June in northern Michigan is a time that residents look forward to all year. The harsh days of winter have gone, the mud and rain of spring are mostly behind us, and summer has reared her beautiful face.

For fifteen-year-old, Melissa Simmons the summer of 1993 was full of promise. She’d just finished her freshman year at Mason County Central High School and started a new summer job at the Blue Lake Resort.

Wednesday June 23rd had been warm and sunny reaching in the upwards of eighty degrees during the day. The warmth lingered that evening with temperatures hovering in the 60s. Melissa, Missy to her family and friends, left her parents’ home to walk to a friends a few blocks away.

More than a week later, Melissa decomposing body would be found floating in the Pere Marquette River.

Just three days after the discovery of her body, more than 50,000 people would flood into Ludington Michigan, just miles from Melissa’s home to watch the 4th of July parade and evening fireworks.

This month marks 27 years since the unsolved murder of Melissa Simmons.

Find show notes and complete sources at https://bitterendingspod.com/podcast/melissasimmons

This is dark stuff, the story of a young, single mother, 31-year-old Linda Patterson Slatten, who was brutally raped and murdered on September 4th, 1981.  Her life was taken in the dark, early morning hours in Lakeland, Florian as she slept in her own bedroom, that seemingly most safe of places. There is a lifetime of pain that exists between that long-ago night and the one that would come later, that would bring with it a name for that faceless darkness who stole into a little family’s home and destroyed three lives, one with murder, and two with the aftermath. 

The light in the midst of all this darkness is that justice comes for those that hurt others, sometimes it takes decades, in Linda’s case it took 38 years, but come it did.

For show notes, please visit https://bitterendingspod.com/podcast/lindaslaten

It was a warm March evening in Cocoa Beach, Florida on March 20th, 1994. Twenty-one-year-old Amy Gellert drove home from church unaware that a masked intruder had broken into her family’s home. As she pulled into the driveway, the intruder viciously attacked Amy’s mother and stepfather with a dagger before fleeing the house where he encountered Amy in the driveway. He slashed and stabbed Amy before disappearing into the night.

  Bleeding and mortally wounded, Amy stumbled across the street into the parking lot of an apartment building where she died just minutes later.

For complete show notes and resources: https://bitterendingspod.com/podcast/amygellert

Eighteen -year-old Elaine Nix was murdered in Gainesville, Georgia in 1999. Her murder has gone unsolved for more than twenty years. 

For complete show notes and resources please visit: https://bitterendingspod.com/podcast/elainenix

This is Part Two of the Michigan Murders - for the first half of the series, listen to Episode 2 of the Bitter Endings Podcast. 

Eighteen-year-old Karen Sue Beineman's murder would be the one that finally blew the case of the Michigan Murders wide open. 

For complete show notes and resources visit my website at 

https://bitterendingspod.com/podcast/michiganmurders2

The murders started on a hot July afternoon in southeast Michigan in 1967. It was a time of freedom and a place of freedom near the campus of Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Nineteen-year-old Mary Teresa Fleszar, a student at EMU, decided to take a walk. It was a warm summer evening in July.

Mary bid farewell to her roommate and strolled off down the street.

Twenty-eight days later, Mary’s heavily decomposed and mutilated body would be discovered near an abandoned farmhouse in Superior Township just north of Ypsilanti.

Mary would mark the beginning of a two-year killing spree that would leave more than six young women savagely murdered, their families lives forever altered, and a town with a black shadow that would not lift for many years if it ever did at all.

For the complete show notes and resources for this episode, please visit my website at https://bitterendingspod.com/podcast/michiganmurders1

Her body was found March 21st, 1969, in a cemetery west of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sprawled on a stranger’s grave, shot twice in the head with a garrote wrapped around her neck, twenty-three-year-old Jane Mixer’s promising life had come to a bitter end.

Visit BitterEndingsPod.com for show resources and full transcript.

Welcome to Bitter Endings, a true crime podcast.  In this podcast, I will cover both solved and unsolved cases of murders. 

You can find me at www.bitterendingspod.com