There are two victims in this piece. The first is Patricia Rosansky, 17 years old, a junior at Battle Creek Central High School who disappeared on her walk to school in February 1983 and was found dead in April in a wooded area of Calhoun County’s Bedford Township, her body covered with a refrigerator door and debris. She was raped and murdered. She has never had justice.

The second victim is Thomas Cress, a man with diminished mental capacity who was convicted of Rosansky’s murder in June 1985 on jailhouse informant testimony, with no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, while the lead detective on the case had already concluded he was innocent. Cress spent 25 years in a unit for mentally ill inmates at a state correctional facility before Governor Jennifer Granholm commuted his sentence on December 28, 2010, her final days in office, because every institutional system designed to correct errors like this one refused to.

What brought me to this case, is one that is perhaps better known; that of Maggie Hume. Margaret Hume, 20, was a separate Calhoun County victim, killed in her Battle Creek apartment in August 1982, raped and strangled. Her case and Rosansky’s are connected because the man investigators believe killed both women is the same person: Michael Ronning, a serial murderer linked to killings across multiple states. Neither case has ever been resolved by charging him. That is the complete picture. Two women, one suspected killer, no charges in either case.

What happened in Calhoun County is not a story about systemic abstraction. It is a story about three specific prosecutors making three specific decisions, each of which made it harder for Thomas Cress to get out of prison for something he almost certainly did not do.

Name Them

Three prosecutors had the Calhoun County case file at different moments. Three prosecutors made choices that kept Thomas Cress in prison. The record supports naming each of them and saying precisely what they did.

Conrad Sindt is now a retired judge. Jon Sahli called a commutation he should have supported “ridiculous.” Susan Mladenoff fought a release that every other credible voice in this case supported. Three prosecutors, three decisions, one man who served 25 years for a crime he almost certainly did not commit. The record supports every word of that sentence.

What Actually Happened in Calhoun County

Patricia Rosansky disappeared in February 1983. Her body was found in April. The investigation produced Thomas Cress as a suspect based on witnesses who claimed he had made admissions in casual conversation. There was rape evidence at the scene. In 1983, DNA science could not link that evidence to a specific suspect. Cress was convicted in a 26-day jury trial and sentenced to life in prison.

Here is what the record also shows. Battle Creek Police Detective Dennis Mullen, investigating both the Rosansky case and the 1982 Hume murder, had by 1991 concluded with certainty that Michael Ronning had killed Hume. Ronning had lived in the same Battle Creek apartment complex as Hume at the time of her murder. After her death, Ronning relocated to Bellevue, Michigan, five miles from Battle Creek. Thirteen days after moving, Bellevue schoolgirl Carrie Evans disappeared while walking down Main Street. Her body was found in the woods near Ronning’s home.

Mullen’s investigation of Ronning’s movements across multiple states produced a documented pattern. In 1986, the Arkansas State Police told Mullen that Ronning, arrested for a murder in Arkansas, had lived in Hume’s apartment complex at the time of her death. As Mullen continued investigating, he concluded that Cress had not killed Rosansky, and that the geographic and behavioral pattern connecting Ronning to the Hume, Evans, and Rosansky cases was overwhelming. Rosansky’s body had been found within two miles of where Ronning was living at the time of her disappearance.

Mullen brought his conclusions to Conrad Sindt, the man who had prosecuted and convicted Cress. Sindt’s documented response: keep your views to yourself unless you have evidence to back them up. They never discussed Cress again. Sindt left the prosecutor’s office in January 1991 to take the Circuit Court bench.

That exchange is the structural center of this case. A detective tells the prosecutor who obtained the conviction that the wrong man is in prison. The prosecutor tells him to be quiet. Then the prosecutor becomes a judge and moves on. Thomas Cress stays in prison.

The DNA Evidence That No Longer Exists

In 1992, the Battle Creek police chief asked the prosecutor’s office to investigate the connection between Ronning and the Rosansky murder. That office, now under Jon Sahli, was participating in a statewide review of evidence in long-term storage at Michigan State Police facilities. The DNA evidence from the Rosansky crime scene, specifically a sanitary napkin with sperm and hairs with intact roots, was destroyed that fall, along with evidence from 69 other cases.

The federal court record in Cress v. Palmer, decided by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007, is specific. A note found on Cress’s May 1992 pro se motion for trial transcripts, filed with the prosecutor’s office, indicated that Sahli had said someone from his office should attend the hearing regarding that motion. The timing is on the record. Cress filed the motion asking for transcripts in May 1992. The evidence was destroyed that fall.

If Ronning’s DNA had matched the evidence from the Rosansky crime scene, Thomas Cress would have been exonerated and the actual perpetrator identified. If it had not matched, the conviction would have been confirmed and the record complete. The destruction of that evidence ensured the question could never be answered definitively. That is the outcome the Calhoun County Prosecutor’s Office presided over in 1992.

The Court of Appeals found grounds for a new trial. The Michigan Supreme Court, in 2003, reviewed the same record, including the destroyed DNA evidence, the recanted testimony, and the Ronning confession, and refused. That is not a system correcting itself. That is a system deciding, twice at the highest level, that the outcome mattered more than the accuracy of the record.

What the Record Shows, Year by Year

What Each Mechanism Did With the Case

It is worth being specific about which institutional mechanisms were available at each stage and what each one did with the information in front of it.

Conrad Sindt had a detective telling him by 1991 that the wrong man was in prison. The institutional mechanism available to him was an honest reexamination of his own conviction. His response was to instruct the detective to be quiet. Sindt then left the office to become a judge, taking no action and leaving the problem for whoever came next.

Jon Sahli had a case file showing a credible connection between a documented serial killer and a murder his predecessor had prosecuted. The institutional mechanism available to him was a DNA test that would have taken the question off the table permanently. The DNA evidence was destroyed instead. Whether Sahli personally ordered it, permitted it through inaction, or was unaware of its relevance is a question the record does not answer with certainty. What the record answers is that the evidence was destroyed while he was the sitting prosecutor, and that he later characterized the release of the man who needed that evidence as “ridiculous.”

Susan Mladenoff had a parole board recommendation, a U.S. Senator supporting the commutation, and 25 years of Cress’s life in evidence. She actively opposed his release, citing holes in Ronning’s confession, which is a prosecutorial argument that sounds serious until you note that Ronning’s confession came in alongside recantations from the prosecution’s own witnesses, no physical evidence linking Cress to the crime, and the destruction of the only evidence that could have answered the question definitively. Holes in a serial killer’s confession do not constitute grounds for keeping a man with no physical evidence against him in prison for a quarter century.

Every Michigan County Needs an Independent Conviction Integrity Unit

The Cress case is not a story about Calhoun County being uniquely bad. The choices made there were enabled by a structural feature of Michigan’s system that applies everywhere: conviction integrity, when it happens at all, happens inside the office that obtained the conviction. Conrad Sindt reviewed Conrad Sindt’s conviction. Jon Sahli’s office controlled the evidence. Susan Mladenoff defended the institution’s conclusion. The incentive structure produced the predictable result.

Conviction integrity units exist in some Michigan counties and in many large jurisdictions nationally. Where they function, they have structural independence from the trial division, accessible intake processes, authority to review evidence, and a reporting obligation that goes outside the prosecuting attorney’s office when the review finds merit. Most Michigan counties have nothing of the kind. Calhoun County did not have one when Cress was convicted in 1985, when the evidence was destroyed in 1992, or when Mladenoff fought the release in 2010. It does not have a meaningful one now.

Barry County, which this publication has covered in detail, does not have one. Many small and mid-sized Michigan counties have no mechanism for reviewing convictions after the fact that operates with any independence from the people who obtained them. The Cress case is the answer to why that matters.

What independence actually requires

A conviction integrity unit that reports to the prosecuting attorney who obtained the conviction is not independent. It is a procedural shield. Real independence means an intake process any party can access, staffing that does not rotate through the trial division, authority to subpoena records and evidence, a clear standard for what constitutes grounds for review, and a reporting obligation that goes outside the prosecuting attorney’s office when the review finds merit. A regional model administered through the Attorney General’s office could serve small and mid-sized counties that lack the caseload to justify a standalone unit. What it requires is that the mechanism exist, that it be accessible, and that it have actual authority.

The evidence preservation failure

The Cress case also illustrates why conviction integrity units are not sufficient on their own. They need access to evidence that has not been destroyed by the office that obtained the conviction. If the DNA evidence in the Rosansky case had been subject to an independent preservation requirement at the time Ronning emerged as a credible suspect, the destruction of that evidence could not have been authorized by the same office with the institutional interest in the conviction standing. It would have been in a chain of custody that included someone outside that office. It wasn’t. It was destroyed. That is a records management failure with direct consequences for a man who needed that evidence to prove his innocence.

Patricia Rosansky. Maggie Hume. Carrie Evans. No Charges.

Thomas Cress got out. He should never have gone in. Those are both true, and they are not equivalent truths. Getting out after 25 years, released by gubernatorial commutation on a governor’s last day in office, is not the same as being exonerated. He was released. The conviction was not vacated. The record was not corrected. No one was ever held accountable for putting him there.

Patricia Rosansky has never had justice. The man Detective Mullen concluded killed her is imprisoned in Arkansas for a different murder and has never been charged with her death. The DNA evidence that might have established this definitively was destroyed by the prosecutor’s office while the case was being actively challenged.

Maggie Hume has never had justice. The Calhoun County Prosecutor’s Office and the Battle Creek Police Department could not agree on whom to charge in 1982. The man who most likely killed her has never been charged with her death. Her case has never been officially closed.

Carrie Evans has never had justice. Her death, and its connection to Ronning’s documented pattern of behavior across multiple states, has never been resolved with a charge.

Three women killed in Calhoun County in a thirteen-month period. One man serving life in Arkansas for a murder in a different state. One man who served 25 years for a crime the record suggests he did not commit. No accountability for the deaths of Rosansky, Hume, or Evans.

That is the complete record of what the Calhoun County Prosecutor’s Office produced in these cases across four decades. Conrad Sindt convicted an innocent man and silenced the detective who found out. Jon Sahli presided over the destruction of the only evidence that could have corrected the record. Susan Mladenoff fought to keep the wrongly convicted man inside. None of them has faced any professional consequence for any of it. Sindt retired from the Circuit Court bench in 2015. Sahli called the commutation ridiculous. Mladenoff moved on.

Thomas Cress, a man with diminished mental capacity who spent 25 years in a unit for mentally ill inmates, is the only person in this case who paid a price proportionate to what the record shows happened here.