Detectives interview murderer before his death, looking into unsolved slayings
Authorities in western Michigan are investigating missing persons cases and unsolved murders after interviewing a convicted murderer and long-haul truck driver with terminal cancer who died last week in a prison hospital.
Kent County sheriff's detectives interviewed Garry Artman three times before his death Thursday at a state Corrections health facility in Jackson, Michigan.
Kent County Lt. Eric Brunner said detectives have “gathered information” from their interviews with Artman and are working with other law enforcement agencies to “connect the dots on missing pieces or homicide cases that are still open.”
Brunner would not say which unsolved cases are being investigated or how many cases are being investigated, although police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have linked Artman to the disappearance of a woman nearly three decades ago.
“Interviews with Artman provided sufficient information to reasonably conclude that he was involved in the 1995 disappearance of Cathleen Dennis, but that it is highly unlikely that Dennis' body will ever be found,” a Grand Rapids police spokeswoman said Wednesday .
Grand Rapids detectives also met with Artman before his death and are trying to determine whether he is connected to other missing persons or homicide cases in that city, the spokeswoman said in an email.
WOOD-TV first reported that Artman was under investigation in other cases.
John Pyrski, Artman's court-appointed attorney, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he did not know whether Artman had committed additional murders. But “if he did, I'm glad he finally made things right” by making them public, Pyrski added.
Artman, 66, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. A Michigan jury convicted him in September of the 1996 rape and murder of 29-year-old Sharon Hammack in Kent County. He was sentenced in October to life in prison without parole.
Artman was also charged with murder in the 2006 killing of 24-year-old Dusty Shuck in Maryland. Shuck was from Silver City, New Mexico. Her body was found near a truck stop along a highway outside New Market, Maryland.
Artman, who had lived in White Springs, Florida, was arrested in Mississippi in 2022 after Kent County investigators identified him as a suspect in Hammack's murder through DNA analyzed by a forensic genetic genealogist.
His DNA also matched the DNA in Shuck's murder.
Kent County sheriff's investigators later searched a storage unit in Florida believed to belong to Artman and found several pieces of women's underwear that had been seized for biological evidence to determine if there were any other victims, Maryland State Police said in a news release from 2022.
Artman previously served about a decade in Michigan prisons after convictions for criminal sexual conduct in 1981.
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Williams reported from West Bloomfield, Michigan.