Detectives interview murderer before his death, looking into unsolved slayings

Authorities in West Michigan are investigating missing persons cases and unsolved homicides 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 questioned Garry Artman three times before his death Thursday at a state correctional health facility in Jackson, Michigan.

Kent County Lt. Eric Brunner said detectives “gained information” from their interviews with Artman and are collaborating with other law enforcement agencies to “connect the dots with missing pieces or homicide cases that are still open.”

Brunner did not say which cold 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 30 years ago.

“Interviews with Artman provided enough information to reasonably conclude that he was involved in the disappearance of Cathleen Dennis in 1995, but that it is highly unlikely that Dennis’ body will ever be found,” a Grand Police spokeswoman said Wednesday. Rapids.

Grand Rapids detectives also met with Artman before his death and are trying to determine if he is related to other missing persons or homicide cases in that city, the spokeswoman said in an email.

WOOD-TV first reported that Artman was being investigated in other cases.

John Pyrski, Artman’s court-appointed attorney, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he did not know if Artman had committed other murders. But “if he did it, I’m glad that in the end he did everything right” by revealing them, Pyrski added.

Artman, 66, had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. In September, a Michigan jury convicted him of the 1996 rape and murder of 29-year-old Sharon Hammack in Kent County. In October he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Artman also faced murder charges for the killing of Dusty Shuck, 24, in Maryland in 2006. Shuck was from Silver City, New Mexico. His body was found near a truck stop on an interstate highway outside New Market, Maryland.

Artman, who lived in White Springs, Florida, was arrested in 2022 in Mississippi 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 from 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 were seized for biological evidence to determine if there were other victims, police said. Maryland State in a 2022 news release.

Artman previously served about a decade in Michigan prisons following convictions for criminal sexual conduct in 1981.

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Williams reported from West Bloomfield, Michigan.