Five Suspects, One Referral: What the Prosecutor’s Own Records Show About the Erik Cross Murder Warrants

Five suspects.
Five murder charges sought.
So why does the prosecutor’s record show only one?

On October 6, 2017, Michigan news outlets reported that the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office had requested open murder warrants for five people in the killing of Erik Cross, a Vicksburg teenager who died on June 26, 1983, after leaving a party. WWMT named all five: Brent Spaulding, his father Brian Spaulding, Amber Thomas, Bill Cook, and Tim Martin. The family learned the news from then-Undersheriff Paul Matyas, according to FOX 17, and went public asking the prosecutor to act.

For a family that had waited 34 years, it was the closest thing to justice they had ever been offered. Nearly nine years later, Clutch Justice has obtained records directly from the Kalamazoo County Prosecutor’s Office through FOIA. They show that the hope Erik’s family was handed in October 2017 had already been taken off the table before anyone handed it to them.

The request was not limited to Spaulding. It sought charging decisions, warrant requests, denials, and administrative records concerning the entire Erik Cross investigation. What came back identifies a single proposed defendant.

What the Prosecutor’s File Actually Says

The core record is a screenshot of the prosecutor’s felony case management screen, titled “Felony Case – Spaulding, Brenton Tyler.” It is assigned to JSGETT, the system login for Prosecutor Jeffrey S. Getting. The referring agency is the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office. The referral date is August 23, 2017.

A second record, the case notes for the same file, carries the narrative. A note dated December 13, 2018 reads that the Office of the Prosecuting Attorney “is denying the request for charges because there are factual and legal issues that we cannot overcome at this time.” A note dated June 14, 2018 was withheld in full as “beyond the scope” of the request. The earliest entry, dated August 23, 2017, is a defendant note reading “open murder.” The notes also show the file was migrated into a new system on September 20, 2025, which is when the court and offense fields were carried over.

The Timeline the Public Never Saw

“Public Pressure” After a Charge Was Already Refused

According to sources close to Erik’s family, Matyas told them that the warrants had been submitted to Getting roughly a month before law enforcement announced them, and that the decision to go public was intended to put pressure on the prosecutor.

The prosecutor’s records fit that account on timing. The documented referral landed on August 23, 2017, and the public announcement came on October 6. But the records add a detail the public account left out: by the time the sheriff’s office took its case to the family and the press, the prosecutor’s file already showed the only documented referral as denied.

That reframes what the community was told in October 2017. The coverage described a sheriff’s office that had done its job and a prosecutor sitting on five pending warrants. FOX 17 quoted Erik’s sister saying, “They can’t hide anymore.” The station’s own web address for the story read “arrest warrants authorized,” which never happened. A 2020 report from another outlet stated flatly that warrants “were issued for five people in 2017.” They were not. A 2019 report placed the hand-off to the prosecutor in October 2017, nearly two months after the date in the prosecutor’s file.

The Four Names Missing From the File

Brian Spaulding, Amber Thomas, Bill Cook, and Tim Martin were named publicly as targets of murder warrant requests. None of them appears in the records the prosecutor’s office produced. There is no referral screen, no screening entry, no denial note, and no co-defendant listing in what was released.

There are only a few ways to explain that gap, and each one raises its own question. The sheriff’s office may have announced five requests while formally submitting one. The office may have submitted additional requests that the prosecutor never entered as cases, which would mean the county has no documented charging decision on four people publicly accused of murder. Or the records exist and were not produced in response to a request that specifically sought them, which is a FOIA compliance problem in its own right.

The timing of the five-name list complicates the story further. FOX 17 was asking Getting about the same five people in March 2016, seventeen months before the only documented referral. Whatever the sheriff’s office had said privately about those five names, the prosecutor’s file did not open a case for any of them until August 2017, and then only for one.

The Attorney General’s 2020 statement adds another wrinkle. The AG referred to “the remaining suspects,” plural, in declining charges. If the state was weighing more than one person, there is still no record in the county prosecutor’s file showing that anyone other than Spaulding was ever formally referred.

Seventeen Years, “Dead Center,” and Nothing New on Paper

The Erik Cross investigation was not a new file that landed on a detective’s desk in 2015. Detective Sergeant Rich Mattison was a patrolman in 1983 and among the first officers on the scene the morning Erik was found, according to FOX 17. Sources say Mattison worked Erik’s case for 17 years.

That history matters, because of what the department said publicly once the case heated up. In September 2015, Matyas told FOX 17 the conspiracy was “falling apart as we speak.” In February 2016, he described investigators as being at “15 minutes to midnight.” By April 2016, CBS Detroit reported, citing Matyas, that five people were believed to be involved and that the case had already been forwarded to prosecutors.

Then, on June 22, 2016, Matyas gave People a different picture. He said that about a year earlier the department had received “real, key information we had never released and it hit dead center,” that the phone had been ringing off the hook, and that roughly half of the tips were helping to further the case. He again counted five people of interest. But People also reported that detectives were still anxious to present their case to prosecutors. Eleven weeks after the public was told the case had gone to the prosecutor, the department was describing that step as one it had not yet taken.

The prosecutor’s records produced to Clutch Justice do not show any referral in 2015 or 2016. The first and only documented referral is dated August 23, 2017, and it names one person. Its agency report number, 15-10015/83-92, pairs what appears to be a 2015 sheriff’s report number with the original 1983 report number.

And when the referral finally came, sources say none of that tip-driven work made it in. According to sources, what the sheriff’s office ultimately submitted was drawn from the original case file and contained nothing explicitly new: none of the tips Matyas described as flooding in, and none of the key information he said had hit dead center. The prosecutor’s own explanation for the denial, that the office faced “factual and legal issues that we cannot overcome,” is consistent with a submission that did not move the evidence past where it had stood for decades.

If a detective spent 17 years on this case, and the department had information that hit dead center by mid-2015 on its own account, the question writes itself: why did it take until August 2017 to put a single name in front of the prosecutor, and why did that submission fail on the same afternoon it arrived?

In 2015, Matyas promised a conspiracy that was “falling apart as we speak.”
Perhaps the story that was unraveling was his own.

Told to the Press, Not Shown to the Prosecutor

Taken one at a time, each of these news stories reads like a department doing its job in public. Put side by side with the prosecutor’s file, they show something else: two years of confident statements to the media, and a paper trail that never caught up with any of them.

The messenger matters. Matyas was not just the undersheriff. He was the sheriff’s office’s public information officer, according to WOOD TV, the official whose job was managing what the press heard. From September 2015 through June 2016, he told local television, national outlets, and People some version of the same story: a cover-up collapsing, a break that hit dead center, five people of interest, and charges close at hand. The case was featured on the national program Crime Watch Daily during that same stretch, and Matyas credited the publicity with flooding the department with tips.

Look at what is missing from that list. When the department had good news to share, it shared it, on the record and by name. When the only documented referral was refused on August 23, 2017, there was no announcement at all. The public heard nothing for six weeks, and then heard the opposite of what the file showed.

Look, too, at how the October 2017 story reached the public. No sheriff’s official went on camera to announce five warrant requests. The news traveled through Erik’s family, who had been told by Matyas, and who then carried it to reporters in their own names. Both stations that broke the story quoted only Erik’s sister. That arrangement put the family’s credibility on the line for a claim the department never had to defend itself, and according to sources close to the family, it was designed to pressure the prosecutor.

The press did not catch it, and some of it made the story worse. Reporters had been asking the right question since at least March 2016, when FOX 17 emailed Getting directly to confirm that charges had been requested against five named people. The prosecutor would not confirm it. Eighteen months later, five warrant requests were reported as fact on the strength of a secondhand account, and one station’s own web address declared the warrants authorized. Errors like those do not correct themselves. They become the record, and for nine years, they were.

A Prosecutor Can Only Charge What Investigators Bring

The easy version of this story is a stubborn prosecutor sitting on a solved case. The records do not support that version either. They raise a harder question about the work that came before the referral ever reached Getting’s desk.

A prosecutor does not investigate homicides. In Michigan, the police agency builds the case, and the prosecutor decides whether what it built can survive a courtroom. When Getting’s office denied the Spaulding referral, it cited “factual and legal issues” it could not overcome. Years later, the prosecutor would say publicly that the evidence was not there, and the former undersheriff would say the prosecutor wanted too much. Each side points at the other. The family is left standing in between.

That leaves two questions the public is entitled to ask. Was the investigation the sheriff’s office handed over a thorough one, built on the new tips and new witnesses it spent two years promoting? Or, as sources say, was the referral assembled from the same original case file that had failed to produce charges for 34 years? A referral that brings a prosecutor nothing new is not a referral built to succeed. It is one built to be refused, and then blamed on whoever refused it.

Erik Is Not the Only Family Waiting

The Erik Cross case does not stand alone. Families from across Kalamazoo County have told Clutch Justice that the sheriff’s office did little to investigate the deaths of people they loved, and that the department stood in the way of answers rather than producing them. Multiple families describe the same experience: they brought evidence to the sheriff’s office and handed it over on a platter, only to be shut down and denied justice. Clutch Justice is documenting those cases one by one.

Ryan Cole’s case is one example. According to sources, Ryan’s case has been stuck in limbo between the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor, with each office leaving the family to chase the other for answers. That limbo is harder to explain because, according to sources, the coroner concluded that Ryan’s death was not an accident. A finding like that should be the start of a homicide investigation, not the end of one.

Clutch Justice has previously reported on the Schoolcraft Township cold cases, including the unresolved deaths of Peggy Jean Woods and Christine Paddock, all under the sheriff’s office’s jurisdiction. When the same agency appears again and again in families’ descriptions of cases that went nowhere, the pattern deserves the same scrutiny as any single file.

Railroaded, Botched, and Buried: The Kalamazoo County Record

Erik’s case did not stall in a department that was simply slow. It stalled in a county whose cold case work was producing convictions that have since fallen apart.

In the early 2000s, a Kalamazoo County cold case team that included sheriff’s detectives and was led by a former Kalamazoo Public Safety sergeant was celebrated for a perfect record: 15 cases, 15 convictions, according to The Kalamazoo Press. One of them was Jeff Titus, convicted in 2002 of the 1990 shotgun murders of Doug Estes and Jim Bennett in the Fulton State Game Area. Two sheriff’s detectives had cleared Titus years earlier, after confirming he was hunting about 27 miles away. He was sentenced to life without parole anyway.

Titus spent 21 years in prison. In February 2023, a federal judge vacated his conviction after evidence emerged that pointed to serial killer Thomas Dillon, whose file had been sitting in the sheriff’s own records. The National Registry of Exonerations lists official misconduct and false or misleading forensic evidence among the factors in his conviction. The state of Michigan paid him $1 million. In May 2026, his federal lawsuit against two Kalamazoo County cold case detectives, alleging they withheld evidence about the other suspect, settled for $5.25 million.

Titus is not the only name. Scott Baldwin, convicted in 2002 in the 1988 murder of Earl O’Byrne after the team’s investigation, was released in October 2025 after juvenile lifer resentencing and died of cancer days later. Advocates who reviewed his case believe he was innocent. The Michigan Innocence Clinic has three other clients convicted after the team’s arrests and more cases in its queue, The Kalamazoo Press reported, including defendants in the 2000 Polderman family triple murder. According to sources close to Erik’s family, the pattern was simple: poor defendants, white and Black, were the ones who got railroaded for the numbers.

The other side of that pattern sits in the same county’s files. Brent Spaulding, the man the sheriff’s office has publicly called its prime suspect in Erik’s death for more than a decade, has never been charged in that case and is presumed innocent of it. He has been in and out of Kalamazoo County’s system on other matters throughout that time. Public reporting documents a 2016 arrest on home invasion and domestic violence charges, a December 2017 arraignment on aggravated stalking, a no-contest plea to stalking and trespassing charges, and a 2018 failure to appear for trial on a drug possession charge, with WWMT describing him as a habitual offender. According to sources, the stack of files involving Spaulding that went unprosecuted stands several feet tall.

Set those side by side. A county cold case team could build a life sentence against Jeff Titus after its own detectives had cleared him. The same county, according to sources, let a pile of files on its own prime suspect in Erik’s death sit unprosecuted for years.

The Proof Podcast and the Detective Who Worked Erik’s Case

Those cases are now the subject of Proof, an investigative true crime podcast whose 12-episode season, “Murder at the Bike Shop,” examines whether the cold case team’s record hides more wrongful convictions. Co-producer Jacinda Davis previously helped bring the Titus case back into public view.

Rich Mattison is part of that story. The National Registry of Exonerations lists him as a member of the cold case team that refocused on the Titus murders in 2001, and Titus’s legal challenge argued prosecutors failed to disclose Mattison’s own conclusion that there were two gunmen. Mattison now says he was removed from the Titus case because he believed Titus was innocent, according to The Kalamazoo Press. Sources say he is currently assisting the Proof team. His role there is unknown.

That puts Proof‘s listeners in front of a detective who, by his own account, saw a wrongful conviction coming in one Kalamazoo County case. Sources say he also spent 17 years on Erik Cross’s case, and the only referral that came out of those years named one person, drew on the original file, and was refused the afternoon it arrived. Anyone relying on Mattison as a guide to what went wrong in Kalamazoo County should ask him about Erik Cross too: what was submitted, what the family was told, and what happened to the evidence the department spent 2015 and 2016 promoting.

Take This Case Out of Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo County has had Erik Cross’s case for 43 years. The sheriff’s office has investigated it, promoted it, overstated it, and let it collapse. The prosecutor’s office has refused it twice on the record produced. The same county’s cold case work has produced more than $6 million in compensation and settlements in a single wrongful conviction, with more cases under review. There is no remaining reason to believe the answer to Erik’s death will come from the same institutions that have held it since 1983.

Clutch Justice is calling for the Erik Cross investigation to be taken out of Kalamazoo County entirely. The case file, the evidence, and every tip received since 2015 should be transferred to an outside investigative agency with no history in the case and no stake in protecting the people who worked it. The charging decision should go with it. Michigan law allows a county prosecutor with a conflict to step aside so that a special prosecutor from outside the county can be appointed to handle a case (MCL 49.160). With his own office’s handling of the case now part of the question, Getting should do exactly that.

What the Sheriff’s Office and Prosecutor Still Need to Answer

The public deserves clarity on several points the records do not resolve: whether the sheriff’s office formally submitted warrant requests for Brian Spaulding, Amber Thomas, Bill Cook, and Tim Martin, and if so, when and under what file numbers; whether the sheriff’s office knew the Spaulding warrant had been denied when it described five pending requests to the family and the press; what the redacted June 14, 2018 entry contains, dated the day after Spaulding missed trial on an unrelated drug charge, and why an entry in the only Erik Cross charging file would fall outside a request for records about the Erik Cross investigation; and why the prosecutor’s office recorded a second written denial of the same referral more than a year after the first.

In December 2025, Matyas told WWMT that the suspects all admit to being there and suggested prosecutors were waiting for a “perfect case.” Getting told the same station that charging requires sufficient, legally admissible evidence. Both positions can be argued in good faith. What cannot be squared is a public record of five warrant requests with a prosecutor’s file that holds one.

This Is Not Just Misconduct. It Is Betrayal.

Misconduct is a word for broken procedure. What the records describe is worse. Erik Cross’s family did not just receive bad information from the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office. They were handed hope, by the people they had trusted with Erik’s case for 34 years, at a moment the prosecutor’s file shows that hope had already been refused.

Think about what October 6, 2017 meant to them. A family who had buried a 16-year-old boy. A sister who had spent most of her life asking the same questions. A community of supporters who had marched, organized, and kept Erik’s name in the news for decades. That day, the undersheriff told them five murder warrants had been requested. They believed him, because believing law enforcement was the only path to justice they had. Erik’s sister went on camera and asked the prosecutor to sign the warrants immediately. She was asking for something the file shows had been denied six weeks earlier.

The family carried the department’s story to the public in their own names. They took the questions, the headlines, and the hope of everyone who loved Erik. Then nothing happened, because the only request documented in the prosecutor’s file had already been refused. When charges never came, the family was left to absorb the collapse, and the public was left to blame the prosecutor for four warrant requests that, as far as his file shows, were never put in front of him, and a fifth he had already turned down.

If the sheriff’s office knew the Spaulding warrant had been refused on August 23, 2017, then it let a grieving family go out and fight in public for a request it knew was already dead. If it did not know its own referral was refused the same afternoon it was submitted, then it was making promises to that family about a homicide case it was not even tracking. There is no version of these records in which the family was told the truth.

And the timing makes it harder to forgive. Matyas announced his retirement in July 2017, a month before the sheriff’s office sent its only documented referral. On September 7, the county named his successor. The five-warrant story broke on October 6, 2017, the day his retirement took effect. The public push for charges came on the undersheriff’s last day in office. Sources say Mattison, the detective who had carried the case for 17 years, left the department at the same time. Sources close to the family believe the case was meant to close out with the careers of the men who had promised the family it was nearly solved. The men who made the promises walked away. The family was left holding them.

According to sources close to the family, the stated purpose of going public was to pressure Getting. Pressure built on a number the record does not support is not advocacy for a victim. It is using a victim’s family as the delivery system. Erik’s family, and everyone who stood with them, were owed the truth about what had been submitted and what had been refused. They were given a press strategy instead.

That is what makes this a betrayal. Not a clerical error. Not a disagreement between offices. A family that had waited three decades for justice was given a version of events the paperwork did not support, at the exact moment they were most ready to believe it.

The sheriff’s office has continued to describe the case as open. An open case is only worth something if the family can rely on what they are told about it. That trust is not owed to an agency by default. It is earned with records, and the records tell a different story than the one Erik’s family was given.

Clutch Justice Calls for a Full, Independent Investigation of the Sheriff’s Office

The Michigan Attorney General has already looked at this case once. Between 2019 and 2020, at the request of Getting and Sheriff Fuller, the AG’s office reviewed whether anyone could be charged in Erik’s death, and concluded there was not enough evidence. That review asked a question about the suspects, and it produced nothing for Erik’s family. Nobody has asked the question about the institution.

No outside authority has examined what the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office actually submitted to the prosecutor in the Erik Cross case, when it submitted it, what it told Erik’s family and the press about those submissions, and why the public account and the prosecutor’s file do not match. No outside authority has examined what happened to the tips and new information the department spent 2015 and 2016 promoting. And no outside authority has examined the other families who say their loved ones’ deaths went nowhere under the same agency.

Clutch Justice is calling for that investigation now, and it should be independent of the agency it examines. At minimum, it must answer whether warrant requests for Brian Spaulding, Amber Thomas, Bill Cook, and Tim Martin were ever formally submitted, and if not, why the public was told they were; whether sheriff’s officials knew the Spaulding warrant had been denied before October 6, 2017; what became of the tips and the key information described to the press in 2015 and 2016, and whether any of it was ever presented to a prosecutor; and whether the problems in the Erik Cross file appear in the department’s handling of other unresolved deaths, including the cases families have brought to Clutch Justice.

A county sheriff is an independently elected officer, which means the county board cannot fire one and the prosecutor cannot discipline one. Michigan law does provide a check: under MCL 168.207, the governor may remove county officers for official misconduct or willful neglect of duty, and in 2018 the Jackson County Board of Commissioners used that process to seek review of its own sheriff. The Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners funds the sheriff’s office. It has the standing, and the responsibility, to demand a written accounting of the Erik Cross warrant requests and to commission an investigation by an outside agency with no stake in protecting the department. Residents have the standing to demand that the board do it.

After more than four decades, Erik Cross’s family deserves answers, not another promise from the people who already broke one.

Stay curious. Question everything. Follow the evidence.