What Went Missing: Kalamazoo’s Evidence-Room Cocaine Scandal, and the Secrecy Law That Still Protects It

A 1993 audit found more than 1,100 rocks of cocaine and other drugs gone from the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety evidence room. What followed was a multicounty grand jury, an aborted wiretap, allegations of evidence swapped for painted soap, a quiet federal reboot, and, in the end, no charges for anyone over the missing drugs at all. Nobody has ever disclosed what any of it cost.

What Disappeared, and When

The Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety discovered the problem during an October 1993 audit of its evidence room. According to the Kalamazoo Gazette’s 1999 retrospective on the case, investigators eventually concluded that more than 1,100 rocks of cocaine and other drugs had gone missing, evidence tied to numerous pending criminal cases across the department. The Michigan Court of Appeals later confirmed the essential shape of that discovery in its own words, describing a large quantity of narcotics apparently stolen from the evidence room and an internal city investigation that followed.

A Deteriorating Evidence Room

The Gazette’s reporting painted the evidence room itself as the soil the scandal grew in. Investigators described an outdated cataloguing system, thin supervision, and drug evidence from closed cases that sat for long stretches before it was ever destroyed. That environment, according to the paper’s sources, made it difficult even to establish exactly how much was missing or when it had gone, a problem that would follow the case all the way to its quiet end. The department’s own historical timeline records a $163,656 overhaul of the evidence room in 1996, an unusually specific and traceable admission that storage and security had become a real institutional liability during this period.

How a Michigan One-Judge Grand Jury Actually Works

To understand why this case could run for five years and still produce nothing on the public record, it helps to understand the tool Michigan handed to the people investigating it. Since 1927, Michigan law has allowed a single circuit judge to act as what is commonly called a one-man grand jury. Instead of a panel of citizens weighing evidence, one judge sits alone, reviews evidence presented by a prosecutor, can subpoena witnesses and compel testimony, and can authorize warrants and charges, all without a defense lawyer in the room to test any of it. A multicounty version of the same law lets that single judge’s authority extend across county lines when a state prosecutor or the Attorney General’s office requests it, which is what happened in Kalamazoo.

The design trade-off is speed and secrecy in exchange for the adversarial testing an ordinary criminal proceeding provides. There is no opposing counsel to cross-examine a witness, no public transcript, and no citizen panel that might push back on a prosecutor’s theory of the case. Michigan is one of only a small number of states that still uses this model at all. It is the same law, unchanged, that would resurface decades later at the center of the Flint water prosecutions, a connection this piece returns to below.

The Chief Suspect: Ulysses Dixon

Investigators focused early and heavily on KDPS Capt. Ulysses Dixon, then a veteran commander in the department’s training division. The October 1993 audit reportedly showed Dixon could not account for hundreds of rocks of crack cocaine he had checked out of the evidence room, which he said he needed to build drug identification “display kits” used for training.

The Wiretap

One of the strangest turns in the case involved an attempt to bug Dixon’s own office telephone. In October 1993, Kalamazoo police and prosecutorial officials moved to intercept his calls, eventually pulling in technical help from Michigan State Police and the FBI. Federal agents reviewing the operation reportedly discovered the required legal authorization for a wire interception had never actually been obtained, and ordered the surveillance stopped. The Gazette’s reporting characterized the episode as an illegal wiretap, and Kalamazoo attorney William Fette later publicly criticized officials for having proceeded with it at all.

A Second Suspect: Larry Boelman

KDPS Lt. Larry Boelman also became a focus of the drug-theft investigation. Detectives reportedly believed he held keys giving him unsupervised access to the evidence room, and surveillance allegedly caught him inside it at a time it was supposed to be closed. A state grand jury ultimately convicted Boelman on prostitution-related and obstruction-of-justice matters connected to traffic tickets, an outcome entirely separate from the narcotics disappearance. He was never charged over the missing drugs.

Command Turnover at KDPS

The scandal did not unfold under one chief or one prosecutor. Edward Edwardson led KDPS when the theft was discovered and the state investigation and grand jury got underway, with James Gregart serving as Kalamazoo County Prosecutor during that same period. By the time the case reopened in 1997, Gary Hetrick had succeeded Edwardson as chief, and it was under Hetrick’s tenure that the department sought federal assistance from the Department of Justice and FBI. Investigators and commanders named across the case file at various points, including Gary Hammel, James Grace, and Daniel Weston, who would later become chief himself, span nearly the entire leadership structure of the department over the life of the investigation. A scandal that outlasts multiple chiefs, multiple prosecutors, and multiple investigative teams is not usually a sign that the problem was contained. It is usually a sign that no single person was ever positioned to be held accountable for the whole of it.

The Grand Jury’s Quiet Exit

In September 1994, Assistant Michigan Attorney General James Blumer reviewed the state’s case and wrote to the grand jury’s forewoman. His assessment reportedly pointed to sloppy recordkeeping and what he called an “appalling lack of security,” conditions that made it difficult to prove either the amount of drugs missing or who was responsible. Blumer reportedly weighed a perjury charge against Dixon before abandoning it. The multicounty grand jury eventually adjourned without indicting anyone over the thefts, a fact the Michigan Court of Appeals independently confirmed four years later when it reviewed the city’s continued secrecy claims.

The FOIA Fight: Herald Co. v. City of Kalamazoo

On July 3, 1995, the Kalamazoo Gazette filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records generated by the evidence-room investigation. The city released some material and withheld the rest, arguing that disclosure would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation, expose investigative techniques, or violate grand jury secrecy and privacy protections. Eventually the city handed the trial court 110 disputed items for in camera review. The Gazette sued, and the fight over those documents outlived the investigation itself by years.

The legal fight turned on a single word. Michigan’s FOIA lets a public body withhold law enforcement records only if disclosure “would” interfere with an investigation, a tougher standard than the federal FOIA’s “could” language. The trial court applied that stricter standard correctly, and the Court of Appeals said so. But the panel also revisited the Michigan Supreme Court’s earlier three-step framework for law enforcement secrecy claims, which requires a public body to offer a detailed, document-by-document justification rather than a blanket assertion that disclosure might someday interfere with something. Kalamazoo had done the detailed version, filing an index and affidavit and submitting to in camera review, and the appellate panel credited that work. What it would not credit was the idea that an investigation stays “open” indefinitely simply because the statute of limitations has not expired. By the time the Court of Appeals ruled in April 1998, more than four years had passed since the theft was discovered and the grand jury had already adjourned without a single indictment. The panel sent the case back to the trial court to determine, given all that time, whether the city’s secrecy claim still held up. What the trial court decided on remand does not appear in any published opinion. The city’s own attorney at the time, Robert Cinabro, defended the withholding throughout the litigation and later publicly acknowledged that the underlying incident had happened.

A Second Run at Federal Charges

The case did not fully end when the state grand jury adjourned. According to the Gazette, KDPS Inspector James Grace revisited the investigation, and a renewed inquiry developed in 1997 that drew in the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. Investigators reportedly narrowed their focus back to the specific instances in which Dixon had checked out evidence he could not later account for. By late 1997 and early 1998, federal investigators reportedly believed charges might be viable, and an Assistant U.S. Attorney’s memo referenced possible grand jury sessions, target letters, and a contemplated indictment. Former KDPS officers were reportedly subpoenaed before a federal grand jury, in a process led in part by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lloyd Meyer. In the end, federal prosecutors declined to bring charges, citing the same problem that had doomed the state case from the start: the evidence itself was too compromised to prove it.

Kalamazoo Was Not Alone

An evidence room that quietly falls apart, and a department that only discovers it after the damage is already done, is not unique to Kalamazoo. The pattern has recurred often enough that it functions as its own category of institutional failure.

The details differ. The result does not. Once an evidence room’s integrity is in doubt, the damage spreads past whoever stole what, and starts eating the prosecutions that depended on that evidence being trustworthy in the first place.

What This Cost: Then and Now

Nobody ever put a final number on this case. Not the city, not the state, not the U.S. Department of Justice. The only dollar figure that made it into the public record is the KDPS evidence room’s 1996 renovation, an unusually specific line item the department’s own historical timeline puts at $163,656.

Using standard Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation data, a dollar in 1996 carries the same purchasing power as roughly two dollars and thirteen cents in 2026. Applied to the renovation alone, that $163,656 line item is equivalent to about $349,000 today, spent on hardening a room after the damage was already done.

Scale matters here. When the same one-judge grand jury mechanism was used at the size of the Flint water crisis prosecutions decades later, the price tag was public and enormous: the Michigan Attorney General’s own 2026 accounting put the prosecution team’s costs at roughly $7.6 million, not counting the separate millions spent defending the officials who were charged, with total case-related legal costs estimated by the Detroit News at $60 million or more. Kalamazoo’s version of the same tool never generated a public number at all, small or large. That is not a difference in mechanism. It is a difference in how much scrutiny each case happened to attract.

What Hasn’t Changed

Strip away the specific names and the specific decade, and the Kalamazoo evidence-room case is a story about a structure: a single circuit judge, sitting alone, hearing evidence out of public view, authorizing investigative steps with no adversarial party in the room to object. That structure is Michigan’s one-man grand jury law, codified in 1927 and still, as of this writing, in force. Michigan is one of only a small handful of states that puts this kind of unilateral investigative power in a single judge’s hands at all.

Nearly three decades separate the Kalamazoo evidence room from the Flint water prosecutions, and the underlying law never changed in between. It is the same statute, doing the same kind of quiet, one-sided work, whether the subject is a police captain suspected of stealing cocaine or a sitting governor’s administration accused of poisoning a city’s water.

This is the same question I ask every time Clutch Justice pulls a sealed file: not just what the record says, but who still holds the power to make sure it never gets fully read, or fully paid for, in public. In Kalamazoo, that power sat with one judge and one city attorney. In Michigan today, it still does.