Josie Duffy Rice
Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist, writer, and podcast host whose work focuses on prosecutors, prisons, and the criminal justice system. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times,…
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On the morning of November 5th, 1986, students at a community college in Port Huron, Michigan, heard the sound of what many thought was a car backfiring. It was a gunshot, and it killed a student named Scott Macklem. The murder would leave the community shocked, and police baffled. Until they found a suspect: a young man who lived across the state.
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Pushkin. Depending on how old you are, maybe you've never heard the sound of a car backfiring. That's what happens when a little bit of gasoline reaches the exhaust system and then suddenly ignites. These days, cars don't backfire that much, but that used to happen all the time. You'd be in a parking lot somewhere and the loud bang would startle you. That's why, on the morning of November 5th, 1986, when a loud crack whipped through the cold air, people nearby didn't think much of it.
00:49
Speaker 2
You know, we didn't even discuss it.
00:50
Speaker 1
Oh, a car backfired.
00:52
Speaker 3
There was no discussion.
00:54
Speaker 4
I could have swore that I heard a back, it sounded like a car backfiring as I pulled into the parking lot.
01:00
Speaker 1
You know, I remember the noise.
01:03
Speaker 4
Which, by the way, wasn't unusual.
01:05
Speaker 1
Those voices are some of the people who were in the area that day. Max, Kathy, and Sherry. They, and a few others, were in the parking lot of the St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Michigan. Some were students. Some were employees. All were unaware that they were about to take on a new identity. Witness. This is where our story starts today. in the easternmost city in Michigan, spitting distance from Ontario, Canada. Port Huron lives near the intersection of Lake Huron and the St. Clair River, and a few blocks from the waterfront sits St. Clair County Community College, or SC4, as the locals call it.
01:53
Speaker 2
The St.
01:53
Speaker 4
Clair County Community College is spread over an attractive 26-acre campus in central Port Huron.
02:01
Speaker 1
That was a clip from a very 1980s promotional video. Downtown Port Huron is pretty, with the low-slung brick buildings and the Christmas lights at night. But on the morning of November 5th, 1986, it was gray and chilly and dreary, a layer of clouds coating the sky. The parking lot of SC4 was full. Most students were already in class, but there were a handful of struggling kids. They were adults, technically, sure. but really just kids falling in lockstep with their friends, a bunch of 18, 19, 20-year-olds who heard not a car, but a gunshot.
02:42
Speaker 5
You don't expect to hear a shotgun blast in downtown Port Huron when you're walking through the college parking lot.
02:49
Speaker 6
You just don't expect that.
02:52
Speaker 1
The gunshot that no one realized was a gunshot was the first thing people did not, could not recognize. But there were other things, too. Like the scream.
03:04
Speaker 6
I'll tell you what I vividly remember. I heard the gunshot. And it was so close. And then I heard the death-curdling scream of that young man.
03:18
Speaker 4
And I froze.
03:20
Speaker 1
Sharon was on her way to work at SC4 that day.
03:24
Speaker 6
In my head, I'm thinking, I don't know what I was thinking. Like it couldn't be real. I proceeded, I went on into the college. There was another.
03:38
Speaker 5
Student, do not know who he was, and I just made a comment about, oh my God, I hope someone was just screwing around out there, but that sounded so real. All he said was, you're not dead.
03:55
Speaker 1
This whole series of events probably has taken me longer to describe than it occurred in the moment. A couple of minutes, max. But that one moment would still haunt these witnesses, and many others in Port Huron, almost 40 years later. I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is The Backfire Effect. Episode 1, The Good Cop. I'm not from Michigan. I'm from Georgia. I'm a journalist and I used to be a lawyer. And in both careers, I focused almost exclusively on the criminal legal system. The story I'm going to tell you, the one that has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of years now, that has taken up thousands of hours of my mental real estate, the story that I've honestly wanted to shake just to loosen its grip on me a little bit, is not the kind of story I usually tell. But it grabbed a hold of me. There's a man in prison right now who maybe shouldn't be there. And he's a complicated man, a brilliant man, a strange man, a man unlike anyone I've ever met before. But I'm getting ahead of myself. On November 5th, 1986, there was the backfire of There was the scream. But as it turns out, the scream didn't really set off alarm bells either. Kathy later told authorities that it did not sound like a yell that a person would make if they were in trouble. Wanda and Jean both saw something weird after they heard it. Wanda, quote, saw a man bend over and grab himself. Then he ran between two cars. She thought he was joking, so she headed to horticulture class. Jean heard someone cry, help me, heard him say, oh God, I'm hurt. She apparently said that she saw a man, quote, walking by his vehicle in a crouched over position, but felt in her mind that this was just one of the college students putting on some sort of act. So she too just went inside. A number of witnesses would later tell investigators about another strange thing. A person wearing a red nylon ski jacket lying next to a car. Most of them just assumed it was someone working on their vehicle. But not an 18-year-old student named Max. His story would be different.
06:52
Speaker 4
I was always never late. And I was late that day, so I was in a rush. I was surprised that there was a parking spot that close to the main buildings. You know what I mean? Like, being late, usually that never happens.
07:08
Speaker 1
The parking spot that Max found was right next to a Plymouth-Therese mill.
07:13
Speaker 4
I pulled in, grabbed my books. As I walked past, kind of fast walk toward class, I remember seeing legs hanging out from under the car.
07:24
Speaker 3
And I.
07:27
Speaker 4
Thought that was kind of strange. And so I stopped, just kind of backed up and said, you know, hey, you need any help? He didn't respond. And so I kind of edged up along the side of the car and said, hey, you okay? And then I heard kind of a moan. And so then I kind of came up to the front of the car there and he was lying on the ground there.
07:53
Speaker 1
Max would later learn the man on the ground was a student named Scott Macklem. And as Max tried to help him, he realized that Scott had been shot. Another student sees Max trying to turn Scott's body over.
08:06
Speaker 4
I just remember looking at him and I remember saying, go across the street to the fire department and get help. And this was before cell phones and, you know, all of that and everything. So he actually had to run across the street.
08:20
Speaker 1
Max tried to do what he could to keep the victim alive, using his clothes to pack the wound. But it was a losing battle.
08:27
Speaker 4
I remember taking off my jacket and stuffing it in the side, trying to keep the blood from... I look back now and think, what good was I going to do?
08:38
Speaker 1
Within minutes, the fire department and the paramedics arrived. By the time police officers got there, the EMTs had already loaded Scott's body onto the stretcher. They pronounced him dead about half an hour later. But Mack suspects he was the last person to see anything like life in Scott Macklem.
08:57
Speaker 4
I was giving him CPR and I remember he kind of just kind of, almost like in the movies, you know, when somebody passes away, he kind of like, it just kind of like the body just kind of went limp. You know what I mean? And his head kind of tilted back. It just might be, I think he was already dead by the time the police got there.
09:33
Speaker 1
In my field of work, if you're lucky or maybe unlucky, depending, You feel drawn to a story. And I was drawn to this one, this series of events that started with Scott Macklem's tragic death 40 years ago. Like I said, it's not the kind of story I normally tell. I've reported on juvenile asylums in Alabama, corrupt cops in Kansas, battered women serving time in Louisiana. I tend to focus most of my work in the South, where I live, and as a Black journalist, my stories are often about Black people. In other words, usually when I do a story, I identify more with the subjects. It's not that I see myself reflected in them exactly. but that they're familiar to me in a way. At times it's been kind of strange to be so focused on this story about these white people in a small town in Michigan. One reason that this story, one of the craziest ones I've heard in my career, has captivated me is because I think it says a lot about the system, but maybe even more about us. About you. About me. I've come to an uncomfortable conclusion over the past few years that I, and I would guess you, are capable of more than I would like to believe. Scott Macklem was 20 years old in 1986, and the couple of pictures I've seen of him, old snapshots from basketball games and high school yearbooks, he's tall with a nice smile and angular features, an athlete, one of two boys, the prized son of Gary and Patricia Macklem. At Croswell Lexington High School, where Scott graduated in 1984, he was captain of the golf and basketball teams and was voted best dressed and most popular. Here's a former classmate of Scott's.
11:35
Speaker 3
He was like maybe the homecoming king or in the parade. And he was very good looking, very attractive.
11:43
Speaker 1
Scott was from a small town about half an hour outside of Port Huron called Croswell, Michigan, where his father was mayor.
11:54
Speaker 3
The teachers liked him. I think it was that he was from a well-known family, maybe, in Croswell. And you could kind of tell the kids who came from Croswell good families and the kids who didn't. And I remember him being treated as though he were, you know, like a Croswell good family.
12:15
Speaker 1
After he graduated high school, Scott had started at SC4, where he was planning on getting his associate's degree in business. He worked part-time at a men's clothing store, where he made close to minimum wage. He liked bird hunting. People said he had great manners and a kind heart. One old friend called him a goody two-shoes. After he died, there was quote after quote from his high school teachers and a local barber. All-American boy, they said. Fantastic young man. A great kid. Happy-go-lucky. The kind you want your daughter to bring home. Speaking of which, Scott had just gotten engaged the month before he was killed. His fiancée' s name was Crystal Merrill. Crystal and Scott had grown up in the same area. They'd been friends for years, gone to the same schools growing up. They'd known each other since kindergarten. She'd spent her childhood on a farm, three or four hundred acres where they raised dairy cattle and beef cattle. People described Crystal as quiet, hardworking, family-oriented, kind of like the girl next door. They'd started dating near the end of high school and continued on and off through the beginning of college. They'd broken up in early 1986, but they'd reconciled a few months later. At the time of the murder, Crystal was pregnant, still in her first trimester. They were planning to get married that coming January. I suspect you won't hear much in this podcast from Scott's family or Crystal's. I've reached out and will keep trying because I'm interested in hearing more about who Scott was. But his family has been reticent to talk, which I get, to have your child killed like that as you're preparing for him to become a father himself, to go from planning a wedding to lowering him into a grave. and then to be asked to rehash it all these years later. I get why they don't want to relive all this. Let's return to the parking lot and the witnesses at SC4 in Port Huron. After Scott is shot and Max tries to save him and the EMTs try CPR, before they realize, the heart-sinking clarity that such a job requires, that it was a lost cause, that the boy, and he was really just a boy, was dead after they put Scott's body on a stretcher and raced to the hospital. The witnesses are left shell-shocked, overwhelmed, confused. And, it turns out, the witnesses had witnessed very little. No one had seen Scott drive up. Had he just pulled in? He'd missed his first class that morning. No one knew where he'd just been. No one knew where he was headed. Was he trying to get in his car? Had he just gotten out? But there was this one thing. Even before they realized that someone had been shot, a few witnesses said they noticed a car drive out of the parking lot quite fast.
15:29
Speaker 6
And then I do remember hearing a car racing away. Just a car going, because in parking lots, cars usually don't go very fast. And I heard a car going kind of That morning, at least.
15:43
Speaker 4
Three witnesses described this car in generally the same way. They described the color as pinkish-tan or reddish-brown or light-brown.
16:11
Speaker 1
Imprecise, yes, but at least in the same color family. And they described the car in the same way. A small, compact, a hatchback. Imagine a Prius, but smaller and more boxy. So, a small pinkish-brownish-reddish hatchback, and maybe a man driving it? No one got a great look at the guy, but they say he was a white male, estimates anywhere from 18 to 25, with dark hair. Some say he's wearing a ski mask and a Green Army fatigue jacket. Some mention facial scruff. Others don't. Two people say he's wearing a knit cap. Another person says he's not. He's in the car, so they can't tell how tall he is. The man is described as trying to conceal his face, or glancing in his rearview mirror to see what was going on with the victim, or, alternatively, laughing and grinning. It's worth noting, too, that there isn't total agreement here, even on the basic descriptions. One witness later recalled a blue car. Another one said he thought he saw a woman driving, not a man. And more than one person mentions a woman, possibly blonde, possibly wearing a red-knit sweater, standing near Scott Macklem after he was shot. So now you have the beginnings of a strange story. There's so much more that's weird about this murder and everything that comes after. So many lives that will be upended. And not just those of Scott's family and friends.
18:03
Speaker 3
St.
18:03
Speaker 1
Clair, Michigan is a tiny town, about four square miles, five, six thousand people, over 90% white. And on this November afternoon, the drive there is something close to beautiful. It's not as cold as I, a resident of Atlanta, expected it to be. You would not believe the winter clothes I bought for this trip. Fleece-lined leggings, thick wool socks. Just a few blocks after we pull off the long stretch of highway, where fallen leaves have piled up along the edges, we find ourselves in farm country. I think it's the next one. I think it might be the one with the red truck.
18:48
Speaker 2
For some reason, I feel like he has a red truck.
18:50
Speaker 1
I don't know. Yep, here's his barn. I'm with Joshua Sharp, another journalist from Georgia, who has spent plenty of his own time wrestling with this story.
19:01
Speaker 7
I'm an investigative journalist. I am based in Detroit, Michigan, where I have lived for going on two years now.
19:14
Speaker 1
On this Tuesday afternoon, we are on our way to visit a retired police detective named Herb Welzer. Herb's around 70 years old, and he has lived here in this buttery yellow house essentially his whole life. It was kind of a strange thing for me and Josh to meet Herb in person after all this time. After talking to him on the phone and reading over his research so much these past few years.
19:39
Speaker 7
I don't think I'd even seen a picture of Herb before we got there. But I knew him very well and I'd been reading his books.
19:50
Speaker 2
Years of his work.
19:52
Speaker 1
Right.
19:52
Speaker 7
But, you know, Herb on the phone, I always just, he felt like this sort of gentle, grandfatherly figure. And then he'd show up, and that is exactly who we found.
20:03
Speaker 1
Hello, chickens. Hi, pumpkins.
20:07
Speaker 2
I give them a treat every afternoon, so... That's what they're waiting for.
20:12
Speaker 1
They see you here.
20:13
Speaker 2
Now over here, I'll show you inside the barn. They actually built the barn before they built the house, my great-grandparents.
20:22
Speaker 4
Oh, wow.
20:23
Speaker 5
Priorities.
20:25
Speaker 1
In the episodes to come, you'll be hearing a fair amount about the Port Huron Police Department. It is not a large operation. Not now and not back in 1986. Back then, it had around 50 officers, mostly men, in a town of around 35,000 and shrinking. One of those officers was Herb Welser.
20:46
Speaker 2
I went here to St. Clair High School and graduated in 1973. And at that time, I still love sports. I'm really into sports, and I wanted to be a gym teacher. But I could see there really wasn't any openings, you know, in gym teaching.
21:06
Speaker 4
So....
21:08
Speaker 2
I had three cousins that were police officers, and I thought, well, maybe I should try law enforcement.
21:15
Speaker 1
Herb, like a lot of people in this story, graduated from SC4.
21:20
Speaker 2
And was hired as a cadet in 1974 at the Port Erin Police Department, and then was hired as an officer in 1976. I was the youngest officer the Port Erin Police Department had ever hired. Just after I was 21, I was hired.
21:40
Speaker 1
Port Huron was not exactly crime-ridden back then, except, of course, for the Canadians.
21:46
Speaker 2
We had a lot of persons from Canada that came over because at that time, the drinking age was 18 here in Michigan. And so a lot of Canadians would come over and get into fights in the bars in Port Huron. So a lot of those calls happened.
22:05
Speaker 1
Herb worked nearly 30 years as a Port Huron police officer. On the wall in his office is a plaque with all his badges, a sign of the years of his life he gave to the department.
22:17
Speaker 2
So as a patrol officer, I was there for about seven years. And then I was a detective for about five years, uniform sergeant for a few years, uniform lieutenant for a few years. And then the last three years, detective lieutenant.
22:38
Speaker 1
I've spent my career scrutinizing law enforcement. Herb spent his in the throes of it, and he loved it. He says he believes strongly in the moral imperative of the job, that his role was to keep the community safe, to behave ethically at all times. And every so often, he'd hear whispers about the Scott Macklem case. He was never assigned to it, but he remembers when the call came into the station.
23:04
Speaker 2
I remember the radio call that it came out as an injured person there in the parking lot. And then later on in the day, I heard that a murder had occurred. So I was working that day.
23:18
Speaker 1
And it wasn't long before the murder was all over the news. The story kept growing bigger and bigger, and the rumors started. After Herb retired from the police force in 2005, he decided to get a private investigator's license. He started looking into the Scott Macklem case, hoping to find something that would vindicate law enforcement.
23:45
Speaker 2
The more I kept reading that stuff, I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over.
23:53
Speaker 1
Herb began to realize that something had gone terribly wrong. And even though he didn't cause the problem, he felt it was his responsibility to help fix it.
24:03
Speaker 2
So that's really why that I became involved in this, was just to do the right thing. And I knew it would come at a cost.
24:15
Speaker 1
Herb was going to be investigating the work of his former colleagues, his friends. Some of the audio you'll hear during this series comes from interviews he's done. He showed us the boxes and boxes of documents that he's collected over the years, sitting in his basement.
24:31
Speaker 2
All of those files there on that rack, and then all of them to the left. And this is my to-do list right there.
24:40
Speaker 1
Oh my gosh.
24:41
Speaker 3
Wow.
24:43
Speaker 1
And Herb's prediction that this investigation would come at a cost was correct. And not just because he's been doing it on his own dime, all by himself, for years.
24:55
Speaker 7
He's done an insane amount of work. And once I realized that all of that's there, I'm thinking, okay, maybe actually, wait a second, maybe, my God, maybe Herb's already figured it out and nobody, including Herb, has put it all together because I couldn't tell you how many interviews he's done.
25:18
Speaker 1
In psychology, there's a term called the backfire effect, a concept coined 15 or so years ago, though the ideas that undergird it have existed for much longer. It says that correcting a false belief can sometimes strengthen it. It's kind of controversial in social psychology, actually. But the idea survives because it points at something real and much older than the term. Rational human behavior is not the same thing as predictable human behavior. If we were purely rational, our beliefs would shift slightly in accordance with new data. Calculators are rational. Humans are not. That's one of the most beautiful things about being human. Our irrationality, our hopes, our perceptions, our convictions are the prism through which we often function. We do not hold our deepest beliefs the way I calculate our process's numbers. We hold them the way we hold the people we love in the picture we have of ourselves, as things that would cost us something to give up. Another variation of the backfire effect, one that sounds prettier, more romantic, is called Belief Perseverance. Belief Perseverance is woven throughout this case, you'll find out. This is a show about everyone for whom the cost of being wrong had simply grown too high to pay, predictable incentives leading to monstrous outcomes. After Scott's death, Everyone in Port Huron is left wondering who kills a kid like this. The people who knew him couldn't make sense of it. As a teacher at his high school put it, things like this don't happen to such nice people. And who kills someone this way? Who does it in the parking lot at 9 a.m.? I've been to this parking lot. It's big. It sits at a busy intersection surrounded by buildings and houses. To commit a crime here is so risky. So impulsive, it's frankly stupid. But it's possible that the one person who might have been feeling worried that day in the parking lot was Scott. Later, people would say that Scott had been acting nervous, preoccupied, concerned for a while. He'd been telling people he was being followed, that someone was out to get him. He allegedly told his manager at work but two men had come into the store a couple of times looking for him. One time, he said, he confronted them and they left. Another time, he hid. Scott told other people, too. A couple of his friends, one of his professors. Crystal, his fiancée, said two men had followed them home the night after Halloween. Plus, stuff had been stolen out of his car. Someone let the air out of his tires. But for some reason... As far as I can figure, Scott never pointed the finger at anyone. He knew them, he told people. But he didn't seem to tell anyone the name of who he thought was harassing him. There were other things going on with Scott. School wasn't going great. His cumulative GPA was about a 1.5. Already, he was in his third year of a two-year business program and nowhere near to graduating. Part of the problem, it seemed, was that he rarely showed up. If he wasn't at school, he was at work, Crystal would later say. But he wasn't really at school. He'd missed 21 days of his accounting class and 18 of algebra. Something was up. The question is, was it connected to the way that he died? Scott's father, Gary Macklem, was not only mayor of their town, he also ran the insurance agency where Crystal worked. That's where she was when the police called around 10 a.m. on the morning of November 5th. Crystal said that she didn't think anything of it. At her job, sometimes cops would call and tell you about an accident or something. But then she heard Gary Macklem say, is he hurt very bad? And knew it was about Scott. He ran out, didn't tell her what happened. But soon after, she got a call from a friend who told her that Scott had been killed in the parking lot of SC4. Scott's parents and Crystal went to the hospital to wait. Soon others came running Crystal's little sister, Scott's boss at the menswear store. There, they learned that the worst had happened, that Scott was dead. In the waiting room, in the midst of their collective shock, they were joined by two officers from the Port Huron Police Department. They were starting their homicide investigation, and they began to ask questions. That's when the trajectory of another life was changed forever, when they heard about a man who might be responsible. A drifter.
30:32
Speaker 4
An outsider.
30:32
Speaker 1
A suspect. Coming up on The Backfire Effect.
30:47
Speaker 4
A policeman came up to me and said, why do you have blood all over you?
30:51
Speaker 3
As I'm walking down the driveway, I see there's like five cars lined up.
30:55
Speaker 5
And then I'm really freaking out.
30:57
Speaker 3
The whole house was surrounded with guys in black and rifles.
31:02
Speaker 4
I'm like, who is this?
31:02
Speaker 2
What are you doing in my home?
31:04
Speaker 4
Tell me who this is right now. I'm calling the police. He goes, well, I am the police.
31:17
Speaker 1
The Backfire Effect is hosted and reported by me, Josie Duffy Rice. Additional reporting by Joshua Sharp. It's produced by Lydia Jean Cott with additional production support from Trina Menino. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our executive producers are Amy Gaines McQuaid and Jacob Smith. Our music was composed by Daniel Walter. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski. Our fact checker is Lauren Vespoli and our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Special thanks to a few more people at Pushkin. who made the Backfire Effect possible. Greta Cohn, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Sarah Breguer, and Karen Shakerji.
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