Ex-cop, son to trial for Lankey perjury

WHITE CLOUD, Mich. (WOOD) - Eight years after Amanda Lankey's body was found, her mother finally sat in a courtroom -- not for the man suspected of killing her daughter, but for his relatives who are accused of lying to police.

"It seems now that things are coming out and coming out fast," mother Victoria Foster said after Thursday's hearing in Newaygo County District Court. "Amanda will get her justice soon. Very soon."

Cecil Wallis Sr. was identified as a person of interest in the disappearance and death in 2004, but he killed himself last year just before a court date on unrelated rape charges.

On Thursday, his sister and her son were in court -- accused of perjury in the Lankey investigation.

Candace Wallis-Baumgartner, a former White Cloud police officer, and her son, Marcus Wallis, were ordered to stand trial.

In the courtroom, Amanda's mom tugged on a necklace her daughter had given her for Mother's Day. She wiped away tears as a Newaygo County deputy testified about the discovery of her daughter's remains.

"I've been lucky so far," she said. "Of course, in my own head, I have that scene, I have that scene in my own head, and I know that she laid there for two weeks."

Deputy John Granzo was a detective sergeant when Amanda disappeared from Cecil Wallis Sr.'s home.

It was Granzo, Foster said, who kept the case going, even as White Cloud's police chief told her Amanda had left on her own.

"In the beginning, when I told them that my daughter was not a runaway, that something happened, that man (the police chief) slammed his hand down on his desk and told me, 'Face it, Vickie, your daughter is a runaway.' That's what I got from them," she recalled.

Granzo testified today that he first asked the former chief, Roger Ungrey, to help identify the body. He could not.

"I've known Chief Ungrey for years, and it was like he was just completely devastated," Granzo said.

Then, he asked Wallis-Baumgartner to cross the yellow police tape in the Manistee National Forest and identify the body, he said.

"When Amanda Lankey came up missing, she disappeared from Candace's brother's house," Granzo said. "Candace works the city of White Cloud and was familiar with a lot of kids."

However, he said, when he asked Wallis-Baumgartner to help identify the body, her reaction was different. She refused to even look.

"It was like she wanted out of there as fast as she could get," he said. "She wanted no part of being inside the crime scene tape, did not want to be close to the remains at all."

However, when questioned by the prosecutor in May under an investigative subpoena, she denied ever being asked to identify the body. That led to one of two perjury charges against her.

The other perjury charge alleges she falsified a police report in a 1999 crash involving her brother.

Amanda's mom believes that with the suicide of Cecil Wallis Sr., justice won't be pure.

"He's being brought to justice now," she said. "Where he's at, he's being tortured far more than I could ever torture him. That makes me happy; that makes my heart happy."

Still, she wants the truth.

"We have to start somewhere. It's been such a long time that it's been at a standstill; this is our start; this is Amanda's start."