A Deathbed Tip Is Not a Dying Declaration: What the Kensler Barn Search Can and Cannot Deliver

A dying man pointed detectives to a barn in Sharon Township. Three days of jackhammering later, the 1976 killing of Manchester attorney Peter Kensler is still open, and the law that governs what happens next is narrower than the headlines suggest.

Three Days Under a Barn

Let me tell you what I noticed first. MLive’s October 9 report by Gus Burns opened by calling it a deathbed confession, and that framing traveled fast. It is not what the sheriff’s office said. Detective Lt. Shane Peltier said the information was “provided by an individual on his deathbed.” He would not say what was found, when the tip came in, or what comes next.

Here is the documented sequence. Matthew Albert and his wife bought the 44-acre farm on Sharon Hollow Road in December 2024. On Wednesday, October 7, FBI agents and Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies began breaking up concrete and excavating beneath an old equine swimming pool in the barn. Albert shared the search warrant with MLive. It identified the Kensler homicide and sought evidence linking the farm’s previous owner, Neil Baggett, to it. Albert said detectives told him Baggett had made statements before his death indicating evidence could be on the land. Baggett died February 22, 2026, in Stewart, Tennessee, at 89. Kensler’s sister, Patricia Fitzgerald, told MLive she knew him as a prominent local horse trader.

Albert said he was notified the search ended about 3 p.m. Friday, October 9, and that the seized-property forms left behind listed nothing.

Kensler’s home was about a mile east of that barn. He was 36, an estate attorney in Manchester, and a bachelor. According to the Ann Arbor News’s reporting that week, he went out into his yard on the evening of February 3, 1976, to meet someone who had pulled into his driveway at 17750 Sharon Valley Road. Investigators told the paper that words may have been exchanged and Kensler turned back toward the house. A 20-gauge shotgun blast hit his shoulder and knocked him down. The second shot was fired into his face at close range. His sister and his secretary found him the next day. Officers estimated he had been dead about 18 hours.

What Michigan’s Evidence Rules Do With a Dying Man’s Words

The dying declaration is one of the oldest exceptions to the hearsay rule, and it carries a near-mythic reputation. The theory is that a person who believes death is imminent has no reason left to lie. That reputation is why “deathbed” does so much work in a headline. The rule itself is narrow.

Michigan Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3) admits, in a homicide prosecution or a civil case, a statement the speaker made while believing his own death was imminent, about the cause or circumstances of that death. In People v. Stamper (2007), decided when the rule was numbered 804(b)(2), the Michigan Supreme Court admitted a fatally injured four-year-old’s statements naming the man who hurt him, because they concerned the circumstances of the child’s own impending death. The statement has to be about the speaker’s own dying. A man in hospice in 2026 talking about a shotgun killing in 1976 is not describing the cause of his own death. However sincere, those words are not a dying declaration.

That leaves MRE 804(b)(4), the statement against interest. It admits a statement so contrary to the speaker’s interests, including his exposure to criminal liability, that a reasonable person would have made it only if it were true. Michigan adds a condition: when the statement tends to expose the speaker to criminal liability, it must be supported by corroborating circumstances that clearly indicate its trustworthiness. The rule does not let the statement corroborate itself.

There is a constitutional layer too. In Crawford v. Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court held that testimonial statements, including statements made to police during an investigation, cannot be used against a criminal defendant unless the speaker is available for cross-examination or the defendant had a prior chance to cross-examine. The Court noted a possible historical exception for true dying declarations and left it unresolved. A statement against interest made to detectives about another person’s role in a killing gets no such exception. If the deathbed statement points at anyone still living, prosecutors would need to prove that person’s guilt with something other than the dead man’s account.

If There Is No One Left to Try

The other possibility is the one the warrant points toward: statements bearing on the speaker’s own involvement. Nothing in the public record establishes what Baggett said or what role, if any, he had, and he was never charged with anything connected to Kensler. But the structure of a case like this is worth understanding, because it is the structure the family now lives inside.

A dead person cannot be prosecuted. What an agency can do is clear the case. Under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting rules, an offense is cleared by exceptional means only when the agency has identified the offender, gathered enough evidence to support an arrest, a charge, and a prosecution, knows where the offender is, and is blocked from prosecuting by something outside its control. Death of the offender is the standard example.

The second condition is the hard one. Clearance by exceptional means is not a ruling on a tip. It is a declaration that the agency had a chargeable case it was prevented from bringing. For a 1976 shotgun killing, that standard cannot be met by a statement alone, which is exactly why investigators spent three days under a barn.

I want to be direct about why this matters for the Kensler family. Patricia Fitzgerald is 94. She told MLive she hopes the case is solved in her lifetime. A homicide can end three ways from here: an arrest and charge, an exceptional clearance backed by real evidence, or an open file. The difference between the second and third is entirely what the evidence shows, and the public deserves to know which one it is when the sheriff’s office decides.

Fifty Years of One Theory

From the first week, investigators told reporters they were talking to Kensler’s close friends. Over time the official account settled on his private life. Police learned he kept false identification, which the sheriff at the time connected to a separate life in downriver Detroit. Family and police believed Kensler was gay, at a time when that carried real social and professional risk, and his sister has said he likely did not want to be out under his own name.

In 1985, eleven years into the investigation with no charge, Detective Kerr went to the Ann Arbor News with a theory about a specific man: a Detroit-area friend Kensler had met in law school, who Kerr said lacked the strength to do it himself but wanted Kensler dead and brought someone who would. MLive identified that friend this year as a junior high assistant principal, and Fitzgerald told the outlet he and her brother were in a years-long relationship. He was never charged. He died in 1992. The only thing that ever attached him to this killing was a detective’s speculation.

Patricia Fitzgerald has rejected that theory for decades. She described the friend to MLive as kind and meek, and she said the department wanted to make the case about a gay couple. The investigators’ theory produced no arrest in fifty years. Her skepticism deserves the weight the department’s theory has had.

The record also shows what that focus may have crowded out. The current search centers on a horse trader whose farm sat about a mile from Kensler’s house. Fitzgerald told MLive she knew Baggett by reputation but was not aware of any connection between him and her brother. Kensler’s former partner, Hendley, also lived nearby and kept horses. None of that establishes anything. It does show a set of local relationships that the public account of this case barely mentioned until 2026.

Sealed Since 1975

In 1975, Hendley filed a civil lawsuit against Kensler, and Kensler countersued. Both cases were sealed by court order and were still unresolved when Kensler was shot. Fifty years later, MLive reports, the nature of the dispute remains unclear.

The 1985 detective’s statement that the bank fight was ruled out says nothing about the lawsuits. Whether investigators reviewed the sealed files, and what they concluded, has never been made public. Hendley died in 1992. Kensler died in 1976. The privacy and business interests that justified sealing a dispute between two living lawyers in 1975 have no living holder.

Michigan’s current court rule on sealed records, MCR 8.119(I), requires a court to find good cause and to weigh the public’s interest before sealing, and it allows any person to move to set aside a sealing order. Those standards did not exist in their current form when these files were closed. They exist now.

What Fixing It Would Actually Require

The Kensler case is old, but every problem in it is current. Agencies still talk publicly about uncharged people. Courts still hold sealed files long after the reason for sealing has died with the parties. And deathbed tips are still reported as confessions before anyone knows what was said. Four changes would address that directly.

I keep coming back to the property forms. Three days, a jackhammer, the FBI, and a blank sheet of paper. That blank sheet is not failure. It may be exactly what an honest search produces. But it is also the clearest picture of what a deathbed statement is worth on its own, and why Patricia Fitzgerald is still waiting. The words were the map. The evidence is the case.