went missing or were murdered in Grand Rapids, most vanishing from the red-light district along Division Avenue South. Among all those cases, o…
www.woodtv.com
