#ReadWithClutch: True Crime Michigan by Tobin T. Buhk

It has been a while since I talked about one of my first loves: true crime. It is no surprise to long-time readers that Ann Rule is one of my personal heroes, and that I had long envisioned I would grow up to be a true crime writer like her.

Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

I did not become a true crime writer in the way I imagined. I am not filing dispatches from a courthouse steps or reconstructing cold cases from a desk in Seattle. What I do instead is sit inside the machinery itself. I read dockets the way other people read novels. I trace institutional failure through procedural record. The cases I cover are not always the ones with body counts, but they have consequences just the same. I got the true crime writer life. I just got it at a different angle than I planned.

So when I pick up a book like Tobin T. Buhk’s True Crime: Michigan: The State’s Most Notorious Criminal Cases, I am not reading it as a civilian. I am reading it as someone who understands what it takes to document the record accurately, and why getting it wrong matters.

What the Book Covers

The case lineup is well chosen. Buhk is not padding the list with cases that are famous only because they were televised. He is working with cases that have genuine historical weight, and most of them are underrepresented in national true crime coverage precisely because they happened in Michigan rather than New York or Los Angeles.

The Purple Gang chapter earns its place. The Bernstein brothers and their associates ran Detroit’s underworld through the Prohibition years with a violence that earned them a reputation even Al Capone chose not to test directly. Michigan had banned alcohol in 1917, three years before national Prohibition took effect, which gave Detroit’s criminal networks a head start the rest of the country was still catching up to by 1920. The Detroit River, barely half a mile wide at its narrowest point, made the corridor between Windsor and Detroit the most efficient smuggling route in the country. By some estimates, the majority of alcohol distributed illegally in the United States during Prohibition passed through Detroit. The Purple Gang did not build that infrastructure. They took it over by force. Buhk traces the arc from street-level delinquency in Little Jerusalem to dominance of the city’s entire underworld, and then the Collingwood Manor Massacre of 1931, which began the unraveling that excessive internal violence almost always produces.

I have spent enough time studying institutional failure to notice something in that trajectory. Organizations built entirely on coercion and fear tend to destroy themselves from the inside when there is no longer an external threat large enough to hold the center. The Purple Gang’s collapse is a case study in that pattern. It is also just a genuinely interesting story, and Buhk tells it well.

The Case That Should Be More Famous

If you know only one thing about this book before you read it, know that the Bath School massacre chapter alone is worth the cover price.

On May 18, 1927, Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer of Bath Township’s school board, detonated explosives he had spent months planting beneath Bath Consolidated School. The explosion killed 38 children and teachers. Kehoe then drove a truck loaded with additional explosives and shrapnel to the school, where he detonated it among the rescuers who had responded, killing himself and several more. He had murdered his wife and destroyed his farm earlier the same morning. A sign wired to the fence at his property read: “Criminals are made, not born.”

This remains the deadliest act of mass violence at an American school in recorded history. It happened 98 years ago and most Americans have never heard of it. The Bath School disaster contradicts the convenient narrative that school mass murder is a modern phenomenon, which may explain why it has been so consistently omitted from national conversations about violence. Kehoe was not a stranger to the institution he destroyed. He was its treasurer. He had performed maintenance and repair work inside the building. He knew exactly where to put the charges and how long it would take to place them without drawing attention.

Buhk handles this case with appropriate gravity. He does not make it spectacular. He lets the facts hold the weight, which is the only responsible approach to this material and one that not every true crime author manages.

Coral Watts and the Near-Miss

The Coral Watts chapter is the one that has a procedural story inside it that I cannot read without my professional eye activating.

Watts operated in Michigan and Texas in the 1970s and early 1980s. He confessed to more than a dozen killings and was suspected in significantly more. In 1982, Texas prosecutors offered him immunity on twelve confessed murders in exchange for a 60-year burglary sentence. Michigan refused to extend the same immunity deal, which meant Watts could still face charges here. What prosecutors did not adequately account for was that mandatory release laws and an appeals court ruling would eventually reduce that 60-year sentence to less than 25 years in practical effect. Watts was facing release from Texas custody by 2006.

Michigan authorities moved to prosecute him on Michigan cases in an explicit effort to keep him incarcerated. He was convicted in the 1979 stabbing death of Helen Dutcher in Ferndale in 2004, and in the 1979 murder of Gloria Steele in Kalamazoo in 2007. He died of cancer in September 2007, weeks after receiving his second life sentence, while confined to a Jackson County hospital.

What interests me in this case is not the violence, disturbing as it is. It is the procedural near-miss. A man credibly suspected of killing upward of eighty women nearly walked out of prison on a combination of plea agreement mathematics, appellate ruling, and the kind of institutional assumption that passes for planning: he will probably die in prison anyway, so why build a case. Michigan prosecutors eventually built the case. They did it under deadline pressure, which is not the recommended condition for careful prosecution. The system caught it. It almost did not.

What Buhk Does Well, and Where There Is Room

Buhk’s background working alongside a forensic pathologist gives the writing a grounded quality that most regional true crime lacks. He is not speculating where he does not have facts, and he is not manufacturing suspense through omission. The cases are presented with historical integrity, and for a book of this scope covering ten cases in roughly 200 pages, that discipline is genuinely impressive.

The Hoffa chapter is lighter than the others because there is less to work with, and Buhk is honest about that. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa has generated more theory than documentation, and any author who pretends otherwise is padding. Buhk does not pad. He presents what is established and notes what remains unresolved. That is the correct call.

If I could ask for one thing in a second edition, it would be more structural analysis. Buhk tells you what happened. He is somewhat less interested in the institutional conditions that allowed it to happen, or the procedural points at which a different outcome was possible. That is a stylistic choice, not a failure, and it reflects what the book is designed to be: a readable, documented survey of Michigan’s worst cases. It does that well.

For readers who want to go deeper on the systemic dimensions of any of these cases, the primary sources are there. Buhk gives you the foundation. What you build on it is your own business.

Why It Landed Differently This Time

I picked this book up with the intention of reading it the way I used to read true crime: for the story, for the craft, for the pleasure of watching someone reconstruct events from the documented record. I did some of that. But I also kept pausing to notice things that would not have registered ten years ago, before I had spent years inside actual institutional records. The immunity deal mechanics in the Watts case. The months-long access window Kehoe had inside the school building. The pattern by which the Purple Gang’s internal violence eventually became more dangerous to itself than external law enforcement ever was.

True crime taught me to ask why things happened. The work I do now is teaching me to ask what the system was doing while they did. Those are not the same question, and they do not always have the same answer. Buhk’s book operates comfortably in the first territory. I have ended up, maybe inevitably, in the second.

Be careful what you wish for.