Leelanau Crime Blotter
Real Investigative Reporting For Winter 2025
Welcome to False Choices, your free and first choice for quality short stories, occasional non-fiction and reviews of writing and movies that you may have missed. Today we offer an account of local 911 calls and the details that our intrepid investigative journalist uncovered in their subsequent hunt for the “Truth.” If you are new here, an especially warm welcome and please subscribe to receive our weekly updates in your inbox! For free!
Our local rag, The Enterprise, always includes a crime blotter with just a few words of description for each 911 call to the authorities. We find this titillating sure, as we have a lot of questions that go unasked and therefore unanswered, and in the end the blotter is unfulfilling. We got fed up, as they say, with the whole debacle and decided that we would do some real journalism and explore the little nuggets provided to get to the “real story,” But which ones? There are normally 60 to 80 calls to the local 911 in any week and there being only two of us, both retired seniors I should add, we would have to make some allowances to both time, energy and cash. After several glass of the local cider, we decided on a dart throwing scheme. My wife taped the paper to the wall and the fun began until an errant dart reminded me that there was just sheet rock behind the paper and it would now require repair. No worries, it’s on the weekend’s to-do list! We were however successful in selecting several local crimes for investigation.
Lost Thumb
The blotter read “Local Man needs assistance after workshop injury.” Well, that was enough to get the imagination running full steam ahead. After poking around a bit we found a facebook group devoted to woodworkers in our little peninsula and from there we discovered the man is an Alain Pips, of Cedar.
While working in his shop on a new credenza, Pips’s wife Gladys approached him that night from behind, bellowing “Alain” over the noise of the shop. Overcome by surprise, poor Alain lost his focus and pushed his thumb through the blade of his table saw, losing about half of it in the process. “She only wanted to tell me that she completed our plans for a little winter vacation. She was very excited. But now she’s taking the midnight train to Georgia by herself, and here I am with half a thumb, and I still haven’t found the other half, and frankly I’m not looking forward to running across it any time soon.”
We caught up with Gladys in Traverse City waiting for the 10:15 AM train south. She was unapologetic about the whole affair and claimed it was all Alain’s fault. “Now I have to enjoy the sun all by myself,” she exclaimed, still in a tiff over Alain’s accident. “But since there’s just one travelling now I added a week in Pensacola to the trip. I heard there’s a naval base there, and a casino.” Poor Alain indeed!
I Live Alone Dotcom!
The blotter read “Domestic disturbance over Youtube video.” This item really roused our imagination as we both indulge in the occasional Youtube binge. I have in fact watched 1000’s of videos about logging, milling, shaping and building with wood, from timber frames to fine furniture, and while my wife raises an eyebrow over this odd compulsion from time to time, we’ve had nary a harsh word about it.
But from one of our local law enforcement officers we discovered that John and Debbie Wasserman of Maple City had more than harsh words. He actually called 911 from a bathroom where he’d taken refuge this particular Friday, but it was not the first Friday disturbance for couple. Turns out that a Youtube channel, My Self Reliance, drops a new video every Friday where a man named Shawn James quietly goes about the business of building a homestead by himself deep in the Canadian wilderness. Oddly, he’s a married man with a family, though they rarely appear. Debbie nicknamed the channel “I live alone dotcom,” and she’s not amused by her husband’s attraction to the Shawn James’ lifestyle. When we caught up with her she explained: “I could see what he was watching! For half the video the guy was making arrows and then he went hunting and skinned a deer, then he split wood and finally gave himself a haircut, and my idiot husband sat there mesmerized. If he wants to live alone, good riddance, but if he thinks for one minute I’m sharing my bed with a man who cuts his own hair he’s got another thing coming.”
We were not able to catch up to John before this post was published, but suffice to say I subscribed to My Self Reliance straight away.
Don’t Mess with Tiger
The blotter read “Dog owner upset about injuries.” First of all, the subject of the call, as it turns out, was the dog’s injuries, not the owners, which is good news I suppose. But there’s not much of interest here. The neighbor’s cat had enough of playful Einstein the young Lab and swiped him across his snout, with nails out. Take what lesson you want from this one.
Unicorns at the Turn
The blotter read “Horses in the road at Macksie and Setterbo.” We’ve been through this intersection a hundred times and never saw a property with horses, so where would they have come from, we wondered? Wild horses? That would be something very new around here.
After a little investigation we discovered that the caller, a Mrs. Heinhorn, well advanced in years, has become entranced by the fantasy novels she signs out at the senior center, and often sees white horses, and even unicorns, bounding across the farm yard. She calls them in on a regular basis, the authorities mentioned, as she’s very concerned about their safety. “As long as she doesn’t get out there in the road in the middle of the night and start directing traffic, what there is of it, around the horses, we’ll just let this one lie,” the Officers told us. Seems like a sound approach.
Your Sauna’s Not Soundproof
The blotter read “Neighbors are too noisy for family neighborhood.”
Well, that’s an interesting start, right? Some further investigation surfaced the following story, which we would rather not believe, but we don’t want to be known as a couple of rubes skeptical of Evolution. Here’s how it was told to us: A newlywed couple in Leelanau Township were both late getting started in the splendors of “l’amour,” she being 45 and he 47; ergo they were dedicated to catching up and did so rather rambunctiously in their sauna on a nightly basis.
When officers arrived on the scene to investigate, it was obvious what was going on, but what could they say, or do for that matter? The earnest couple was on their own property and furthermore the one officer - a college graduate - explained that it was a matter of evolution for a female to produce loud audible signals during the ‘good times’ because this is how females of our hominid ancestors (chimpanzees he added, a little condescendingly) alerted males in the group that they were accepting applications, as it were, for further ‘activity’. Huh? Come again!
He was happy to explain: “Our ancestor’s males often killed the offspring of their group if he didn’t think they belonged to him, as a matter of preserving resources, you see. So by mating with all or most of the males in the group, the female was creating an insurance policy that her offspring would not come to a similar fate. During sex then she made sure all the other males in the group knew she was open…” Ok, we got it. “So being audible is a holdover from our evolutionary past..” Ok, we got it. Evolution. “This also explains why men are so quiet…” Ok, we got it.
Not sure what the neighbors and their children might learn from this, but we don’t want to be known as the Scopes of the north, so we let it lay and turned our attention elsewhere.
A Philosophical Crime
The blotter read “Neighbor finds children left alone.”
This seemed a little serious and became more so as we learned the details of this report. Turns out, after a chat with the attending officers, the wife and mother of the children, ages 2, 4 and 7, had spent a night in jail after officers found her wandering around Lake Leelanau recently in the early morning hours, mentally unstable and racked with grief. Her husband, a Professor of English Literature at a renowned state university, had also abandoned the children after driving his wife and their mother from the house.
The officers only learned what had happened when the infamous Professor returned to the house two days later to retrieve several volumes of his important book collection, including we were told, the Complete Works of Rousseau and many of the tomes of the renowned German cocaine addict and friendless loner, Nietzsche. When approached by the officers, the Professor was enthusiastic in the defense of his actions, telling the officers that he couldn’t possibly limit himself to one woman; and that children were best when allowed to raise themselves, as Rousseau’s did, devoid of adult meddling and interference. Furthermore, he went on to add, lifting Thus Spoke Zarathustra high above his head, “a child who scales the heights of life on his own will attain the character of a noble and learn to loathe the dependency of the slave.”
The officers were unmoved by this display and the Professor now sits in the local jail for the abuse of his spouse and his negligence of the well being of his children. We also heard subsequently that he’s made himself no friends among either his fellow inmates or the guards as he continues to berate all them for their lack of understanding of such a great man, meaning of course himself.
The mother and children have been reunited.