Finding Deanie: Secrets Revealed

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) -- Cold case detectives told 24 Hour News 8 they have interviewed suspects in West Michigan who know where to find the body of Deanie Peters, who was 14 when she disappeared from her school nearly three decades ago.

And, they've made those suspects a promise: Anybody involved in the Feb. 5, 1981, disappearance won't face criminal charges -- unless they helped kill Deanie.

"There are individuals in the Grand Rapids area that know what happened to Deanie Peters, that know where her body is, and they've chosen to remain uncooperative in this investigation," said Sgt. Sally Wolter, the head of the Kent Metro Cold Case Team.

The statute of limitations has expired for those who helped hide Deanie's body, or who know about it and have refused to tell police.

Wolter said she believes a "number" of people still living in West Michigan know where Deanie's body is buried.

In this special report, 24 Hour News 8 tracked the cold case team's investigation from Kent County to Kentucky and back again.

Along the way -- new details about threats against Deanie, a recently failed lie-detector test and the man identified by police as the main suspect.

Also, Deanie's mom and stepfather, Mary and John Peters, sat down for their first broadcast interview since days after the disappearance.

"I can't believe anybody could do this to parents, or anybody could know something and keep it a secret for all these years," Mary Peters said. "It's hard."

Meeting Deanie

Deanie was a typical teenager -- hanging out at the mall, borrowing her friends' clothes, sneaking out her bedroom window to smoke cigarettes. She was an eighth-grader at Forest Hills Central Middle School.

She liked the band Meatloaf -- and boys.

"She was the girl that for me, that I think every girl would have liked to look like," said one of her best friends, Cathy Weeks Kingma. "At 14, she definitely didn't look like 14. She was absolutely beautiful."

On Feb. 5, 1981, just before 5 p.m., she was getting ready to leave the middle school gymnasium with her mom after watching her little brother wrestle.

"She asked if she could go to the bathroom first, and she walked across the gym floor and never came back," her mother said.

Kent County Detective Ken Kleinheksel, the original investigator, said he was stumped.

"At the time, she was last seen by the back door of the school -- she was walking side-by-side with a friend, or a girlfriend, or with a young lady approximately 15 to 17, 18 years old, and they were talking and there was no argument; there was no disturbance," he said days after the disappearance.

Did she run away? Was she kidnapped?

For weeks, friends, family and volunteers searched for Deanie. Her mom and stepfather pleaded for her return.

The case struck fear in a community that, until then, had been given little reason to fear. And investigators couldn't provide any relief.

"I know we made mistakes back in those days," said now-retired Kleinheksel in a recent interview. "We had limited resources. We didn't find her."

A shaky start

At first, Kent County detectives focused on middle school custodian Arthur Diaz. Kids at school knew him as Mr. Art. He was 40 years old, had moved to West Michigan from Chicago and taken the job at Forest Hills.

"They thought I had kidnapped her and sold her somewhere in Chicago, or somewhere in Nevada," he said. "I have some friends out in Nevada, and I'm saying, 'you are nuts. I've been here all this time.' "

Diaz was cleaning the school office the night Deanie disappeared, though he tells 24 Hour News 8 he didn't see her there.

But he remembers her.

"She was a happy-go-lucky kid," Diaz said.

Detectives interviewed him repeatedly -- "you know, the good-cop, bad-cop, good-cop, bad-cop routine."

Perhaps, they suggested, he burned her in the school incinerator.

He faced questions in front of a grand jury -- after spending the night at the Kent County jail.

In his cell was another inmate, planted there by police -- a man who owed detectives a favor. Would Diaz make a jailhouse confession?

Diaz thought the inmate was an undercover cop. He said he had nothing to confess.

"I thought I was living in a nightmare," he said of the experience. "You're going to hang me for something I didn't do?"

Diaz said he lost sleep, spent $1,600 on an attorney and watched as detectives searched his property. Shortly after the disappearance, he said, Deanie's mother confronted him at the school.

She recalled that Diaz helped her look for Deanie immediately after she vanished.

In 2008, the newly formed Kent County Metro Cold Case Team took its turn at Diaz, but he said he refused to take a polygraph test.

The team -- with detectives from Kent County, Grand Rapids and the Michigan State Police -- started working the case in March 2008 with a $300,000 grant.

A source close to the team told 24 Hour News 8 that Diaz -- now 69 -- is no longer considered a suspect.

But to the retired custodian, living on Grand Rapids' northeast side, that

is little relief.

"There's going to be doubt in somebody's mind somewhere," Diaz said. "It leaves a little shadow over your head. It's not a halo up there. It's a dark cloud."

Other successes

The case also weighs heavily on detectives.

"It's really difficult to put 10,000 man hours onto an investigation, 16 months, and not be at the point where you would expect to be," Wolter said.

In recent years, cold case investigators have cracked other high-profile cases:

• The 1993 murder of millionaire businessman Robert Fryling at his Cascade Township home. An outside investigator solved it eight years later with arrests of a pimp and a prostitute.
• The 1975 murder of Laurel Ellis in Heritage Hill, with the conviction of Lamont Marshall in 2008. He is linked to five other murders in the Grand Rapids neighborhood.
• The 1979 gang rape and murder of Janet Chandler in Holland, solved with the arrests of six people, including five security guards in 2006 -- 27 years later.

"After watching the Janet Chandler case, that's a clear example of how individuals can hold a secret so horrifying for so long," Wolter said.

Early on, police in Deanie's case received a tip that turned their focus away from the janitor and onto Joseph Fallstrom, of Lowell.

But Fallstrom steered them elsewhere -- telling investigators what he heard at a summertime gathering four or five years after Deanie's disappearance.

He said he was partying around a bonfire on a sod farm along the Grand River. Also in attendance, he said, was a friend of a friend named Bruce Bunch.

"He's throwing a big fit, crying and blubbering and saying, 'I killed her. I killed Deanie Peters.' And he kept carrying on about it, you know, and I bumped one of my friends and I said, 'What's he talking about?' 'Oh, that's just Bruce. When he gets drunk, he's a poor-me baby.' "

Moving on

Deanie was officially declared dead in 1992 -- 11 years after she vanished. Cause of death: unknown. Place of death: unknown, according to her death certificate.

Her mom and stepfather have moved to Arizona, but still find it difficult to move on. Her little brother, William, who was 6 when Deanie watched him wrestle, is now 35.

They've kept some of Deanie's stuffed animals, and the photos that keep her 14 forever.

"I don't think you ever get over it -- you kind of move on," Mary Peters said. "There's certain times of the year (when) it's worse than others, like now, because it's coming up on the anniversary of her disappearance of 29 years. So, I don't think you ever get over it, because there's no closure here."

Even without a known killer to forgive, the family has found the grace to grant forgiveness.

"I've already forgiven that person a long time ago, or persons, you know," she said. "They're the ones who have to live with the guilt, not us."

The search, now, is for Deanie's body -- and her killer.

For a time, it appeared Fallstrom might be the man.

24 Hour News 8 spoke to another man who also overheard Bunch talking about Deanie at the party, though that man wouldn't go into detail and didn't want his name used.

The original detectives interviewed Fallstrom in the 1980s.

"They said, 'We heard a different story,' " he recalled.

"'What would that have been?'" Fallstrom said he responded.

Answered the detectives: "'Well, we heard that you and your brother accidentally ran her over at a party and that you guys disposed of her body.'"

Fallstrom -- the story goes -- was canoeing with friends down the Flat River in the years after the disappearance when they approached the former Young Marines Camp, on a hill overlooking the water in Ionia County.

"Supposedly, I pointed up there and said, 'That's where we buried Deanie Peters.' Well, that's an absolute lie," Fallstrom said. "I never even canoed that stretch of river."

That led to repeated searches at the former camp.

"Over the years, every so many years, it would come up again," Fallstrom said. "And then I'd be visited again by some detectives, and they'd want to hear the story.

"The whole time I told them, 'I will take a polygraph.' "

"'That won't be necessary,' " he recalled detectives saying. "Almost like they wanted to keep me wrapped up in it."

Fallstrom denied it again in 2008 when the cold case team tracked him down.

This time, he said, he took a polygraph.

"At the end of the polygraph, (the polygraph operator) said, 'Mr. Fallstrom, I'm going to pass this along to the detectives. You're clearly not part of this.' And, I said, 'Yeah, that's what I've been saying for the past 20-some years."

He also showed the cold case team what he says finally cleared his name -- an alibi, in writing.

A U.S. Army document shows he was at Fort Benning, Ga., as a trainee in early 1981 -- when Deanie went missing.

A source close to the investigation said the Army papers -- which Fallstrom only recently obtained -- officially eliminated him as a suspect.

"You can't explain the amount of shame -- to be in the eye of the spotlight," Fallstrom said.

A theory revisited

But

recently, the spotlight shifted, focusing on a new theory -- or actually, an old one that has resurfaced.

At a November news conference, cold case team members asked for more information about a physical altercation between Deanie and other students.

"I can't tell you what the altercation was about, but I can tell you it concerned Deanie enough and it concerned the school officials enough that knew about that to document it," Wolter recently told 24 Hour News 8.

One of Deanie's best friends, who asked not to be identified, told 24 Hour News 8 that Deanie told her about the altercation.

Deanie said it happened at the middle school between Deanie and two girls just days before the disappearance. It involved a boy Deanie was dating.

The other girls, including the boy's sister, threatened Deanie if she didn't break up with him, the friend recalled.

Wolter wouldn't discuss details of the fight. "A lot of homicides occur for simple, mind-blowing reasons," she said.

Deanie's mom said the cold case team only recently told her about the fight.

"It doesn't make sense at all, for somebody to fight, or possibly kill my daughter over a boy," Mary Peters said.

The best friend said she told a detective about the fight just days after the disappearance. She wondered why police didn't follow up on it 29 years ago.

Kleinheksel said he doesn't recall being told about the fight during his search for Deanie.

"We had hundreds of leads, hundreds of tips, and was there a lack of communication? Yes, there was," he said. "I'm not pointing fingers at anybody -- (it's) just that we never got that information to follow up on."

A police source told 24 Hour News 8 one of the girls in the fight was identified as a former girlfriend of Bruce Bunch.

Bunch was 17 when Deanie vanished. He lived with his family in a double-wide trailer backed up against a wooded hill on Grand River Drive.

He was a junior at Lowell High School -- not a good student, relatives said, but he showed an interest in fixing cars.

And, an acquaintance recalled, he also showed an interest in a girl who went to Deanie's school.

"He would show up at the sod field parties this one particular summer with this pretty girl -- way too pretty for him, let's just put it that way," Fallstrom said.

Since retiring in 1994, Kleinheksel has worked on the case as a private detective, out of his basement office.

Kleinheksel said he recently tracked down a new witness: a woman living in Lowell who already had spoken to the cold case team.

She told him Bunch drove to her house with friends one night:

"He came that night, Bruce Bunch did, and he was just upset and just goofy, and he said, 'Today, I was at a school, and didn't mention the name of the school, and I hit a girl with my car. He said, 'I either backed over her or ran over her, and I killed her.' So he loaded her up in the car, we -- and I don't know who the 'we' is -- and took her out and they took her down Cascade to Snow Avenue.

"At the end of Snow Avenue comes the freeway, and they took her out and they -- there's a pile of rocks. They laid her on the ground and covered her up with a big pile of rocks."

Kleinheksel thinks Bunch and others later buried her elsewhere after the spring thaw.

In search of Bruce Bunch

In 2008, Metro Cold Case detectives started tracking Bunch -- a man now identified by a source as their best suspect.

In Michigan, the team searched potential burial sites connected to Bunch and others.

The team has interviewed more than 300 people, worked more than 10,000 hours and has traveled to seven states, including Kentucky. And they've focused on one man.

Somerset is a town in southern Kentucky -- a state best known for horse racing and bourbon.

But Somerset is in Pulaski County, a "dry" county, where finding bourbon takes some work, and where bells ringing from the white steeples of Baptist churches are the biggest draw.

Bunch settled there with his first wife, Beth, their young daughter and his wife's two sons. He had family there.

It was 1985 and four years after Deanie disappeared.. Bunch had opened his own garage.

"He was a real good mechanic -- probably the best around," said a friend, Terry Bryant. "There wasn't nothing he couldn't fix or diagnose."

Jeff Rouse worked for Bunch, drank with him and, eventually, bought his garage.

"If a man was going to be around a drunk, he's the kind you wanted to be around, keep you rolling all the time," Rouse said.

He recalled one of those drunken experiences.

"We were all sitting around after-hours one night -- we'd all had a few beers -- and he made a joke: when he was 17, 18 years old being a murder suspect. That's the only thing I've heard the man say about it."

Nobody pressed Bunch for details, Rouse said. "We all kind of thought it was a joke, really, you know?"

Several years after the disappearance, in April 1988, Bunch and his wife were visiting relatives in Lowell.

The story about Bunch's blubbering at the sod farm had reached Lowell police, who pulled him

in for questioning.

"When I asked him what was going on, what was said, how he answered the questions, all he told me is they don't know what they're talking about," recalls his first wife, Beth Vaught. "Any other time I brought it up, it was not subject to discussion."

Police had hearsay, but no evidence -- no crime scene, no body.

In early 2008, Bunch told a reporter about a dream he had about Deanie after watching a TV report, but insisted he did not kill her. He said he told others about the dream, which prompted rumors that spun out of control.

He also told the reporter he did not know Deanie.

"His statement changed every time someone talked to him," Wolter said.

The investigation has frustrated cold case detectives, she added.

"Solving old cases doesn't always mean you make an arrest, but you come up with answers, and I think we're at that point where we do have some answers," Wolter said.

The cold case team eliminated old suspects -- Diaz and Fallstrom, among them.

Also among those cleared: Edward Zakrzewski II, who is on Florida's death row for killing his wife and using a machete to kill his two children. He used to live near Forest Hills Central Middle but had moved from Michigan before Deanie vanished.

Police also eliminated Deanie's stepfather, John Peters.

Instead, detectives have zeroed in on one man: Bunch. Detectives interviewed his relatives, friends and co-workers.

"They thought he had murdered a girl and done something with the body, and they couldn't find the body," Bryant said.

Vaught said all five of the cold case detectives interviewed her and her new husband in Somerset. She told them about her ex-husband's nightmares and about the violence.

"Bruce seemed troubled many times through the years," she said. "I can't explain anything as to why he was having nightmares."

She said he once pushed her from their stopped car when he was drunk, breaking her ankle.

"I know that he was a big drinker when I was with him and there were some times, some pretty scary times, when he and I had our little scuffles," Vaught said.

Although Bunch has no criminal record in Michigan or Kentucky, court documents obtained by 24 Hour News 8 show his first wife filed for a domestic violence order in 1994.

He "will do anything to keep me, such as beating me, killing me and or blowing his own head off," she wrote. "Also, he looks for me when I'm away from the house and says he'll run me off the road."

"He was a loud, obnoxious, forceful person," Vaught said.

It wasn't unusual, she said, for Bunch to wake up after a night of heavy drinking, and remember nothing.

"He'd get up the next day, get moving and say, 'I did what?' "

The couple divorced in 1998 after 15 years of marriage, and she was left with lingering questions.

"I don't know why, but I've always had an idea that if Bruce was involved with it, it was probably an accident and he was probably drunk, in a car, and he and maybe others just got scared and did the wrong thing back when," she said.

Before the cold case team could interview Bunch, he died. He was buried in Somerset on Feb. 5, 2008 -- the 27th anniversary of Deanie's disappearance.

The cause of death: myocardial infarction -- a heart attack -- at a Somerset hospital as doctors performed a heart catheterization. He was 44 years old and had a history of heart problems.

Secrets revealed?

Dead or alive, the cold case team wanted to learn as much as it could.

Is it possible he revealed a secret? A death-bed confession?

"That seemed to be the main concern -- was to pick and dig and try to put the pieces together from something that maybe he had said or done," Vaught said.

Detectives found his only child, his daughter, Janelle Mosely, in Louisville.

"The detectives have came to everybody and asked everybody that they can possibly ask, and they haven't found out anything that they didn't know before, and I mean, I just don't see why they keep bringing it up," Mosely said. "People can talk, but that's all they can do is talk. There's nothing to be proven. Oh, we don't know who it is, so let's put the blame on some dead guy."

It wasn't the first time Mosely had heard about Deanie and her father's alleged involvement.

About nine years ago when Mosely was 16, a retired detective --- she believes it was Kleinheksel -- tried to reach her father. So, she questioned her dad.

"I said, why? And he told me that there was some girl that was missing, her body was missing and they thought that he could have something to do with it because he knew the girl or he met the girl, or something like that," she said. "I asked him straight out. I said, did you have anything to do with it, dad? 'No, hell no.' That's what he told me. 'Hell no.' "

Mosely said she has no reason to doubt her dad. Even though her father drank a lot and had a big mouth, he was still a good man, she said.

"He was a very lovable guy, even though he was an asshole, because he was -- but it was because of his mouth," she added.

Rouse said cold case detectives