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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Temujin Kensu spent much of his youth wandering, mainly in his home state of Michigan. In 1986 he and his then-fiancée moved to a cabin outside Port Huron, where he briefly dated someone else. A few weeks later, he and his fiancée moved again, more than 400 miles away, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He says he was there on November 5, 1986. But that didn’t stop police from accusing him of a murder he said he could never have committed.
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Pushkin. Previously on The Backfire Effect.
00:16
Speaker 2
I heard the gunshot, and it was so close.
00:20
Speaker 3
And then I heard the death-curdling scream of.
00:25
Speaker 2
That young man.
00:26
Speaker 3
I remember seeing a guy leave in the parking lot, leave the car, drive past too quickly for parking lot, the and exit the parking lot.
00:39
Speaker 2
The reality of what it was was crazy.
00:46
Speaker 4
I thought, man, there's more red flags that just kept coming up over and over.
00:58
Speaker 1
I want to introduce you to a man named Timogen Kinsu. That's not his birth name. He was born Frederick Freeman, but changed it years ago. He's also gone by other names, known in some places as Mickey Ford or John Lamar. Aliases, technically. But we'll get to that. Timogen is 63 now, and his physical condition has deteriorated a lot. But back in 1985, his body could withstand more. He was engaged to a girl named Michelle, and the two of them were living a nomadic lifestyle.
01:36
Speaker 2
We actually lived on bikes in the winter, like literally lived on 10 speeds. All of our belongings packed up on these 10 speeds, and we would go and we would camp out in the woods in the snow.
01:46
Speaker 1
To me, this sounds like a nightmare. The cold, the bikes, the whole not having any place to live. But Timogen looks back on it fondly.
01:54
Speaker 2
It was actually a really fun time. We just had a great time. I would sing to her. You know, we would ride all over Flint and Burton and just go everywhere on these bikes. And we would find, you know, cool places to camp out, literally like in blizzard snow. And we would lay down sleeping bags in the snow, like way out in the woods somewhere. And in the morning, we'd get up and we'd go start our day.
02:17
Speaker 1
So he and Michelle, they don't really have a plan. They're not tied down by anything, since they barely have anything. They don't really work. Michelle earns a little money at restaurant jobs here and there. When he was required to name an occupation, Timogen would put musician... or nutritionist, or quote-unquote self-employed. And sort of randomly, in April of 1986, they decide to move to Ghetto, a town 30 minutes outside of Port Huron. They don't really know anyone there, or much about the place at all. Here's Michelle.
02:53
Speaker 5
I'm not sure what the reason was that we moved there, other than.
02:59
Speaker 5
I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful area. You know, it has the river and we lived in a little cabin and then right down at the end of the street was like here on there was a beach and it was just really pretty.
03:11
Speaker 1
They liked the cabin, enjoyed being by the water. Rent was 200 bucks a month, fully furnished. It felt peaceful, maybe even a little bit like home. But that move, that spur of the moment decision would end up being perhaps the worst choice they'd ever made. I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is The Backfire Effect, Episode 2, The Hypnotist. Over the past few years, I have spent many, many, many hours talking with Temujin.
04:09
Speaker 6
Hello, this is a prepaid debit call from.
04:12
Speaker 2
Temujin Kensu.
04:15
Speaker 1
Temujin likes to talk. About almost anything. His friends and his enemies both will tell you that. You know how even the most talkative people have times they just don't feel like talking? If Temujin has ever had one of those days, I sure haven't seen it. He's always talking. His monologues are sometimes riveting, other times educational, can be tiresome, and even a little frustrating.
04:42
Speaker 2
I'm not hating on Chuck Norris, and I understand he was a very nice person, but he was a terrible martial artist. We went from atomic weapons to thermonuclear weapons, and then we went from uranium to plutonium, and then, you know, began to work on cesium weapons, which are... So for my joints, I would take krill oil. Fish oils, green lips, sea mussel. By the time he was making Walker, Texas Ranger, because he couldn't do advanced techniques, they brought in stuntmen to do all the complex kickings. I would use glucosamine and chondroitin, of course. MSM. I would probably use....
05:16
Speaker 1
Timigen seems to have an opinion about everything. About politics, history, movies, which Qatar is the best. He knows a lot of very miscellaneous stuff.
05:28
Speaker 2
I'm a fountain of useless information.
05:32
Speaker 1
But most of the time, he wants to talk about how four decades ago, the murder of Scott Macklem changed his life. This is a story about one man and the road he took that found him in the midst of a police investigation. To understand what happened next, after Scott's death, you've got to understand Timogen. Timogen was born in Flint, Michigan. Back then, Flint was still a prosperous city, full of auto plants. But by all accounts, Timogen had a rough childhood, sad and lonely. His parents were just teenagers when they had him, and his dad died when Timogen was young. He says his mother was abusive. Timogen was close with his grandfather, but then he died too. After that, Timogen moved around a lot. When his mom remarried, they moved in with his stepdad. Then later he lived with his grandmother and even spent time in foster care before graduating from high school. By the time he was 22, Temujin had done the following things, not necessarily in this order. Joined and promptly left the military due to what he describes as debilitating shin splints. Enrolled and dropped out of college. Had at least one, maybe two children, with one, maybe two different women. Married his first wife and had yet another child with her. Joined, let's call it soft joined, a cult. Separated from his first wife and moved from Michigan to Washington State, then back, then forth, then he says back again. Now, in the spring of 1986, he's engaged yet again, this time to Michelle, and they're living in that cabin outside of Port Huron. Already, you can get a sense of the themes that echo through Timogen's life. the patterns that will rear their head time after time. The women, yes, but also the wandering. I don't know if it was the misery he felt at home as a child, or losing his father and grandfather, or the time in foster care that did it, but something seems to have instilled in him a penchant for the next thing. Timogen was restless, always ready to move at a moment's notice, in search of something he never seemed to find. One day, in May of 1986, Temujin and Michelle were wandering around the mall in Port Huron, trying to pass the time. Back then, Temujin was an amateur musician with 80s-style shaggy dark hair, and he fancied himself kind of a rock star.
08:25
Speaker 2
There's a little music store in there, and I went into the music store called Port Huron Music Center, and I was talking to the guy there, and he said, listen, he said, we've got a bunch of clearance stuff. They didn't have, like, rock and roll items. He said, but I do have, he said, quote, a really badass amplifier.
08:41
Speaker 1
Again, Timogen was broke. He and Michelle didn't even have a home phone. But he bought the amp anyway. He still has a receipt for it. It's dated May 23rd, his 23rd birthday. They leave the music store and go to the video store. You know, a blockbuster-type place, but local. And this is where he says he met a woman named Crystal. She worked there. Timogen introduced himself to her as John Lamar.
09:10
Speaker 2
And, you know, she was Google-ing me. And so anyways, I got some videos. Videos were like a dollar back then to rent. And I rented some videos, and I ordered a horror series, kind of comical, called Ghoulies. And she gave me the silly movie Goonies.
09:29
Speaker 1
You may remember Crystal. She was Scott Macklem's former girlfriend and future fiancé. At this point, though, she and Scott were broken up. Timogen and Michelle, however, were not broken up. They were, as I mentioned, engaged. But that didn't stop him from dating other women at the same time. Timogen was shameless about this, brazen. He'd ask other women out right in front of Michelle. Timogen says that in this case, Crystal asked him out when he came back to return the movies and complain about the mix-up.
10:01
Speaker 2
She was, oh gee, I'm so sorry, let me take you out to dinner. And then later she admitted she did that on purpose in hopes that I would come back and say something.
10:10
Speaker 1
There's little about the ensuing relationship that Timogen and Crystal agree on. But they both say that it was over by the end of June. They dated maybe five weeks. She would later say that when they ended things, he told her, quote, no skin off my back if I ever see you again. That summer, Michelle found out she was pregnant, and she and Timogen decided to leave the Port Huron area. It became just another stop on the road of Timogen's life. Ephemeral, easy to leave behind. And it may have stayed that way if it weren't for what would happen that November. That's when Timogen became the main suspect, really the only suspect, in the murder of Scott Macklem. Michigan, unique among the lower 48, is divided into two big chunks, peninsulas each surrounded by the Great Lakes. The lower peninsula is the bigger one, shaped sort of like a mitten. That's where most Michiganders live. Port Huron is on what people from Michigan call the Thumb, on the southeastern edge of the state. All the way on the opposite side of Michigan, in the northwest, is the Upper Peninsula, or the UP. If you've never been there, the UP is its own world. It's the great outdoors, lots of hiking and hunting and dog sledding. Timidget and Michelle were natives of the Lower Peninsula. but they decided to move to the UP in the summer of 1986. It was a decision they'd made at a random rest stop. Here's Timogen talking to journalist Joy Marie Mann. I had a little pocket knife, and we had a Rand McNally road map on the table. I took the knife and I went like this and just kind of went, bink, and I let it go and it fell on Escanaba. They lived outside of Escanaba, a tiny town of around 14,000 people. And they were still there a few months later, on the morning of November 9th, 1986, four days after Scott Macklem had been shot and killed. This is when a bizarre series of events began in the already strange life of Temujin, when his propensity for wandering and moving on came to an abrupt end. That morning, Temujin was at his friend Paul's house.
12:38
Speaker 2
He was making breakfast for me. He was making French toast, actually.
12:42
Speaker 1
Timogen and Paul were in Paul's kitchen when the phone rang. It was Dash, a mutual friend of theirs.
12:49
Speaker 2
And Dash said, hey, listen, Paul, have you seen Mick?
12:52
Speaker 1
Remember I told you Timogen had a few different aliases? In the UP, he went by Mickey or Mick.
13:00
Speaker 2
And Paul goes, actually, Mick's right here right now. And Dash was all I had, I got to talk to him. So I get on the phone. He said, Mick, listen, he said, I don't know what's going on. He said, but Tom Ford's dead. Tom's dead and they think you killed him.
13:12
Speaker 1
In hindsight, this is all very confusing. Through this garbled game of telephone, Timogen found out he was suspected of murder. But he was told that he was wanted for the murder of not Scott, but Tom, a childhood friend of his from Flint. It didn't help that Tom and Timogen were on the outs at this point. So upon hearing the news of Tom's alleged death, Timogen says he felt a lot of things.
13:39
Speaker 6
Sadness.
13:40
Speaker 2
I love Tom.
13:41
Speaker 7
I love Tom.
13:42
Speaker 2
Even though we'd had a falling out, and, you know, I probably wasn't the best of friends, I still knew Tom since we were children, and I had a lot of affection for him.
13:51
Speaker 1
He also felt a little bit of panic.
13:53
Speaker 2
He had taken some things of mine and abandoned a motorcycle of mine. And so, you know, they knew that I was upset about this. I told everybody what Tom had done. So the first thing that goes through my mind was, oh, my God, Tom and I just had this falling out, and I had told everybody what he did, and now something's happened to Tom, and they just think that I did it.
14:10
Speaker 1
Here's Dash, the one who called and told Timogen he was wanted for murder. Dash told Timogen he'd heard this rumor from another friend's father, who was a local probation officer.
14:26
Speaker 2
So Timogen calls up that friend. Timogen says he was confused, concerned.
14:39
Speaker 1
But figure that there had to be a way to clear his name. All he has to do is explain himself, talk to someone. So he decides to hit the road and head for Flint, where he and Tom were from. Remember, this is before the internet, texting, cell phones. It wasn't always easy to track people down. It's a long drive, and on the way, he's stopping at payphones and making calls, trying to figure out if Tom is alive or dead. He's also calling the Flint cops to ask them if he is wanted for murder.
15:15
Speaker 2
I said, you know, I think you guys are looking at me for the murder of this friend of mine, Tom Ford. And he goes and he checks and he comes back and he's like, we don't have a dead Tom Ford. And I'm like, well, do you have like a John Doe maybe, you know? And I thought, well, that doesn't make any sense. If they think I killed Tom, they know who Tom is. But I asked that anyways, you know, watching television.
15:34
Speaker 6
I guess.
15:35
Speaker 2
And he's like, no, we don't have any John Does either.
15:40
Speaker 1
We have a record of these calls, by the way, since he used his calling card. Timogen calls police in Flint at least four times. And each time, he says he asks them, are you guys looking for me? Do you think I killed someone?
15:52
Speaker 2
And then he tells me, and I don't have any warrants for you. And so I actually said something to the effect of, I think you're trying to trick me or whatever. And he goes, look, if I was trying to trick you, I'd try to trick you into coming in. I wouldn't tell you that we're not looking for you. I was like, okay, that makes sense.
16:07
Speaker 1
Timidgin gets to Flint, and he ends up staying with a woman that he knows there, yet another woman he was involved with at the time. And he's calling home every so often to check up on Michelle, who remained back in the farmhouse they rented in the UP. And at some point she mentions that she has seen some men dressed in camo with guns outside of their farmhouse. She thought maybe they were hunters.
16:31
Speaker 2
It's very common up there to ask you to hunt on somebody's property. And the farmhouse we were renting was on a 40-acre piece of land. So it wasn't uncommon to have hunters up in that area.
16:41
Speaker 1
But, as Michelle would quickly learn, they weren't hunters. They were cops. They'd been staking out the house, and soon they returned with a warrant. It had nothing to do with Tom Ford, who, incidentally, was still alive. I'm still not exactly sure how his name got caught up in this whole thing. But as Michelle learned from the police, someone else had been killed. One cop was particularly vicious. She says he was threatening her. He had her go wait in a cop car.
17:11
Speaker 8
It was freezing and snow, and we're out in the country, so we had this long driveway. So as I'm walking down the driveway, I see there's like five cars lined up, five or six cars, I think. And then I'm really freaking out. The whole house was surrounded with guys in black and rifles.
17:30
Speaker 1
When they finally let her back inside, she watches as they destroy her home.
17:34
Speaker 8
They're cutting open the mattress, cutting open pillows, whatever, like boxes, all kinds of things. They're just like opening and throwing and tossing and searching through everything.
17:48
Speaker 1
In the middle of all of this, Timogen calls home from a diner outside of Flint. And he's shocked when an unfamiliar man picks up the phone.
17:58
Speaker 2
And I'm like, who is this? What are you doing in my home? And I said, tell me who this is right now. I'm calling the police. He goes, well, I am the police. And I said, who are you? And that's when he said his name. This is John Bowens of the Portier Police Department.
18:25
Speaker 1
Scott Macklem was shot around 8.55 on the morning of November 5th, 1986, in the parking lot of the St. Clair County Community College. You've heard about the shotgun blast to Scott's abdomen, about Max, the first person who realized Scott had been shot and was trying to keep him alive.
18:44
Speaker 7
I remember he kind of just kind of, almost like in the movies, you know, when somebody passes away, dies or whatever, he kind of like, it just kind of like the body just kind of went limp.
18:55
Speaker 1
Minutes later, the Port Huron Police Department arrived at the scene. And it is then that a whole new chapter of this story begins. We are in investigation territory now, and every choice made, or not made, closes doors that should have stayed open.
19:10
Speaker 7
Port Huron is a small city that has a lot of, that tries to have big city issues.
19:16
Speaker 6
You know what I'm saying?
19:17
Speaker 7
It's like you wanted to be a big city and, you know. The Port Huron Police Department didn't always have the greatest of reputations.
19:26
Speaker 1
As a former lawyer who reports on the criminal justice system, I've read many, many, many police reports. Often, I'm reading reports and cases where an officer or a department has been accused of, in technical terms, messing up. We often think of police misconduct as synonymous with police brutality, the barbaric moments that in recent years have been caught on video, the shooting or beating of unarmed men or women or even children. But police misconduct takes many other forms, too. Inexperience, sloppiness. Whatever the origin, from the beginning of the Port Huron Police Department's involvement in this case, the investigation is marred by its failures, starting with the crime scene. At a crime scene, especially a homicide, there is a routine that departments are supposed to follow. It's nothing new. It goes back to the beginning of forensic science more than a century ago. The Locard exchange principle was invented by Edmond Locard, the French criminologist who is often called the father of the crime lab. The principle states that every contact leaves a trace. It undergirds the forensic approach to crime scenes. You protect them. There are rules, guidelines, best practices. Number one, you secure the scene. The low-card exchange principle means that every person who interacts with a scene will leave something and take something away, a footprint, a fiber. So you put up tape, you keep bystanders out. Number two, you document. You photograph everything in place before anyone touches anything. Because the second you move a shell casing or pick up a bag, the scene can't be recreated. The photographs are the only reliable record. So you take a lot of them. Number three, you collect all potential evidence. Fingerprints, hair follicles. You preserve, you tag, you send it all to a lab. Because when you're standing on the scene, you can't be sure of what will end up being relevant. And lastly, number four, the big one, is that you talk to people. The Port Huron Police Department does almost none of these things. They don't secure the scene, even though the police make note of how many people are wandering around in that outdoor lot in the middle of a college campus. They apparently didn't put up crime scene tape for at least 45 minutes. Here's an eyewitness we're going to call Alec, who says he was on the scene that day.
22:09
Speaker 9
People were just running in and out. I mean, they were just pretty much, you know, they would try and keep you back, especially away from the body.
22:21
Speaker 1
The police don't document enough. Instead of hundreds of pictures, the Port Huron Police Department apparently took around just 15 photos. And then there's what the police collected and what they failed to collect. When Scott falls and hits the pavement, his gym bag is right there. Here's Max again.
22:39
Speaker 7
I can still remember his gym bag. I think it was his gym bag. It was right by his car door.
22:46
Speaker 1
Why was Scott carrying his gym bag? It's not clear. He'd had gym class that morning, but he hadn't gone. He was an athlete. Maybe he was going to work out later. Who knows? There are a hundred reasons you could have a gym bag. But when a student is shot in a targeted hit in a school parking lot, wouldn't it be worthwhile to see if the gym bag he was holding could tell you something? The same goes for the textbooks on the hood of his car. But there is no record of the police testing any of it. Not the gym bag, not the books, not Scott's clothes. And Max's jacket, the one he used to try to stop the bleeding, the police don't even ask for it.
23:25
Speaker 7
And I always want to find an issue, but I don't think they took the jacket. You know, normally at a crime scene, you kind of take everything.
23:35
Speaker 1
So who did the police actually talk to? The records we have indicate that the answer is not enough people. Not the seven boys standing in the lot that morning whose names are right there in a police report. Not the people that others called in about. This person was there. This person might have seen something. Not the many SC4 students walking to class through that parking lot in the minutes before Scott was shot, any one of whom might have seen him pull in or noticed a stranger idling in a parked car. And the people that police did talk to felt like they were making it harder, not easier, for witnesses to recount their stories.
24:14
Speaker 7
A policeman came up to me and said, why do you have blood all over you? Almost like, you really think that I did this and I would stay here and wait around? You know, kind of thing.
24:24
Speaker 2
It was just kind of weird.
24:27
Speaker 1
Max thought the police would have more questions for him eventually. But they didn't seem very interested in what the last person to see Scott Macklem alive had to say.
24:35
Speaker 7
I got one phone call a week later. Other than that, it was radio silence. I kept waiting to get a phone call or a subpoena or something, but I never did.
24:46
Speaker 1
By the time the morning of November 5th is over and Scott Macklem is pronounced dead, the police have already lost the chance to gather almost all the physical evidence this case was ever going to produce. The kind of minutia that real cases get built on. The answers to questions that now can never be answered. That chance was gone. In the immediate wake of Scott's death, his parents, his fiancée Crystal, and Crystal's 16-year-old sister are at the hospital, along with Scott's boss. That's when Port Huron officer Jim Carmody and Sergeant John Bounds arrive to ask questions. This is the biggest turning point in the case, and yet nobody can really pin it down. Who first put Timogen's name in front of the police? The two officers, writing the same day about the same morning in the same emergency room, don't agree. Officer Carmody's report says that Crystal's sister came to him unprompted with the name of a man she knew as John Lamar, her sister's ex-boyfriend, who the family believed was responsible. But Sergeant Bowne's report says nothing about Crystal's sister. He credits Scott's boss, who he says told him Scott had been threatened three weeks earlier by John Lamar. Years later, Scott's boss recalled it differently. He said that he remembered Crystal giving the name to police, not him. And Crystal would give yet another account. In her telling, nobody in her family volunteered Timogen's name. An officer came to her, asking whether she'd had any former boyfriends. The police asked, so she answered. It's a small thing, you may think. But it's a harbinger of what's to come. Because how could this one moment produce so many conflicting stories? Who planted the idea in whose head? The murkiness of this moment is part of a pattern that shows up again and again through this case. The lack of clarity. The evasion. Shifting stories. However it happened, though, the name of a suspect was a big deal. Because the crime scene was a bungled mess, which meant there would be no physical evidence of who committed this murder. What the police will need to arrest Timogen, though, is a warrant. They need a picture of him, and they need someone, ideally more than one person, who can identify him from a lineup. They need eyewitnesses who plausibly saw someone who looks like Timogen near or leaving the scene of the crime. The police do find an eyewitness, a student named Rennie. He'd heard the shot, though at first, naturally, he thought it was a car backfiring. and he noticed a car driving away. Rennie gave police an actual description, the make and color of the car, the man behind the wheel, and even, he claimed, the license plate number. Okay, turns out the license plate doesn't match any car, but still, it's something. This would seem a promising lead, except in the midst of Scott's tragic death, this also turns into a comedy of errors.
28:10
Speaker 6
40 years?
28:13
Speaker 2
It'll be 40 years this year.
28:15
Speaker 6
Oh my gosh. Dr.
28:18
Speaker 1
Thomas Mooney is in his 80s now. He taught psychology at SC4 for decades. He was somewhat of a legend there. Generations of students rolled through his classroom. The morning of November 5th, 1986, when Dr. Mooney pulled into the lot for class, he noticed all of the commotion. Right in the middle of it was one of his former students, Officer Jim Carmody.
28:42
Speaker 6
Jim, what's going on? Well, there's been a shooting. For a fact, the guy who saw it is in your next class.
28:52
Speaker 1
Mooney says they talked for a second before he went and taught his class like normal. In that class was the promising eyewitness I was just telling you.
29:00
Speaker 6
About, Rennie. I was free after that and asked, would he like to come down to my office and we'll hypnotize him to focus on what he saw to strengthen that memory. So we took him down to the office. I think I taped it. Yes, yes. Dr.
29:22
Speaker 1
Mooney had taken a couple of classes on hypnosis with a former professor, but he hadn't actually hypnotized many people, barely any, in fact.
29:31
Speaker 6
Have I used it much? No, not really. Is it a real effective tool? It puts people in a altered state. Well, so do drugs.
29:44
Speaker 1
Mooney says he recorded the hypnosis and gave it to the police. But the tape is missing. What we have is a transcript. And in it, Mooney asks Rennie to go back through his day. Quote, kind of an out-of-the-body astral projection kind of thing, he tells him.
30:01
Speaker 6
He went into a good France. We took him back. He had parked in the same parking lot as I did and watched this car come up the drive. I stopped him and said, describe the front of the car. He described the front. Let the car come up a bit more. Take a look at the guy. Describe him better.
30:29
Speaker 1
While hypnotized, Rennie talks about the car he saw pulling out of the parking lot after the shooting. He says it's tannish, mink-colored. He describes it as a boxy hatchback. Mooney has been listening, but then his questioning becomes a little more... leading. Leading. Mooney says, what make of car is this?
30:51
Speaker 5
Ford?
30:52
Speaker 1
A Chevy? And Rennie replies, I think it's foreign. Mooney says, so it's not one of the U.S.
30:58
Speaker 7
Cars.
31:00
Speaker 1
Rennie reiterates, no, it's one of the ones that... And Mooney cuts him off. That's for sure? And then, a few lines later, Rennie has described the car's driver as a man in a ski mask. Hasn't mentioned facial hair at all. but with no prompting, Mooney says, quote, now he's got a beard, too? Rennie also talks about how Scott looked when he fell, even though he already admitted that he hadn't seen Scott fall. If the idea of hypnotizing a witness sounds strange to you, same. People are prone to the power of suggestion, and that is especially true when they're being or believe themselves to be under hypnosis. All these years later, Dr. Mooney bristles at the idea that the hypnotism was junk science. He remembers it differently, that he was merely a conduit, the facilitator of the truth. He says what he did was ethical.
32:03
Speaker 6
Well, come to find out there was contraview. You implanted false memories in this guy. What a crock of shit.
32:11
Speaker 1
Years later, an expert witness who reviewed the transcript... called this close to the worst hypnosis session he had ever seen. Quote, an egregious example of how not to use hypnosis. By midday of November 5th, 1986, the police have no physical evidence, one compromised witness, and the name of a suspect who lives across the state. It's not ideal, but for the lead investigator, Sergeant John Bounds. It's enough.
32:47
Speaker 4
I can just tell you that John, the best way to describe John was kind of rough around the collar.
32:56
Speaker 1
Herb Welzer is a former Port Huron police officer who has been investigating this case for 20 years. You met him last episode. He worked with John Bounds for decades. Herb is the kind of guy who sees the best in his fellow officers, sometimes maybe beyond reason. But even he has very few nice things to say about John Bounds.
33:18
Speaker 4
You know, I think he was a heavy drinker, chain smoker, really coarse language.
33:28
Speaker 1
Like Herb and many others in this story, John Bounds was a Port Huron area native. He had gone to Port Huron High School, had also attended SC4. He had black hair, a thick black mustache, and a taste for breaking the rules. In other words, John Bounds had a reputation, even as a student at SC4. Here's Dr.
33:50
Speaker 2
Mooney.
33:52
Speaker 6
Of all the.
33:52
Speaker 10
Courses I taught, 16,000 folks. John Bounds takes my basic psych, summertime, sits in the front row and gets out the current edition of Playboy and is reading through that.
34:08
Speaker 1
John Bounds is dead now. He's been dead for two decades. But his reputation lives on. He was a lawman who didn't really care about the law, who used his position to his benefit when he could, who was intimate with corruption and didn't like to follow the rules. John Bounds liked to have a good time. The eyewitness, Alec, actually knew him. Here he is talking with Herb.
34:33
Speaker 9
I mean, I can go on for years and talk about John Bounds. I mean, at the biker parties and everything else. Did John Bounds use drugs?
34:44
Speaker 2
Cocaine.
34:45
Speaker 4
Really?
34:46
Speaker 7
Yeah.
34:46
Speaker 9
Because he would get drunk all the time and they wanted, you know, and they, here's a, I'll pick me up.
34:58
Speaker 1
Four years before Scott Macklem's murder, the Port Huron Police Department fired John Bounds after state police caught him illegally gambling. He was terminated for misconduct and neglect of duty. But a few years later, He got his badge back. Almost the whole case against Timogen comes down to police reports. And almost every one of them was typed up and submitted by John Bounds. A police report can feel factual when you're holding one. It's official, it's dated, it's been sitting in a file for 40 years. Herb Welser has written plenty of police reports himself. But over the past 20 years... he's found himself in a new and kind of strange position as he attempts to meticulously double-check the police reports filed by John Bounds in this case. In my own efforts to trace back Bounds' paperwork in this case, I've come to an unsettling conclusion that a number of Bounds' reports can't be corroborated. He seems to have made things up out of whole cloth. For example, during the investigation, Bounds said, that just a few days before the murder, Timogen had been seen at a Halloween party in the Port Huron area. It was there, police hypothesized, that Timogen found out about Crystal and Scott's engagement, which drove him, they said, to murder. Herb Welzer has tried to track down the people that, according to Bound's reports, placed Timogen at the Halloween party, but none of them remember even talking to police.
36:38
Speaker 9
I have no idea what you're talking about.
36:41
Speaker 4
I've never was interviewed by a foreigner police officer.
36:44
Speaker 2
I have no idea what you're talking about.
36:47
Speaker 1
And it's not just the party. This kind of thing happens in other police reports in the case as well.
36:52
Speaker 4
I've had people say, I never said that. I don't remember being interviewed about a murder case. And you would think on a murder case, a young person being interviewed by a detective on a murder case, that they would remember that.
37:10
Speaker 1
Even another detective on this case, Harry Hudson, said that Bounds' police reports contained lies. Herb showed Harry a report with his name on it, describing interviews that he and Bounds supposedly did together. But Harry said they never happened. Sergeant John Bounds. This is the man Timogen finds himself on the phone with, who is in the midst of ransacking his home in the Upper Peninsula. It's eight days after Scott's murder, four days after Timogen has heard this rumor that he's wanted for killing his friend Tom.
37:46
Speaker 2
He said, Crystal said you killed her fiancé. And I had no idea who that was. And I said, who the hell is that? I said, why would I do that? And he said, you know, come on, Fred, you know why you did it.
37:56
Speaker 1
Tell me what's going through your head when they say, like, Crystal said.
38:00
Speaker 2
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. This whole time I thought Tom was dead. So there's like literally this relief that Tom's not dead. At the same time, I'm being wrongfully accused of the murder of somebody I've never met. I was flabbergasted. I really was. And are you, like, freaking out? I'm absolutely freaking out. So that's when I decided I'm going to call Crystal. So I got the phone book, and her mom and dad were in the phone book. And so I called that number.
38:23
Speaker 1
Timogen is a talker, as I told you at the beginning of this episode. This is what he does. He talks. He says he knew that the call was likely being traced, and he says it was the first time he'd spoken to Crystal since they'd broken up in June.
38:40
Speaker 2
I think I was kind of frantic, like, Crystal, why are you telling the police that I did this? I haven't seen you in months. And she admitted that. And I'm like, why do you think that I did this? Why would I do this? You know, I moved away. I never bothered you. I know you never saw me coming around or anything like that. And I never contacted you again. So why would you think that I did this? And she was trying to put it on the police. And she was implying the police had evidence that I did it. And I said, that's absolutely not true.
39:14
Speaker 1
Timidgin says he was on the phone, this payphone in a donut shop, for an hour or more with Crystal. When he finally hangs up, he looks outside and sees that the place is surrounded by cop cars. He says he walks out to a squadron of SWAT officers in body armor. If we try our hardest to understand the Port Huron Police Department perspective, if we squint a little, perhaps we can understand why they set their sights on Timogen. He had a criminal record. He lied about his name. He lied to women. Dated them cavalierly, mostly didn't treat them well. And he had a temper. People had seen glimpses of it. He'd been arrested for assault. And there was no question he had the capacity for violence. And, after all, it often is the boyfriend. Three women a day are killed by a current or former romantic partner. But it turns out this wasn't really about Temujin at all. It was about protecting reputations. John Bounds was a man who didn't take well to being held accountable, who wanted to shield himself from the consequences of his mistakes. And, as luck would have it, Scott Macklem's case was John Bounds' first time being lead investigator on a homicide. So he'd have to go after Timogen Kintsu. He was the only lead they had. Timogen is arrested outside of Flint. He's put in a police car and interviewed. In the years since, the tape of that interview, like the hypnotism tape, has gone missing. But the transcript survives. The officer is very clear. He has the right to remain silent. I bet you can guess at how Timogen responds to that. I know what I did, he is quoted in the transcript saying. I'll tell the truth. Hours later, Timogen stands in front of a judge and is arraigned for murder.
41:19
Speaker 2
I really didn't believe any of it was real. And I was like, well, they're going to figure out this is not me. They're going to do their police job. And, you know, I was sure they were going to figure out that I was innocent, that I didn't do this, and they're going to catch the real killer.
41:39
Speaker 1
Next time on The Backfire Effect.
41:45
Speaker 4
Can you imagine the pressure? The mayor of Croswell's son gets murdered in broad daylight. The pressure to get a conviction. I just felt that maybe this guy is actually telling the truth, and it's time to look into it.
42:01
Speaker 2
We're sitting at a table before one of the hearings, and he literally said to me, like, do you know where I can get some coke? And I was like, he's like, you must be somebody you can call or something. And I was like, what are you, nuts?
42:19
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 Bruguier, and Karen Shakerji. Additional thanks to Joy Marie Mann.
The Host
