Alice kalom

June 7, 1969

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The Depot House was the place young people in Ann Arbor flocked to on Saturday nights to let loose and dance. Nobody saw Alice Kalom, arrive at the converted railroad station to attend a local musician’s birthday party. She had, understandably, blended into the crowd of 200 other people who had shown up that night.

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The witnesses at the party were unreliable. Some people claimed to have seen her dancing with a long-haired man.   For some reason, there was little known about Alice’s last hours of her life.

The last person to see her was a girl named Gloria Patterson. Gloria told the police that she saw Alice outside of the Depot House twice that night. The first time, she said she remembered seeing Alice making out with a guy who was inching his hand up her white skirt. The second time, she remembered seeing a man coax her into a red Volkswagen. The police could do very little with this information. The vehicle description did not match the vehicles in the previous cases. They didn’t even know if the girl Gloria had seen was actually Alice.

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June 9, 1969

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After she left the party, nobody saw Alice get shot in the head—the bullet lodging into her spine. Nobody knows if it was the first or second gunshot she tried to block with her right hand that took off her thumb. They didn’t see her murderer mercilessly slash her throat eleven times, and stab her twice in the chest--puncturing her heart. Any one of those wounds would have killed her, but the presence of them all was clear overkill.

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Alice’s body was found by three boys out on an errand to cut lilacs for a local florist. Her clothes were found scattered around her body. Her rainbow striped raincoat was one of the only things left on her. The rest of her clothes had been cut up the middle, except her white skirt, which laid beside her. There, on Alice Kalom’s skirt, was the bloody outline of a boot.

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Alice hadn't been killed where the boys found her body. Investigators could tell by examining the absence of blood pools underneath her corpse. The killer’s ability to carelessly dump the women’s bodies into ravines and brush piles after murdering them, clearly displays the lack of empathy he had toward his victims. The unspeakable cruelty these women faced, even in death, sent shockwaves through the community. Both U-M and EMU initiated an escort service on their campuses—they sought male volunteers to walk young women home at night.

 

Clearly, they had no inkling that the killer could be among them.

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