MI MI - LAMONT MARSHALL, Grand Rapids, 1970-1980

[BostonSu]

I just stumbled across this case, and I'm hvaing trouble finding amything more about it. Anyone out there familiar with this young woman's case?


Vesta Speet had driven from Holland, MI, to Grand Rapids on the late morning of September 15, 1970, to have lunch with her newly married daughter, 19-year-old Shelley Speet Mills. In the car was her (Vesta’s) blind father, who was going to spend the afternoon with Shelley when Vesta went to visit her mother. He waited as Vesta went up to the apartment in a house at 314 College N.E. She thought it odd that Shelley had not come out to meet her when she honked the car’s horn, something the friendly young woman normally would have done.

But things weren’t normal. Inside the apartment, Mrs. Speet found murder–bloody murder


http://www.delayedjustice.com/?page_id=1255

 

[palmerk]

Try looking under "Shelly" Mills -- You'll find more. They think her murder might be connected to this one...http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/06/prosecutors_point_to_pattern_o.html

 

[BostonSu]

Try looking under "Shelly" Mills -- You'll find more. They think her murder might be connected to this one...http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/06/prosecutors_point_to_pattern_o.html

Thanks! The murders do seem to share a lot of traits.

 

[OkieGranny]

From 2008:

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/07/heritage_hill_killer_eluded_po.html

By the time of Catherine Fingleton's 1980 killing, investigators were desperate to solve a string of slayings that dated a decade. A particularly vicious killer targeted attractive young women in the Heritage Hill area...

In the pre-DNA age, police could not tie the suspect, Lamont Marshall, whose own mother went to prison for killing her husband, to the killings... After several grand juries did not find evidence to charge Marshall with murder, prosecutors changed tactics. Forsyth, then an assistant prosecutor, asked Marshall, who took the witness stand before a grand jury, about a banister spindle used to kill Ida Mae Luchie in 1977. Marshall denied ever seeing it. It was the break Forsyth was seeking. The spindle came from one of Marshall's former homes. He once used it for protection.

The statements led to a 1982 perjury charge, akin to the feds hitting Al Capone with tax evasion. Marshall was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The killings stopped.

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/07/lamont_marshall_sent_to_prison.html

Lamont Marshall, convicted in the 1975 murder of a young Heritage Hill resident, received his mandatory sentence of life without parole today.

Marshall killed Laurel Jean Ellis, 20, on May 22, 1975. Ellis was raped, strangled with her bra and stabbed 45 times in the head -- with one of the knife thrusts penetrating her skull and piercing her brain.

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/06/prosecutors_point_to_pattern_o.html

Police say Marshall could be connected to the deaths of Shelly Mills in September 1970, Kathryn Darling in March 1976, Nancy Sweetman in December 1976 and Catherine Fingleton in July 1980.

As it turned out, DNA tied Russell Allen Vane to the murders of Kathryn Darling and another woman (Diane Holloway, 1979), so he very well could've been responsible for some of the others as well.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/02/pair_of_murder_sentences_desig.html

In any case, a shocking number of horrific murders over a decade within a very small area - see the map at the bottom of the first link above.

 

[Richard]

Bumping this thread up. What other murders might be connected to him? What information is available on him?