Echoes in Battle Creek: The Crimes That Refuse to Stay Buried
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In February 1983, 17-year-old Patricia Rosansky left for school in Battle Creek—and never arrived.
Weeks passed before anyone found her. She would not be the first, nor the last, of several young women savagely killed in the adjoining area.
On April 6, her body surfaced in a shallow ravine at an illegal dump site near the Kalamazoo River. Her body was found lodged next to a discarded chimney boot with a refrigerator door over her. Someone had tried to hide her, as if the earth itself might erase what had been done.
Patricia had moved to Battle Creek in 1982 from Collingswood, NJ, with her brother and sister-in-law. Her mother, Catherine, died in 1977.
Her autopsy revealed she died from blows to her head with a club-like object. She had defensive injuries on the back of her hands, and she had bruises on the back of her legs, buttocks, and neck. Her body was naked from the waist down, with the panties by her ankles. “There was evidence of forced anal intercourse.” A disturbing detail, pieces of a tree limb had been forced into her throat.
But Rosansky wasn’t the only one.
Less than a month earlier, on March 13, another 17-year-old—Karry Lynn Evans—vanished from nearby Bellevue, where she lived with her paternal grandparents. This site was just a few miles away from where Rosansky would be found. Her body was discovered on May 10, also concealed in a remote, wooded area by mushroom hunters. She was strangled.
Two girls. Same age. Same region. One month apart.
Both dead.
The pattern unsettled investigators—and terrified the community.
Rumors spread quickly. Some whispered about cult activity along the Kalamazoo River, suggesting something darker than a lone killer. Prosecutors publicly dismissed the theory but quietly pursued it. They claimed to have a suspect but refused to release a name.
One of the suspects in the Rosansky murder was a self-proclaimed satanist who said he practiced “black mass” in the Kalamazoo area.
Evans had written to friends about satanic beliefs and had been seen in a red jacket printed with “666.”
Less than a year before Rosanky and Evans were killed, Margaret “Maggie” Hume, 20, was found dead in an apartment she shared with a friend. Police discovered her body inside a walk-in closet covered with a pile of clothes and a blanket. The cause of death was strangulation, and she had been raped.
There was no sign of a struggle; she was not bruised, nor was the apartment ransacked.
She was the daughter of St. Philip Catholic Central High School’s athletic director and worked as a medical technician. She was known as a happy person with no known enemies.
For more than a year, all the cases lingered in uncertainty.
Then, in November 1984, tips began pointing toward Thomas David Cress for Rosansky’s murder.
Cress lived near her and had spoken to her. John Moore testified he lived with Cress and heard him state in February, 1983, after coming home in the evening, that “he felt a little better because he went and knocked off a piece.” Cress had also said he liked Rosansky.
Moore testified that in July 1983, Cress had taken him, his brother Walter, and Cindy Lesly to a wooded area, pointing out where Rosansky’s body would later be found. Cindy Lesly would eventually go to the police with this information and received a $ 5,000 reward for information on the crime.
Candy Moore testified that Cress frequented her house almost every day during the spring of 1983, and told her on two different occasions that “he had killed a girl named Patty and put her in a ditch.”
Emery DeBruine testified in May 1983 that he saw Cress in a bar, and he told him he had raped a girl because she refused to have sex with him, and that it was a perfect crime, and no one would find out about it.
Walter Moore, during confession of his own crimes to the police, told them that Cress said he had picked up Rosansky, and they had smoked marijuana. When she refused to have sex with him, he raped her, killed her, and dumped the body in a wooded area.
Perhaps most chilling—he allegedly asked multiple people whether they had ever had sex with a corpse.
Shirley House, landlady for the Moores, overheard Cress say, “I cannot believe that I got so hard up I had to kill the bitch for a piece of ass.”
The jury found Cress guilty of first-degree felony murder.
Cress denied every allegation. Still, he admitted one crucial detail: he had dumped trash at the exact site where her body was found.
Witness testimony deepened the suspicion.
It was enough.
A jury convicted Cress of first-degree felony murder.
But the story didn’t end there.
Years later, another name surfaced: Michael Ronning.
In the mid-1990s, Ronning—already imprisoned—confessed to multiple murders in Michigan, including Rosansky’s. He provided videotaped statements, passed a polygraph, and even signed an affidavit claiming sole responsibility.
At first glance, it seemed like a breakthrough.
Ronning also confessed to killing Maggie Hume. He lived below her at the time she was murdered. He also indicated he killed Karry Evans.
Of all his confessions, the one to Maggie Hume was the most impressive. He drew a map of her bedroom and recalled how her dresser was angled in a corner. He described the grassy area near the apartment complex where he tossed her billfold after the crime, a detail that had never been made public.
But the details didn’t hold for other murder sites.
Ronning failed to locate the Rosansky crime scene when taken there. He described injuries that didn’t match the autopsy. He claimed methods of killing that forensic evidence contradicted. Witnesses later testified that he admitted fabricating the confession—allegedly to secure a prison transfer closer to his family in Michigan.
Eventually, the Calhoun County Prosecutor’s office questioned a former legal secretary for the attorneys who represented Ronning, since they believed that she supplied him with information about the cases.
It was noted that he was careful about admission of guilt in states with active death penalties.
The murder of Annette Melia, a 20-year-old woman, occurred in Arlington, Texas, in September 1982, and her remains were found a few hundred yards from those of another victim, Melissa Jackson, who disappeared in August 1983.
He admitted to committing seven murders, including Melia’s, and offered to help solve the case if the death penalty were waived for him. However, no formal charges were ever brought against Ronning in Texas, and investigators at the time cited only circumstantial evidence and the lack of DNA due to skeletal remains.
Investigators began to question everything.
In 2003, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Ronning’s confession lacked credibility and contained significant errors.
The case against Cress, already fragile in the eyes of some, grew even more uncertain.
Then, in 2010, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm commuted Cress’ life sentence. Granholm, a Democrat, ended her term as governor several days later.
Cress walked free.
No one else was charged.
Five years later, Cress’ son, Thomas David Cress Jr., was arrested and sent to prison for a crime spree. He was found guilty of breaking and entering, home invasion, receiving and concealing guns, and absconding/forfeting bond. All of this was compounded since he was known as a habitual offender.
But Rosansky and Evans were not the first shadows to fall over Battle Creek, and Ronning
More than a decade earlier, in November 1969, 14-year-old Diana Lynn Black disappeared while walking to school. She was found in a soggy field, in sight of Lakeview High School, by a boy who took the same route every day on his way to school. She had been missing for a week. The cause of death was determined to be strangulation. A stocking was tied around her neck.
Her belongings lay nearby.
The newspapers noted that authorities in both Battle Creek and Washtenaw County said they saw no connection between Black’s murder and the slaying of seven young women in the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area during two years. At least five, if not six, of the girls were either strangled or slashed about the throat.
Investigators chased leads, but none led to an arrest.
One suspect, Kenneth Guy Shilts, drew attention after his arrest in Alabama.
In 1956, Shilts was arrested for assault and battery after he attempted to pull a young girl off a bus bench in San Bernardino, California. In 1960, he was charged with molesting two girls, 7 and 9, while they were visiting Capitola, where he lived. By this time, he was already a convicted sex offender.
In February 1970, he was arrested in Alabama on a charge of child molesting. A notebook in his possession had a list of 426 little girls in 13 states. The Calhoun County prosecutor attempted to learn if there was any connection between Diana and Shilts.
In 1969, he lived at 785 E. Michigan Avenue, but he soon left and would later be arrested in Dothan, Alabama, for trying to molest a girl in a playground. Shilts had served in the Korean War as an Army private. He was a drifter who worked odd jobs throughout the South, even though he was a native of Battle Creek.
Shilts was also investigated in the disappearance of Peggy Rahn, 9, and her friend Wendy Stephenson, 8, who disappeared from Pompano Beach, Florida, in December, 1969. Shilts had an entry in his notebook referencing Wendy and Peggy, Pompano Beach.
Shilts had his own tragic family past. His father, Guy Shilts, married Edna Crego in 1922. In the 1930 census, she was living with her husband and children, but a year later, in 1931, she had been adjudged insane. In 1943, when Guy Shilts sued for divorce, she was an inmate at the Kalamazoo state hospital. They divorced in 1944, and he married Clara Glenn. Edna Shilts died in 1990, and her son Kenneth followed her to the grave a year later. Was her legacy a streak of insanity reserved just for him?
Ironically, his brother Robert served as a deputy for the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Department for 36 years.
Despite his disturbing history, police eventually ruled Shilts out in Black’s murder.
In 2008, robbery convict Mark Allan Schmid confessed to the murder of Karry Lynn Evans. Police believed he was trying to receive additional years to his sentence, since minutes before he robbed a bank, he visited the police station complaining that he was having trouble acclimating to society. He had spent 15 years behind bars and was free for only 8 months. He had committed the latest robbery in a wheelchair since he suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis.
Authorities believed his confession, like others, was not true.
The trail went cold.
Years passed. Rewards were offered. Tips came and went. Nothing stuck.
Other names surfaced over time—including Gerard Schaefer, who later claimed responsibility for unrelated murders—but no definitive answers emerged. He was murdered in prison in 1995.
The victims remained.
The truth did not.
As of 2026, the murders of Patricia Rosansky, Karry Evans, Diana Black, Maggie Hume and others connected by proximity and fear remain, in many ways, unresolved.
In Battle Creek, the past never fully settled.
Some cases fade.
Others linger—quietly, persistently—like something waiting to be uncovered.