MONROE, Mich. — The boxload of typewritten notes, yellowed newspaper clippings, audio cassettes and videotapes might well have been museum pieces for the group of Gen Z students visiting the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. “I had to show them how to work the VCR; that’s how old I am,” quipped Detective Joshua Motylinski, 38.
Though weaned on Google, Bluetooth, and smartphones, the young men and women—five University of Michigan-Dearborn students—managed to figure it out.
And from the technology of yesteryear, a grisly story emerged: the 1990 double murder of a woman and her adult son in Whiteford Township near the Michigan-Ohio line. It was an unfinished story whose ending the five students longed to help write. And they’re getting that chance, thanks to an innovative program that goes beyond true crime to make police work real.
The UM-Dearborn Cold Case Partnership with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office gives a select group of criminology and criminal justice majors a chance to crack unsolved murder cases, some dating back nearly 60 years.
For the Fall 2024 class—unlocking the Whiteford Township homicides—the course materials were all in that cardboard box. The cache of newspaper articles, interview notes, and audio and video recordings were stored years before these students were born.
“Detective Motylinski handed us the box of evidence, and we took it from there,” fourth-year criminal justice major Lauren Fossano said.
The assignment was clear: “Our role is to develop a deep understanding of case details by piecing together vital evidence,” Fossano said. Most Thursdays, she and her classmates trek the 35 miles to Monroe from a campus near Fair Lane, the landmark estate of Henry Ford. Ford Motor Co. headquarters is just a five-minute drive.
A relatively small sheriff’s office serves Monroe County, home to 155,000 residents and far enough from Detroit to fend off suburban sprawl. The 72-person department has just three detectives, and the daily tally of misdemeanors and felonies leaves them little time to circle back to the 17 unsolved murders that occurred in the county between 1967 and 2006.
Enter students from the criminal justice programs at UM-Dearborn and the University of Toledo, in a parallel partnership with the office of Sheriff Troy Goodnough. Typically, UM-Dearborn and University of Toledo interns work on the same case each semester—separately, but simultaneously.
“Our ultimate goal is to close these cases and provide closure to the families of the victims,” Motylinski said. “The Dearborn and Toledo students give us a fresh set of eyes and fresh perspectives.”
The Cold Case Partnership is a two-way street.
“Academia has changed,” said Amny Shuraydi, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice who serves as co-instructor for the course. “Many classes today are online, making it difficult to schedule field trips. We sometimes get students off campus, but it’s usually a one-off experience. And they generally don’t receive a lot of hands-on learning in class. In the classroom they’re taught theories and what’s done in the field during an investigation. But they really don’t know the extent of investigations until they experience it in real time. Reviewing these cases gives the students an opportunity to access police work firsthand—in ways that aren’t typically available to the general public. It isn’t voyeurism but, rather, a chance to contribute and weigh in on the investigation.”
Greg Osowski, a retired Detroit homicide detective, is Shuraydi’s co-instructor. Wisecracking and well-versed in the ways of the street and the criminal mind, the 25-year law enforcement veteran is a cop straight from Central Casting. “I’m Holmes, she’s Watson,” is the way he describes teaching in tandem with Shuraydi.
Osowski joined the UM-Dearborn faculty 12 years ago, a coda to his first post-retirement position as director of the criminal justice program at Henry Ford Community College.
The Partnership is unlike anything Osowski experienced while pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in criminal science from, respectively, Wayne State University and the University of Detroit Mercy.
“We didn’t have something called ‘hands-on experience’ or internships back in those days. Just academics and a few guest speakers,” he said. “I would have been far better focused had I been given this kind of knowledge prior to becoming a police officer.”
Osowski, 77, tends to wonder aloud about retiring for good. The notion doesn’t last long. “These kids energize me,” he said. “They keep me active. They keep me alive.”
Osowski and Shuraydi bring complementary viewpoints to the course—a tasty double dip for the students.
“One worked as a police officer and the other one didn’t, so we get two different views,” Fossano said. “Amny looks at things from the clinical side and Greg from the perspective of law enforcement. We kind of tie everything together. Pretty cool.”
Fossano was leaning toward a career in medicine until a high school criminal justice course pushed her in a new direction.
“I still loved the idea of going into the medical field, but had a shift of heart because I decided criminal justice is for me,” Fossano said.
The change of heart didn’t lessen her desire to dedicate her life’s work to improving the lives of others. Two options were on the table as she entered her final year at UM-Dearborn: A position in parole or probation that would allow her to help ex-offenders transition to purposeful lives, or becoming a victims’ advocate.
“I have a strong pull toward working with both ex-offenders and victims because I believe both need to be heard in different ways,” Fossano said.
On an early-October Thursday, as on most Thursdays, Fossano and her classmates gathered around a conference table to review the evidence in the 1990 killings. Osowski, Shuraydi, and Motylinski joined them.
Though not yet hardened investigators, the students no longer flinched at the brutal details of the victims’ final moments. They’d learned of the causes of death from published reports: The killer slashed the throat of the 55-year-old woman and took the life of her 22-year-old son with a 20-gauge shotgun blast to the face. Autopsies showed that both had been assaulted with the butt of a gun while alive.
The crime’s savagery pointed to an individual who knew the victims. Interviews with loved ones, friends, neighbors, and co-workers suggested a possible link to drugs. Because it was an unsolved crime, huge gaps in the narrative remained.
Osowski, not for the first or last time, reminded the group: “Follow the threads wherever they take you. And remember, never eliminate anything completely.”
‘I was a nosy kid’
Lindsay Bleau, a UM-Dearborn graduate now pursuing a master’s degree in the university’s criminal justice program, was part of a student team that examined a different cold case the previous spring—one from 1967. She’s leaning toward working in parole and probation, saying she was destined for a career in criminal justice.
“I was a nosy kid growing up, the kind of kid who wanted to know the reason a strange car was parked on my street. Whenever anything out of the ordinary happened in my neighborhood, people would say, ‘Go ask Lindsay. She’ll know what’s going on.’”
Her inquisitive nature resurfaced in the cold case review when she spied similarities between the 1967 and 1990 investigations.
“I don’t think there was police error in either case,” she said. “But the transcripts do raise questions about why they sometimes didn’t pursue certain angles.”
Bleau and her classmates were reminded that technology common in crime-solving today was nascent, perhaps even nonexistent, when investigators worked the case 34 years ago.
“They didn’t have the foresight to know we’d have the technology such as DNA testing years later,” Shuraydi said. “Policing and investigations have come a long way, partly because of forensics and partly because of progress in every profession.”
“Things were a lot different,” agreed graduate student Lily Morris. A few moments later, Morris’ eyes brightened when Motylinski hinted that a DNA match might be found that could clarify the involvement of a person of interest in their case.
”Exactly what you hoped for,” Osowski said, “a dumpster dive.”
“I do love trash,” Morris admitted.
Morris, a California native, took a circuitous route to UM-Dearborn. She earned a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, then worked as an addiction counselor in the Detroit area, aiding offenders in an alternative sentencing program.
The work piqued her interest in learning more about criminal justice.
“I still want to go into forensic psychology,” Morris said. “But I kind of stumbled on this master’s program and figured I should probably understand how the system works before I go into the field. So here I am.”
She tempers her enthusiasm for the whodunit side of the project with empathy for the lives cut short in 1990.
“To me, a big part of this is not just trying to solve a crime but to honor the victims and their family and treat them with the respect they deserve,” she said.
Caught up in the sleuthing, the students openly yearned to conduct follow-up interviews that might move the case forward—a wish their mentors made clear would never be granted.
“I appreciate their excitement and totally get it,” Motylinski said. “This is real-life stuff, and they take a lot of pride in what they’re doing. But it’s still a police matter and, you know, I (as a sworn law officer) need to handle certain things”—meaning, matters subject to scrutiny by a judge or lawyers in the case.
Osowski expanded on the point. “Evidence brought before a court of law has to pass the litmus test to determine relevancy and whether it was legally collected. A case can be thrown out of court if those steps aren’t taken, and that’s not a chance worth taking. They’re frustrated that they can’t grab hold of something and run with it. I tell them, ‘Relax. A murder that hasn’t been solved in 34 years isn’t going to be solved in two days.’”
Coming from Osowski, an old-school cop never hesitant to share war stories, that message is likely to resonate. The students consider him a seasoned sage.
“He helps us far more than he knows by asking questions that get us thinking about the case in different ways,” Gulraiz Virk said. “He doesn’t take over, but he gives us a little push and trusts us to take it from there.”
Virk, a fourth-year student, plans to join the Michigan State Police when he graduates in June. “When I apply, they’ll see I have experience in the field, that I’m not completely new to this kind of work,” he said.
Born in Pakistan, Virk was 6 months old when his family migrated to the Detroit area. His father’s TV-viewing habits planted the seed that brought him to UM-Dearborn and, one day, a Michigan State Police post.
“My dad would come home from work and turn on shows like Criminal Minds and Blue Bloods,” Virk recalled. “He wasn’t a police officer, but he liked that kind of program. I’d watch with him, and before long I began thinking, ‘Oh, that job would be really interesting; I’d like to do that.’”
It didn’t take long, though, for Virk and his classmates to learn the difference between police dramas and actual policing. True crime podcasts, Dateline docudrama, and small-screen cop shows unfold at warp speed when compared with the pace of a real-life investigation.
“On Criminal Minds they create a profile, investigate and—boom!—have a suspect in custody in an hour,” Virk said. In the real world, he and his classmates spent the better part of two days reviewing a 4-inch binder of notes—a binder they would return to countless times throughout the semester.
“It takes far more time to wrap your head around a case than what you see on reality crime TV or Law & Order,” Fossano said. “But it’s helpful to get perspective on what it’s like when the pieces of the puzzle don’t come together right away and how to take a couple steps back to see how they fit.”
Added Motylinski: “This gives them a dose of reality. Cops on TV shows never get called out in the middle of the night or have something come up at the last minute that causes them to miss a family event. And we take our time at murder scenes because we want to sure we get it right.”
And of course, getting it right has been the ultimate goal of the Cold Case Partnership since it launched, with little fanfare, in 2023. It grew from a friendship between Sheriff Goodnough and Donald Shelton, a former state circuit court judge who headed the UM-Dearborn criminal justice program in retirement. (Shelton has since retired from that position as well.)
Goodnough calls the relationship with UM-Dearborn “a win-win from our perspective.” Shuraydi concurs.
Despite its low-key rollout, word of the Cold Case Partnership has spread quickly, sparking a huge jump in applications. This fall, more than a dozen students applied for the five investigative slots.
“We prioritize people who are closer to graduation,” Shuraydi said, “but we encourage those who apply early not to give up on a chance to join us down the line. GPA is important, but it’s not the only factor. The key is determining how a student will benefit from the experience based on career goals and, in that context, what they will bring to the table. Reliability and a willingness to drive to Monroe once a week is also important.”
So far, participating students have clearly been motivated. “They’re pretty self-sufficient once they get into it,” Motylinski said. “They don’t want me looking over their shoulders or babysitting them. It’s almost like, ‘Uh, you can leave us alone Detective Motylinski. We’ve got work to do.’ They’ll come back with questions or to bounce possible solutions or ideas off me. But once they get into the rhythm, they notice how this is different from their normal classes.”
Easing the monotony of reading and rereading interview transcripts, Motylinski leads visits to crime scenes (“dump sites” in Osowski’s parlance), tours of the county jail, and tutorials on the department’s state-of-the-art mobile crime lab.
But at no point does anyone lose sight of the objective: accountability for whoever killed two people.
Motylinski, Shuraydi, and Osowski counseled patience, noting that a 34-year-old homicide won’t be the top priority should the investigation warrant DNA testing by a forensics lab.
As the semester progressed, the students turned their attention to summing up their findings in a presentation to sheriff’s personnel and representatives of the county prosecutor.
No matter the outcome of the case, Fossano will long cherish her opportunity to investigate an actual crime while still an undergraduate.
“You just don’t learn things like we’ve learned in a classroom setting,” she said. “Hearing about a case is one thing. But reading the case notes, listening to the tapes, and working with Detective Motylinski made us see law enforcement through a different lens. He gave us a bag of tools we can apply to our jobs after graduation. What we learned in Monroe County, we will use in real life.”
