Scott Macklem was twenty years old. His murder has never been solved.
On the morning of November 5, 1986, he was shot once and killed in a parking lot at St. Clair County Community College. He was a son, a brother, and an expectant father. His death was a tragedy and his family’s grief is real. The question this page asks is whether anyone ever seriously looked for the person who killed him.
Campus security head Donna Henderson testified Macklem had no parking permit for that lot and no tickets; his presence there that morning was not predictable to an outsider.
The botched investigation
Within a day, the investigation had narrowed to one man, 450 miles away. Leads left behind, resources refused.
The case against him began with a name, and no two accounts agree on who gave it.
On the morning of the murder, the identification witness pointed out a different man.
No one saw the shooting.
The one description of the driver came from a hypnosis session, and the details that matched Kensu were supplied by the hypnotist.
The fingerprint that excluded him was last searched in 2008.
Basic steps were never taken.
Almost the whole case was built on the reports of one detective, and some of them cannot be corroborated.
The State Police found his alibi witnesses within two weeks. Port Huron did not return the call.
Run the prints.
The identifiable print from the evidence has never matched anyone, including Kensu, whose own fingerprints have been in the databases since 1987. Port Huron's own police department last had it searched in 2008. It remains on file at the State Police laboratory. The request is to run it once on the systems that exist now. The box was a Federal 20-gauge shell box; the fatal round was 12-gauge (Tr. 864; Welser 2008 evidence review, property tag 3445). The difference is one more reason to run it. At trial, the jury heard the lifts had never been compared with him (Tr. 867).
Ask Whitmer to run the printsThe FBI has replaced the system that searched it. Running it again is a different search.
Prints were lifted from the victim’s own car in 1986. There is no record of what became of them.
Michigan’s integrity unit frees people when old evidence meets new testing. This case has evidence that has never been tested at all.
Two people can order this search: the Attorney General and the Governor.
An unsolved murder. An innocent man serving for it. You can ask her to correct both.
Her term ends in 95 days.