From Allegan to the Ballot: What Berrien County Voters Should Know About Judicial Candidate Myrene Koch

From Allegan to the Ballot: What Berrien County Voters Should Know About Judicial Candidate Myrene Koch

What Is Actually on the Ballot

Berrien County’s published candidate list identifies Myrene Kay Koch as a nonpartisan filer for 5th District Court Judge, for a six year term ending in 2032, at a St. Joseph address. The list separates the seats. Incumbent Judge Gordon Gary Hosbein appears on the incumbent line. Koch and Jennifer E. Fields appear as candidates for the non-incumbent seat.

The county’s own list carries a statutory note explaining that judicial offices reach the August ballot only when more than twice as many candidates file as there are judgeships available. Two candidates for one non-incumbent judgeship does not clear that threshold, which sends this contest directly to the November general election. Voters should confirm the final ballot configuration with the Berrien County Clerk, because the county publishes these lists as unofficial.

How Koch Got to Allegan, and How She Left

Koch joined the Allegan County Prosecutor’s Office as an assistant prosecutor in July 2002 and became chief assistant prosecutor in June 2017. In March 2018, Chief Circuit Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker appointed her Prosecuting Attorney. The vacancy existed because the sitting prosecutor, Roberts Kengis, had been appointed to the circuit bench by Governor Rick Snyder. Koch took office on March 19, 2018, the same day Kengis put on the robe.

She won a partial term later that year against Mike Villar, then held the seat in 2020 against Villar again by a margin of fewer than twenty votes. In August 2024, on the third attempt, Villar defeated her in the Republican primary. He was sworn in and took office in January 2025.

That sequence matters for a judicial race because it establishes the structure Clutch Justice has been documenting since 2024. Allegan County’s prosecutor was appointed by a judge. That judge had mentored the prosecutor’s predecessor, who then became the second judge on the same bench. The three of them ran the county’s criminal docket. The emails they exchanged while doing it are now public.

What the Michigan Supreme Court Found

On July 16, 2024, the Michigan Supreme Court decided People v. Loew. The question was whether emails Judge Bakker sent to Prosecutor Koch during a criminal sexual conduct trial were permissible administrative communications or improper ex parte contact. Bakker wrote to Koch about the State Police investigation, offering her assessment of the trooper’s work, then followed up asking why the complainant had not been referred for a medical examination. The defendant and defense counsel were never told these messages existed.

The Court of Appeals had held the communications were administrative and therefore allowed. The Supreme Court reversed on that point, holding they were not made for the purpose of managing or executing a proceeding, and that they violated Canon 3(A)(4)(a). Justice Welch’s separate opinion noted the long history of Bakker and Koch working together as prosecutors in Allegan County before assuming their later roles.

The Emails Nobody Was Supposed to Read

The Watson Township supplemental amicus brief filed in the Loew appeal at the Michigan Supreme Court, docket number 164133, attached email exhibits obtained through FOIA requests to Allegan County. Those messages sit on county government servers and span roughly 2016 through 2020. Clutch Justice reported on them in June 2026. They establish the following.

The Charges an Appellate Court Said Should Never Have Been Filed

In In re DMT, the Michigan Court of Appeals addressed an Allegan County case in which a man was jailed over communications containing profanity directed at his own attorney. The court held the communications were constitutionally protected speech and that classifying them as a true threat was error. During oral argument, a member of the panel expressed open puzzlement that the charges had been authorized at all.

Charging decisions belong to the prosecutor. The office that authorized those charges was Koch’s. For a candidate asking voters for a district court bench, that is the most directly relevant item in the entire record, because district court is where charging decisions get their first judicial test. It is where arraignments happen, where bond is set, where probable cause is found or not found, and where a judge either checks the prosecutor or does not.

Warrantless Arrests and an Office That Would Not Comment

Clutch Justice reported in September 2024 on an Allegan County resident who described being arrested at his door without a warrant, in an account connecting former Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Haverdink to enforcement actions tied to cases before Kengis. In one documented instance, Haverdink stated in his own report that he knew the subject through monitoring that person’s social media activity. Multiple sources have described these detentions as carried out on directives from Kengis and Koch without warrants or probable cause. Those descriptions are allegations from sources and have not been adjudicated.

Koch did not respond to requests for comment when Clutch Justice reported that story. Neither did the sheriff. A source in that reporting described the practice of dismissing charges without prejudice as a mechanism that leaves a person waiting to see whether the arrest happens again.

Clutch Justice has also reported that under Koch’s supervision, an assistant prosecutor characterized a young girl and an adult as mutual combatants in an abuse matter, a characterization that determined how the case was handled.

The Fitzhugh Case: A Homicide, a Competency Finding, and a Prosecution That Stalled

The William Fitzhugh case is the clearest example in the Allegan record of what happens when a homicide prosecution depends on decisions made inside one office, and the decisions cannot be reopened afterward.

What Happened to William Fitzhugh

William Fitzhugh, 82, of Pullman, died on December 12, 2021. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, with the cause described as complications of multiple injuries, malnourishment, and neglect. Hospital records documented a broken femur, a broken nose, multiple broken ribs in different stages of healing, and a collapsed lung. On October 18, 2021, his son had found him curled on a bare mattress in severely poor living conditions. William told authorities his injuries were not accidental and named his grandsons, Cory Nethery and Christopher Fitzhugh, whom he and his wife Eula had adopted and who had lived with them for much of their lives.

FOX 17 obtained Adult Protective Services records through FOIA and found at least four referrals dating to 2017. Referrals in June and October 2021 were denied for investigation, including one that specifically cited Christopher’s June 2021 arrest and alleged he was impaired. William repeatedly denied abuse to APS, which treated him as capable of making his own decisions. On October 29, 2021, he disclosed the abuse to law enforcement and APS. Both grandsons were charged with vulnerable adult abuse and embezzlement on November 15, 2021, and with felony murder on February 23, 2022, after the autopsy.

The difference between the two outcomes came from competency law. It was not a finding that Christopher took no part in William’s abuse. He has never been tried.

What People Close to the Case Say

Multiple people with direct knowledge of the Allegan County proceedings have told Clutch Justice that Christopher Fitzhugh was not mentally incompetent. They say the competency process that Koch’s office pursued while she was prosecutor is what produced the incompetent and not restorable finding, and that the finding effectively ended the criminal case.

The public record adds context that cuts the other way, and it belongs here. After Christopher’s release, Koch sought his civil hospitalization, and she said publicly that her office did not believe he should be free in the community given the homicide allegations. FOX 17 reported that Christopher’s own guardian voiced fear about meeting him at the residence where he was staying. Judge Buck denied the hospitalization request. An office trying to keep a defendant confined after release is not an office that wanted him free, and the distinction between what the office sought at the end and how the competency process began is exactly what a full reconstruction of the court file should settle.

Why It Matters for a Judicial Race

Competency questions come up on criminal dockets at every level, and a judge who sees one has to decide whether the process is being used to determine a defendant’s actual capacity or to reach a result. The Fitzhugh case also carries the pattern this investigation keeps finding in Allegan County: Bakker appointed Koch, Bakker sentenced Nethery, and the outcomes of a single homicide were decided inside a small circle of people who had worked together for years. Voters are entitled to ask Koch how her office handled the competency process, what she would do differently, and how she would handle a case like it from the bench. She has not answered questions from Clutch Justice on the subject.

The Documentary Cameo: A Starring Role in a Case She Did Not Crack

In 2024, Netflix released Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter, a documentary series directed by Ryan White about the 1989 disappearance of 14 year old Aundria Bowman from Hamilton, in Allegan County, and her mother Cathy Terkanian’s decades long search for her. TV Guide’s cast listing names Koch among the people appearing as themselves, credited as the Allegan County Prosecuting Attorney. It lists two other figures from this investigation in the same film: Judge Margaret Zuzich Bakker, credited as Chief Circuit Court Judge, who sentenced Bowman in 2022, and Chris Haverdink of the Allegan County Sheriff’s Office, the former deputy named earlier in this article.

Clutch Justice’s question is simple. What did Koch’s office contribute to the outcome that put her on screen?

What the Public Record Shows About How the Case Moved

The thirty year gap between Aundria’s disappearance and any movement in her case ended because Virginia police, working a separate cold case, built a murder case against Dennis Bowman, and that case produced an arrest and then a confession. Virginia investigators did the investigative work. Allegan County’s part in the solve was helping with the arrest and receiving the result. When the charges came, Koch described them as “the first step to seeking justice” for Aundria’s family. That statement is accurate, and it is also a description of where her office started once the hard part was already done.

That is an assessment of the public record, offered as editorial judgment, and Clutch Justice invites correction. If Koch’s office did work on this case that the record does not show, she is free to describe it. She has not responded to requests for comment.

The appearance matters for this race because voters are being asked to treat a documentary credit as evidence of judgment and results. A prosecutor’s name on a famous case is not the same as a prosecutor’s work on it. The same film also features the judge whose emails to Koch drew a Michigan Supreme Court canon finding, who also sentenced Bowman, and the deputy named in the warrantless arrest accounts above, who, as Clutch Justice reported in 2024, contacted Terkanian about a possible harassment complaint while she was trying to prove where her daughter was buried. Three of the people at the center of this article sit together in a story about a case that Allegan County did not solve on its own.

The Office She Left Behind

In June 2024, Koch spoke to a Kalamazoo television station about Michigan’s prosecutor shortage. She described her own office in terms that require no interpretation.

She attributed the problem to a statewide compensation crisis, and that crisis is real. Prosecutors across Michigan have described the same pressures. But her opponent’s campaign put a number on the Allegan figure that same summer, counting twenty departures over her six year tenure, nineteen resignations and one termination. Both accounts describe the same office. They differ on the cause.

Management capacity is a legitimate question in a judicial race. A district court judge runs a courtroom, a docket, and a staff. Voters are entitled to weigh how a candidate ran the last office she was elected to lead.

She Already Works There

Koch is not an outside candidate. Berrien County’s own staff directory lists Myrene Koch as an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney assigned to the Niles division of the Berrien County Prosecutor’s Office, which operates out of North Front Street in Niles. The office is led by Prosecuting Attorney Amy Byrd.

That single fact reframes the entire race. Koch is a sitting prosecutor asking voters to seat her on the district court bench in the county where she currently prosecutes. She is not moving to Berrien County. She is moving across the well.

Prosecutors run for judge in Michigan constantly, and there is nothing improper about it. The 5th District Court’s own bench has been filled by former Berrien County prosecutors before. The transition is routine, and it is not a scandal.

What is not routine is the specific record Koch carries into that transition, and what it suggests about how she would handle the separation the job requires. The Loew exhibits describe a prosecutor who received a presiding judge’s private assessments of a pending case and, on the available record, did not put a stop to it. Judicial candidates who come from prosecution offices are asked, correctly, how they will handle cases involving former colleagues. The standard answer involves disclosure and recusal in early matters. Koch should be asked that question, and voters should weigh her answer against the four years of ex parte correspondence documented in a Michigan Supreme Court filing.

The Question Voters Are Actually Being Asked: Her Daughter Works There Too

Taylor Koch has been an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney in the Berrien County Prosecutor’s Office since 2019, according to her own professional listing and contemporaneous local coverage. She is Myrene Koch’s daughter. She handles work involving child victims and witnesses, and she is the owner and handler of the courthouse canine advocate introduced in 2024 to support children testifying in Berrien County.

The chronology matters. Taylor Koch was in that office roughly five years before her mother arrived. Nothing about her position was obtained through her mother, and nothing in this article is directed at her conduct or her competence. She is a working prosecutor with her own record.

But if Myrene Koch is elected to the 5th District Court, the arrangement changes in a way Michigan law addresses directly, and voters should understand the mechanics before November rather than after.

What the Rule Actually Requires

MCR 2.003(C)(1)(g)(ii) disqualifies a judge from any proceeding in which a person within the third degree of relationship to the judge is acting as a lawyer. A child is a first degree relative. If Taylor Koch appears as counsel of record on a case, her mother is disqualified from hearing it. That is not a judgment call, not a matter of the judge’s comfort level, and not waivable by the judge’s own sense of her impartiality. It is automatic.

What the rule does not do is disqualify the judge from the entire office. Michigan does not impute a relative’s employment to every case that office brings. Judges across this state hear cases prosecuted by offices that employ their relatives, and it happens without controversy. A blanket bar would be both bad law and bad policy, because it would effectively tell the adult children of Michigan judges to leave the region or leave the profession.

Where the Harder Question Lives

The recusal rule handles the cases where the daughter is counsel of record. It does not reach the cases where she is not counsel but her colleagues are, where she worked the file at the charging stage, where she is a supervisor or successor on a matter, or where she is simply down the hall from the attorney standing at the podium. Those cases fall under the general standard instead.

That general standard is MCR 2.003(C)(1)(b)(ii), which disqualifies a judge who has failed to adhere to the appearance of impropriety requirement in Canon 2 of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct. It is a flexible test that depends on what reasonable minds would perceive.

It is also the exact provision the Michigan Supreme Court applied against Judge Bakker in People v. Loew. The Court held that a private channel between the bench and the prosecution damaged the appearance of justice regardless of what was said in it. The prosecutor on the other end of that channel was Myrene Koch.

So Is It Ethical to Vote for Her

That question needs to be split, because it contains two different things and conflating them produces a bad answer.

The first is whether the family relationship disqualifies her from serving. It does not. Michigan has no rule against it, the recusal mechanism exists precisely to manage it, and treating a candidate’s adult daughter’s job as a disqualifying fact would be unfair to both of them. Voters who reject that framing are correct to reject it.

The second is whether voters want a court in which that mechanism has to work correctly, consistently, and without anyone watching. Recusal is self executing. There is no clerk who flags it, no automatic docket screen, no outside body reviewing whether a judge stepped aside when she should have. It runs on the judge’s own discipline about maintaining separation between herself and the prosecution.

That is the specific thing the documented record from Allegan County puts in question. Not her legal ability, not her daughter, and not her right to run. The record describes years in which the line between the bench and the prosecutor’s office was treated as porous by everyone involved, and it took a Michigan Supreme Court opinion to say so out loud. A voter who reads that record and concludes she has learned from it is making a defensible judgment. So is a voter who concludes that the office asking the most of that particular discipline is the wrong place to find out.

Clutch Justice does not tell readers how to vote. It tells them what is in the file.

The 2024 Canon 7 Motion

One prior incident belongs in this record because it was litigated publicly. In 2024, Wilcox Newspapers reported that Mike Villar filed a motion seeking Judge Bakker’s recusal after Bakker liked a social media post by Taylor Koch defending her mother during the Allegan prosecutor’s race. Villar’s motion argued that the interaction amounted to a public endorsement of a candidate for non-judicial office in violation of Canon 7 of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct. The reporting indicates the hearing was adjourned following a recess.

The Canon 7 obligation in that motion belonged to Bakker, not to either Koch. It is included here because it is the one documented instance in which this specific family relationship intersected with a judicial ethics rule, and because the motion is a matter of public record.

The Prosecutor Shopping Attempt Now Reads Differently

In August 2025, Clutch Justice reported that Judge Bakker had attempted to move a case to a Berrien County prosecutor, and identified Berrien as the county where Koch was then working. At the time, that was reporting based on Koch’s employment. With the county directory now confirming her position, the significance of that attempt is worth restating plainly: a judge whose ex parte communications with Koch had already drawn a Michigan Supreme Court canon violation finding sought to route a case to the county where Koch was employed as a prosecutor.

Clutch Justice makes no claim that Koch solicited that referral, participated in it, or was aware of it. The attempt was the judge’s. But it belongs in this record, because the question in front of Berrien County voters is whether the professional pattern documented in Allegan County stayed in Allegan County.

Why This Record Belongs in a Judicial Race

There is a version of this story that reads as a former official moving one county over and starting fresh. Michigan attorneys relocate. Careers change direction. A primary loss is not a disqualification, and nothing in the public record bars Koch from seeking this seat. She has spent the years since 2024 doing the work in a new office, and that counts for something.

But the specific job she is seeking is the one that sits directly across from the job she held. A district court judge decides whether the prosecutor has shown probable cause. A district court judge decides whether charges proceed. A district court judge is the person who is supposed to say no when an office authorizes charges against protected speech, and the person who is supposed to keep the state at arm’s length rather than corresponding with it privately.

The documented record from Allegan County describes a courthouse where that distance collapsed. Two judges and a prosecutor who socialized, coordinated, discussed each other’s careers on county email, and exchanged private assessments of pending cases. The Michigan Supreme Court looked at one slice of that and found a canon violation. The Court of Appeals looked at another slice and found an unconstitutional jailing. The Judicial Tenure Commission looked at it and issued a letter it is forbidden to acknowledge. And in the Fitzhugh case, the people closest to it say a competency finding entered on Koch’s watch has outlasted her tenure and left a family without a trial.

What Voters Can Do Before November

Verify the ballot yourself with the Berrien County Clerk’s elections division rather than relying on any candidate list, including the one cited here, because the county publishes those as unofficial. Review campaign finance filings for judicial candidates, which are monitored by the same office. Read People v. Loew directly through the Michigan Supreme Court’s public case documents rather than taking any publication’s summary of it, this one included. Attend a candidate forum and ask about the In re DMT charging decision specifically, and about how her office handled the competency process in the Fitzhugh case, because those are questions only the candidate can answer.

And watch the 5th District Court. Court watching is the single most effective accountability tool available to an ordinary person, and it costs nothing but a morning.