‘Come on with it.’ Detective challenges exonerated man suing after 21 years in prison

A Michigan man who served 21 years in prison for the shooting deaths of two hunters has been exonerated and released. Now, he’s suing the detectives who helped put him behind bars.

Jeff Titus, 71, was released from prison on June 1, 2023 after officials learned that crucial evidence had been withheld during his trial, according to a lawsuit.

“It’s like I’ve been reborn, and I’m starting life all over again and everything is all new,” Titus told WXMI.

But one of the detectives who worked the case stands by his actions and says he still believes he arrested the right person, according to WOOD.

“I never arrested a man in my life that wasn’t guilty,” former Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office Detective Mike Brown told WOOD. “Never.”

Titus is suing Brown and another detective for $100 million.

“If they want to sue me for $10 hundred million, come on with it,” Brown said, according to WOOD.

The other detective named in the lawsuit, now-retired Michael Werkema, hasn’t publicly commented on the Titus’ accusations. McClatchy News has reached out for comment and didn’t immediately receive a response.

The lawsuit filed by Titus claims there was another suspect who fit a description of the shooter. However, Titus was the primary focus of the detectives’ investigation, despite him having an alibi and passing a polygraph test.

“Those two detectives were so blinded by their hell-bent objective to get Jeff Titus. Mike Brown has said, ‘I knew from day one he was the killer,’” Titus’ attorney Wolf Mueller said during a news conference, according to WOOD. “Well, when you do that and don’t look at the evidence objectively, you start cheating.”

It all traces back to Nov. 17, 1990, when Doug Estes and Jim Bennett were shot at close range while they were out hunting in Fulton, Michigan. Around the time of the shooting, two witnesses came across a man whose car was stuck in a ditch near where the men were shot.

Three years later, in 1993, those two witnesses identified the man during a police line up, the lawsuit says.

At the time, the man they identified was also a suspect in a series of murders in Ohio. But, the lawsuit says police ruled this man out because they didn’t believe he could have made it from Ohio to Fulton, Michigan, within the timeframe of the shooting, according to the lawsuit.

The case went cold until 2000, when two cold case detectives, Brown and Werkema, began investigating. The lawsuit says they heavily focused on Titus because he lived adjacent to the Fulton State Game Area, where the two men were killed.

But Titus had an alibi, the lawsuit says. He told them he was 27 miles away hunting with a friend. But he says the detectives still felt he was guilty, despite there being no physical evidence or eye witnesses connecting him to the crime, according to the lawsuit.

During their cold case investigation, “Brown was aware of the folder containing information about a serial killer in Ohio,” the lawsuit says.

In 2020, Michigan Innocence Clinic Director, David Moran reviewed Titus’ case and found a folder containing 30-40 pages with information on the suspect who had been identified by the witnesses, the lawsuit says.

That suspect pleaded guilty to the murders of five hunters and fisherman in Ohio, all of which happened around the same time as the murders in Fulton, according to the lawsuit.

“One of the murders was committed one week before the Bennett/Estes murders and one murder was committed one week later,” the lawsuit says.

Among other evidence from the initial investigation, the folder contained news articles referencing a “serial killer putting outdoorsmen in his sights” as well as notes from an FBI agent who had interviewed a federal inmate. The inmate told the agent that the suspect admitted to the Fulton murders but said “no one would be able to prove he was even in the county at the time of the murders,” the lawsuit said.

But the folder and the evidence inside was never turned over to the prosecution or Titus’ defense attorney, therefore it was never presented during his trial.

“Mr. Brown will have to answer how such critical evidence of another suspect was not included in the homicide file, while any evidence suggesting Mr. Titus was involved, made it into the file,” Mueller said in a statement to McClatchy News.

A jury eventually found Titus guilty of first-degree premeditated murder after prosecutors accused him of being an “an overzealous protector of his property” and of having killed the hunters for supposedly trespassing, according to the lawsuit.

Brown told WOOD he never heard of the other suspect until after Titus’ conviction.

“I didn’t have anything to do with that… I know nothing about (those) years,” Brown told WOOD.

“Both of those gentlemen were responsible for hiding evidence that wasn’t discovered for 20 years,” Mueller told WOOD.

In February 2023, the Michigan Attorney General’s Officer ordered a new trial based on the evidence. Then, on June 1, Kalamazoo County Prosecutor, Jeffrey Getting, agreed to dismiss the charges against Titus.

“Mr. Titus was deprived of a fair trial, as admitting to by the county prosecutor. He spent over two decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit because the defendants, Brown and Werkema, intentionally hid evidence of a serial killer of hunters who had been identified by two witnesses immediately after the shooting. This lawsuit will force Brown and Werkema to answer for their actions,” Mueller said in a statement to McClatchy News.

Titus was awarded $1 million by the state of Michigan for the wrongful conviction, which he says he plans to donate, according to WXMI.

“I am going to do a scholarship to the University of Michigan, two of them right now. Those will be for students that go in to be attorneys that will work in the Innocence Clinic Innocence Project for at least four years; I will pay their full college tuition and books,” he told WXMI.

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