Crews dig again in Deanie Peters search

LOWELL, Mich. (WOOD) - Cold case investigators looking into the Feb. 5, 1981 disappearance of then-14-year-old Deanie Peters did not find the evidence they were hoping for during a Tuesday dig behind an old schoolhouse in northwest Ionia County.

"We're wrapping up this part of the operation," Kent County Sheriff Larry Stelma told reporters at around 2 p.m. "So they'll move on to the next set of leads." The sheriff did not want to disclose when or where the next search would take place.

Peters disappeared from her brother's wrestling practice at Forest Hills Central Middle School in Ada. She told her mother she was going to use the restroom and never returned.

The site of Tuesday's dig, northeast of Lowell near Potters Road and Marble Road, has long been tied to the investigation. The Lowell police chief visited the Keene Township site shortly after Peters' disappearance. In the 1990s, a tipster told investigators that he overheard a man named Bruce Bunch at a party talking about burying Dean Marie Pyle -- known as Deanie Peters -- there.

"He was haunted by the chains clanging on the may pole behind the schoolhouse where he claims to have buried her," said the tipster, Joe Fallstrom, in an interview last year with 24 Hour News 8.

The cold case team reopened the case in March 2008 with the hope that new theories, new standards and new technology could shed some light, Sheriff's Lt. Kevin Kelley told 24 Hour News 8.

"Through their looking at the case and reinterviewing several witnesses, this is one particular location where they thought that it was necessary to dig to look for Deanie Peters' body," Kelley said.

Tuesday's dig began around 9 a.m. with more than a dozen people involved -- along with heavy equipment.

"Went by one time and the tents were there," neighbor Betty Nelson told 24 Hour News 8. "Came by another time and the backhoe was there so thought something was up."

"They used the mechanical excavator here to skim the top soil," Stelma told 24 Hour News 8. He said the team contacted the Michigan State University Department of Anthropology to engineer the dig. And once that top soil was skmmed, the anthropologists examined it.

"When there's a change in the soil composition than they can point out where that soil's been disturbed -- or it hasn't been disturbed" even nearly three decades later, the sheriff explained.

Nelson has lived in the area for roughly 15 years. When she moved in, "Our neighbor told us that there was a rumor that a girl from Forest Hills was kidnapped, killed and buried behind the old schoolhouse.

She said she thought it was just a story, a rumor -- and hadn't thought about it until she saw crews digging. Tuesday's unsuccessful search could put that rumor to rest.

The case has involved several other suspects, including a custodian at Forest Hills Central Middle School and a death-row inmate in Florida. Charges were never filed in either instance.

Investigators have used psychics, hypnotized a student and sent Peters' dental records to other states to help in the case. You are asked to call the Kent County Cold Case Team at (616) 632-6123 if you know anything about Peters' disappearance.