MICHIGAN 1985 Cold Case Solved After 18 Years — Justice for David Tyll & Brian Ognjan
On November 22, 1985, David Tyll drove his black Ford Bronco to pick up Brian Ognjan at his home in St.
Clair Shores, Michigan.
The trunk was packed with hunting rifles for a weekend at the Tyll family cabin in White Cloud.
Tyll, 27, had just gotten married and worked as a mechanic for his father-in-law.
Ognjan, also 27, an auto mechanic, was saving money to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend.
They had been best friends since Boy Scouts, growing up together in Detroit.
It was the Friday before Thanksgiving.
Deer season had just opened and 700,000 Michigan hunters were spreading into the woods.
Everything was normal.
Tyll and Ognjan never reached the cabin.
They never bought hunting licenses.
They never contacted their families.
The Ford Bronco disappeared.
The guns disappeared.
The bodies disappeared.
No blood, no clothes, nothing.
Police deployed divers, ground-penetrating radar, cadaver dogs, aerial surveys, and mobilized everyone from a 15-person county sheriff’s office to Interpol.
Unsolved Mysteries aired the case on national television.
Posters of the two young men were put up all over the state.
Thousands of tips poured in.
None of them led anywhere.
But this is Mio, Michigan, a small town in the pinewoods where everyone knew what had happened that night and not one person dared to open their mouths because the killers lived right there, in the community, and the whole town was afraid of them.
For 18 years, the two Duval brothers walked free, bragging about the murders, and no one dared to touch them.
It took 18 years, a detective obsessed enough to knock on every door in the dark, a trembling witness afraid of dying who finally admitted she had seen it all with her own eyes, and a female prosecutor willing to take a case with no bodies and no physical evidence before a jury.
This is the story of Michigan’s most horrifying cold case and how it was solved.
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To understand why the disappearance of David Tile and Brian Ognjan became an obsession for the entire state of Michigan for nearly two decades, you have to understand who they were.
David Kenneth Tile was born on August 21, 1958, grew up in the Detroit area, stood 6 ft 2 in tall, had brown hair, green eyes, and a beard at the time he disappeared.
He worked as a mechanic for his own father-in-law, went to work as regular as a clock, >> >> and had never missed a day without calling ahead.
He had just gotten married, his life was stable, and he was building a future with his new wife.
Brian George Ognjan was born on January 16, 1958, also from the Detroit area, about 5 ft 9 in tall, weighed 174 lb, and had a mustache.
He worked as an auto mechanic, a hard-working and reliable man, and he was saving every dollar to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend.
Think about that for a second.
A 27-year-old man saving money to get down on one knee and propose to the person he loved.
He was not running away.
He was planning the rest of his life.
Tile and Ognjan had been best friends since they were kids, meeting through Boy Scouts, growing up together in Detroit, going through their teenage years together, and keeping that friendship into adulthood.
The kind of friendship where you call each other every week, the kind where you stand there fixing each other’s ties at a wedding.
In a photo the families later provided to investigators, Ognjan is adjusting Tile’s tie on Tile’s wedding day, and both of them are smiling.
That is the last photo many people remember of them.
The plan for the weekend of November 22, 1985 was simple.
Drive the black 1980 Ford Bronco, Michigan plate 447 HRZ, to the Tile family cabin on Baseline Road in White Cloud, northern Michigan, about 200 mi northwest of Detroit.
Hunt deer, drink beer, do the dumb things men do in the woods.
But instead of going straight to White Cloud, they decided to stop and see friends in Mio first, a small town about 185 mi north of Detroit, in the opposite direction from White Cloud.
That decision changed everything.
That morning Bryan Ognjan cashed a $50 check in St.
Clair Shores.
Tile picked him up and they hit the road.
That was the last time either family saw them.
The last time Tile and Ognjan were seen, never confirmed with certainty, was in the Houghton Lake and Mio area that day.
They had reached Mio.
They had gone into bars, drunk, played pool, and chatted with the servers, but they never reached White Cloud.
Tile’s father, his brother, and others were waiting at the cabin.
Tile and Ognjan never showed up.
>> >> And here is the detail investigators would come back to again and again over the next 18 years.
They never bought hunting licenses.
In Michigan, you have to buy a license before you go into the woods.
Tile and Ognjan did not buy one.
>> >> That meant they had never really started the hunting trip.
Something had happened before they could reach their destination.
When Monday came and neither of them showed up for work, neither called, neither made contact in any way, both families knew immediately that something very serious had happened.
These were not the kind of men who skipped work for no reason.
Tile had never missed a day of work without telling his father-in-law.
Ognjan was the same.
Get drunk on Saturday night and sleep through Monday, maybe, but no contact for days? Never.
The families called the police and the search began.
At first, police thought this might be an ordinary missing person’s case.
Two young men out for a trip, drinking too much, maybe a car accident on a forest road, maybe lost in the woods.
But as day after day passed with no sign of Tile, Ongjen, or the Ford Bronco, the search began to expand.
The Michigan State Police got involved, >> >> then federal agencies.
Divers searched lakes and rivers around Mayo and White Cloud looking for the Bronco on the bottom.
Aerial survey teams scanned the forests from above.
Ground penetrating radar was brought in to scan suspicious ground.
Cadaver dogs were deployed.
Psychics were called in.
Every tool law enforcement had was used.
The Alcona County Sheriff’s Office with 15 employees took part.
Interpol, the international law enforcement organization of 181 countries, was also mobilized.
Posters with photos of the two young men and reward information were printed by the thousands and put up everywhere.
Behind every bar, on the glass door of every store, in people’s front yards, even on car windows.
Every November, when deer season returned, police and the families put out another appeal, reminding 700,000 hunters to keep their eyes open as they moved through the woods looking for anything suspicious, a piece of metal, a scrap of fabric, a bone.
Tips poured in from all over the United States, from reasonable to insane.
Someone said they had seen the two young men in Florida.
Someone said they had fled to Mexico.
Someone said the Bronco was at the bottom of some deep lake.
Someone blamed drugs.
Someone blamed a woman.
Someone said Bigfoot.
Police checked every tip, chased every lead, followed every rumor, and every time they hit a dead end.
The black 1980 Ford Bronco, plate 447 HRZ, seemed to have evaporated off the face of the earth.
If it was at the bottom of a lake, the divers did not find it.
If it was hidden in the woods, the aerial teams did not spot it.
If it had been destroyed, not one piece ever turned up again.
And two living people with families who loved them, with a girlfriend waiting, with worried parents, disappeared the same way.
Not a trace.
The television show Unsolved Mysteries aired the case nationwide, putting the faces of Tile and Angion into millions of living rooms across the United States.
Every time it aired, every time the reward increased, a new wave of tips poured in, and every time police chased every lead and came back empty-handed.
The two missing young men became an urban legend.
Were they at the bottom of some lake? Had they fled the country? Had they been pulled into a drug ring? Had they been taken by aliens? Each theory was crazier than the last, and none of them had evidence.
The story gradually disappeared from the front page, then from the news section, then from public memory.
But it never disappeared from the families memory.
Every year, every November deer season, the parents of Tile and Angion appeared in front of cameras.
Eyes red, voices shaking, begging anyone who knew anything to speak up.
Helen Angion, Brian’s mother, then past 60, was still waiting.
Kathy Tile, David’s mother, was still waiting.
They were waiting for a phone call, a letter, a bone fragment, anything to prove that their sons had not simply evaporated off the face of the earth.
That call never came.
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Now, here is what police knew but could not prove.
For years investigators kept hearing the same name, the same family, from many different sources, the Duval brothers.
Not vague rumor, not baseless speculation, but bragging.
Raymond Jr.
Duval Jr.
and Donald Coco Duval had many times in many places to many different people talked about killing those two hunters.
Once in a bar in Wixom, once to an ex-wife, once to a girlfriend, and many other times.
They hinted that the bodies had been fed to pigs.
They hinted that the Bronco had been taken apart.
But hints and indirect bragging are not evidence.
There was no eyewitness, there were no bodies, there was no physical evidence, and no one was willing to stand in court and point at the Duval brothers and say I saw them do it.
Why did no one dare? To understand that, you have to understand who the Duval family was.
And when you understand, you will understand why an entire town stayed silent for 18 years.
Seven Duval brothers, not two, not three, but seven men of the same blood, raised in the Michigan woods, living by their own rules.
They split their time between Monroe in southern Michigan and the pinewoods around Mio in the north.
In both places, their reputation arrived before they did.
The most common comparison locals used to describe the Duval brothers was the backwoods thugs in the movie Deliverance, but multiplied by three.
They were a group that drank themselves senseless, fought brutally, and regarded no law or social norm as applying to them.
Locals knew an unwritten rule.
If you picked a fight with one Duval today, you would be fighting all seven tonight.
Farmers in the area blamed them for killing livestock.
Local police actively avoided contact with the Duval brothers unless it was truly necessary, and when it was, they always went in large groups, always with backup.
Think about that.
Police, the people paid to protect the community, were afraid of one family to the point that they had to call in backup every time they needed to talk to them.
J.
R.
and Coco Deval were the two oldest of the seven brothers.
Raymond Wilbur Deval Jr.
, nicknamed J.
R.
, was 34 in 1985, and Donald Dean Deval, nicknamed Coco, was 33.
Before they were suspected of murder, they already had a long and varied criminal record.
They ran a chop shop for stolen cars, where stolen vehicles were taken apart and sold piece by piece.
They poached trout and deer, treating conservation laws like a joke.
They illegally tapped into the power grid to use electricity for free.
>> >> They lived in small cabins and trailers in the woods, shot wild animals, drank, and held annual cookouts with friends, family, and other rough characters.
A journalist later described them as living proof of evolution in the criminal world.
Meaning they had been born and raised in crime, >> >> and each generation was more sophisticated than the one before.
But what made the Deval brothers truly dangerous was not only the violence.
>> >> It was their ability to silence everyone around them.
No one wanted to turn their life into hell by accusing them.
And that is exactly what happened for 18 years.
Rumors spread all over Mio, through the bars, through whispered conversations by winter fires.
>> >> Everyone knew.
Everyone heard.
Everyone stayed silent.
The Deval brothers bragged about killing the two hunters to many people in many places for many years.
They told drinking buddies.
They told relatives.
They said they had killed those two guys and fed them to the pigs.
But no one called the police.
No one wrote a complaint.
No one was willing to put their name on a statement and say, “I know what happened”.
Because everyone knew the price of opening their mouth.
A dog shot dead.
Another dog run over right in the front yard.
The vehicle deliberately leaving the road to hit the animal.
A gentle reminder about a pretty niece.
A knock on the door at midnight.
That was not empty threat.
That was the language the Duval brothers used to keep the secret, and it worked for 18 years.
Now we come to that night, the night David Teel and Brian Augjan walked into the bar.
What happened next was reconstructed from witness testimony at the 2003 trial, from the Duval brothers’ own bragging over 18 years, and from the account of a woman who had seen it all, but stayed silent for nearly two decades because she was afraid of dying.
On the evening of November 22, 1985, Teel and Augjan stopped at Linker’s Lounge, also called Linker’s Lost Creek Lodge, a small bar about 5 mi west of Mio in the Luzerne area.
This was remote country, dark forest roads, houses hundreds of yards apart, the kind of place where a scream in the middle of the night might not be heard, or where anyone who heard it would pretend then they had not.
Teel and Augjan drank a lot.
They played pool.
They flirted with the servers.
They were two city guys in a rural bar, louder than they needed to be, more confident than was safe.
They did not fit in with Mio, and Mio noticed.
In the bar that night were two of the seven Duval brothers, Raymond Jr.
and Donald Coco.
An argument started.
No one knows exactly who said what first, but the back and forth between the two city hunters and the Duval brothers escalated quickly.
There may have been a minor scuffle.
It may have been only words, but however it started, the Duval brothers were not the kind of men who let an insult go.
They started making phone calls.
Friends, other brothers, companions started pouring into the bar.
The situation shifted from tense to dangerous.
Also present at Linker’s Lounge that night was a woman named Barbara Boudreau and her friend Ronnie Emery.
Boudreau lived in a house right near the bar, only a few few hundred yards away on the dirt road.
She saw the Duval brothers calling more people in.
She saw the atmosphere in the bar change.
She knew what was about to happen.
The Duval brothers bought a six-pack of beer for Till and Augerjan and told them they had better go home because something was about to happen.
That was not advice.
That was a final warning.
Boudreaux and Emery also left the bar at the Duval brothers word, went back to Boudreaux’s house nearby, and sat down to watch Scarface on videotape.
Outside in the darkness of the Michigan pinewoods in November, the temperature near freezing, a light snow on the ground, everything was quiet.
Then screams tore through the night.
Boudreaux and Emery heard yelling, cries for help, the sound of beating coming from across the road.
They knew what it was.
The Duval brothers had blocked the two hunters.
When they looked outside, there was a strange truck parked right at the entrance to Boudreaux’s house.
They did not dare go out the front door.
Instead, they climbed out the bathroom window and crept through the woods to get closer to the noise.
And what they saw would haunt Barbara Boudreaux for the rest of her life.
In the semicircle of light the truck headlights cast on the ground, the Duval brothers and their companions were beating David Till.
>> >> Not fighting.
Beating.
With feet, with fists, and with an aluminum baseball bat.
Till lay on the ground, curled up, and begged.
He begged them to stop.
He begged to live.
And they kept hitting him.
They swung the baseball bat at his head, and the sound of metal hitting skull was like dropping a pumpkin on concrete, blood spraying everywhere.
They beat him until Till stopped moving.
Then they kept beating him.
They kicked his motionless body.
They laughed.
Brian Augerjan watched all of it.
Two people held him while the Duval brothers killed his best friend right in front of him.
Augerjan broke free.
He jerked out of the hands holding him and ran.
Ran into the dark.
Ran into the woods.
Ran for his life.
But they caught him.
They dragged him back into the circle of headlight.
And when he was dragged back, he collapsed.
And the Duval brothers started laughing because Augnon John was so scared he had wet himself.
A 27-year-old man saving money to propose to his girlfriend, so terrified he lost control of his body.
And the killers laughed in his face.
Then they beat him to death.
The same baseball bat, the same fists, the same feet, until both bodies lay motionless on the cold ground.
A few minutes after Boudreaux and Emery climbed back into the house through the bathroom window.
>> >> There was a knock at the door.
Boudreaux opened it.
Coco Duval stood there.
And he said one sentence that Boudreaux would hear echoing in her head for the next 18 years.
You didn’t see anything.
Pigs have to eat, too.
That was not a vague threat.
That was an explanation where the bodies would go.
The Duval brothers later told many people on many different occasions that they had cut up the two hunters, run them through a wood chipper, and fed them to their vicious pigs.
Tiles Black 1980 Ford Bronco was taken to scrapyards the Duval brothers owned or frequented and taken apart piece by piece, disappearing forever, just like its owner.
Neither the bodies nor the vehicle were ever found.
Not one bone fragment, not one drop of blood, not one piece of metal.
If the story about the pigs was true, there was nothing to find.
>> >> And the Duval brothers knew that.
That is why they dared to brag.
That is why they did not need to hide it.
Because even if everyone knew, no one could prove anything.
No bodies, no physical evidence, no murder weapon.
Word against word, and who would believe a drunk in a bar over two men the whole town was afraid to look in the eye? And so time passed.
Months became years.
Years became a decade.
The Duval brothers lived free, moving through the community, drinking in the bars where they had killed, and once a year, or more often, they stopped by Barbara Boudreaux’s house to remind her to keep her mouth shut.
They mentioned her pretty niece, the tone gentle, but the meaning not gentle at all.
One of Boudreaux’s dogs was shot dead.
Another was run over right in the front yard, the vehicle deliberately leaving the road to hit the animal.
By the mid-1990s, the disappearance of David Tile and Brian O’Gion was dead.
The case file sat in a cabinet, covered in dust, opened by no one.
The original investigators had retired or transferred.
The leads had run dry.
Every November, the Tile and O’Gion families still appeared in front of cameras, still put out appeals, still asked the same question they had been asking for more than 10 years.
If someone knows something, please speak up.
And every November, the answer was still silence.
The state of Michigan was betting that time would do what the justice system had failed to do, that the families would accept it, that the case would fade from public memory, that the Duval brothers would die as free men, and that whole dark chapter would close itself.
They did not know about Robert Lesneski.
Michigan State Police Detective Robert Lesneski, nicknamed Bronco, inherited the cold case in the late 1990s, >> >> more than 15 years after Tile and O’Gion disappeared.
The case came to him not because someone believed it could be solved.
It came to him because it had to sit on someone’s desk, and Bronco was the one who got it.
>> >> But Bronco was not the kind of detective who takes a file and files it in a cabinet waiting for retirement.
He was the kind of person who, once he picked something up, could not put it down.
He started reading, thousands of pages of files, hundreds of reports, dozens of statements, all piled in disorganized boxes that had not been properly organized for more than a decade.
He read every page.
He recoded every document.
He reorganized the whole chaotic pile of paper into a system he could work with.
And the more he read, the more he was pulled in.
The case haunted him.
Bronco worked hundreds of hours off the clock, unpaid, asked by no one.
He re-interviewed old witnesses, people who had talked to investigators 10, 12, 15 years earlier.
Some remembered more than they thought.
Some remembered less than they claimed, but Bronco wrote it all down, compared it with the old files, looking for contradictions, gaps, things that did not match.
He always carried a shovel in the trunk of his car, not because someone told him to, but because every time he drove the forest roads around Mio and saw a piece of metal sticking out of the ground, he stopped and dug.
It might be trash.
It might be scrap from an old car, but it might also be part of the black Ford Bronco that had vanished 15 years earlier.
He never found it, but he never stopped looking.
New tips still trickled in now and then, and Bronco chased every one.
Most led to dead ends, like the hundreds of tips before them, but one tip changed everything.
A woman contacted Bronco and said she knew another woman she believed knew something about the disappearance of the two hunters.
That woman lived near a bar in Luzerne, where Till and Ongjin had been seen playing pool and teasing the servers on the night they disappeared.
Her name was Barb Boudreau.
Bronco had no address, >> >> no phone number, only a name and a general area near the bar, so he started knocking on doors.
Every day after his shift, after dark, Bronco drove without a badge to the area around Linker’s Lounge and knocked on every house.
>> >> Hi, I’m Detective Lesneski from the Michigan State Police.
I’m looking for a woman named Barb Boudreau.
Do you know where she lives? >> >> No, sorry to bother you.
Then the next house, then the next, then the next, day after day.
This lead seemed headed for a dead end like the hundreds before it.
But Bronco was not the kind of person who left a lead unfollowed to the end.
One more door, then one more door, and one more door as the light was fading.
A cautious woman cracked her door open.
“Hi, I’m Detective Lisneski from the Michigan State Police and I’m looking into” The woman jerked.
She started shaking.
Not a slight shake, shaking violently, her whole body, so intensely it looked like she was having a seizure.
“You’re going to get me killed”.
She said and pushed the door shut.
Bronco felt adrenaline surge through him.
He later said he nearly collapsed.
For the first time in his career, he did something he had never done before.
He put his foot in the door, blocking it just before it closed all the way.
He had found Barb Boudreau.
And her reaction told him more than any statement could.
A woman with nothing to do with the case, living hundreds of miles from the city, hearing the word police and shaking so hard she nearly fainted.
That meant she knew something.
And what she knew was dangerous enough to make her afraid of dying after more than 15 years.
Boudreau did not say much that first meeting.
She closed the door and Bronco left her alone.
But he came back.
The next day, the next week, the next month.
He did not come with a subpoena or a threat.
He came like he helped her fix things around the house.
He helped her with odd jobs.
>> >> He installed a security camera at her house so she would feel safer.
He always drove without a badge, always came alone, always careful so no one would see a police car parked in front of Boudreau’s house because he knew that if the Duval brothers found out police were talking to her, her life could be in real danger.
Over many months, slowly, piece by piece, Boudreau began to talk.
But she told the story in a very specific way, a way Bronco immediately recognized as deliberate.
>> >> She said her friend Ronnie Emery had been with her at the bar that night.
She said Ronnie had gone outside to check when he heard the noise.
And she said Ronnie came back in and told her what he had seen.
The screams, the beating, the truck headlights, the baseball bat, the blood, two hunters begging for their lives, the Duval brothers laughing as they hit them, the sound of metal hitting skull, motionless bodies still being kicked, specific, vivid, haunting details.
But all of it through Ronnie’s account, not through her eyes.
And Ronnie Emery had been dead for many years.
Bronco understood immediately what this meant.
Boudreau was telling the story through the eyes of a dead man to protect herself.
If she said Ronnie’s had seen it and not her, then her statement was only hearsay, unusable as evidence in court.
She could not be subpoenaed as a witness based on what someone else had told her.
That was the law.
And Boudreau, though she had lived a hard life, a recovered alcoholic with no degree or status, was not a fool.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She was giving Bronco enough information for him to know the truth, but not enough for him to drag her into a courtroom where she would have to point straight at the Duval brothers and say, “I saw you kill those two men”.
By 2002, Bronco knew almost for certain what had happened to David Till and Brian Ognjan.
He knew who had killed them.
He knew where.
He knew how.
But he did not have enough evidence to arrest anyone.
Boudreau was still telling the story through Ronnie Emery’s eyes.
And as long as she kept telling it that way, Bronco’s hands were tied.
He needed a bold move.
And that move came from the Michigan Attorney General’s Office.
Working with Attorney General Mike Cox, Bronco and the investigative team decided to issue subpoenas for Barbara Boudreau and several other witnesses, forcing them to come to Lansing, the Michigan state capital, and testify under oath before a formal hearing.
Cox called this tactic the poor man’s grand jury, a plain way of saying they were using legal power to force people who knew the truth to tell the truth.
Not before a formal grand jury, but before investigators and prosecutors in a hearing room in Lansing.
It was the last throw.
If it moved nothing, the case would die for good.
Boudreau was the first to testify.
She sat in front of the investigators, raised her hand and swore, and began to tell it.
The same story, the same details, the same way of telling it, through Ronnie’s eyes.
Screens in the night, truck headlights, a baseball bat, blood on the snow, tile bagging, Angie Ann running and being dragged back, the Duval brothers laughing, motionless bodies still being kicked.
Every detail was right.
Every detail was vivid.
And every detail was useless under the law because it came from the account of a dead man.
The hearing room grew heavy.
The investigators looked at each other.
They all knew what she was hiding.
They all knew she was protecting herself.
And they all knew that if she left this room still telling the story through Ronnie’s eyes, they would never get the Duval brothers into court.
>> >> Bronco turned off the recorder.
He leaned forward, his face only a few inches from Boudreau’s.
He begged her, not ordering, not threatening, begging.
Tell me what you know, Barb.
Tell me the truth.
And something changed in her eyes.
A small change, hard to notice, as if a wall inside her had finally collapsed after 17 years of holding.
“Bronco, you know I saw it, don’t you?” she said.
“Yes, I know”.
Bronco said, “but I need to hear it from you”.
>> >> Silence.
Then Boudreau said four words Bronco had been waiting years to hear.
“I’m dead,” she said, and then she told it.
This time not through Ronnie’s eyes, this time through Barbara Boudreaux’s own eyes.
She had been there.
She had climbed out the bathroom window.
She had crept through the woods.
She had stood in the dark and watched the Duval brothers beat two young men to death under the truck headlights.
She had heard the baseball bat hit skull.
She had heard the begging.
She had heard the laughter.
She had seen all of it.
And she had stayed silent for 17 years because she believed that if she opened her mouth, she would be next.
They had an eyewitness.
In May 2003, nearly 18 years after the night David Tyll and Brian Ognjan were beaten to death outside a bar in Luzerne, Raymond Jr.
Duval Jr.
, 52, of South Branch, and Donald Coco Duval, 51, of Monroe, were arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
For the first time in 18 years, someone was facing justice for the deaths of the two hunters.
The trial was set for October 2003.
Because of extensive media coverage in the Mio area, the case was moved to Arenac County Court in Standish, about 60 miles south of Mio.
A jury of six men and six women was selected.
And the prosecutor assigned to the case was Donna Pendergast, a Michigan assistant attorney general with a fearsome record.
Pendergast was the daughter of a Detroit police officer, hard as steel, and had put dozens of killers in prison over her career.
But this case was different from every case she had handled.
No bodies, no physical evidence, no murder weapon, no fingerprints, no DNA, no confession.
>> >> Nothing but witness testimony, and the most important witness was a recovered alcoholic who had drunk nine drinks on the night she witnessed the murders and had stayed silent for nearly 18 years because she was afraid of dying.
If Pendergast could not convince the jury to believe Boudreau, the Duval brothers would be free again.
And this time, perhaps forever.
When Boudreau’s turn came to take the witness stand, the courtroom was so quiet you could hear breathing.
She sat there, facing the Duval brothers for the first time since the night they had knocked on her door and told her she had not seen anything.
And she told it.
She told about that night at Linker’s Lounge.
She told about seeing the Duval brothers call more people to the bar.
She told about leaving with Ronnie Emery when she sensed danger coming.
She told about screams tearing through the dark.
She told about climbing out the bathroom window, creeping through the woods, and standing in the dark watching the scene she had carried in her head for 18 years.
She described the semicircle of truck headlights.
She described the Duval brothers beating David Tile with feet, fists, and an aluminum baseball bat while he lay on the ground begging for his life.
She described the sound of the baseball bat hitting Tile’s head as if you dropped a pumpkin on the ground and blood spraying everywhere.
She described Brian Augden being held by two people, breaking free, running into the dark, being dragged back, collapsing, and the Duval brothers laughing when they saw he was so scared he had wet himself.
She described them beating Augden to death right after that.
And she described Coco Duval appearing at her door a few minutes later saying she had not seen anything.
Pigs have to eat, too.
The defense attorneys attacked Boudreau from every side.
They pointed out that she had drunk nine drinks that night.
>> >> They pointed out that 18 years had passed and human memory is not reliable after that much time.
They pointed out that she had been an alcoholic.
They pointed out that she had told the story through Ronnie’s eyes for years before changing her statement.
They tried to break her on the witness stand, make her contradict herself, confuse her, make her collapse.
Boudreau did not collapse.
She answered hard, firm, so direct that the defense attorneys were thrown off.
She admitted she had drunk a lot, but said she was a long-time alcoholic and knew how to stay clear-headed.
She admitted she had stayed silent for 18 years, but explained that she stayed silent because she believed opening her mouth meant death.
And the details she gave, the ping of metal hitting skull, the sound of Teal’s skull breaking, the mocking laughter when Ang Jan lost control of his bladder from fear, those were not details someone makes up.
Those were details only a witness would know.
Sensory details, sounds, images that no one could imagine if they had not stood there, in the dark, watching two people beaten to death in front of them.
The defense knew they could not beat Boudreau’s testimony with logic or counter-evidence.
>> >> So, they chose a different strategy.
Offer alternative stories, no matter how crazy those stories were.
And the witnesses the defense called to the stand would become one of the strangest chapters in Michigan court history.
>> >> The first defense witness was a slow-speaking man, a heavy alcoholic with a steel plate in his skull from a crane accident.
He claimed that Teal and Ang Jan had told him they were going to leave the country together.
Two young men with stable lives, steady jobs, one newly married, one preparing to propose, suddenly deciding to abandon everything and disappear from the United States.
No one in the courtroom believed a word.
The second witness was Ken DeVol, one of the seven DeVol brothers.
>> >> He was called to the stand and declared that he could not remember anything, citing a combination of long-term cocaine use, a stroke, and Alzheimer’s.
A witness who remembers nothing is not a witness.
It is an empty chair that can talk.
The third witness was the peak of absurdity.
A man claimed he had once lost his memory but had recently recovered it and now remembered that his friends had killed Tile and Aag John with an axe in downtown Grayling, >> >> then stripped their clothes, held their mouths open, and drowned them in the Au Sable River until their bodies sank.
>> >> He also claimed a personal relationship with Leslie Williams, the notorious serial killer in southeastern Michigan.
Pendergast did not miss the chance.
On cross-examination, she asked him one question in a calm voice.
“Do you know who prosecuted Leslie Williams?” He said, “No”.
“You’re looking at her,” Pendergast said.
No one understood why the defense had put that man on the stand.
The Duval brothers did not take the stand.
Their lawyers had clearly decided that letting the two defendants open their mouths in front of the jury would do more harm than good, especially when both had spent 18 years bragging about the murders to anyone who would listen.
Defense attorney Seymour Schwartz argued that the prosecution had not met the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, that the entire case depended on the testimony of an alcoholic telling an absurd story 18 years after the event.
Then Donna Pendergast stood before the jury and gave her final summation.
She looked straight into the eyes of the 12 jurors and said the two defendants had escaped justice for 18 years through lies and threats.
“Do not reward the defendants for 18 years of lies and terror,” she said.
Then she turned and looked straight at Raymond and Donald Duval, the two men sitting at the defense table, and said the words the whole courtroom would remember.
“Those faces are nothing more than the masks of monsters”.
>> >> She said their crime was an evil so dark that your worst nightmare pales in comparison.
The jury left the courtroom to deliberate.
12 peoples, six men and six women carrying the weight of 18 years of secrecy, 18 years of family pain, 18 years of a town living in fear.
No bodies, no physical evidence, no weapon, only words.
The words of Barbara Boudreaux, the bragging of the Duval brothers themselves, and the question each juror had to answer, is it enough? They deliberated about 2 hours.
When the jury returned to the courtroom, Judge Ronald Bergeron read the verdict, >> >> guilty.
Both Raymond J.
R.
Duval, 52, and Donald Coco Duval, 51, were convicted of first-degree murder for both killings of David Tile and Brian Ojibway.
Raymond Duval dropped his head onto the defense table.
On the victim’s family side, Helen Ojibway, Brian’s mother, then 77, had waited 18 years for this moment.
“God answered my prayer,” she said.
David Tile’s father stood before reporters with bloodshot eyes and said one sentence he had held inside for nearly two decades.
“They took my son”.
The judge imposed the mandatory sentence under Michigan law for first-degree murder.
Life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Both Duval brothers would die in prison.
Defense attorney Schwartz said he would appeal, saying he was disappointed in the verdict and that his clients had not done it.
The appeal was later denied.
The verdict stood.
The conviction of the Duval brothers without any physical evidence, no bodies, no weapon, no blood, no DNA, is one of the most extraordinary convictions in Michigan judicial history.
It proved that credible witness testimony, combined with circumstantial evidence, and the killers’ own bragging, can be enough to put a murderer in prison, even when no physical trace of the victims remains.
>> >> It set a precedent.
Bronco Lesneski and Donna Pendergast both believed there were others involved in the murder that night, that at least three other people had witnessed or assisted, >> >> but none of them were charged.
Both Pendergast and Bronco have retired.
Barbara Boudreau, the woman who lived with the secret for 18 years and finally found the courage to tell the truth, died in 2007, 4 years after the trial.
The violence did not end with the Duval brothers.
In 2005, Don Duval Jr.
, Duval’s daughter, was convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing a man named William Gilbreath to death and received a sentence of 31 to 46 years in prison.
>> >> She had grown up physically and sexually abused by the very men in the family who were supposed to protect her.
>> >> Violence breeds violence.
That is the real legacy of the Duval family.
Author Tom Henderson recorded the entire case in the book Darker Than Night, full title Darker Than Night, >> >> The True Story of a brutal double homicide and an 18-year-long quest for justice.
The case was also aired on Unsolved Mysteries, Cold Case Files in the episode The Missing Hunters, Sins and Secrets episode Mio, and Murderbook.
The bodies of David Tyner and Brian Ognjan were never found.
The black 1980 Bronco, plate 447 HRZ, was never found.
If the story about the wood chipper and the pigs is true, there is nothing to find and perhaps there never will be.
Every November, when deer season returns, hunters still pour into Mio, still drive the road where Linker’s Lounge once stood, still stop at the bars where two 27-year-old men once drank beer and laughed on the last night of their lives.
The story was never forgotten.
The whole town was relieved when the Duval brothers were taken away, but the memory is still there in every conversation by the fire, in every look when someone mentions the name Duval.
Donna Pendergast, when asked about the motive, said she had no answer.
There is no way to understand the reason for Brian and David’s deaths, she said, because it was pure evil and there is no way to understand pure evil.
You can only recognize it for what it is.
David Teel, 27, a mechanic newly married, got in a car to hunt deer on November 22nd, 1985.
Brian Ogden, 27, an auto mechanic saving money to propose to his girlfriend, sat in the passenger seat beside his best friend.
They never came home.
But 18 years later, someone refused to let them be forgotten.
A detective knocking on every door in the dark.
A trembling woman who finally told the truth.
A female prosecutor looking monsters in the eye and naming them.
And 12 people in a courtroom in Standish, Michigan saying what should have been said in 1985.
>> >> Guilty.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories of forgotten victims and the people who refused to let them be buried.
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