The girl in the café
Waitress Donna Sutcliffe took deep breaths and counted backward. Ten, nine, eight …
Before she got to zero, she was in a trance.
The psychiatrist took her back in time, asking her to describe a family trip to Disneyland to be sure she wasn’t faking.
Then he brought her back to the previous year, to a day in October 1981 when she was working a shift at the Black Earth Café. He was hoping that under hypnosis, Sutcliffe would recall more about the suspicious couple she’d seen that day — and the little girl with them.
The girl looked like 21⁄2-year-old Michelle Manders, who was missing at the time. Her body was later found tangled in some brush near the bank of the Rock River 22 days after she disappeared from her Watertown home in the middle of the night.
What are you doing? the psychiatrist asked the waitress. Walking out of the kitchen. He continued: What do you see? The clock on the wall. The customers.
Sutcliffe described the people eating breakfast as if she was standing in the restaurant looking at them.
But when she woke from hypnosis, eyes redrimmed, the private investigator who’d arranged the session didn’t have any more details about the couple than before:
The woman was about 5’10”, 150 to 160 pounds, heavyset and well-muscled. Gray streaked her short, dark hair.
The man stood several inches shorter than his
companion and weighed 20 or 30 pounds less. He had auburn hair, a ruddy complexion and wore glasses. Both appeared to be in their late 40s or early 50s.
The private detective, Norbert Kurczewski, next introduced Sutcliffe and two other waitresses to a police artist. The women worked with him to come up with sketches of the couple, which were distributed to the media.
Kurczewski, hired by Michelle’s mother in 1982 — about a year after the girl’s body was found — didn’t just assume someone would recognize the couple and call in a tip. He decided to follow up with a possible witness: Teri Mueller.
Teri, whom Jan had befriended several weeks earlier, had been at the Manders’ house learning to sew the night Michelle disappeared. When Teri’s husband hadn’t picked her up by 10:30 p.m., she decided to spend the night. But the next morning Jan found a note saying he’d arrived shortly after midnight.
About a week into the search for Michelle, Teri told investigators she opened the door for the little girl in the middle of the night and let her walk outside.
Despite the fact that Teri suffered from brain damage and schizophrenia that sometimes resulted in delusions, authorities decided to classify the case as an accident based largely on her statement.
When Kurczewski caught up with Teri a little over a year later, she told him something she never told the police:
As she lounged on the couch in the Manders’ living room the night Michelle disappeared, she saw headlights through the window. Assuming it was her husband, Joe, Teri rushed out the door. But it wasn’t him. The car was white, and bigger than the red, twodoor Matador that Joe drove. The engine was running. Teri couldn’t tell if anyone besides the driver was in the car.
About a week after that revelation, Kurczewski spoke with Teri again.
This time, she said she saw someone in the back seat of the car: Michelle.
The little girl was peering through the side window, Teri said. Teri didn’t go toward the car or try to read the license plate number, didn’t scream or yell. Instead, she walked slowly up the steps and back into the house. She couldn’t explain why.
I wish this had never happened, she told the private detective, sobbing.
Why didn’t you tell anyone this before? he asked.
I was afraid of the cops. I didn’t want to be hassled by them anymore. Joe didn’t want the hassle. I know she didn’t just walk out. She didn’t just fall in the river. Something happened that wasn’t right. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Kurczewski thought hypnosis could help get a clear story out of Teri. A description of the driver of the car. The license plate number. The direction it was headed.
Teri’s husband wouldn’t let her do it, according to a memo from Kurczewski to the Watertown police.
In a recent interview, Teri said that while she remembered speaking with Kurczewski and remembered a white car, she didn’t remember if Michelle was in the car, wasn’t sure if she opened the door, didn’t remember whether or not Joe had come into the house and had no recollection of Michelle waking up that night.
Teri said the private detective asked both her and Joe to be hypnotized.
Joe didn’t want to. He didn’t want Teri to, either, she recalled. When she asked him why, he said they might die.
And while the police had deemed Teri credible enough to base their theory that Michelle’s death was an accident largely on her statement about opening the door, they didn’t believe what she said about the white car.
“Where the remark came from and why she made that, I have no idea,” said Orval Quamme, then a Watertown detective. “There was nothing to substantiate that.”
Teri and Joe looked nothing like the couple the waitresses saw in the Black Earth Café.
Teri was 22 and chubby with shoulder-length brown hair. Joe, 28, had receding dark hair, a mustache and an average build.
Were the waitresses mistaken? Was Teri’s story all in her mind? Or did the two sequences of events fit together somehow?
Back when the waitresses first reported seeing the couple with the girl, before Michelle’s body was found, none of the investigators — local, state or federal — tried to answer those questions.
After Kurczewski got involved a year later, Watertown Police Chief Richard Reynolds decided it was worth following up with the waitresses.
The three women and a couple of customers were “definitely sure of what they saw,” he later told reporters. “If there was any error, we certainly wouldn’t let the case go.”
He added: “It wouldn’t be our first error.”
Reynolds sent a detective to Black Earth to investigate further. The detective tracked down a couple who resembled the one in the sketch. They told him they had 33 grandchildren. More than one of them were young girls with blond hair.
The couple had been to the Black Earth Café and might have taken a granddaughter there in October 1981, they said, but they couldn’t remember.
To a recently divorced woman named Sharon Blasing who saw it in the newspaper, the sketch of the man looked a lot like her ex-husband, James Dunn.
After Blasing called in a tip, the police paid her a visit.
She told them Dunn was a house painter, a roofer and an ex-Navy sailor.
He was also a convicted child molester.
I was afraid of the cops. I didn’t want to be hassled by them anymore. Joe didn’t want the hassle. I know she didn’t just walk out. She didn’t just fall in the river. Something happened that wasn’t right. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. TERI MUELLER RESPONDING TO A QUESTION ONE WEEK AFTER INITIAL INTERVIEWS