By: Ryan M. Place

Papa Hulet, as he is affectionately called by friends and family, has had a remarkable career investigating suspicious deaths of all types. Homicides, suicides, autoerotic asphyxiation, gang victims, Mafia killings, blunt force trauma, stabbings, thermal burns, meth lab explosions, scraping brain matter off walls with putty knives, etc, you name it, Marc Hulet has handled it. “Decomp fluid, worst smell in the world. It’s the stickiest oiliest shit imaginable”, he says. “I’ve also fallen into the Detroit River while getting a body out of the water. It’s not very pleasant to surface gasping for air next to bobbing corpses.”

Born in 1951 in Pontiac, Hulet attended Stevenson Livonia High School before attending Central Michigan University 1969-1973. Hulet was a Sigma Tau Gamma, graduated with a B.S. in Public Health Education and stayed inside the jock dorm Barnard Hall, “CMU was a great baseball school. Serial killer John Norman Collins stayed inside Barnard Hall when he went to CMU back in ’66. He then went to EMU and pledged Theta Chi and the saying at the time when I was in school was ‘Be a Thete and kill your date’ because of Collins.”

The shift into morgue work was an interesting zigzag, “Like many people these days, I couldn’t find work with my degree when I graduated. I was working as a dreaded telephone bill collector when I saw a positing at the County Building for an Autopsy Tech. I applied, got the job and started at the Detroit Morgue in August 1985 and by seniority became an Investigator in 1989. I worked for the morgue for 28 years and every single day was different and interesting.”

Located at 1300 East Warren Avenue in Detroit, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, aka: the Detroit Morgue, has roughly 50 employees, 9 investigators and handles approximately 14,000 reportable cases of unnatural death per ye  ar. “We bring in a third of those cases, we average 10-14 bodies/day and out of that we autopsy 95%. Yes, the bulk of our cases are from Detroit. 2-3 homicides, 2-3 drug related, usually heroin or prescription pills.”

Wayne County, Michigan’s most populated county, has some 2 million people spread throughout 42 cities and in 2012, the city of Detroit alone officially registered 411 homicides. “We got our work cut out for us. In 2008, the Detroit Police Crime Lab shut down. Then in 2009, we had almost 70 unclaimed bodies stacked in our morgue freezers.” Research shows that unclaimed bodies and any stray body parts from Wayne County are buried at Knollwood Cemetery on Ridge and Saltz in Plymouth.

The original Detroit Morgue was in the basement of old city hall from 1871-1926 before it moved to the beautiful Egyptian-style building that used to be at 400 East Lafayette @ Brush. After 69 years at that location, the current Detroit Morgue opened in 1995 at 1300 East Warren @ Russell Street. “We have 60 body racks. The regular holding cooler is 39deg for fresh bodies. Then we have a freezer cooler for long-termers. It’s got a big latch inside just in case you get trapped in there like somebody did one time.”

The morgue also features a ‘Museum Hallway’, collection of death-related artifacts started by forensic pathologist Werner Spitz. “Spitz was legendary. He was the Chief here when I started. He’s worked on big cases like OJ Simpson, JFK, Casey Anthony, Phil Spector, etc.” Werner Spitz worked 1972-1988 for Wayne County and 1972-2004 for Macomb as forensic pathologist. He’s performed over 50,000 autopsies and his son Daniel Spitz in now Chief Pathologist at Macomb County Morgue.

Several high-profile cases stand out in Hulet’s mind:

Romulus, Michigan (August 1987)

“Northwest Flight 255 crashes at Wick and Middlebelt due to pilot error, didn’t set wing flaps properly. Major plane crash out at Metro. 156 passengers and 1 motorist were killed. 1500lbs of body parts were unidentifiable, you know, can you put humpty back together again? I was working that night, driving westbound down I-94 at Southfield heading to another scene, dark rainy night, saw a yellow glow in the sky. Quickly thereafter I got the call. Radio dispatch Wayne County Sheriff said ‘accident, fire, aircraft’. Little 4yr old Cecelia Cichan was the only survivor, we found her strapped to a seat in the wreckage.”

Detroit (1980’s)

“Butch Jones had a gang called Y.B.I. (Young Boys Incorporated) in the Monterey-Dexter cipher and they would use little kids to sell drugs, mostly heroin. YBI were the main pushers of narcotics in Detroit in the 1980’s and racked up triple digit body counts. The 1980’s in general was a period when we had the most homicide-related deaths for Detroit.”

Southeast Michigan (1990-1998)

“Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted over 100 people with mercy-based suicide. He gave people with documented terminal illness the means to self-euthanize with sodium pentothal inside his van after they underwent thorough and extensive counseling. We dealt with several cases in Wayne County over the years.”

Grosse Ile, MI (2001)

“Heinz Prechter, brilliant German guy who invented the sun roof in cars, hung himself at his affluent 5-acre compound on the island-city of Grosse Ile downriver. Recall he was supposedly suffering from bipolar depression and sadly took his own life.”

Detroit (2000)

“Ex-sailor John Eric Armstrong kills 5 prostitutes (youngest 16) and leaves them beneath the John Kronk overpass on an elevated train track. Claimed he killed women at each port he disembarked at. We found one girl next to the tracks, then from that vantage could see another body down below, then from that vantage down below, we saw another body in the bushes, etc. All victims were one week apart. Girls were strangled and beaten to death.”

WTC, Manhattan, NYC (September 11th, 2001)

“I’m a member of DMORT, it’s a national federal organization under FEMA created in 1992 and we’re called in to help recover and identify bodies in mass fatality situations. 9/11 was one of those tragedies. Plane crashes into WTC, so many dead, too many to handle. DMORT, we get called in as helper-assistants. I was there for weeks working the Morgue at Ground Zero in a tent city on 30th Street, east of 1st Avenue with 180 DMORT volunteers from around the country. We worked with about 300 law enforcement and NY Port Authority people. Bodies crushed, burned, stray heads, hands, we spent most of the time trying to identify loose body parts and saluting American flag-draped bodybags that were loaded into fleets of refrigerated trucks and taken to the NYC MedEx Office. It was a grim assembly line of body bags. By May 2002, the total inventory was over 20,000 body parts and 2,700 bodies.”

Canton, Michigan (2007)

“17yr old PCEP student Jean-Pierre Orlewicz and his buddy Alex decapitated their drug dealer at JP’s grandparents house on a blue tarp in the garage at 8234 Holly Dr, Canton. The head, featuring visible hack saw marks, was found in the Dearborn Heights section of Hines Park near Hines Drive and Woodbine. My scene was the torso in Northville. We found it decapitated and sporting numerous stab wounds, wrapped in a blue tarp, it had been set on fire and was covered in sticky blueness. The burned out truck was found behind the Meijer on Warren and Newburgh in Westland. This case was labeled ‘The Thrill Kill Murders’.”

Detroit (2007)

“Shelly Andre Brooks was a serial killer who was leaving naked crackwhores spread eagle inside abandoned houses after he bludgeoned them to death on Detroit’s Eastside. He had been doing it for years and we finally caught him in 07’. I handled several of his victim’s cases. It was terrifying.”

Hulet also mentions two locally infamous Detroit cases that he was aware of but didn’t work on:

Detroit (July 14th, 1982)

Woodbine and 7 Mile = “This Detroit biker Robert Beckowitz is shot in the head and stabbed 84 times at his house (19326 Woodbine, Detroit) by his girlfriend and her secret skinhead boyfriend. The couple then had a 3-day naked orgy with the corpse while mutilating and dismembering it and documenting everything with Polaroid pictures of them doing it. When the drugs ran out, the girlfriend confessed.”

Detroit (1985) Cass Corridor

“Dr. Alan Canty was the sugar daddy of heroin addict prostitute Dawn Spens. Dawn had a pimp named ‘Lucky’ in Detroit’s then-wicked drug infested Cass Corridor along Cass Avenue. Well, they beat the psychologist Canty to death with a baseball bat, dismembered him, got high and went joyriding down I-75, throwing chunks of him out the window on their way up North. They buried the head behind a cabin near Petoskey.”

Finally, after dealing with death for three decades, Hulet is now ready to relax, “I’m going to sit back, watch sports, spend time with my wife and support my kids in everything they do and enjoy retirement.” Do it to it, Papa Hulet! You’ve earned it.