Michigan Criminal Lawyers Blog

In 2010, Corey Kucharski of Milwaukee was charged with killing both his parents; Kucharski was convicted in December of 2011 of first-degree intentional homicide, and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of supervised release in 30 years. Kucharski, who is now 38 years old, appealed his conviction, arguing that the judge in the case was wrong in ruling him mentally responsible for the murders of Ralph and Pamela Kucharski, as it was undisputed that at the time of the killings he was suffering from schizophrenia.

At trial, the defendant maintained that following a stint of heavy meth use, voices he started hearing told him to kill his parents. In February of 2010, Kucharski shot his mother four times and his father 10 times inside the home they all shared before calling to report the deaths to the police. Upon calling 911, the defendant told the operator to send the coroner, that his parents were dead. He also reportedly told a dispatcher that his parents were not getting up right now, that they were in a better place.

Although Kucharski was examined for competency twice and ruled competent to stand trial both times, the 1st District Court of Appeals ruled this week that the defendant was “clearly in a psychotic state” when he shot his parents. In the 2 to 1 ruling, the appeals court judges also wrote that there was no other explanation for Kucharski’s behavior. The appeals court tossed the 2011 conviction and ordered a new trial for the defendant. Continue reading

On Thursday April 24, 67-year-old Mike Reda was sentenced to life in prison without parole in the shooting deaths of 59-year-old Deborah Socia and 61-year-old Maria Victoria Gonzalez.  The two women were residents at the Pablo Davis Elder Living Center in Detroit.  The shooting took place in October, and according to investigators was prompted by a failed romance.

Reda, who is a retired father of seven children, said following the shooting in a videotaped confession played during his preliminary hearing that he could not control himself, and that he had told the two victims to stay out of the lives of himself and his girlfriend.  Reda claimed that the two women were interfering, that they were keeping Lupe, his girlfriend, away from him.  He said that Lupe had not come to his residence in more than two weeks.

Reda admitted in the taped confession that he had drank approximately three bottles of brandy on the day the shooting took place.  He allegedly shot Socia as she was talking to another resident of the senior citizens apartment complex outside the building.  Gonzalez was shot twice in the head after the defendant allegedly went to her apartment and broke down the door to gain entrance.  Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway, who sentenced Reda on Thursday, called the shooting deaths a “horrible incident.” Continue reading

In 2012, Jack McCullough was convicted of a kidnapping and murder that occurred in Illinois in 1957.  This was one of the oldest unsolved crimes in United States history to go to trial, involving the abduction and subsequent choking/stabbing of a 7-year-old girl who was playing on a street with a friend.

On the evening of December 3, 1957, Maria Ridulph and Kathy Chapman were playing when McCullough, who is a former police officer, approached them in a friendly manner.  He was allegedly giving Ridulph a piggyback ride when Chapman decided to run home and get her mittens because it was cold.  While she was gone, prosecutors claim he drug Ridulph into an alley where he proceeded to choke and stab her.  Ridulph’s body was discovered about 120 miles away in a grove of trees off the side of the highway the following spring.

McCullough was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty.  The guilty verdict was based primarily on Kathy Chapman’s photo identification of McCullough some 55 years later, and the allegations of McCullough’s half-sister that in 1994 when their mother passed away, she said on her deathbed that she knew her son killed the girl.  McCullough was a suspect at the time of the murder, however he claimed that he had been traveling to get a medical exam in Chicago at the time.  Police took him off the suspect list because he had an alibi. Continue reading