Where’s Michelle?
After Jan Manders tucked in her 2 1⁄2-year-old daughter, Michelle, for what would be the last time, she spent several hours in the living room teaching her friend Teri Mueller to sew.
Jan met Teri a couple of months before Michelle disappeared from her family’s Watertown home on Oct. 13, 1981.
Both women had applied for jobs as nurses’ aides at a nearby nursing home, and they had to take a test before they could be hired.
Teri, who suffered from a metabolic disorder that resulted in brain damage and from schizophrenia that sometimes caused delusions, couldn’t read well and asked Jan for help. Jan didn’t want to risk her own chances by cheating, so she said no.
Before they left, Jan had a job offer. Teri did not.
Feeling sorry for Teri, Jan invited her for coffee on the way out.
As they got to know each other, Jan told Teri about Michelle and about her other two children: Christopher, 6, and Jennifer, 4.
Teri, her thoughts and sentences running together, talked about her husband, Joe, whom she’d married at the courthouse over her parents’ objections.
Joe worked odd jobs and had spent time in prison for burglary. Teri’s parents worried he would take advantage of her naiveté. Teri didn’t think so.
“He mingled with everybody,” she recently recalled. “My friends, my — my family. He wanted to be a big part of my family, get together and stuff. There’s a time when we got stuff from my dad, like money and stuff. He’s always there. My mom was like don’t give him any money. Don’t give him any money. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.”
Teri loved children, but she and Joe never had any of their own.
After Teri started spending time with Jan’s kids, she asked for pictures of Michelle, Jennifer and Christopher, and carried them in her wallet.
Although Teri couldn’t quite fulfill Jan’s craving for adult conversation, she was guileless and sweet.
Instead of staying cooped up while her husband, Mike, traveled for his job, Jan sometimes took her children to the apartment complex where Teri and Joe were staying with a relative. It was near a park with a pond, and the kids loved to feed the ducks.
Within a few weeks of their first meeting, Jan had helped Teri get a job at a different nursing home. When Teri expressed interest in learning to sew, Jan offered to teach her.
Teri had her first lesson in the hours before Michelle vanished.
Mike was in Appleton on a job.
Joe dropped off Teri at Jan’s place around 7 p.m. and was supposed to come back for her at 10. When he still wasn’t there by 10:30, Teri decided to spend the night. Jan brought her some blankets for the couch, checked on her sleeping children, and went to bed.
When Jan woke up the next morning, the living room was empty. She found a note from Teri, saying Joe had picked her up at 12:15 a.m.
Michelle usually made her way to the kitchen for breakfast on her own, but that morning, she didn’t.
Jan went to wake her, but found Michelle’s bed empty. It looked slept in but not messy, the covers smoothed.
Jan sent Christopher down the street to school, trying to shield him from the panic welling up inside her.
Jennifer, who wouldn’t start kindergarten for another year, looked on in confusion as Jan tore open the closets, sending sheets, coats and shoes flying. Pants and shirts hit the floor as the frantic mother yanked out dresser drawers and dumped them upside down.
Floorboards creaked as she shoved beds away from the walls, crouching to peer beneath them.
At one point Jan ran, shouting, out the back door.
“Where’s Michelle? Where’s Michelle? Where’s Michelle?”
She called Teri at work, hysterical.
“My baby is gone! Where’s my baby?”
“I don’t know,” Teri answered, perplexed. “I don’t have her.”
Two-and-a-half weeks after Michelle disappeared, investigators had only a single clue: Jan’s purse, found about a block away with its contents strewn on the ground.
Then, just before Halloween, Watertown Police Chief Richard Reynolds called a news conference to announce a new lead.
“We have a statement from a 22-year-old female friend in the home that evening that she let Michelle out that evening,” he announced.
“Do you have any idea why?” a TV reporter asked.
“No,” Reynolds said. “I have no idea other than the fact that she maybe became annoyed because she had not been picked up at this time and handed the girl the purse and just opened the door for her.”
The reporters were baffled. Why would a woman give a toddler her mother’s purse? Why would she let her out of the house in the dark? In her pajamas? And in the rain? Would a little girl even want to go outside under those conditions?
And if that’s really what happened, why did this woman take so long to come forward?
Reynolds’ answer to all those questions was the same: “I don’t know.”
Reynolds didn’t tell the reporters Teri Mueller’s name, nor did he tell them about her history of delusions.
He didn’t tell them that in one version of her story, Teri said she felt someone push her from behind as she opened the door, but when she looked around, no one was there.
In an interview earlier this year, Reynolds said he never spoke with Teri personally, and doesn’t recall being told she had an intellectual disability.
To Orval Quamme, then a Watertown detective, Teri’s limitations were apparent. As a result, he allowed her husband to stay in the room one of the times he questioned her — something he didn’t normally do.
Like most police officers, he usually talked to each witness or suspect separately to keep them from influencing each other and to tell if their stories matched.
Quamme also took Teri’s disabilities into account when evaluating her statements, he said, accepting those that fit with other things the police thought were true and dismissing those that didn’t.
That’s why he believed Teri when she said she opened the door, Quamme recalled.
Teri told him she had trouble turning the dead bolt on her way out, Quamme said in a recent interview. He suspects she simply left it unlocked as she rushed to meet her husband. He doesn’t think she purposefully opened the door so Michelle could leave, as Reynolds told reporters at the time.
But the retired detective isn’t certain.
“You know, it’s a million scenarios you could dream up and it wouldn’t take much imagination,” he said. “I mean, there’s just all kinds of things that could have occurred, and nothing … from my point of view, could say, ‘This is what happened.’”
***
Despite her limited mental functioning and conflicting descriptions of that night, Teri’s statement about opening the door marked a turning point in the investigation.
Before she gave that account, the authorities were nearly certain Michelle had been kidnapped. Some worried the
crime could be connected to several other unsolved disappearances and deaths in Jefferson County over the previous seven years.
After Teri said she opened the door, investigators pivoted toward the theory that Michelle must have wandered away, fallen into the Rock River and drowned.
Many of the records in the case, including Quamme’s reports, have been destroyed. None of the remaining 200 pages obtained by the Journal Sentinel — nor any of the available media reports from the time — reflect any skepticism about Teri’s story on the part of law enforcement.
To the contrary, a state justice department report says this: “Primarily due to Teri Mueller’s statement, the FBI withdrew most of their investigative resources from this investigation.”
They did so before Michelle’s body was found, deciding they had no jurisdiction, Quamme said.
As for the shadow man Michelle’s 4-yearold sister said she saw in their bedroom in the middle of the night, the authorities didn’t think it was much of a clue, Quamme said.
The man couldn’t have been the children’s father, as Michelle’s sister, Jennifer, thought in the fog of sleep. Mike Manders was out of town that night.
The police thought the man was Teri’s husband, Joe.
Jennifer must have been confused, they believed. She probably saw him earlier in the evening, when he dropped off Teri.
Not in the middle of the night.
Today, Jennifer isn’t sure if the man was Joe or someone else, but she is adamant that someone came into the darkened bedroom as she and her sister slept. Her most vivid memory is waking up to a man turning on the light.
“I don’t buy the whole wandering away story,” she said recently. “It just doesn’t make sense to me, just because I remember what I remember.”
***
Teri didn’t talk to the media back then.
During a recent interview, her responses to questions about what happened that night were garbled.
“He was going out of town, Mike. He was going out of town. And Jan Manders called me, wanted me to be with her while he was gone. Came over. Told Joe I was going to Michelle Manders’. Aargh. Jan Manders’. I stayed for a while. She wanted me to spend the — I spent the, I didn’t feel right spending the night cause I didn’t know her that well, you know?”
Teri also gave conflicting answers about whether she opened the door for Michelle.
“I do remember I let her out, I know that,” Teri said.
In response to another question, she contradicted herself: “I think I left the baby – I’m not too sure. I do not know. I don’t know. … Jan Manders’ husband was out of town. … Put Michelle and everybody else to bed and stuff. She must’ve woke up in the middle of the night.”