Michigan asks judge to release man charged with murder of two hunters

Michi­gan on Wednes­day sen­tenced a man serv­ing almost 21 years to life in prison for the mur­ders of two hunters, accus­ing him of fail­ing to share sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence about a pos­si­ble involve­ment of an Ohio ser­i­al killer before tri­al. He asked the judge to release him.

Jeff Titus’ rights were vio­lat­ed in 2002 by keep­ing infor­ma­tion with­held, the attor­ney gen­er­al’s office said in court filings.

Author­i­ties in south­west­ern Michi­gan are like­ly to drop the case, but Titus, 71, will be giv­en the right to appeal.

Kala­ma­zoo Coun­ty Dis­trict Attor­ney Jeff Get­ting said he sup­port­ed Titus’ release but declined to com­ment until Dis­trict Judge Paul Bow­man makes a decision.

It’s an unusu­al devel­op­ment for Titus, who has long main­tained his inno­cence at the Inno­cence Clin­ic at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Law School.

In 1990, Doug Estes and Jim Ben­nett were shot dead near Titus’ rur­al prop­er­ty, but it was more than a decade before Titus was indicted.

Author­i­ties con­firmed at the time that Titus was hunt­ing in anoth­er coun­ty on the day of the shoot­ing. But he still claimed he drove home in time to kill the man as a trespasser.

In 2019, after Titus lost a series of appeals in state court, the Attor­ney Gen­er­al’s Con­vic­tion Con­sis­ten­cy Divi­sion agreed to review Titus’ case.

A few months lat­er, David Moran, who runs the Inno­cence Clin­ic, made a star­tling dis­cov­ery at the coun­ty sher­if­f’s office. An ini­tial inves­ti­ga­tion found a 30-page file that men­tioned anoth­er sus­pect, Thomas Dil­lon, of Mag­no­lia, Ohio.

This infor­ma­tion was not known to Titus’ tri­al lawyers or to local prosecutors.

“Dil­lon is a con­vict­ed ser­i­al killer who has mur­dered sev­er­al hunters and nature lovers,” said Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Pal­las and Moran in a joint statement.

“He was arrest­ed in 1993 and even­tu­al­ly plead­ed guilty to five counts of first-degree mur­der in Ohio to avoid the death penal­ty,” they said.

The state also col­lect­ed oth­er infor­ma­tion about Dil­lon, who died in 2011 at the age of 61. I learned that the FBI was watch­ing him and found him dri­ving hun­dreds of miles from his home in Ohio.

Dil­lon’s Ohio state prison cell­mate not­ed that Dil­lon admit­ted to killing two hunters “in a coun­ty where no one could prove it.”

Undis­closed files also show that a woman and her son brought to Ohio by inves­ti­ga­tors con­firmed that Dil­lon was in a car in a ditch near the scene. .

Ques­tions about Titus’ guilt and Dil­lon’s pos­si­ble role were heav­i­ly cov­ered in 2020 and 2021 by the false accu­sa­tion pod­cast Undis­closed and TV sta­tion Inves­ti­ga­tion Discovery.